Lake Wobegon Days

by Garrison Keillor

  Taking the ladder away when Mr. Tollerud was up on the barn roof.

  The toads at the revival meeting.

  The dead cat in the stovepipe.

  The pie-eating contest at the county fair, 1941, between Harald Ingqvist and Florian Krebsbach, each of whom had been given a good pep talk by the boys, promised $10 if he won and told that Lena Tommerdahl would go skinny-dipping with him afterward. Hard to believe they fell for this, but Harald and Florian hated each other, so they approached the pie table in a frenzy. They ate so fast, they didn’t notice how greasy the apple filling was, which the boys had pumped full of mineral oil, until it was much too late. The boys cheered them on, screaming at them to go-go-GO, and Harald and Florian ate slower and slower, gobs of filling on their faces, until they stopped and looked around, stupefied by pie, and tried to stagger to the trees, but truth struck them before they got there. “They blew up,” said Uncle Tommy. “It even came out their noses.”

  And now they are whispering about something else, and one by one they sneak outside. “Where are you going?” I ask. “We have to go look at Al’s garage floor,” says Tommy. “We poured the concrete yesterday, and I think we might’ve poured it upside down.”

  “Can I come?”

  “No, we’ll be back soon as we check that concrete.”

  When I came along, the age of privy-tipping had passed, the age of car explosives was almost over. Carl Krebsbach wore it out when he sent away for $20 worth of car bombs. They worked just fine; he hooked one up to the ignition, the victim turned the key, BANG! he jumped, hit the ceiling, leaped out, ran around, ha ha ha. The trouble was, you get an awful lot of car bombs for $20, and Carl used up the joke before he used up the supply. The age of gunpowder dragged on and on until everyone was sick of it.

  The flame flickered briefly on the Fourth of July. Major arms shipments came in from the Dakotas in May and June, fireworks being illegal in Minnesota; ammo was stored up, heavy artillery and bombs and rockets were moved to the front, and on the eve of the Fourth, light skirmishes broke out between the town constables, Gary and LeRoy, and the insurgent forces, who competed to see how close to the old Chevy cruiser they could set off the charges. After dark, the law cruised down the alley at about four knots, its long white beam sweeping the backyards, Gary and LeRoy peering out the open windows—did they see us? Yes! Run! No, wait. Now, good old Larry, the one who can play Taps with his armpit, darts into the alley and fires a colossal rocket that arcs gracefully over the cruiser, where it explodes a few feet in front of the hood ornament with a shower of purple sparks and a blast that rattles garage doors, and the Chevy’s taillights burn bright red as Gary hits the brakes and throws it in reverse, burning rubber, and you and four boys run like rabbits through Mrs. Mueller’s yard—Unnnhhhhhh! What happened? I ran into the birdbath. Come on, get up! No, you guys go on, I’ll just lie here and die.

  “I saw you!” the law yells. “I know who you are!” It yelled that at us for years, meanwhile more and more trash barrels got bent out of shape from cherry bombs dropped in them to see the cloud of ash come up and hear that big boom. Watching the Volunteer Fire Department set off the official fireworks was not the same, even when the Roman candles exploded horizontally into the old people’s section and the lame leaped out of their lawn chairs and ran.

  One August evening, we sat on the porch, too hot to read, waiting for the sun to go down, when Senator K. Thorvaldson came by and said he had a present for us. It was in the paper bag. Three rockets, about two feet long.

  My sister wanted to fire one and save the others for later, which was ridiculous. My brother and I just laughed at her. We stuck the rockets in a row on the lawn and fired them one-two-three. The fuses hissed, the rockets whooshed straight up and whammed, and dropped tiny wooden soldiers on paper parachutes. When the last soldier fell to earth, she said, “See? Now that’s it. If you’d’ve saved some we’d still have two left over.”

  I could see her point. I said, “I wish we could have fireworks every night.”

  “If you had them every night, you’d get tired of them,” Dad said. “It’s just like anything else.”

  I said I didn’t think I could ever get tired of fireworks. I thought we ought to keep a big supply of them and shoot off some every night, about ten or fifteen.

  “Well, we can’t and that’s all there is to it.”

