“Nothing wrong with wanting to be in heaven,” she said. “I could be there in fifteen minutes. Cast off this old body and get a new one. What’s wrong with that? I’d wait for you there.”
This was too much for me. My eyes got red and itchy and I wanted to run away. She was clutching my arm. She said, “You’re the dearest thing there is, precious. I love you more than I can say, precious. I want you to promise me you’ll always come out and visit, no matter what.”
I made a sort of agreeable sound in my throat.
“Promise,” she said.
I said that she was wrong about people looking down on her. I said that everybody liked her very much. This was not true, but I said it in a pleasant tone of voice.
“I know all about what people think, they’re not so clever they can hide it from me,” she said.
She had gotten up from a sitting position and now was kneeling in the dirt, sitting back on her heels, tomatoes in her lap, her old print dress, and her white stockings rolled down to the ankles, her hair wispy under the pins, the blue bandanna scarf, straps of her underthings hanging down and visible in her sleeve, the hair on her arms, her tears, her red nose, the warts on her neck, and suddenly I felt a faint revulsion for her. My crazy aunt. I stood a few feet away, holding my bucket, wanting to go home, wanting not to have heard anything she said, willing it to not exist, crossing it out, hoping she wouldn’t touch me again. I had a big urge to set the bucket down and light out through the trees and bike back to town and never return.
“If Mother were to die, you’re all I have left in this world. If you turned your back on me, I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t.”
She sat and sniffled and blew her nose and she clambered to her feet and we walked back to the house and put the pressure cooker on and no more was said for a while. But I was spooked out of my skin. I couldn’t put it out of my mind, the thought of her going upstairs and drinking poison from a bottle. Should I sneak up and find the brown bottle and dump it down the biffy? No, I didn’t want to be anywhere near there anymore. Even the thought of her death was too much for me. When she went to the cellar to look for Kerr lids, I was halfway out the door to go home, but then Grandma came tiptoeing downstairs from her nap and I had to sit and visit with her, and Eva came back and made tea, and we sat in the front room. Grandma said, “One of these days I’ll lay down for a nap and I won’t wake up. I look forward to that.”
“Now, Mother,” said Eva. “Don’t talk like that. It scares me silly.”
“Someday you’ll know what it’s like to be old,” Grandma said to me. “It’s not a whole lot of fun, take my word for it.”
I always knew Aunt Eva to be an oddball, what with the backwards psalm, the eighty-seven counties, the hypnotizing of chickens, her fear of strangers, but the talk of poison was in a whole new category of nuttiness. They would be talking about us at the Bon Marché for years to come. The people with the lunatic aunt who drank the rat poison.
I stood at the window waiting for my chance to escape. Grandma heisted herself up and headed for the biffy, and Eva said it again. If I thought you were going to forget all about me, I’d go upstairs right this minute and take that poison. She said she’d had a dream that I was grown up, wearing a very expensive suit and tie, walking in a crowd of strangers down a city street where she stood alone on the corner, hungry, lost, scared, and I walked right past her, not recognizing her, my own flesh and blood. She spoke my name and I turned and said, “Who are you?” And she ran away into the woods and the woods stood for her own death. “In the dream I knew I was about to die, and I wasn’t afraid,” she said. “I was happy to.”
And as she said it, I knew that the dream was real. That was exactly what was going to happen someday.
“What kind of poison?” I asked.
“Arsenic.”
“Wouldn’t that be painful?”
“I don’t care. It’d be the last pain I’d ever have to suffer, and it couldn’t be anything like the pain of seeing people I love turn away from me.”
