Funerals, however, were my favorite. Funerals expressed my deepest feelings at the time; grief, of course, and the sadness of life, but also bravery and great dignity—funerals were dignified because we had a real corpse—our black spaniel, Cappy, and a series of cats, and a parakeet named Pete. Other people held funerals for paper dolls such as Hedy Lamarr, but we thought that was childish. We had the real goods.
Our funerals were based on the funeral of Aunt May, who died an old, old lady, of cancer, and whose funeral was the first our parents let us attend. I was seven. My mother didn’t think I should go because it might be “too much” for me, and the words “too much” rang out in my ear: too much? I had had far too little, I thought that too much would be just about enough. She and Dad discussed it quietly on the front porch one Sunday afternoon while I wiped dishes. I liked to walk around while I wiped and, taking a pass by the open door, heard my name spoken in Dad’s low voice and stopped and knelt by the window. He was saying I had reached the age of accountability and the funeral might turn my mind toward eternal things. “Well,” she said, “I don’t know,” and I knew I was going to get to go.
My mind had been on eternal things for a while, at least on death, the door to eternity. I knew that dead people were buried in boxes in the ground, and I often wondered what they did there, in the dark with no food, no radio, no books. Grownups did have, I knew, an ability to sit still for a long time, but death seemed like quite a feat even for them, even knowing that the Lord would come and get them and they would fly up to heaven.
Aunt May lay in Lundberg’s Funeral Home, which was also the Lundbergs’ home. They lived on the second floor and in back. Mary Ellen Lundberg was eleven and was in my sister’s class. She and her sister Leila sang at funerals, including Aunt May’s, their blond hair in curls and their white dresses ironed and black shoes shined, “Asleep in Jesus, blessed sleep” and “Called From Above.” Mary Ellen said that dead bodies are cold and hard, the blood is all drained out of them, and sometimes they sit up in the coffin. But Aunt May didn’t look like she was going anywhere. My dad held me up to look at her. “It’s like being asleep,” he whispered, but to me she looked no more asleep than a piece of lumber. She looked dead as a doornail.
We sat in back of the long room filled with black folding chairs, so still you could hear the old ladies fanning themselves. Dry coughs and solemn whispers, and faint odor of flowers and mothballs. Men in their blue Sunday suits. They walked softly, hardly letting their feet touch the floor. When Mr. Lundberg shut the lid on Aunt May, he did it as if she was made of spun glass and might shatter. Mrs. Lundberg played the organ softly, pumping the pedals, the bellows wheezing, and then Mary Ellen and Leila (Leila who punched me in the stomach once) sang in tiny voices, “Abide with me, fast falls the eventide.” And Uncle Al got up to read about the corruptible putting on incorruption in a voice I never heard before, not like his voice at all but thin, like the voice of a ghost.
I imagined my own self dead and lying in a coffin, this solemn crowd gathered here in honor of me, and me a little ghost sitting by my big dad, enjoying the elaborate delicacy and gentleness of my funeral. Standing outside waiting to ride up to the cemetery and then at the cemetery and later at Flo’s house, people who never said boo to me before did now and put a hand on my head, petted me like a cat. May’s brother Roy, an old man who once yelled at me for coming in his yard to get a baseball, put his old hand on my head as he talked to Dad, and scratched my hair and kneaded my neck muscles. “You got a good boy here,” he said. Ordinarily, men like Roy weren’t sweet like that, but sweetness was all over that funeral, even Leila was sweet. She said, “You should come and play in our yard sometime, we got a swing,” evidently thinking I was all broken up over Aunt May, but I wasn’t, I was enjoying every minute of it.
Our funerals did not quite achieve the Aunt May standard, hard as we tried. For one thing, Mother made us do it right away when the dead body was found, no time to plan things properly, we had to get busy and dig a hole. For another, our funerals attracted a few who laughed out loud during the service, and when we told them to beat it, they said, “It’s just a dumb old cat!” We could’ve killed them. Especially the Krebsbachs, who sang off-key on purpose and when we put the box in the hole, they sang under their breaths, “The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, the worms play pinochle on your snout.” But we did our best.
