Lake Wobegon Days

by Garrison Keillor

  One night, she and I snuck over to the Tollefsons’ after their lights went out and left a half-bushel of tomatoes on their back step.

  On this morning in August when I am thirteen, it’s hot by ten o’clock. I poked along over the Post Toasties as long as I could, then my mother sent me out to pick tomatoes. Rudy and Phyllis were already out there. I picked one and threw it at a crab apple tree. It made a good splat. The tree was full of little crab apples we’d have to deal with eventually, and a few of them fell. My brother and sister stood up and looked: what did you do? we’re gonna tell.

  I picked the biggest tomato I saw and took out a few more crab apples. Then I threw a tomato at my brother. He whipped one back at me. We ducked down by the vines, heaving tomatoes at each other. My sister, who was a good person, said, “You’re going to get it.” She bent over and kept on picking.

  What a target! She was seventeen, a girl with big hips, and bending over, she looked like the side of a barn.

  I picked up a tomato so big it sat on the ground. It looked like it had sat there for a week. The underside was brown. Small white worms lived in it. It was very juicy. I had to handle it carefully to keep from spilling it on myself. I stood up and took aim, and went into the wind-up, when my mother at the kitchen window called my name in a sharp voice. I had to decide quickly. I decided.

  A rotten Big Boy hitting the target is a memorable sound. Like a fat man doing a bellyflop, and followed by a whoop and a yell from the tomatoee. She came after me faster than I knew she could run, and I took off for the house, but she grabbed my shirt and was about to brain me when Mother yelled “Phyllis!” and my sister, who was a good person, obeyed and let go and burst into tears. I guess she knew that the pleasure of obedience is pretty thin compared to the pleasure of hearing a rotten tomato hit someone in the rear end.*

  “Look at what he did!” she said, but Mother just said that that was enough of that and to get back to work. That was fine with me. Later Phyllis caught me coming out of the bathroom and pinched me. In my baby picture, still displayed on the piano, she held me on her lap and looked down at me with pure devotion. I couldn’t help telling her how much her attitude had changed. I told her not to be so unhappy. “Life is what you make it,” I said. “You should get out and enjoy yourself more.” As I said it, I jumped back in the bathroom and locked the door. She pounded on it, then pretended to go downstairs, but I could tell fake footsteps and I stayed put. “I can hear you breathing,” I said. I stayed put for all of one Reader’s Digest and part of another. A door slammed downstairs. My mother called my name. I yelled for help. She came upstairs. “She’s hiding. She’s after me,” I said. “Don’t be silly,” Mother said, “there’s nobody here but me.”

  The all-time biggest tomato ever raised in town was Irene Bunsen’s in 1978, the year the Whippets beat Albany when Wayne Tommerdahl whacked the ole tomato into the eighth row of soybeans with the bases loaded in the ninth. One day in early July, Irene saw that her tomato had championship potential, which in a town full of fierce competitors who’ve seen some biggies was a tomato to get excited about, particularly for Irene, who was known for her black thumb because she had bad luck with marigolds. Everyone else’s would come up like a drill team and Irene’s got sick and drooped, and some women made cutting remarks such as, “Gee, you’re the first person I ever knew who had trouble with marigolds. Mine grow like weeds.”

  The contender tomato was situated high on the plant, which she had staked up, so she was worried it might lose its grip. She pounded in two more stakes and made a little hammock out of mosquito netting for the tomato to lie in. It weighed close to twenty ounces. Her sister Arlene grew a two-pounder once, but Clarence ate it before the jury arrived, so it didn’t count. The record was twenty-four.

  Irene nursed it up to twenty-two. She was so proud of it, you’d’ve thought she made it in her basement. You’d’ve thought she invented tomatoes. She tore the other tomatoes off the plant on the theory they were taking nourishment away from the champ. She rigged a hanky to protect it from sunburn and one night she woke up in a storm and ran out to make sure it wouldn’t blow down. Clint woke up when she left and looked out the window. He saw her in the flashes of lightning, kneeling by the tomato plant, holding onto the stakes.

  As it closed in on the record, she checked it twice a day for bugs and whatnot, and it was during a routine check that she bumped the hammock. The champ took a dive, hit the deck, and split wide open. Irene ran in the house and called her sister who ran right over. Irene was bawling so hard she couldn’t see, so Arlene went out and scooped up the remains and went to work. She stuffed its insides back in, patched it with masking tape, and took a basting syringe and replenished its bodily liquids. She put it in a plastic bag, and they took it in to Ralph for the weigh-in.

