Lake Wobegon Days

by Garrison Keillor

  The Brethren did not hold with ambition of worldly success, and their hopes for their children were modest ones: to earn an honest living, take pleasure in the Lord, and suffer trouble cheerfully. College was not necessary, nor was a well-paying job. Mr. Milburn of the St. Cloud Brethren earned a good dollar as a wholesale hardware salesman for Benson Brothers, but salesmanship forced a man to put his faith on the shelf—if a client cursed and told dirty jokes, he’d have to bite his tongue. Farming was the most godly livelihood, and show business was the least. When Bernie Carlson (“Mister Midwest”), host of the popular “Happy Day” and “Farm Hour” shows, got fired for a drunken remark to the Sweetheart of Song, it was noted as “what happens to people who get too big,” the logical consequence of success. Bernie was “big” in nobody’s eyes but ours. WFPT in Freeport was a Quonset hut in a cornfield by the tower. Nevertheless, he drove a white Olds and was on the radio, so he was pointed out to me as a sign of “what happens.” I was ten and I liked to read from the newspaper into a cardboard tube, cupping a hand behind my ear to hear if I had Bernie’s deep bass tones.

  On Memorial Day, two great bands of marchers assemble in the morning, the Catholics at Our Lady and everyone else at the Lutheran church, and the Catholics are definitely the flashier outfit. Twelve Knights of Columbus led by Florian Krebsbach will lead them in their smart black suits and satiny capes with silver sabers at their sides and gorgeous white plumes on their black tricorn hats, followed by Father Emil in gold-embroidered surplice, and the five Sisters leading the classes from Our Lady School, including the flutaphone band in red capes, tooting “Immaculate Mother.” We pass Our Lady on the way to the Lutheran church, and the Catholics are a wonder to behold. Florian, a mechanic by trade, now gives off the aura of an Admiral of the Fleet; gold and silver medals adorn his chest as he stands with the other Knights, smoking a last Lucky, and gives a nod to us poor Protestants slouching by. The Catholic boys’ drum and bugle corps wears purple sashes with white fringe, the boys’ honor guard carries a dozen flags including six American (five large, one immense), the Order of St. Benedict, the Marian Society, the St. Joseph’s Circle, and the long green banner of the Little Sisters of St. Margaret, and six white carbines for the rifle salute. They could add two senators and an elephant and it wouldn’t be any more magnificent than it is.

  The municipal Lutheran procession is nothing but a bugler, two flags, the Sons of Knute, and a big crowd. “Christians don’t go in for show,” my father says, explaining the difference. We aren’t Lutheran, but there are only two parades to choose from; if we Brethren put on our own, it would look like a few people going out to lunch. “Christ commanded us to be humble,” he adds. Well, I guess we’ve got that commandment in our hip pockets. We’re humble to the point of being ridiculous. We look like POWs.

  We march first, and the Catholics march after us. We walk up the hill to the cemetery behind Gary and LeRoy in the cruiser, the bubble light flashing, and the poor old Knutes wobble along and everyone else brings up the rear, and as we turn the corner onto Taft, we hear the clatter of drums and a burst of flutaphone toots and Florian hupping the Knights, and I turn to see the Catholics swing out onto Taft and head for our rear. Our numbers are approximately equal, but if they attacked, they would roust us in a minute. I’ve read Foxx’s Book of Martyrs, and it’s hard to forget: scenes of faithful Huguenot believers praying quietly and praising God and forgiving the hordes of Catholics who pile kindling at their feet. If the Knights were to tie me to a telephone pole and pile dry brush around me and call on me to renounce my faith while a Catholic Boy Scout prepares his flints, what would I do then? I guess I’d renounce, all right. Kiss a statue, hold a crucifix, do what they said. I could always cross my fingers at the time and prevent a real conversion. God would know I didn’t mean it.

  Our Prairie Home Cemetery is divided into Catholic and Us; they have their gate and we have ours, and a low iron fence with spikes separates the two. After service, while our elders stroll among the stones, we boys practice jumping the fence. Little kids stand by and watch this, lost in admiration. You make your first jump when you’re nine or ten and the fence comes up to your thighs, an awesome feat because if you missed, of course, you’d fall on the spikes and be impaled and die there. Nobody could save you. You’d flop around like a fish on a hook and be buried immediately. When you clear the fence, then you have to jump right back over or else. “You can’t come here,” David Krueger told me. He was Catholic. He had a heinie and a fat face and was “after” me at school. He got me. “This is holy. Get the hell out.” I broke away from him and vaulted back to our side. Then he jumped over and we chased him back. Then we stood and exchanged views.

