Lake Wobegon Days

by Garrison Keillor

  “He never should have played. Dutch and me, we argued with Henneman to send him home, but there was naturally a big crowd to see him play so play he did. I never saw a man sweat so much. His eyes bugged out. He flopped on the bench and almost passed out. Then he dropped one in the top of the seventh. It wasn’t important, we were up by six runs, there were two outs, we said, ‘Shake it off,’ but it bothered him so that when he come up to bat, he was set to kill one. And instead it killed him.”

  “It was the bottom of the seventh, Roy on first and me on third, no outs, a count of two-and-two, and he stepped out of the box and looked down toward me, but he wasn’t looking at me because his eyes wouldn’t focus. He was clearing his throat and I thought he was choking so I called time and ran in, but he wasn’t choking, he was crying. He says, ‘I’m no good.’ I said, ‘You’re the best. You’re the best there ever was.’ And then I went back to the bag.”

  Wally stops. He can’t finish the story. He shuts his eyes and tears squeeze out from his eyelids and fall down his poor old face. Up and down the bar, old guys look away and touch their eyes. The alarm clock ticks by the cash register, and you can hear the electric clock hum in the Cold Spring beer sign. The big fan above the door hums. Everything else stops at the Sidetrack when he comes to that point in the story everybody has heard him tell so often.

  The rest is: Wally Bunsen swung at the next pitch, an inside fast ball across the letters, and fouled it off into his own head and fell across home plate and died. They said he never knew what hit him. Some of his family said that was what comforted them in this terrible tragedy, that he hadn’t had to suffer, but of course he had suffered a great deal more than they knew.

  When I thought of him, I imagined him as my best friend and him and me taking off to go fishing together. I even practiced what we would say. He’d say, “Nothing beats fishing.” And I’d say, “You’re not just talking.”

  In August, Coach Magendanz gets in his Chevy wagon and drives around recruiting Leonards for football season. The late Leonard Halvorson, for whom the high school teams are named, recruited in September with an emotional speech to the student body about school pride and about rival schools who at that moment were planning our disgrace, but Coach likes to go one-on-one and establish a personal rapport with his prospects. “You coming out for football?” he says to a big boy he’s found mowing hay in a ditch. The boy is not sure. “You queer?” Coach asks. “If you are, I don’t want you.” The boy thinks he may after all. Coach has fifteen or twenty certains on his list and needs to round up as many undecideds. He looks for size, speed being rare among Norwegians and Germans, and for malleability or what he calls attitude. In football, it’s kill or be killed, and he needs some killers. “There is an animal in you and I intend to bring it out,” he tells the team the first day of practice. The new boys glance at each other—it isn’t what they learned in Luther League. He picks out two big boys to stand up and face each other. “Okay, Stuart,” he says, “rip his shirt off.” Stuart advances. “You going to let him rip your shirt off, Stupid?” Coach yells. Stupid isn’t. They go at it in the hot sun, fooling around at first but then the animal in them comes out. They grunt and pant, rolling in the dirt, getting wristholds, leg holds, ripping each other’s shirts off, until Coach calls them off. “That’s football,” he says. “Any pansies in the bunch can get up and leave right now.”

  Some of us who are more sophisticated drift by the practice field on our bikes. It isn’t Goodhue Field but Sandburr Field at the county fairgrounds; Goodhue is grassy and Coach likes to start on dirt. Forty boys do pushups in unison, then stand up for the burpies. We wave to them, on our way to go swimming. He looks at us and we don’t hear what he says to them; he says, “I gueth they can’t take their eyth off you guyth.” We hear about it later, and far from being sophisticated, we are filled with terror. All those afternoons we went skinny-dipping, the curiosity about what each other looked like—is something terrible going on? Are we that way? Perhaps we are, otherwise why are we so uncertain about girls? We don’t talk about this. But each of us knows that he is not quite right. Once, at the river, Jim made his pecker talk, moving its tiny lips as he said, “Hi, my name’s Pete. I live in my pants.” Now it doesn’t seem funny at all. If it’s not wrong, why were we worried somebody would come along and see?