I got on my bike with a big bag of tomatoes clutched in one arm and I kissed her goodbye and wheeled away and onto the paved road and down the hill and over the crick and I knew that if she took arsenic I didn’t want to be around or know anything about it or even attend the funeral. But Grandma looked good, her color was good, her mind was pretty sharp. If she could hold on for another ten years, then I’d be 24 and by that time a person knows what to do about these things. It was a fine day, no time to be thinking about funerals. I rode along no-handed, a talent common among tree toads I’m sure, and as I came to the first mailbox, I took a tomato out and threw it sidearm and missed, but I hit the big yellow sign with the curved arrow and went around the curve fast, still no hands on the handlebars, and hit the curve sign on the other side of the curve. The crowd of strangers in Aunt Eva’s dreams was a crowd of friends of mine in some city I hadn’t seen yet but would see and would be happy there. Yes! Happy! Strangers to her but dear friends to me. People who don’t sit around planning their funerals and complaining about the cost of butter nowadays and waiting for the Lord’s Return and agonizing over every light left burning in an empty room. My friends will be of another race entirely, a more joyful race, and I intend to be happy right along with them, and if you expect me to sit and weep and mope in the damp and gloom, you’ve got another think coming, by God—and I hit the stop sign where the township road met the county road, splattered tomato all over, and missed one mailbox and then hit three in a row, for a record of six hits and two misses, and hit the RAIL ROAD CROSSING sign on both sides of the old Great Northern spur, and was coming in sight of town, up to the tree between the road and the swamp where Uncle Al had nailed the FOR ALL HAVE SINNED AND COME SHORT OF THE GLORY OF GOD sign—“Surely,” said Grandpa, “surely he has sense enough not to”—and Jesus looked down and said He believed I was going to hit it and of course He, being part of the triune God, was right—the big tomato made a lovely looping arc and splatted right between COME and SHORT and left a bright-red mark like blood, and now I was nine-and-two and the WELCOME TO LAKE WOBEGON was a cinch for No. 10 and the SLOW CHILDREN was No. 11 and just for the principle of the thing, I stopped to throw the last three tomatoes as high in the air as I could, to hear them hit the asphalt. If someone had come by and stopped and asked why I was wasting all those perfectly good tomatoes, I would have said, Because they’re my tomatoes and because it makes me HAPPY! Let’s hear it for Happiness! I’m h-a-p-p-y to throw t-o-m-a-t-o and a splanch and a splinch and a mighty spil-woshish. Grandpa turned away from the window, he couldn’t bear to see it. For somebody who was in heaven, he sure worried a lot.
26
Stole Your Undies
The next Sunday, Roger pitched great against Albany and beat the Meinschafters, 7-2, on a grand slam by Ronnie Piggott, who ran the bases backwards, knees pumping high, arms outstretched, waving his cap, whooping like an Indian, and fell on home plate and kissed it and hopped up and did a somersault, he was so pleased with himself. Nobody’d ever seen such showboating by a Whippet before. Jim Dandy sat glumly in the press box and announced the batters and tipped the vodka, and I asked him if he ever heard from his brother Ricky, and he shook his head. “Young Richard is gone. We’ll never see him again in this life,” he said. I asked how “My Girl” was doing—Big Daddy Fats played it almost nightly on Weegee—and he said that it was going down the toilet, that the distributors and jukebox jobbers and program directors were against them because they were local. “People in Memphis love Elvis, and Fats Domino is a god in New Orleans, but Minnesota? Huh-uh. Don’t stand a chance if you’re from here. You get no favors. Nix on you. If you were any good, you’d be in New York, not here. That’s the psychology.” He said that Earl the Girl was talking about joining the Dominos who were on the road with the Crew Cuts and Teresa Brewer. “If he does, we’re kaput. Ausgespielt. The Doo Dads will be dead.” The sound of it made him smile. “Doo Dads dead,” he said. “Dead indeed.
Doo-dah, doo-dah.”
The ump was a squat man solemn as a bishop who called strikes with a motion like someone ripping a cardboard box and yelling “HEE-raw!” and Roger had him ripping boxes all night. Roger was improving every week, you could see it. He had refined his windup so now it looked like a man turning to close a window and then lunging for the door while falling off the stair, and his money pitch was right on the money, curving up and away from a right-handed batter, and the change-up defied the law of gravity, and the fastball blew their hair back, and he tied Albany in knots. One bullet-eyed batter after another stood and waved his little stick and stepped out of the box between pitches and did stuff with dirt and small stones and scratched his heinie and hoisted his testicles and looked down to the third-base coach as if he might have a handle on things, and then stood in to the plate again, and Roger threw another HEE-raw! And another box got ripped. And the batter walked back to the bench and sat down. Wham bam, thank you, ma’am.
Kate sat in the front row, her bare arms on the rail, her chin on her arms, not taking her eyes off Roger. I trotted down to visit with her after Ronnie’s grand slam and she said she couldn’t wait for the summer to end. Why? Too hot. She hated the heat, and hated everyone asking her what she was going to do come fall.