  “Catholics stink.”

  “You stink so bad you think everybody does. You stink so bad, you make flowers stink.”

  “The Pope is dumb, he can’t even speak English.”

  “You’re so dumb you’re going to hell and you don’t even know it.”

  “Am not.”

  “Am too.”

  That was afterward. First, our crowd gathered in silence on the slope above the obelisk erected in 1889 by the Grand Army of the Republic in grateful memory of those brave men who laid down their lives for their country and conducted a formal service out of which, had they been watching, those brave men surely would have gotten a big kick. The ladies’ sextet, decked out in white dresses, gathered to one side of the obelisk along with (then) Mayor Hjalmar Ingqvist and Pastor Tommerdahl, and the schoolchildren’s committee to the other, under the eye of Miss Lewis. For once, we needed no shushing; the presence of death hung heavy in the sweet summer air, as the killdeers called their name and the meadowlarks warbled and our relatives eased themselves down on the fresh grass, and the somber reality of the committee’s task weighed on us.

  All eight of us, chosen on the basis of good behavior, had memorized three pieces—the Gettysburg Address, “In Flanders Fields,” and the Twenty-third Psalm—but we did not know which child would be called on to recite until the moment for that piece arrived and Miss Lewis put her hand on the victim’s shoulder. It was an agonizing wait: your mind raced through the lines—

  In Flanders fields, the poppies blow

  Between the crosses, row on row—

  That was easy, but then what? Something about larks singing, which was stuck to “Four score and seven years ago” and “He maketh me to lie down,”—and when you tried to pull out the line about the larks, your hot little mind coughed up a wad of odds and ends, a whole bird’s nest of lines (“Pepsi-Cola hits the spot, twelve full ounces, that’s a lot”), and you tried to catch Miss Lewis’s eye with a silent message: I can’t do it. She looked straight ahead.

  The Sons of Knute honor guard stood at the gate smoking and fiddling with their rifles, waiting for the crowd to shut up, then they marched double-file up the drive, all eight of them. On the gravel, their shoes ground out a sort of beat for a few steps and then the curve and the incline threw them off stride and they hauled up to the obelisk shuffling, almost dancing, trying to get back in step, until the Grand Oya yelled Halt. They turned to face us, and the sight of them did nothing for our confidence. They looked exhausted by the march. They wore the remnants of old Army clothes, whatever still fit them, and they made me think I’d rather die young in battle than grow up to be a Knute. All in all, they were not the men you’d pick to fire rifles around a crowd.

  Pastor Tommerdahl took two steps forward, bowed his head, and prayed. It was a long one, taking in a good deal of American history, and gave me time to worry about the Gettysburg Address, the first hurdle of the program. The awful moment arrived. Karen was tapped for the Address, stepped forward, and said it perfectly. The ladies’ sextet then offered “Abide With Me.” They got to use a hymnal, one more unfair advantage of being older. I pulled for them to hit a clinker, I wished they’d hit one so bad that people would laugh out loud, and then they did—Mrs. Tollefson screeched like an old screen door—and I stif
led a sudden laugh and it came out as a fart. Miss Lewis poked me, and I stepped forward, thinking it was time for “Flanders Fields,” and had to be yanked back.

  John Potvin was tapped for the poem, my classmate who we called “Wiener.” He stepped forward, got the first two lines out, stopped, and swayed in the breeze. “That mark our place,” Miss Lewis hissed between her teeth. He said that. “And in the sky!” she hissed. He said that, and she gave him the line about larks, but his mind was shot and then he ducked and turned around and I saw the dark spot on the front of his pants. Leonard Tollefson finished the poem and had to be prompted, too. This made all of us except Karen feel sick to our stomachs. Normally, the Twenty-third Psalm was a cinch, but it had now escaped me and I knew it had escaped the others—I could smell the sweat and hear lips moving. “The Lord is my Shepherd.” That was all of it I had, that and the valley of death.