  My Uncle Earl centered the line of the great Leonards team of 1932 that beat Minneapolis Roosevelt in the days when football was football, before shoulder pads or hot showers. A Saturday afternoon in November in Memorial Stadium at the University, the teams fought to an 0-0 tie as the sun set. Uncle Earl’s shirt hung in shreds, one eye was swollen shut, his left hand was broken from being stepped on, and blood ran down his legs into his shoes that squished when he walked. But the huge crowd wouldn’t go home without somebody winning, so the game went on in the dusk. The Leonards had only fifteen on the squad, and some were hurt worse than him, so he stayed in. The two lines crouched and heaved forward, and the weary Leonards fell back, until the ball was on their two-yard-line, first and goal for the Teddies. The referee had a flashlight. He shone the light on the ball as the teams lined up. The crowd roared, all rooting for Roosevelt. Then the light failed, and Uncle Earl, crouched ahead of the ball, hollered “Hup!” and grabbed it. The lines crashed together. Leonards yelled “Fumble! Fumble!” A Leonard fell and the Teddies tore his uniform off trying to get the ball. But Uncle Earl had it under his arm, and he had walked toward the sideline with it and was strolling up the field. He walked ninety-eight yards for the winning touchdown and when they got the flashlight fixed, there he was under the goalposts. He played against me and my cousins when we were little. He picked up the ball and walked the length of the yard with six of us hanging on him.

  When I was fourteen, he came up to bat one hot July afternoon in the Father-Son Softball game and looked at me playing third base and pointed his bat at me. I crouched; my mouth was dry and my heart pounded. He waited for a low pitch and drove it straight down the baseline—a blazing swing, a white blur, a burst of chalk dust—I dove to my right just as the ball nicked a pebble—it bounced up and struck me in the throat, stopping my breath, and caromed straight up in the air about fifteen or sixty-five feet. Blinded by tears, I hit the ground face first, getting a mouthful of gravel, but recovered in time to catch the ball and, kneeling, got off a sharp throw in the vicinity of first which caught him by a stride. I was unable to speak for twenty minutes. That play was some proof that I was all right. Everyone saw it and said it was great; even guys who didn’t like me had to say that, because it was.

  * Once a bat got loose in Mrs. Krueger’s house and swooped from room to room and scared her silly. She lay on the floor, then crawled to the phone and called Gary and LeRoy to come and kill it, meanwhile her big cat Paul, named for her late husband, sat on the highboy studying the bat’s flight and in one well-timed leap knocked it to the floor where Gary and LeRoy found it. They offered to look around the house for more bats. They took their time about it, never having seen her house before. Upstairs, although she lived alone, they found five single beds each neatly made and the covers turned down, and the kitchen table was set for two. The radio was on, playing one Glenn Miller tune after another. Out in the squad car, they searched the radio for Glenn Miller and couldn’t find any. LeRoy went back in, thinking he might have left his glove or something, and her radio was still playing Glenn Miller, “Tuxedo Junction.”

  FALL

  A hard frost hits in September, sometimes as early as Labor Day, and kills the tomatoes that we, being frugal, protected with straw and paper tents, which we, being sick of tomatoes, left some holes in. The milkweed pods turn brown and we crack them open to let the little seeds float out across the garden on their wings of silvery hair. The milk of the milkweed is said to be poisonous. Toward the end of September, the field corn is ready to be picked, about the same time as the sun (represented by an orange in Miss Lewis’s hand) is directly over the equator of a pea, thus maki
ng day and night of equal length, the northern hemisphere of the pea (us) tilting away from the orange and toward the darkness. The orange is smaller than the one Senator K. Thorvaldson gives me for Christmas, the glorious Florida orange. “Here, Chonny,” he says, “you put this in your stocking.” He has forgotten my name—he gives oranges to so many kids—but he likes me and wants to be on a first-name basis. On a cold December morning, the orange gives off the sweet essence of Florida, a spectacular smell, almost as good as Vick’s Vaporub. But Christmas is a long way off, beyond the planets of Halloween, Armistice Day, and Thanksgiving.

