Pilgrims

by Garrison Keillor

  “She’d saved up money to go to Italy and by the time she had the fare, she was in a wheelchair so the money sat in the bank and then in her will she designated it for the purpose of putting his picture on the gravestone. Ma was a bulldog. Let me tell you. Once she got an idea she stuck with it.

  “I promised her I’d go to Rome and put it on his gravestone. And that gave her peace at the end. So finally I was all set to fly to Rome and then I met a woman online and she talked me into going dancing with her and we were doing a mambo and I got dizzy and slipped and tore my knee to shreds and they operated on it and it’s still not right and now they’re taking me off painkillers. I’m in rough shape. Oh ducky, I wish to hell I could find someone to do this for me.”

  “You want me to go to Rome? I can go.”

  He was in pain. He sounded like someone was sitting on his chest. He said, “I never met you, never knew any Krebsbachs when we lived there. I’m sure you come from good people though.”

  “Actually, I am a Schoppenhorst,” she said. “Krebsbach is my husband’s family. My dad was the butcher. On Main Street, next to Skoglund’s. It’s gone now. But I’d be happy to do it.” She was afraid he might croak right now and then what?

  “It would be such an enormous favor.” His voice broke. He was about to get on the bus to heaven. A nurse came in his room and he put his hand over the phone. Muffled voices. He came back to the phone. He sounded groggy. Maybe they’d shot him up with Percocet.

  “A guy always assumes he has more time, you know? And I think maybe mine has run out. So there’s no point in being coy about it. If you’d do this for me, I’d be in your debt forever. If you said no, I wouldn’t blame you at all. You don’t know me from a bale of hay. If you’d go to Rome and find my brother’s grave and put his picture on it, if you would do that for me”—he took a deep steadying breath—“I could be at peace with my mother. I don’t know about God, but Mother, yes.”

  She didn’t exactly say yes—she said, “I’ll do it if I can get some people to come with me”—but he wept. “That is a huge load off my mind,” he sobbed. “You have no idea. I’ve thought about this every day for the past ten years.”

  And then he dropped the other shoe.

  “Ma left the travel money in treasury bonds and now it’s $150,000 so if you want to go and take some people with you, there’s money for that.”

  She was about to say that she couldn’t possibly accept money from him to go to Italy. And then she swallowed those words and said, “Well, let me think about it.”

  After they said good-bye, she wanted to ask him straight out:

  Why did Gussie attack the German machine-gun nest? Was his unit pinned down?

  What else do you know about the Gennaro woman? She sounded very nice to me. Tell me the truth.

  Do you have children? Are you rich? Are you a Republican?

  Do you have any nice memories of Lake Wobegon? Were people nice to you?

  It dawned on her that night that fate had chosen her to lead a trip to Rome, she who had never so much as led a trip to Melrose or Sauk Centre. There are things that will not be done unless you do them yourself. And she went into training for it. A brisk walk in the morning, fifteen minutes out and turn around and come home. More fruit. Cinnamon tablets and fish oil and vitamin E. Dandelion tea. She had won a great prize, the good faith of the Norlanders, who would handsomely provide for a group of Wobegonians to travel to Italy for the purpose of plastering a picture of their dead son on his tombstone. This much was clear. But how many travelers could fly over and back for $150,000? Maybe a dozen. Who should go? And who does not get to go?

  Now there is the question.

  No, no, no. You do not have to take twelve people on this trip. It does not take twelve people to stick a picture on a gravestone. You and Carl can do this, the two of you. Fly first class and stay in a five-star hotel. Why not?

  WHY NOT

  It would be selfish and sinful.

  People would be angry and not speak to you and you’d have to move to Minneapolis.

  Bad karma. Something bad would happen. Carla would be robbed by a thug. Carl Jr. would lose his job and go on food stamps and get fat, as poor people so often do, and take temporary work as a subject in cruel experiments.

  WHY

  It would not be selfish or sinful. It was your idea to call Norbert Norlander and he offered you $150,000 to go to Rome. He didn’t say you had to take along ten other people.

  So what if they do get angry? Their problem. And if they’re so small-minded, maybe I want to move to Minneapolis anyway.