“What are you going to do?”
“Well, see, that’s the question I hate. The answer is, I don’t know, and I’m looking forward to doing it, whatever it is, that’s for sure.”
I asked if she still wrote poems. I was only trying to make conversation.
“I’m too busy for that,” she said. “I think, before you sit around writing poems about what you feel inside and shit, you ought to go live a little and have some experiences worth writing about someday. So that’s what I’m doing. I’m having experiences.”
I nodded. I wished she’d say more, but she didn’t. What experiences? I wondered, and then I guessed maybe I’d rather not know. So I just said that that all sounded fine to me and that it’d be nice to see her again, but something told me I shouldn’t hope for too much. The afternoon we shot pool and kissed in the movie seemed like a thousand years ago. Like something I’d read in a book.
On Tuesday night the team traveled to Bowlus and Roger had the Bull batters corkscrewing themselves into the ground with his fastball and then the change-up winging its way like a silver moth and the batters swinging as if at the moon, saliva churning in their mouths, teeth grinding, their eyeballs ratcheted tight as ball bearings, all of them so PO’ed at the thought of losing to the pitiful Whippets, they could hardly see straight. Roger took his sweet time, stopped to carefully tie a shoelace, pat the resin bag and bounce it in his palm, study his outfield, and adjust his pants, then he bent in for the sign, wound up with great gathering force, and threw letter-high, and the batter swung with conviction as the change-up putt-putt-putted across the plate a second or two later. The ump made his strike sign like he was pulling a starter rope on an outboard motor. Different ump. Roger sped up, he slowed down. He worked that Bowlus team like a monkey works a banana.
The sky turned dark in the seventh and black thunderheads floated in from the west like a range of mountains, and when Roger came striding out for the bottom of the ninth, the light was like an old black-and-white movie, as Bowlus’s dreaded Hang-man’s Row of Wagner, Wagner, Schimmer, and Schultz came to bat, the Bulls down by two, the Bull fans standing and pleading, Doctor, save my baby! One by one three of the ferocious four came to the plate and stood heavy-browed and fearsome to behold, waving their manly clubs, and the Bowlus fans tightened the imaginary noose and made choking sounds, but it was the hang-men who choked, not Roger. He gave them all his gaudiest stuff and they scowled and swung at the pitch previous and missed the current one and were set down like legless men at a square dance. The last batter, Schimmer, swung hard at two straight ankle-high fastballs, and stepped out of the box and stood, wishing no doubt that he had stayed home with the hogs, and loosened his crotch and stepped back in, and Roger threw him a slow change-up that fluttered homeward and bounced on the plate and skittered off and Schimmer flung himself at it swinging like a ton of bricks and the ump pulled the starter rope and the sky exploded into light, as brilliant jagged bolts of electricity ripped toward the earth, thunder slapping against the grandstand ker-whammmm, sheets of rain sweeping across the parking lot, and the Whippets dashed for the bus laughing like children at Christmas, and the Bowlus crowd had to trudge home in the storm, which pitched its tent over the ballpark and dumped the entire contents on their heads. They looked like drowned cats as they straggled past our Whippet bus. They didn’t bother to run, the defeat had taken the will to run right out of them.
It was a festive bunch on the bus. Even Ernie, who had injured his throwing arm in a drinking mishap, was going around backslapping, and Milkman Boreen and Lyle Dickmeier, the Beer Belly Boys, were passing out boilermakers in paper cups, and Boots Merkel and Rudy and Orv Schoppenhorst and Marv Mueffelman dealt out the cards for a round of Borneo, and Lyle let out a long melodious belch.
Kate was there. She and Roger sat snuggled together in the back. Roger showed her his billfold with her picture tucked in a secret pocket along with a perpetual calendar, a Prayer for Times of Discouragement, and a George (The Ace) Fisher baseball card. The Ace was an Avon boy who pitched three seasons in the New Soo and then went up to the Chicago Cubs for five sterling years in the Windy City. If it could happen for him, it could happen for Roger. The lovebirds whispered and smooched, and Ernie said, in a stage voice, “Ole and Lena, you know—they had twelve kids, because they lived near the train tracks, and when the midnight train came through and woke Ole up, he’d say, ‘Well, should we go back to sleep or what?’ and Lena’d say, ‘What—?’ ”
“Yeah,” said Rudy, “and then he run off with the waitress, but Lena, she had six more kids, because ever so often Ole would come back home to apologize. He never sent her money for the kids, though: he always wrote in the letter, ’P.S. I meant to enclose money but I already sealed the envelope.’ ”
Ernie told a couple of raw ones about a man and a woman making out in a car with the gearshift on the floor between them, trying to get Roger’s goat, but he wouldn’t rise to the challenge. I sat next to Ronnie. He said, “I heard Roger got lucky again last night. Nothing like a piece of fish pie to get a man ready to pitch a ballgame.”