  I knew he’d say that. I could’ve said it for him, I knew how he talked. I could’ve done the whole conversation and saved him the breath. “Please? No. Absolutely not. Oh, Dad. No—I said no, I meant no. But—. That’s enough—no means No.”

  He cut our hair on the porch, my brother and I taking turns on the high chair. The gentle snip-snip-snip of the scissors made me think he was in a good mood, and so I’d save up a good idea like fireworks or a vacation trip to the nation’s capital, a little home-improvement idea such as TV or air-conditioning, for when he worked on my head. He was good at barbering and proud of his work and when he had almost finished and was doing the last little snips, not even cutting hair, just clicking the scissors near the head and admiring the job and in a sense admiring me, I would say in a careful voice (having sat still for fifteen minutes, phrasing this in my mind), “I was reading a book about Washington, D.C. A guidebook. You know, you really learn a lot of history by seeing it. They say it’s something everybody should do, go to Washington.” Or, “I counted up the money I’ve saved and it’s almost enough for an accordion. I figured out that, with what I have, I could buy one now and pay you back for the rest by Christmas.”

  But I knew the answer, because the principle was clear. It’s good to wait, nothing should come easy, you’ll appreciate it more if you work for it. You’ll appreciate it the most if you never get it, I thought.

  That wasn’t how the Flambeaus lived in The Flambeau Family Series: scarcity wasn’t the guiding light in their lives. Emile and Eileen and son Tony, when they were in the Congo in The Case of The Strange Safari and the Land Rover went over a cliff and the native guide M’Bulu ran jabbering into the underbrush when he saw the skull on the rock and the three Flambeaus’ were sleeping on the dirt and eating nuts and berries, they did this because they had to, not out of some misguided notion it was good for their character, and you knew that when they solved the case and went home to Manhattan, they’d have themselves a night on the town and drop fifty or sixty bucks without blinking. You never read about Tony asking Emile for, say, an accordion or some rockets, and Emile saying, No, you get that, you’ll enjoy it for five minutes and then get tired of it. Tony was treated like an adult, and he got to live life to the full. He wasn’t always being told to wait. The Flambeaus’ life was fraught with peril, Count Dumont was sworn to vengeance after they drove him from his Caribbean island stronghold, and when you live under a sword like that, you don’t cut corners. Our life was fraught with peril, too—accidents could happen anytime, the house burn, a car go out of control, lightning strike, and next thing, your parents would be weeping over your small, still form, feeling terrible for having denied you so much pleasure—well, why wait until it’s too late?

  If doing without makes you appreciate things more, I guessed that the people of Lake Wobegon should be the happiest people in the world. No purple mountain majesty there and no alabaster city, just waves of grain and the Co-op Elevator.

  I liked what Pastor Tommerdahl said at Mrs. Lundberg’s funeral. He spoke on the text “So teach us to number our days that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom,” and to him, it meant that we should live each day as if it were our last. Mrs. Lundberg was the Asparagus Lady. She had a half-acre of it, my favorite vegetable, so delicious and it needed no planting, no weeding: it just jumped out of the ground by the thousands. Asparagus was the only extravagant thing about Mrs. Lundberg; otherwise she was like us.

  If you lived today as if it were your last, you’d buy up a box of rockets and fire them all off, wouldn’t you?

  Muriel Krebsbach, daughter of Hazel and Fred, go
t rheumatic fever when she was nine and lay in bed a year and when she came back to school, she was excused from recess and spent the time reading books. She was skinny and mopey and had black stringy hair.

  Fred ran away in 1953, while going to St. Cloud to buy a cold chisel. Muriel was twelve. Even before Fred absconded, Hazel considered Muriel no better than an invalid, and after he left, Hazel really cracked down. Muriel was sent to bed at the slightest symptom and warned against overexerting herself, and soon she didn’t need to be told. Any sudden moves, her mother was right there to give her a look. Anyone asked her how she was feeling, her mother was right there to answer for her: “Not too good, thank you. She’s been kind of puny and listless.”

  One summer afternoon when she was seventeen, she was taking a nap, her second or third, and dreamed that a pig in a white straw hat came out of the woods and said, “Play me a tune and I’ll dance for you.” So she played a tune and the pig danced. Not well, but all right.

  When she woke up, she went in the kitchen to take her pills, and Hazel said, “Cut up some tomatoes, but be careful with the knife.” The first tomato Muriel sliced had a hollow center in the shape of a heart. She thought about it and decided it was a sign, and what it meant was: open your heart.