  “It looks like it blew up,” he said.

  Arlene said, “Well, that’s between you and me. It had a little accident, but it’s still a tomato. Weigh it.”

  Twenty-five ounces. If you added three for all it went through, it’d be twenty-eight, but twenty-five was good enough for the record.

  The next year, there were no remarks about Irene and her fatal effect on plants. Nobody looked at her yard and said, “Look at that. Her marigolds don’t even bloom.” Irene didn’t plant marigolds. She put in tulip bulbs, bought from a nursery in North Dakota, a special breed that can take any punishment and stay on their feet, a cross between the Hardy Mojave and the famous Yukon Yellow, the tulip of the tundra. Her tomatoes didn’t do so well the next year, but as Clint said, once you’ve produced the all-time champion, you have nothing more to prove. You’re No. 1. You can sit back and let the others try to beat your mark.

  Buster’s hair grew back. My sister forgot about the tomato. She went with Wally Pilcher for a few months, they drove around in his Ford, she gave him a wallet-sized photo of herself looking up in a dreamy way, it rode around on Wally’s big butt. I didn’t like him because he had one long eyebrow and he called me Sport. I put a potato in his tailpipe. One day mother got a block of ice and turned the electric fan on it and we sat in the cool breeze, drinking iced tea, like royalty.

  “It’s so hot I can hardly get my breath,” she said.

  “I don’t think it’s healthy to get so hot,” I said. “I’ll bet we could find a used air conditioner in St. Cloud. You see ads in the paper all the time.”

  “You stopped breathing once when you were five weeks old. Did I ever tell you that?”

  No, she certainly hadn’t.

  “I was about to take a bath and then I thought I’d better check the crib, so I went in and you weren’t moving at all. I thought you were dead. I snatched you up and tore out of the house to the Jensens and pounded on the door, and right then you let out a cry. Anyway, we took you to the doctor.

  “What did the doctor say?”

  “He wasn’t sure. He didn’t think it was a seizure. I guess it was just one of those things that happens sometimes.” Then she got up to make a salad for supper.

  That’s how Mother told stories. Never enough detail, and she always left you hanging at the end. If she had gone ahead and run the bath water, I’d be dead right now. And it was “just one of those things that happens sometimes”? I felt a little weak myself. I had about gotten over the fear that I’d stop breathing during the night, all those years I used to remind myself to breathe, and now this. So it wasn’t dumb to think that your breath could stop at any time. It could happen right now, sitting on a white kitchen chair in a cool breeze and drinking iced tea. Fall over dead on the linoleum. Thirteen years old, dead.

  Three years before, the Heglunds brought their boy home from the doctor with six months to live. He and I had been friends once, then he threw a rock at me and we drifted apart, and soon after he came down sick with the flu. Or so they thought until the doctor had a look and heard a ratchety sound in his heart. There was nothing to be done about it. They put his bed against the upstairs window so he could look out, and
one day our class got out of school to go stand in the street and wave at him. It was August but the Heglunds got him a Christmas tree, and all his relatives sent presents, including a movie projector. One day he got a letter from the governor, which his sister brought to school: we all got to hold it. Nobody talked about him, it was too sad, and gradually we forgot about him. When he came back to school in December, nobody made a fuss over him. His death had pretty well worn out our interest in him, and we had nothing left for his resurrection. Mrs. Heglund told my mother that she got sick of him lying in bed, which was a mess, and one day she hauled him out and sent him to school, and the exposure to cold air improved him, and soon he was running around and being his usual dumb self.

  Exposure to heat was killing me; August 12, 101°: why? Dallas, 98°. Miami, 96°. You don’t have to be Einstein to see the unfairness of it. What happened to the forces of nature that socked us with −30° six months ago, were they on vacation? By rights, we should be cool and comfortable, being so far north, but instead we woke up and at eight o’clock the last of the cool was burning off, the State Farm thermometer out the window over the sink was slowly percolating to the top. Sitting eating soggy Cheerios on the morning of a hot one, a day that promised nothing but a lawn to mow and then a blank afternoon reading back issues of the Geographic, I knew that summer was an experiment that didn’t work. It looked good in May as things warmed up and Miss Lewis’s classroom turned rank and sour, and for a few weeks of June a person could fill his time with projects, but by August summer was dragging on the ground and only a good thunderstorm could bring it to life. Standing in the dormer window as black and purple clouds boiled up in the west, I pretended I was the captain of the house, sailing straight into it, and when the lightning came closer, blazing bolts ripped the sky and the bomb went off at the same instant and Mother yelled at everyone to go to the basement, I stayed on deck and secretly wished for a tornado.

