Lake Wobegon Days

by Garrison Keillor

  “It was his time,” said Elmer at the time, reflecting the general Knute philosophy of death as a lottery, and yet they miss him so much every year, the Duck Hunter’s Duck Hunter. A man who lived for the hunt, lived by the lake about a beer can’s throw from the blind, and took his gun to bed with him in season, the bedroom window being a four-foot single-pane spring-action sash-loaded window that dropped into its housing when he yanked the rope tied to the bedpost, permitting a good shot from a mattress position. His last fall, he bagged two from bed with one shell in a heavy drizzle an hour before dawn, barely awake, his head still on the pillow—that’s how good a shot he was. Lois jumped three feet straight up, she yelled, “What in the name of creation!” and hit the floor and was at the door in one jump. “Mergansers,” he said.

  Action is slow in the blind. Seven A.M. and only clouds have flown over and birds too small to shoot, nonmeaty birds like sparrows and those white-breasted ones, and the hunters are thinking of former days. “It was better hunting before you had jet planes,” says Mr. Nordberg. “Something about the sound, it’s hell on ducks. It ruins their instincts, you know, so they don’t fly bunched up so much in formation, you get more loners than you used to.”

  “Well, that’s the trend everywhere you look now,” says Elmer, and indeed this seems true, of man as well as duck. Everyone out for himself, no loyalty, no interest in others, just grab whatever you can get. It’s sad to think about the way things have gone downhill. “I’m glad I don’t have much longer,” says Mr. Nordberg. “I’m glad I lived when I did. I’d hate to be young and have that to look forward to.” Tears come to his eyes as he says it. “There were no times like the old times.” This reminds Elmer of Pete. He stands up stiffly and proposes a toast to their old friend. Mr. Berge is asleep and Swanny doesn’t feel so good. He has been sitting on a hemorrhoid the size of a Concord grape, no position gives him relief, and all the anesthetic he has put away has not helped either. Elmer and Mr. Nordberg haul in the decoys and Bob and Cully climb out. Ivar and Phil, Johnny, Gus, and Sig and Bernie come up from the rear. Edgar pulls the last bottle out of the Porta-Bar chest. “To Pete,” he says. “God love him.” They pass the bottle around. It truly does seem like the end. Of these grizzled old comrades in their big jackets and brown ponchos, gray-haired veterans of so many hunts, good pals and true, the finest men by God that you could ever hope to meet—who knows which ones will never see another October? They all are well into heart-attack country now, where life’s road gets steep and a man is easily winded. Women go on and on but men drop like flies around this age. “To all of the brothers who have gone before, God love them,” says Elmer.

  “Ike. George. Val—” Mr. Berge stops. The roll of the dead is too long, and he’s afraid he will forget one. The bottle goes around again, a shorter trip as they are standing closer, shoulder to shoulder. Edgar says they should buy a Last Man bottle and bury it in the blind for the survivor to come out and have a toot on in their memory. “It wouldn’t last long, somebody’d sneak out and finish her up,” says Cully looking at Mr. Berge who is insulted. “This is no time for that kind of talk. My God. You can’t be decent then keep your mouth shut for Chrissake.”

  Elmer feels so tired he’d like to curl up in the car and sleep all day. “You’ll outlive us all,” says Edgar to Mr. Berge, trying to cheer him up. “The hell I will. Cully will and he can buy his own bottle. I ain’t paying for it.”

  Cully goes off to take a leak. Swanny has to go home and get in a sitz bath. He came in Edgar’s car so Edgar has to go too and Bernie. Sig and Ivar think they’ll be going. “Why? What’s the rush?” says Elmer. Well, they just think they may as well. “Why? What’s the problem? Afraid the wife’s gonna chew your ass?”

  Well, no, Sig says, it’s just that he came out to hunt, not to stand around and get soused—“Soused! Soused? You got your nerve to stand there and say that! I dare you to say it again! Look at me and say it! Look at me! You’re saying I’m drunk then have the decency to look me in the eye!” Johnny steps in between Sig and Elmer. “I’m going,” says Phil. “I never saw the likes of you guys. What would Pete think? He’d be ashamed.” Phil leaves and Sig decides to go with, and Johnny. Cully comes back and goes with them. That leaves Elmer and Gus. They sit down in the blind. “What are you thinking?” asks Gus. “Let’s hang it up.” “You know,” says Elmer, “I don’t think nothing is ever going to be what it was ever again. We’ve about seen the last of it. I’m getting too damn old.”

  Uncle Virgil Bunsen, a former Knute, died during hunting season so the Knutes honor guard was in good form for the graveside salute, and attendance was good what with hunting being poor. His death caught almost everyone by surprise, though: they hadn’t known he was alive. He moved to Nevada in 1925 and didn’t keep in touch, so not many people at his funeral knew him well enough to feel as bad as they knew they ought to. They went to be sociable. The few who wept did it out of custom and because they didn’t want to pass up the opportunity.