  Muriel liked to look for signs and omens. She liked to sit on the porch and think, The next man I see is the man I will marry, though the next man always turned out to be nobody special—Mr. Berge returning a shovel, Elmer coming to haul away the trash; or she would close her eyes and open the Bible and put her finger on the page, and whatever verse she touched, that would be God’s special message to her, even though it might be “And Jared lived an hundred sixty and two years and he begat Enoch.”

  The morning after the dream, however, she put her finger on the Bible and read, “And ye shall wash your clothes on the seventh day, and ye shall be clean, and afterward ye shall come into the camp,” which struck Muriel as a message you must act on immediately or else you will never get another clue in this world.

  Washing her clothes was no simple matter with Hazel there. Hazel knew whenever Muriel drew a deep breath. But when her mother turned to see to the bacon, Muriel spilled cranberry juice on herself and headed for the basement. Hazel came after her. “Let me do that,” she said, but God had told Muriel to wash her clothes, and so she did, and took a bath and got dressed and snuck out of the house and headed for the camp.

  The only camp she knew was the clearing in the woods that we boys called “the camp,” where we played Indians. We weren’t there, we were too old for that, and the littler kids had another camp. Our camp was up on the hill behind school, a good steep climb, and when she got to the top, her heart was pounding so hard she sat down on a stump to rest, but she was excited. She wasn’t supposed to be there, and if someone saw her and asked, “What are you doing, Muriel?” she’d have to tell a lie, and she didn’t lie well, so they’d know she was lying and they’d take her home and tell her mother.

  It was thrilling to think about. She decided that if someone came along and asked what she was doing, she’d say, “I’m waiting for my destiny,” and if they didn’t like it, they could lump it.

  She listened to the wind in the trees, listening for a voice in the wind. She looked at clouds, thinking she might see a face, a picture, some sign. She thought, The next man who walks into the woods is the man I will marry. She wished she had brought her Bible.

  It was a blazing hot day, even in the shade. She lay down on the grass by our campfire pit. She kept looking up, looking around: something was just about to happen that would open up her dry life and make it bloom like a tiger lily. A miracle, a vision, it was trembling on the verge like a drop on the faucet.

  Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility was going to walk out of the sumac and tell her a story, give her a message, as Our Lady had done with the children at Fatima. The Pope would send a bishop to ask for the message, but Muriel would say, No, Our Lady told me to keep it secret until 1980. The good people would build a shrine here, and Muriel would tell them to write on it, “Ye shall wash your clothes on the seventh day, and ye shall be clean.” In Lake Wobegon, women always wash on Monday, the second day, and Saturday would be a big change for them, but they would do it, and then something else would happen. A poor beggar would arrive on Saturday morning and ask her to wash his clothes. (Was this the significance of the pig?) Ish, his clothes stink like a cesspool, but she washes them anyway, using extra Oxydol, and they come out gleaming white, like in commercials, and when he puts on his clothes, he becomes a prince and he gives them a million dollars. And this would be the message from Our Lady: be nice. A simple message, one everyone has heard before, and maybe she wouldn’t save it until 1980, maybe she would take that message straight to the people right away: “Be nice. Be nice to each other. Be nice to me,” and people would see it and obey. Boys who teased her by singing “Muriel, Muriel, looks like a body at a burial” would say they were sorry. She’d have a million dollars. She’d send half to the Pope and keep the rest to build a nice shrine and maybe a house up here, and she would come out on the balcony and bless the pilgrims: “Be nice, Remember to be nice.”

  They would have a yard like the Hagendorfs’, with a stone grotto and waterfall, colored lights, iron deer, and wind chimes. Perhaps the waterfall would have healing powers, and crippled children would be dipped in it and stand up and walk. Instead of being cooped up, they would get better right away.

  All of this seemed to her just about to happen all afternoon as the faceless clouds floated by and she prayed for God to make it happen, something, it didn’t have to be great, just any little thing He could give her, and finally she settled for a shaft of sunlight that broke momentarily through a hole in one cloud—not a tremendous shaft as in pictures of angels descending to earth, but a shaft nonetheless, which seemed to indicate Hope. When you look for your destiny, she thought, you see everything more clearly, even if the destiny doesn’t exactly come. When the sun broke through the cloud, she felt exalted. She could almost hear an organ playing, like the organ on “Friendly Valley,” where June was in such a pickle now that Walt had gone to Chicago without marrying her, and yet the organ seemed to say that good things will happen if you’re only patient.