The Perfesser chuckled. “I understand that he got her depantsed and the stairway to heaven was waiting and he couldn’t get his flag unfurled. He reached for the pistol and it was a pistachio.”
“Lordy, Lordy.”
“Yes, sir.” They said this just loud enough for Roger to maybe hear it, but he didn’t raise an eyebrow.
The bus chugged through Bowlus, which already seemed chastened and diminished by our victory. “Drive around the block again,” yelled Ronnie, and Ding’s brother Fred at the wheel cranked it and we circled downtown, the windows down, yelling, “Bowlus, Bowlus, you’ve been beaten! Your pants are gone and your lunch is eaten! We can beat you Sundays and beat you Mondays! Your ass is bare ’cause we stole your undies! We can beat you Tuesdays and beat you Fridays! We stole your ladies in the little pink nighties! Thanks for the memories, Bowlus!” Round and round the block we went in the rain, past the café full of Bowlusites waiting for the storm to let up and the Big Bowl supermarket, where shoppers hustled to their cars with brown bags in both hands, and the taverns with the loungers huddled in the doorway, and we expressed our wholehearted disdain for Bowlus and everything it stood for, even Ding was sort of chanting it. Ronnie yelled, “Let’s go get some red paint!” but that was too much, and Fred steered us toward home.
27
The New Day Dawns
The next morning, Uncle Sugar called up and Mother said to Daddy, her hand cupped over the phone, “Sugar’s upset. You talk to him.” Daddy was reading Beetle Bailey in the funny pages and still had L’il Iodine and Peanuts to go, while finishing his oatmeal and looking forward to his cup of
Folger’s coffee. He said to tell Sugar to call back later. “Talk to him,” said Mother. “He’s on the verge of tears.” She put the phone up to Daddy’s ear and he took it as if it were a live bomb. To have a male relative weep in his ear was nothing Daddy cared to be part of. But he held the phone and heard the whole sad story. Sugar had been in the Chatterbox Café the night before and Mr. Berge walked up to him and said, “What’s this I hear about your daughter shacking up with the Guppy boy?” The news was all over town, evidently, if a slow leak like Berge had got wind of it. Daddy tried to pass the phone back to Mother, Sugar’s tinny voice sawing away inside, and she shook her head—this was Daddy’s family, his sister’s husband, and he could do some of the listening for a change—and then Sugar went to pieces and Aunt Ruth came on the phone, all distraught, asking Daddy about mortgaging their house to raise money to send Kate away to a Home for Wayward Girls in Indiana and Ruth was sobbing and then pausing to mop up the liquid, and Daddy stiffened as if he were on the electric chair. And then suddenly I can see why.
It is a dazzling writerly moment for yours truly.
I am—I hesitate to say this, my fellow countrymen, sensing your views on the matter, but let the truth be judiciously weighed and a fair verdict rendered—taking notes on paper napkins on my lap as Daddy listens to Sugar and Ruth. For breakfast, we use cheap brown napkins, not so soft as the deluxe we bring out for company, and the cheap ones make excellent notepaper, and I am jotting down key phrases of conversation with a ballpoint as, with my left hand, I hold my toast and jelly, and in this state of heightened attention, I notice my own father’s eyes watering and his nostrils twitching and a redness spreading on his face, and suddenly it dawns on me: He dreads tears for fear that he himself will cry. And right there Daddy opens to me like a book. All his grumbling and grouching, his crotchets and glooms and snits and stews, are mere camouflage for a sensitive heart, and I, a writer, am afforded this slight insight, and it is my sacred duty to look upon the heart, as God does, and to reveal it.
Lake Wobegon Summer 1956 Page 21