  Superstition. Not part of Christianity at all. Grow up.

  And then she thought, “No. This is a story. You are only a character in it. You’re not the author. You don’t have to justify a beautiful stroke of good luck. Accept it. Smile and say thank you. You have endured long stretches of tedium and your share of sudden hard blows. You love a man for his good humor and good heart and marry him, try to do the right thing, make a nice home with music playing and the smell of baking, bring your kids up to work hard and tell the truth, and you go through the miserable arguments (‘You don’t care about me and the kids. You don’t care what we want or how we feel. We’re just baggage to you’) and you survive those and then you have to survive the worst blows, the miseries of your kids.”

  Their daughter Carla was the brainy one who was supposed to go to college and become a scientist and instead she fell in love with Jack the guitarist and followed him to New York where she lived in various states of illusion for three years—Budding Actress, Soon-to-Be Singer, Author of Memoir—moving from sublet to sublet in far upper Manhattan. When Carl flew out to rescue her, she was staying with an ex-boyfriend and his girlfriend, sleeping on their couch, to save money for singing lessons. She was dressed all in black with a red shawl, dark red lipstick and fingernails, and her hair seemed to be styled at random, in the dark. He asked how she was. Fine. Good.

  “I came out to make sure you’re not sick.”

  “I’m not,” she said.

  “Are you pregnant?”

  “No,” she said, “I’m not.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes, I took a test yesterday. I’m not.”

  Okay. Good. But a large chasm opened up at his feet, and he flew home in a slight panic, which made the bat episode even worse. A month later, Carla met Bradley, fresh out of chiropractic school, and melted right into marriage to him, and now was trying to have his baby, which she believed would save the marriage from the dead weight of Brad’s anxiety. He had to avoid chocolate, loud noise, and direct sunlight, and needed to have a child for a sense of “completion,” whatever that meant.

  A long story. Ai yi yi.

  Carl Jr. had quit a good job with Northwest Airlines—“It’s getting in the way of my life,” he said—to be a songwriter and barista in Seattle, content to make four hundred lattes a day and write songs about uncertainty and indifference. He had tried to find himself in Minneapolis and now he was trying to find himself in Seattle. He was sort of tracking himself across the country.

  He attended Wisconsin Wesleyan for one year, the year that puncturing holes in each other’s bodies was the vogue on campus. It was a coed dorm and there was a lot of sex going on and beer flowed freely and they used a leather punch to install new metal in each other. He got an eyebrow ring, a nose plug, a neck ring, and an odd bacterial infection that went on for three years. Something usually found only in owls.

  Margie was pretty sure he was gay. He lived with three roommates, two of whom were definitely gay, and he never mentioned girls in a romantic way. No girlfriend. And he dressed gaily and fussed over his apartment. Unlike regular men. You went there and expected to see empty beer bottles on the floor and pizza boxes and underpants with skid marks but instead it was immaculate and had vases with dried weeds in them and lamps with tassels and a black-and-white striped throw over the sofa.

  And Cheryl, the spunky one in the family, g
one to Minneapolis to be a free spirit and enroll in a community college (Dance Workshop; Introduction to Film; Human Sexuality; and a composition course, Keeping a Personal Journal), and that lasted for a year and now she worked at the cosmetics counter at Wal-Mart and was finding out that life is real (though her Facebook page showed 865 “friends,” most of whom she had never met). She wore tiny blue rectangular glasses. She never cooked. She sang in a vegan punk band, Dead Babies:

  If you eat meat, why not drink blood?

  Pick up roadkill out of the mud.

  Nice fresh weasel crushed by a diesel.

  And if it’s rotten, serve it au gratin.

  A whole catalogue of trouble. And now Carl didn’t want to sleep with her anymore. As Carla used to say: UNFAIR.

  But now comes $150,000 walking through the door on its hind legs, hand outstretched, and Hello Stranger. She might have to lie and tell Carl she won the money in a contest. Name the Lake Home, Fly to Rome—“Honey! Wowser! Look at this! I won! I won! O boyoboyoboyoboy. They chose my entry, ‘Lake Haven’ and now we can go to Rome, you and me, darling.”