  Muriel went home and got her bawling-out from Hazel and, as Hazel remarked, “I say it and it goes right off you like water off a duck”—it was true, it didn’t make her feel bad at all.

  When Fred did not return from his trip for the chisel, Hazel looked around to see if he had left her a note explaining that he’d be gone overnight. She had said good-bye to him when he went out the door and he hadn’t mentioned a long trip then, but he was taciturn and full of secrets. His taste for Ever Clear pure grain alcohol was a secret to her for years, as were the mail-order books he kept in his workbench. One day she went to look for a C-clamp and saw a grimy picture of a bosomy dame in black net stockings and a harness like a telephone lineman’s. She learned about the Ever Clear one morning when the toaster burst into flames and she grabbed his cup and threw the coffee on the fire. The coffee exploded. Then she had an idea why he always poured his own and what was in the bottle marked DON’T THROW OUT under the sink.

  On his workbench she found a note he had written to himself the morning he left, a list of jobs to do around the house. It began:

  (1) Replace back steps.

  (2) Take squash out of basement & build new shelfs.

  (3) New tailboard for truck.

  (4) Shower head.

  And it continued on to:

  (31) Tear out tile around tub & retile. (1st fix pipe)

  (32) New water heater?

  (33) New siding on garage wall. Maybe NE side too.

  (34) Check roof.

  Evidently he had decided to sit down and get his life in order, and then when he looked at what needed to be done, he panicked and ran. Thirty-four items on the list, and he was thirty-four years old. When she noticed that, she knew that it was more than coincidenc
e. It was a sign that he had reached his limit as Fred and would never come back. He had left his wallet behind, too. Evidently, he was going to be somebody else for a while.

  * Porch society is described by Gaylord Gibbon in his Etiquette Along the Mississippi (p. 28), a book not found in our house but it applied to us anyway:

  The backyard is for privacy. Only people walking in the alley will bother you, and they’re the sort who would anyway. The porch is sociable, but certain rules apply:

  • Even if you’re screened from public view, it’s polite to call out hello to passers-by you know. It’s up to them to stop or not. It’s up to you to invite them in or not. The porch is a room of your house, not part of the yard. Only peddlers or certain ministers would barge right in.

  • If you say, “Why don’t you come up and sit for a bit?,” it is customary for them to decline politely. If the invite was legit, it should then be repeated.

  • An invite to the porch is not an invite to the house. Its terms are limited to a brief visit on the porch, no refreshments necessarily provided unless the occupants have such at hand.

  • When the host stands up and stretches or says, “Well—,” the visitor should need no further signal that the visit has ended. Only an oaf would remain longer. If the host says, “You don’t have to run, do you?,” this is not a question but a pleasantry.

  Humankind knows no finer amenity than the screened porch. It is the temple of family life, and the sacred preserve of the luxurious custom known as “visiting.” Compare it to the barbarity of the “business lunch,” the hideous conversational burden of the cocktail party, and the prison that is the formal dinner, the porch visit shines with civility.

  * A/C, dishwashers, automatic transmissions, frozen dinners, and liberal theologians.

  Some people move away, they get A/C first thing and crank it up to Cold. They drape themselves over it. Then they find a church where God is the gentle mist rising from the meadow and the smile on a child’s face. They don’t want to get sweaty anymore if they can help it. Some people dive right into decadence and make up for lost time, such as Wendell Tollerud who became a big noise in life insurance, has two cars (automatic with A/C), a one-acre ranch house (A/C, all the conveniences), membership in the Presbyterian church, and bought a lake home to get away in, which, he found to his horror, had no indoor plumbing. It was in virgin wilderness up north where septic tanks are forbidden. He paid the price of the cabin for a stainless-steel Swedish catalytic toilet (indoor) that converts shit to a fine white ash like powdered sugar. Wendell had had eighteen years of outdoor biffies and they held no further attraction. He wanted one you could sit in and not be reminded of all the people who’ve been there before you.