  One Saturday in October, Mayor Clint Bunsen puts up his storm windows, and the next Saturday everyone does, including Byron Tollefson and his boy Johnny, home from college, who asks, “Why do we have to do it today just because everyone else is?” He also wonders why they don’t get aluminum combinations with the storm enclosed that you just slide up or down instead of taking down screens and lugging these ancient storms up from the cellar and washing them and hoisting them up: it about breaks your back, and the second-story ones you got to hump up a ladder which won’t reach unless it’s at an 89° angle so you climb straight up the cliff bucking a hundred pounds of glass and if a gust catches it or if the legs slip or if you take a deep breath or lean back one degree or if you have a serious thought in the back of your mind, you’re a goner.

  Byron has the radio on to the Gophers, who are getting pounded by Ohio State in heavy static, so it’s hard to follow exactly, it’s a sort of general overall disaster. Sounds like a short-wave transmission from the Russian front, but they’re in Columbus, and the long, long wave of crowd noise means another Buckeye TD, which makes it 51-7. “Our Gophers are definitely being outplayed today,” the announcer remarks. It has put Byron in a tough mood. “Don’t tell me about it. Just do it,” he says and he points up to the front bedroom window, number fourteen (XIV scratched in the sill and in the side of the storm), and braces his foot on the bottom rung. Byron can’t lift the big ones on account of his back, which he sprung the day they moved into this house, carrying the refrigerator; and he doesn’t climb because his sinuses are affected by heights.

  It was chilly the next night, and the night after that. Father Emil’s hay fever began to subside to two hankies per day. There had been no mention of the Feast Day of St. Francis in the bulletin, so Sister Arvonne asked him straight out if he wasn’t going to have the blessing of the animals. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “It’s so hard on the grass. They tear up the sod and then it freezes and you got hoofprints in the spring.”

  “If it’s your allergies you’re thinking about, we could get Father Todd,” she said.

  “Oh, it’s not the allergy, it’s the commotion. You know—” and he paused profoundly—“we have to think twice about providing ammunition to the unbeliever. What troubles me about the blessing of the animals is the circus aspect. People see this, they think, Well, there go the Catholics. I think, Sister, we could bless animals without having them on the premises, same as the criminals or the lepers—you wouldn’t ship in a bunch of lepers so we could pray over them, would you?” Meanwhile, he thought: Father Todd? Bring in Father Todd? The T-shirt priest? The last time he got talked into Father Todd was for an Easter sunrise vigil for Catholic youth, which the man presided over in a T-shirt. With a picture of Our Lord on water skis that said “He’s Up!” What would the man do on St. Francis’s Feast Day? Probably wear antlers and talk about Our Brother the Buffalo.*

  “Well,” she said, “I know people who have their heart set on it, so if we’re going to disappoint them, let’s not do it at the last minute. And what’s wrong with a show? Entertainment began in the Church, after all. People need it.”

  A reference, perhaps, to Father’s part in the town council debate on installing a community TV antenna on the water tower. He was going to stay away, and then he heard that Principle was melting among the Protestants so he felt obliged to carry the ball. Long ago, he used to ask his parishioners to sign a pledge to turn their TVs to the wall at 5 P.M. Friday and leave them turned until Sunday after Mass, but it didn’t work out. People turned their TVs toward the wall at such an angle that the picture was received by a mirror and transmitted back to them. More houses every year put up ugly thirty-foot antennas to pull in St. Cloud. So he went and gave a speech against television. Television dulls the moral senses, breaks up the family, distracts people from religious obligations, and tempts children with all manner of junk. Pastor Ingqvist then gave the case for educational programs and went out of his way to mention the Pope’s visit to New York, the extensive TV coverage, the value of watching this, etc. Father Emil said that if you want to know what the Holy Father said, you could find it in The Catholic Bulletin; if you just want to see him climb in and out of limousines, then watch TV. Clint Bunsen said he doubted they could afford it anyway with Bud needing a new hydraulic lift for the snowplow. Bob Peterson said if the snow plowing went like last year, people would be spending lots of time indoors and needing entertainment. Bud challenged him to name one day when the streets weren’t clear by noon. Bob said there were so many it was hard to pick just one. Clint called for order. Then Harvey spoke about the danger of electrocution. Since time immemorial, boys have climbed the water tower. It’s dangerous, it’s wrong, but sooner or later a boy must do it, and with a TV antenna, there is always the danger of electricity getting loose. The water tower sweats, so all you’d need would be a few volts, and boys would fall like flies. “Then we’ll be on television,” he said. “They’ll all come with their cameras to take pictures of the service in the gymnasium and those little white coffins all in a row.” The vote was four opposed, one abstention.