  And then Mr. Keillor stepped in and made his generous gift to the August Norlander Memorial Expedition.

  MR. KEILLOR SPEAKS

  Mr. Keillor was coming to address the Thanatopsis Women’s Club at their February luncheon at the Sons of Knute Lodge (“My Life in Broadcasting”), rescheduled from September when, if the truth be told, he’d gotten a better offer (he said it was the flu but the next day he was doing Larry King. LK: “Your last book, Spittoon—I laughed so hard, I practically busted my hernia.” GK: “Thanks. It was a joy to write.”) and Judy Ingqvist asked Margie to introduce him.

  “He needs no introduction. Everybody knows him too well already,” she told Judy.

  “Everybody deserves an introduction. Just don’t mention his marriages and he’s very sensitive about his age. And his looks. Butter him up a little and pop him in the oven.”

  “Why me?”

  “Because you’re our writer, Margie.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Oh please—“

  “I love that poem of yours. Don’t be so modest. It’s good.”

  “That poem” was a sonnet Margie had written too many years before. Good grief. And now her old friends’ daughters had it read at their weddings.

  To those who are in love, each day is a gift

  And this is why we embark on marriage

  To see the beloved every day and our hearts lift

  And we sit together on a bench amid the foliage.

  Dear you nesting comfortably at my left side,

  Your head on my shoulder against my cheek,

  Arms around each other in the fragrant eventide,

  And we whisper in the dark and then we do not speak.

  Your body and mine fit so comfortably. I put

  My hand against the side of your beautiful head

  And we sit peacefully merged from head to foot,

  Wrapped in one thought that doesn’t need to be said.

  Once we walked home and you kissed me at my door.

  This is the day we say good-bye no more.

  Margie winced everytime she heard it. So girlish and naive, written when she was eighteen and still dating Larry whom she didn’t like, but she wrote the poem and when it appeared in the Literary Leaf, people congratulated Larry for God’s sake. Assuming he and Margie were engaged. God help us. “I didn’t know you felt that way,” he said. “I don’t,” she replied. It was humiliating. To be known for a thing you’d done so many years ago. Like some old souse in the Sidetrack still thought of as a star quarterback though it had been a thousand bottles of whiskey ago. She had borne three children—three epidurals, three episiotomies, three kids breast-fed and toilet trained, three leaky boats launched—and now her biological clock had stopped and her life expectancy clock had begun. She was fifty-three. Twelve years to retirement, twenty-seven years to octogenarianhood. But here in “the Little Town That Time Forgot” she still was the brainy girl with her nose in a book who wrote sonnets.

  So she would have to introduce Mr. Keillor. —“It doesn’t have to be long. Just make him feel at home.”

  “Well, the truth is that I’m not such a big fan of his work,” she said. “I’ve tried to read it and just can’t get into it.”

  “Just rattle off his awards and tell people his radio show has four million listeners and let it go at that.”

  Four million people, tuning in to hear Mr. Keillor’s quiet monotone murmuring on about the weather and gardening and how he once threw a tomato at his sister. Unbelievable. How empty people’s lives must be. But of course on any given day there are millions in nursing homes, unable to reach the off knob—millions more in correctional institutions where a cruel warden might force entire cell blocks to endure two hours of folksy chuckles. She’d heard his radio show a few times, while running errands on Saturday, twisted the radio dial and there he was, murmuring away, telling stories about a gloomy small town she didn’t recognize at all, full of righteous yokels addicted to tuna hot dish.

  Oh well.

  She dressed up for the occasion, snazzy black pants, pale yellow blouse, and low-heeled pumps, applied some blush and rose lipstick. Then her big down parka. A bitterly cold day and her car wouldn’t start and she was about to set out on foot the four blocks to the Sons of Knute when her father-in-law, Florian, drove by and insisted on helping, an old man laboriously attaching a pair of jumper cables to her battery step by painful step, shimmery snow falling as if inside a snow globe, billows of steam from chimneys, and then she had to invite him in to warm up with a cup of coffee, and he sat and complained about Myrtle and how she wanted to go to Florida in February and if she wanted to go so bad, why couldn’t she go, dammit, why did she have to drag him along with her? “So what’s going on with you?” he said. And she told him she had some travel plans of her own. Rome. In April.