  Pastor Tommerdahl again, with a few remarks. He spoke about the gallant men of the First Minnesota who held their position at Gettysburg against the rebel onslaught, our own men falling and dying in the tall grass that July afternoon and their comrades coming forward to repel the Confederate charge with bayonets, wrestling with the enemy in hand-to-hand combat—as his raspy voice went on and on, I let my mind drift away to my grandfather, born in 1860, three years before Gettysburg, in New Brunswick, his father’s family having gone there from England about the time of the American Revolution. His mother’s fled there about the same time from America. Her ancestors were loyal subjects of the King, who lived in Connecticut and Massachusetts and lost everything in the war except the clothes on their backs. School had taught us to regard the Loyalists as turncoats, like the Confederates, who fought on the side of Error, but I imagined them as farmers like my uncles, who had gone along minding their own business until one day someone like Miss Lewis had butted in and told them to shape up or else, and they refused.

  The disobedience of my ancestors was a wonderful thought; I imagined myself back there with them. Taking up a rifle and fighting against America! Shooting at George Washington, the Father of Our Country! Shooting the white wig right off his head! A terrible wicked idea, it made me shiver to think it but I kept right on thinking. Standing in the row of condemned children, heads hanging, awaiting our humiliation—suddenly gunfire from the line of trees! Miss Lewis clutches her bosom and falls to the gravel, and enemy troops swarm up the hill—but they aren’t enemies! They’re my relatives! They hoist me up to their shoulders. “You’re safe now,” they say.

  And then it happened. I felt her bony finger on my shoulder. I took two steps forward. Faces grinned at me from the crowd. My brother smirked. The Knutes smiled, their rifles in hand. I looked down at the dirt and let fly with the psalm, my heart pounding in my ears, and when I got to “I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever,” I expected to fall down dead. I stepped back, watching the spot in the dirt where I would fall. Miss Lewis then led the crowd in “America,” a confident first verse followed by a second and third that were inaudible except for the sextet who had hymnals, and after a moment of silence, I heard the Oya holler, the slap of hands on rifle butts, the clinks of the bolts, and then the guns went off with a mighty blast so close that we felt the heat and the ladies’ sextet scattered in shrieks, and we heard the shots rip through leaves.

  Some ripped through the leaves of the oak tree where Harold Olson sat on a lower branch with his bugle, waiting to sound Taps, picked for this honor on the basis of ability and citizenship. He jumped ten feet and ran down the hill and stopped and tried to play Taps from there, but after being shot at, his concentration was gone—it didn’t sound like Taps, it sounded like someone had picked up a bugle and was trying it out. He fooled with Taps for a while and quit. The Oya yelled, “Company dismissed!” Little boys dove in to grab the brass shell casings. My Aunt Flo put her arms around me. She said that the Twenty-third Psalm was the best part of the whole program and she was so proud of me she could hardly stand it. We walked around the cemetery, looking up our dead relatives.

  For the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953, Miss Lewis brought a radio to school and we listened to it at our desks. The horse troops clopped by and battalions of drums, then a band of bagpipes, which we had never heard before, and so she drew a picture on the blackboard. We recognized it instantly as a penis and scrotum, and so did she when she heard the buzz and stepped back for a look, so she made the bag rounder and made the pipe stand up, which fascinated us even more, and finally she erased it and turned and said, her face glowing, “Small minds think small thoughts.” Soon another bagpipe band marched by, and Jim whispered to me, “They’re playing their pants.” That made stuff come out my nose. “Leave the room right now,” she said. I went out in the hall and sat on the top stair and looked down the stairwell. Three flights to the basement. Above the stairs, a round window divided into four panes by a wooden cross, its crossbars flared out in the molded frame. The stairwell looked like the front of a church—Westminster Abbey, maybe, although through the window I could see roofs of stores on Main Street and the lake. That, I imagined, was the Atlantic Ocean.

  Elizabeth II ascended the stairs slowly, in time to faraway music. She wore a gold crown encrusted with diamonds, a long white dress, a mink coat, golden slippers, and carried a jeweled scepter under her arm like a twirler’s baton. Behind her came ladies and a footman holding a radio on a cushion and an archbishop praying, and when she reached the landing below me, she looked up and gave me a dazzling smile. She climbed the stairs until she stood before me, I not daring to look up, staring at my black Keds. She said, “You of all my subjects have been truly faithful and good, and so I hereby do make you my knight forever and ever, and grant you your heart’s desire.” And she touched the top of my head with the scepter and was gone.