  Father Emil’s vacation is in August; his fifteenth annual bus tour of Civil War battlefields, he is now the senior member of his bus. They added Nashville this year, otherwise it was the same. “You keep discovering new things every year, though,” he says, and he finds to his surprise he is becoming more sympathetic to the Confederacy, partly the work of sweet-talking waitresses who say, “Hah yew doin’? C’d ah git yew s’m pah? Mo’ cawfee, honey?” The tour spent a night in a town east of Knoxville, and he walked to a tavern across the highway from a revival tent and sat in the dark, where a man told him a long story about a man who kept three wives for twenty years and none of them knew about the others. The man in the dark was a son of the second wife. He said, “Daddy was too much for one woman. I guess he was the best-loved man who ever was. We just all wrapped ourselves around him. When he finally got sick, he just went off and shot hisself. He didn’t do it at home, though, I’ll say that for him. He didn’t want to make his family have to clean up after him.” When Father left, it was two hours later, and across the highway they were singing at the tops of their voices about the love of Jesus. The South was wrong, but nothing is simple. Lee coming home to commit treason for friends he didn’t agree with: was that right? Maybe, Father thought when he was on vacation. He walked from monument to monument, green pasture once heaped with the dead; he wondered about his own troops: would they march so far on pitiful rations, with no decent shoes? His fellow passengers complained about heat, air-conditioning, too much salt on the chicken, poor TV reception in motels. Riding down from the Blue Ridge to Chancellorsville, where the hapless Hooker was whipped by an army half its size under Lee, where Stonewall Jackson was mortally wounded, and on to Fredericksburg, scene of Burnside’s humiliation—history and tragic blunders and terrible slaughter on every hand wherever you looked—a woman in the seat in front of him said, “I tried to watch Donahue this morning, it was like it was coming from the moon.” A force of thirty-six tourists but he doubted they had the wherewithal to hold up a gas station.

  With Father’s return imminent, the parish bade farewell to his sub, Father Frank. The Kruegers threw a cocktail party for him in their backyard where they have a concrete patio and a glass-top table with umbrella (green-striped) attached. The guest list was small; not many Catholics in town are comfortable around a priest in a sportshirt and yellow shorts, drinking gin and saying, “Damn, this is good, Jack. Dry. Mmmmm. What did you do? Just think about vermouth, for Christ’s sake?” For his farewell homily, Father Frank developed the Twenty-third Psalm into a golf course where He maketh the ball to lie in the fairway and leadeth it around the water hazards. Yea. Though we walk through the rough, we will fear no bogey, for He prepareth the green before us in the presence of sand traps, and our putt runneth over to the cup and dwells there. Father Frank is on the back nine of life these days and thinks it’s the best part of the course. He looks good. Close-cropped gray hair, good tan, and—well, should you say this about a priest? Should you even think it?—good legs. Hell, yes! he’d say, just because I’m a priest doesn’t mean you can’t look! He hugs women and gives them a good smack on the lips.

  In 1975, Jack Krueger worked all spring and summer to start a Country Club in town. A loan guarantee under the Rural Recreation Development Program got the ball rolling, and Jack took an option on forty acres of Old Man Tollerud’s pasture and woodlot. No investors stepped forward for weeks; people wanted to know who else had signed up—they didn’t want to be the first; the membership fee was $1,000. Maybe it’d sell better if they knew what they were buying, thought Jack, so he paced off two hundred yards on the pasture, put a can in a hole, mowed the grass short and Roto-tilled three sand traps. He invited prospects to try their hand. Mr. Tollerud, however, refused to remove the Holstein hazards, and when the first foursome approached the tee, cows moved in for a closer look. Clint Bunsen’s ball hit one amidships, and she turned her head and gave him a look as if she’d heard someone curse. They played the hole and then came back and played it again. Clarence Bunsen told Jack, “I can’t imagine doing this all afternoon.” But, as he told Clint later, it was the principle of the thing. A golf club would be the first organization that it cost a pile of money to join. Sons of Knute you get in for $10 initiation and eating a raw egg and memorizing a few lines of Norwegian. Church you join when you’re born, for nothing. “If I had a thousand dollars and I wanted people to know I had it, I wouldn’t have to join a club, I could walk around town with the money on a forked stick,” Clarence said. “I could wave it right in people’s faces.” Because he wouldn’t join, Clint didn’t, and when Clint didn’t, people thought it might be fishy, and by August, the Holsteins had trampled the first hole. You couldn’t tell it had ever been.