Our cat Pinky was hit by a car. My sister found him in the road by the ballpark. She ran home, crying her head off, and she and I went to get him with the coaster wagon. She didn’t want to look. I put the white doily from the dining room table over him (knowing I’d get it later, but it was right that Pinky should have a nice piece of cloth) and lifted him into the wagon, and we went home and I got a shoebox and started digging by the lilacs and she went around to invite the guests. We got five Little Flock hymnals out of the piano bench and picked out two songs. We set up folding chairs by the grave. The funeral was at three o’clock. Then the sad task of laying Pinky in the shoebox—and then he didn’t fit because his legs were stiff, so we got a hatbox and dug a bigger hole. We put him in the shade, the doily wrapped around his little orange body except for his face. Donna Bunsen arrived and Janet and Judy Peterson and Jim and Marlys Mueller and Margaret Nute. They said they were sorry and shook our hands and then we got started.
“Let us sing Number 203,” I said. We sang “Abide with me” and I stood up and read about the corruptible in a voice like Uncle Al’s. We sang “Away in a tent where the gypsy boy lay, dying alone at the close of the day,” and then I couldn’t think of how to pray, so we had a silent prayer. I closed my eyes and thought about our cat, how I had fed him that morning not knowing it was his last breakfast, how glad I was that I had stolen half a can of tuna for him (though I was sure to get it for that, too), and how I would never see him again ever. I thought of him in heaven, chasing birds, where it is always warm and sunny and there are no cars. I thought about us children: would one of us eat breakfast one morning and then go out and be hit by a car? Yes, I was sure it would happen, and right then my tears started flowing in earnest. Marlys put an arm around me. And then a crab apple flew in and bounced a few feet from Pinky.
It was Casper Krebsbach, firing from the side of the garage, crouched behind the garbage can. “Casper, you creep!” my sister yelled. Marlys said, “Don’t pay any attention to him. That’s what he wants. Ignore him.” But it was hard to ignore hard green crab apples lobbing in, and finally my sister made a dash for him. She caught him by the shirt and swung him around and threw him down and pounded him twice, hard, on his back, before he got away. Then we stood around the hole, put the cover over Pinky, set the box in the hole, and knelt, gently pushing handfuls of dirt over him. We patted the dirt into a mound and laid a half-slab of sidewalk on it, and wrote, in orange crayon, “PINKY our cat 1950 A.D. We love you. R.I.P.” and went in and had macaroons and grape nectar on the porch. We sat in a circle and conversed as people do after funerals. “How is your mother?” I asked Marlys. “She is very fine, thank you,” she said. “Is your family planning a vacation this summer?” “Yes, we plan to visit the Black Hills in August, Lord willing.” “Lord willing” was a phrase learned in church, denoting the uncertainty of the future. It seemed appropriate after burying a cat.
* Brethren history is confusing, even to those of us who heard a lot on the subject at a young age—the Dennis Brethren, for example: I have no idea whether they left us or we left them. Ditto the Reformed Sanctified, and the Bird Brethren, though I think that Sabbath observance was involved in our (i.e., the Beale Brethren, what we were called before 1932 when we Coxes left the Johnson wing) dispute with the Birds, who tended to be lax about such things as listening to the radio on Sunday and who went in for hot baths to an extent the Beales considered sensual. The Beale, or Cold Water, Brethren felt that the body was a shell or a husk that the spirit rode around in and that it needed to be kept in line with cold baths. But by the time I came alon
g, we listened to the radio on Sunday and ran the bath hot, and yet we never went back and patched things up with the Birds. Patching up was not a Brethren talent. As my Grandpa once said of the Johnson Brethren, “Anytime they want to come to us and admit their mistake, we’re perfectly happy to sit and listen to them and then come to a decision about accepting them back.”