  “Oh my gosh, Myrtle’s going to have a fit if she doesn’t get to go with you,” he said.

  Oh God. No way. Not her shrieking mother-in-law. Her voice could strip wallpaper. “She can’t come. You have to be in good shape. We’ll be climbing mountains.”

  “She’s been climbing all over me for fifty-two years. You bet she’s in shape!”

  It was bitterly cold, so the Sons of Knute cloakroom felt crowded because everybody was twice as big with their big down parkas on, a parade of dirigibles with moon boots and chopper mittens.

  Thanatopsis met in the Knutes’ ceremonial room, horned helmets and musty animal skins and Norwegian banners hanging on the walls, framed photos of former Grand Oyas, some stuff in Norwegian, a painting of King Haakon standing in the middle of Main Street (as if!) looking like a man with a migraine. Judy had sprayed the room with lilac mist to mitigate the odor of cigarette smoke. Sixteen round tables, blue tablecloths, a copy of Mr. Keillor’s Love Sonnets at each place, the room packed with women, Sister Arvonne chattering about the inauguration of Obama and how thrilled she was to have a president who can open his mouth and talk, and Myrtle Krebsbach in her jet black wig, her cackling laugh like sharp hammer blows, Eloise hollering at somebody across the room. The Catholics were loud, the Lutherans softspoken as a rule. (Except for her, Margie.)

  And now Judy Ingqvist was at the lectern, twenty feet away, opening the meeting, tall, dignified, blond, while Eloise was still flapping around the room, whooping, winking, poking, wearing a corsage the size of a toaster. Fascinating to watch her. Wobegonians tended to be polite, leery of giving offense, so they are easy prey for a loud, pushy person like Eloise. “I don’t believe it!” she screeched, and whacked Mary Magendanz on the shoulder. “He said what? What a crusty old booger he is! Well, we’ll clean his clock for him. We’ll take him down a notch or two.” The old boys who used to run the town were utterly dumbfounded by Eloise. She blew into town, went to a council meeting two days later, stood up and spoke, and she never stopped. The old boys were only interested in roads, roads, roads,
and dead opposed to zoning or libraries or historic preservation, they were all about road grading and dumping gravel and filling potholes and God forbid we should spend money on a public tennis court, what do we need with that? Eloise came in and rousted those old boys and made them cry in their beer. She blew them out of the water. Val Tollefson had asked Bud to haul dead brush out of his (Val’s) yard with the municipal truck and Eloise hung him out to dry. Misuse of public funds, plain and simple. She depantsed him in public and the old boys quietly folded their hands and let her walk over him. The power of surprise attack. Meanwhile, Myrtle was talking about pancreatic cancer, and the guest speaker for the day, Mr. Keillor, sat at the head table, smiling in a non-directional way. He wore a black suit a size too small, a white shirt, and a bright red tie with coffee stains. She noticed a green leaf on his cheek, so she walked up and said hello. “Good to see you,” she said and pointed to her cheek. “You’ve got a piece of salad or something on your face.” He brushed it away. He looked peeved. A person should be grateful to have facial food pointed out to them, but not him. Oh well. She wondered how he felt when he returned to his old hometown. Did he regret his career of self-display—did he understand that the self he paraded was not the one everyone in Lake Wobegon remembered? To them, he was a small dark cloud of a man given to sarcasm and ridicule, a man of false humility covering enormous self-regard, but on the radio, he was jovial and winsome, Pal to the People, Celebrator of Home & Family & Heartland & Hard Work. He was an ace at the classic American game of playing dumb. An educated man pretending to be a simple peasant, the oldest dodge in the books, the secret of demagogues and flimflam men since time immemorial. Somehow he’d achieved fame of a sort, but at home he was strictly a nonentity. Lake Wobegon High was a small school but many people in the class of 1960 didn’t remember him at all. Years later, when he became famous, they saw his picture in the paper and thought, Who? Where was he? In some state facility for troubled youth and got his diploma in summer school? Was he in our school?