  “Nothing ever changes in this town,” said Jack. “It’s hard to get people interested. You set off the fire alarm and they just get up and go to lunch.”

  The fire siren goes off at noon and six every day but Saturday (noon only) and Sunday (Be still and know that I am God). That is how we tell time, that and the progress of the sun across our sky. Some people wear a watch—on the one hand. On the other hand they don’t look at it very often.

  As children we got so we could tell time by the sun pretty well, and would know by the light in the room when we opened our eyes that it was seven o’clock and time to get up for school, and later that it was almost ten and then almost noon and almost three o’clock and time to be dismissed. School ran strictly by clocks, the old Regulators that Mr. Hamburger was always fiddling with, adding and subtracting paper clips on the pendulum to achieve perfect time, but we were sensitive to light, knowing how little was available to us as winter came on, and always knew what time it was—as anyone will who leads a regular life in a familiar place. My poor great-grandpa, when his house burned down* when grandma left the bread baking in the summer kitchen oven to go visit the Berges and they built the new one facing west instead of south: they say he was confused the rest of his life and never got straightened out even when he set up his bed in the parlor (which faced north as his f
ormer bedroom had): he lived in a twilight world for some time and then moved in his mind to the house he’d grown up in, and in the end didn’t know one day from another until the day he died. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil,” but there’s more than one kind of shadow, and when a man loses track, it can kill him. Not even the siren could have saved my great-grandpa. He died of misdirection.

  The siren isn’t set off by a clock but by Bud Mueller who takes a nap in the fire truck and sets his alarm clock for noon if the nap starts early. He gets up, pulls the siren lanyard, and goes back to snooze for another half hour. His breathing sounds like the cardboard flap you pin to the back wheel of your bike to make a motorcycle. At six, he sounds the siren on his way home to supper and usually is a few minutes fast.

  At noon, as the siren dies slowly at the end of its long scream, almost everyone in town puts down one thing and picks up another. Fr. Emil picks up his breviary and prays for the poor people. “My God, rich people have the time to praise You if they want to, but the poor people are so busy, accept their work as praise because, my God, they don’t have time for everything.” A lot of poor people knock off work right then and have them some dinner, such as the Commercial Hot Beef Sandwich at the Chatterbox: two slices white bread, two big dollops mashed potato, three chunks pot roast, and dark gravy poured over everything—you also get string beans and a slab of pie—$1.75. The Chatterbox gets as loud as the school lunchroom at noon with all the good eaters piling in, and sometimes the siren sets off an alarm in Dorothy. She straightens up, standing over the gravy pot with a ladle in her hand, and looks like she could brain somebody with it. She is a big lady and with that hairnet on, her head looks like a helmet. The big booths in back are full of hefty guys jammed in tight—they roll Horse with dice out of leather cups and turn and holler at guys lumbering in the front door, so there is dice clatter and loud volleys of talk across the room and the crash of plates—she looks like she could clear the room in about eleven seconds flat. “You know, I think I’d sell this place for about half of what anyone in his right mind would want to pay for it,” she says to nobody in particular. It’s packed today because it rained so hard last night nobody could get into the fields this morning and a lot of them wound up in town. Big butts of pear-shaped gents in coveralls lined up on the stools like the 1938 Chicago Bears as seen by Bronko Nagurski. Platters of the Commercial on the counter (“Twenty-six years I stood back here and watch them eat—if I got some hogs and a trough, I’d feel right at home”: Dorothy) and big forkloads of chow hover above the gorge, meanwhile Al who hasn’t yet got his dinner hunkers at the end and clears the phlegm from his head with one expert snort. It’s a deep liquidy snort of a sort that Flora would never allow at home, but here at the Box he cuts loose as if it were no more than a little cough, a mere ahem, and then he eases up one cheek and releases a whistle of a fart. Bob next to him is offended. “Take a dump while you’re at it,” he says. “Gotta eat first,” says Al.