* Clarence Bunsen: “Most Brethren I knew were death on card-playing, beer-drinking, and frowned on hand-holding, and of course they wouldn’t go near a dance. They thought it brought out carnal desires. Well, maybe theirs lay closer to the surface, I don’t know. Some were not only opposed to dancing but also felt that marching in formation was wrong, so we called them the Left-Footed Brethren. Some others were more liberal, Mr. Bell for example, he thought cards were okay so long as you didn’t play with a full deck. The Bijou used to show good movies but the Brethren and some Lutherans ganged up on Art and made him stop, so now you have to drive to St. Cloud if you want to see unmarried people together in one room with the door closed. It’s a shame. I think if the church put in half the time on covetousness that it does on lust, this would be a better world for all of us.”
SUMMER
In winter, we sit in the house
Around a blazing fire.
In summer, we sit on the porch
Like birds on a telephone wire.
Society of summer evenings in Lake Wobegon was formal and genteel. We didn’t bolt our food and jump up from the table but waited for the slowest eater, me, who hated all vegetables except pickles, and cleared the table, and two of us did dishes, a race between washer and wiper. By then, it was six o’clock. Children of age could go out bike-riding, the younger ones played in the yard. Mother and Dad worked in the yard, except Wednesday, which was prayer meeting, and then sat on the porch, and one by one we joined them.
The porch is about thirty feet long, almost the width of the house, and six feet, eight inches wide. The porch is enclosed with ten-foot-tall screens and we sit in old brown wicker chairs, rocker, couch, except me. I lie on the floor, feet to the house, and measure myself against that wonderful height. A six-eight person can pretty much write his own ticket.
“They say we’re supposed to get some rain,” Ralph said, stopping by our porch,* “but then they’ve been saying that for a week.” The grass is brown, and you can taste dust in your mouth. A cloud of dust boils up behind Mel’s car when he comes with the mail, and then he doesn’t stop at the mailbox. Not even a shopper today or the phone bill (Who called Minneapolis last month? Three dollars! What do you think this is, the Ritz Hotel?). Not even a free pamphlet from Congressman Zwickey’s office, something from the U.S.D.A. about keeping cool.
The dog days of August, they’re called, but you get them in July, too, days when dogs camp under the porch where the dirt is cool and damp or lie panting in the shade, big grins on their faces. Good old Buster. Phyllis and I trimmed him one afternoon and kept trimming until we got him trimmed all even, he was clipped down to the stubble. A dog heinie. He seemed grateful. We ran the hose on him and he lay in the sun and got a dog tan.
Nobody in this family lies in the sun. You work in the sun, you lie in the shade. We don’t have air-conditioning, of course. “If you’d work up a little sweat out there, the shade ought to feel good enough for you,” is Dad’s thinking. Air-conditioning is for the weak and indolent. This isn’t the Ritz, you know. Be thankful for a little breeze.
It was luxuries like A/C that brought down the Roman Empire. With A/C, their windows were shut, they couldn’t hear the barbarians coming. Decadence: we’re on the verge of it, one wrong move and k-shoom! the fat man sits on your teeter-totter. You get A/C and the next day Mom leaves the house in a skin-tight dress, holding a cigarette and a glass of gin, walking an ocelot on a leash.*
What about the Ingqvists, they have air-conditioning.
We’re not the Ingqvists.
What about Fr. Emil?
He has hay fever.
Father’s hay fever was so bad last summer, he could hardly breathe. His face was puffy, he went around with a hanky in his hand. He went to the North Shore for some relief in August, but one week alone with all that scenery was all he could bear. So he’s got an immense Northern Aire in his bedroom window and he lives up there.
It was when Mrs. Hoglund got one that people talked. There was nothing wrong with her, so who did she think she was? She said she got it for Janice who broke out in heat rash, but Janice only visited for a week or two and always in June. “Well, it was probably a mistake,” Mrs. Hoglund said, “but as long as I have it, I might as well get the use of it.” So we’d sit on our porch on an August evening, quietly perspiring, and hear her machine humming next door. If only there were a way to connect air-conditioning to health or education. An article in the Digest: “Air-Conditioning: Man’s New Weapon Against Malaria.” COMFORTABLE CHILDREN SCORE HIGH IN SCHOOL, STUDIES SHOW—KEEPING COOL ALSO CUTS CASES OF POLIO, SAYS DR. But school is out, and Mother thinks air-conditioning causes colds. When I remark on the heat, she simply says, “Make the best of it. Life is what you make it.” Her answer to any complaint without specific symptoms. “Life is what you make it.”