  Saturday. Opening day of duck hunting. At three A.M. a basement light shines in the squat brick lodge of the Sons of Knute where Elmer is brewing three giant pots of coffee, a special Knutes blend, double-strength with two raw eggs per pot, guaranteed to open a dead man’s eyes. Other necessities have been hauled the day before to the Pete Peterson Memorial Blind—two fourteen-foot fiberglass duck decoys, a duckboat to retrieve the kill, carpet strips for the blind—and Edgar is bringing the brandy. Elmer had a good golden retriever once, named Duke, but he got too fond of coffee laced with brandy; two years ago he plunged in and paddled out for a dead duck and chewed it up and couldn’t be trusted again. The giant decoys were borrowed by Pete Peterson (1910-1978) from his friend Walt who built them for the 1972 Minneapolis Duck Show and who didn’t need them back. Walt’s theory was that ducks fly too high to see life-sized decoys, that giant decoys would appear life-sized from cruising altitude (though making the lake seem dramatically smaller by comparison) and thus would exert greater draw. Each decoy can hold two hunters, but unfortunately, the immense superstructure makes the vessels unseaworthy, and they leak slightly, due to the holes in the bottom for the uprights, and the hunters within—one of whom puts his head and shoulders in the duck’s head (which the other rotates with a hand-crank) and fires through the nostrils on the bill, an awkward shot at best, made more so by the tendency of the decoy to tip when a large man, excited by quacking aloft, jumps to his feet and pokes his shotgun out and begins to blast—tend to gel wet and discouraged. A third decoy, the U.S.S. Pete, sank with Gus aboard in the fall of 1974. Gus heard incoming mallards and jumped to his hunting station, the Pete rolled to starboard, and Gus, trying to right it, stuck his big foot through the fiberglass shell and she descended into the drink tail first and he had to blow the head off to get out.

  The Memorial Blind, named for the unlucky man whose lakeshore property it was dug into, is a trench with a bench where eight can sit camouflaged by haybales and wait for their prey. But the thought of eight Knutes firing guns from that small space is too much even for them, so four marksmen occupy the blind, two serve as ballast in the decoys, and the others, eight or ten, remain in the weeds behind the lines, ready to provide supporting fire. Opening Day morning is chilly and often rainy, and they need the brandy to kee
p warm, and more coffee to keep sober, and brandy in that coffee to keep calm and also because the coffee tastes better if it’s well-laced, so by sunrise a Knute is in a fraternal mood, full of loyalty to his pals of the mystic order of the hunt and to departed friends now manning the pearly blinds in the duck shoot in the sky, such as Pete Peterson.

  Poor Pete. Cancer got him. He always knew it would and in his last years kept a desperate watch for signs of it—the Seven Danger Signs was taped to his bathroom mirror—but without much hope: every day revealed a possible sign, something unusual, a little change of weight, a thickening, a slight lump, some soreness, a redness of the stool, a sore that was slow to heal (older guys heal slower)—then, that fateful Friday, he felt a definite lump on the back of his head and was dizzy and found blood on his toothbrush. Lois was off to clean the church and he panicked—jumped in the car in his pants and T-shirt—it was Dr. DeHaven’s day off and besides, Dr. DeHaven didn’t believe his cancer theory—so he headed for St. Cloud to a new doctor, and only a panicky man would have passed that semi the way they said he did, on a long right-hand curve going up the hill toward Avon, and there he suddenly met his end and found his peace in the grille of a gravel truck.