  Processions often occurred to me when I was alone, or I walked in one if I happened to be walking at the time, to school or home from school or to the lake. Crowds clapped silently from the ditches, and great men looked down from reviewing stands on the housetops. Honor guards snapped to attention, Hup-thunk-bam! “Sir—” the captain said. “At ease, Captain,” said I. The band played “Minnesota, Hail To Thee.” I walked with a slight limp from my war wounds, carrying a softball bat—“You’re wounded, sir. Let me—” “I’m all right, Captain. Others have suffered far worse than I.” “Yes, sir.” My voice echoed in the vast stadium amid the silent throng: “I am-m-m-m deeply-ly-ly-ly hon-on-on-on-ored,” and indeed I was deeply and continually honored wherever I went, whenever I was alone.

  Life in a small town offered so little real ceremony. Every morning we Boy Scouts raised Old Glory in front of school, a satisfying moment, the triangle unfolded, the eyelets clipped to the lanyard, salutes all around, and up she went, snapping in the wind, but so short—why not a prayer, a speech, a few maneuvers, some rifle shots? We of the school safety patrol got to wear Sam Browne belts and carry red “Stop” flags on poles; at my post on the corner of Main and McKinley, I made little kids stand and wait until something big like a truck came along so I could stop it and march them across, but only little kids would wait; the bigger ones just laughed and ran across the street.

  I was eleven. A bad age for a boy so starved for ceremony, because as I got good at it, other kids were losing interest. My older sister and her friends had gone in for weddings in the woods, dress-up affairs, and I’d be usher one day and ringbearer another, then once got promoted to minister, stood on a stump, held a candle, and said “Dearly beloved” and read from Corinthians, and was good, but then they got interested in bike-riding with boys, which didn’t include me.

  Little kids weren’t much fun because I had to tell them everything to do, which is all right if you’re playing Army but not if you are King Vincent I of Altrusia ascending the throne in a royal-blue chenille robe—then the Altrusians are supposed to pay homage and lay precious gifts at your feet and make good bows and go down on bended knee and back away from the throne bowing, and it r
uins the occasion if King Vincent has to tell them how to pay homage, they are supposed to just do it. I was extremely good at these events and couldn’t see why other kids weren’t. You’d go along in the ceremony—this time it’s Crazy Horse and the Sioux Chieftains in a council of war, asking the Great Spirit to bless them as they go after the cowboys—and everyone is doing a fairly good job of talking Indian and tossing the sacred dirt to the four winds and passing the war pipe, then one kid says, “Let’s do something else. Let’s go swimming,” and it ruins it. Or one of them turns and shoots you. “What are you doing? You can’t shoot people here!” I yelled. “You’re dead,” he said. Two of the Tollefsons and Karen Skoglund and I played office on the Skoglunds’ back porch; they had two desks, two telephones, and good paper from Skoglund’s dimestore, receipts and bills and carbons, but they scribbled any old thing and expected you to believe it, then didn’t bother to add up the numbers right. Karen was president, of course, which was fine, but when she got tired of office work and went in to watch television, she told us we had to stay. “You’ve got to get out those shipments,” she said. I quit.

  When I was twelve, the summer of 1954, Jim and his brother Sheldon and I held Senate hearings for a week in their basement where they had a Ping-Pong table. It was Jim’s idea—he had seen this on television and knew how it went—but I was a better Senator McCarthy than him, so he became a detective who helped the committee and Sheldon, of course, was a Communist. He was good at it—we had him dead to rights, piles of proof that he spied and gave secrets to the Russians, most of the proof in writing! and he sat there across the table with a gooseneck lamp aimed at him and lied his head off. Then he was Senator McCarthy and I was a Communist, a General John LaClaire who committed treason from the very heart of the Pentagon, a desperate criminal and atheist who sneered at the Committee and then one day during hard questioning about his chummy correspondence with Stalin—the Committee had birthday cards in its possession—he leaped up and pulled a .45 automatic and was shot down dead by Senator McCarthy and sprawled across the table, his soul gone to hell. That day, the Committee adjourned, its job done, and we spent part of August as detectives on the trail of three classmates whom we suspected of smoking cigarettes in the woods. We found a few butts near the old fort on Adams Hill and kept up surveillance for a day or two, then laid a trap. We left fresh cigarettes on a tree stump, cigarettes we had put cat hairs into, and observed our suspects for signs of nausea. We caught one, Paul, and made him confess. It was a good summer.