I feel that the saying “Life is what you make it” points directly toward air-conditioning. Mrs. Hoglund is making the best of it, obviously. She is sitting and enjoying a fine program on television (which we don’t have either) and is cool as a cucumber.
“We could try having an air conditioner and see if we like it, and if we don’t, we can send it back.”
I sit, all hot and bothered, suffering, and mention this. Mother says, “Go outside. Do something. Take your mind off it.” But outside is not the answer. I want to be inside with cold air blowing at me. I’ve been outside in the garden working. The rule around here is that you finish your work first before you take off and play, which means that I waste the cool of the morning slaving over vegetables I don’t like, and when I’m finally free to take off, it’s too hot to do much. I get my golf club, a mashie niblick, out of the garage and play an imaginary game I invented, called Championship Golf: wherever I hit the ball, wherever it stops, that’s where the hole is. I’m the champion, but it’s boring to be so good, and it’s hot. I sit under a tree with two other kids, talking about what we would do if we had a million dollars. I would buy a large cool house with a swimming pool and hire some servants. Bringing me glasses of cold nectar is what they would do, and cranking up the air conditioner.
Despite the heat and no rain, gardens come on like gangbusters, faster than we can haul in the stuff and give it away. Ralph sells no produce in July and August, not an ounce. Cans of Libby’s tomatoes gather dust on his shelves. Tomatoes are free for the asking, sacks of tomatoes are thrust on you after church.
Nothing has changed in the garden since then.
Slaving in her half-acre spread, August 1984, Mrs. Luger doesn’t recall the garden fever that hit her and the Mister last winter* when months of cold weather set them off on a seed binge, and they careened through the catalog like submarine sailors on shore leave, grabbing everything in sight.
By May 1, twenty little tomato plants in sawed-off milk cartons had taken over the kitchen dinette. Two large boxes from Gurney’s cooled their heels on the chairs. Mr. Peterson and his Allis-Chalmers plowed the half-acre on his plowing route through town, and Mr. Luger worked it with a rake, busting up the big clods, making a flat brown table. May Day dawned warm and sunny, and the two veterans nodded at each other over morning coffee. It was V-Day.
By July, Mr. and Mrs. started to feel they’d set something in motion back there that was getting out of hand, and now, late July and August, the glacier is moving in on them for good. The pressure cooker has been running full blast for days, Ralph is out of Kerr lids, but vegetables fill up the fridge, the kitchen counter—quarts of tomatoes have been canned, still more tomatoes move in. The Mister reaches for the razor in the morning, he picks up a cucumber. Pick up the paper, underneath it are three z
ucchini. They crawled in under there to get some shade, catch a few Zs, maybe read the comics. Pumpkins are moving in to live with them. At night they check the bed for kohlrabi. Turn out the lights, they hear rustling noises downstairs: a gang of cauliflower trying the back door. Go to sleep, dream about watermelon vines reaching out and wrapping their spiny little fingers around your neck, the Big Berthas, the forty-pounders. Those canteloupe they planted, the Dauntless Dukes: why plant twelve hills? why not two?
“I like to have extra just in case and also it’s nice to have some to give away,” says Mrs. Luger, her hair melted to her head from an afternoon of canning. But everyone else has some to give away.
Back in April, she’d have killed for a tomato. Not the imported store tomatoes that were strip-mined in Texas, but fresh garden tomatoes that taste like tomatoes. That’s how my mother felt, too, back then in my youth, so in May she set out thirty or forty tomato plants to satisfy our tomato lust and now, going into August, fresh tomatoes are no more rare or wonderful than rocks, each of us has eaten a bushel of them and there are plenty left where those came from.
Lake Wobegon Days Page 16