  Clarence had got the news on Monday from his cousin Denise, Virgil’s daughter, who asked Clarence to handle the arrangements because she couldn’t be there. “I think Dad would’ve wanted to be buried up there; he hated Nevada. Anyway, Burt and I have to go to Hawaii for two weeks. It’s something we’ve been planning for a long time and, anyway, I want to remember Dad the way he was. I can’t see what good it would do me to be there, I don’t know anybody and funerals depress me. I think we have to look ahead. Not look back. You know.”

  Who was Burt? Her husband, Clarence guessed, but which one? The last he heard she was married to a Ray. And where was Aunt Ginny? “Oh, she died about six years ago,” Denise said. “I thought Dad wrote to you.”

  The upshot was that he had to get up at six A.M. and go to the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport, find a certain freight terminal, sign a receipt for Uncle Virgil, and talk a young man in a suit into letting him put the box in the panel truck instead of hiring a hearse. The man told him that he was only an assistant manager and didn’t make the rules. He said, “Would you want people hauling you in an old truck after you pass on?” Clarence said, “It depends who the people are.” Back home, he dropped off the box at Lundberg’s Funeral Home and went to persuade Pastor Ingqvist to give Uncle Virgil the benefit of the doubt and provide a Christian burial, then he called Elmer about the honor guard, and about four o’clock he headed up to the cemetery with Bud to help dig.

  “It looks like rain for tomorrow,” Bud said. “That’s why I didn’t want to wait. You ever dig a grave in the rain? It feels like you’re digging your own.” Clarence worked the pick and Bud shoveled. The two little Diener boys rode up on their bikes and sat down to watch. The men took turns in the hole. The plot was between Clarence’s Uncle Frank, the oldest boy who never married, and an Alphonse Herberger whom he had never heard of: 1881-1924. It was going to be a tight fit, they could see as they got down to four feet, and Bud said he hoped Virgil was the sort who got along. Clarence was sweating. He shuddered each time he raised the pick and brought it down. Pieces of what looked to be Frank’s coffin kept turning up beneath his feet and he was afraid of bringing up a bone. The boys were hoping for just that. They peered down when Clarence climbed out. “What do dead people look like when they’ve been buried a long time?” one asked.

  Bud leaned on his shovel and sucked his teeth and looked at them thoughtfully. “Weeel, we don’t ordinarily dig them up to find out,” he said, “but ever so often now and then we have to, like with the boy—what was his name now? The one who died of diphtheria? You remember, Clarence. Oh, well. Anyway, he was about your age. A wonderful boy. He had a brown collie dog used to follow him like a shadow and the two of them liked to swim together and they’d go fishing and in the winter they slid down the hill, you never saw a boy and a dog so close as those two were. Well, the boy got sick, and he just got worse and worse. He was too Weak to walk but they hitched that dog up to a wagon and he pulled the boy around town every day until one day he
was too sick even for that and one week later he was dead.”

  “Well, of course, his parents were heartbroken and his brothers and sisters. They sat around crying their eyes out for two days, looking at that poor child lying in the coffin, but the collie dog took it even harder. He wouldn’t eat a bite, he didn’t sleep, he just sat by the coffin and cried, the way dogs do, moaning, and when the boy was buried, the dog lay on his grave and wouldn’t leave, so they left him here.”

  “Well, sir, it was two days after the burial, the dog came tearing down the hill like he was crazy, barking and yipping and wouldn’t quit. They tied him up but he kept on until finally the father said, ‘I believe he wants us to follow him,’ and sure enough. They untied him and he took off for the cemetery and stood on the boy’s grave and howled, and when the people got up there, the dog began to dig in the dirt. The father said, ‘He’s trying to tell us something,’ so they got shovels and dug as fast as they could, and got down to the little coffin and lifted it out and opened it up.”

  “Well, sir, what they saw inside, it just tore their hearts out, it was so horrible. People took one look and turned away, sick. The boy’s eyes were wide open and his face looked like he was screaming. His face was all bloody and so was his hands. He had clawed the cloth off the lid and scratched the wood and had torn off half his clothes and scratched his face to ribbons. You see, they had buried him alive.”

  The Diener boys did not move a muscle as Bud told them this: they looked as if he had clubbed them over the head. Clarence got back in the hole to pick some more.

  “His father was never the same after that. He completely lost his mind. He became like a little child. Every day he sat in the yard and just hummed and talked to hisself and the dog sat there with him. It was the saddest thing you ever saw. And now the boy and his father and his dog are all dead, buried up there around back of the maple tree. I can show you their grave if you want to see it.”

  The boys whispered, No, they didn’t want to. They picked up their bikes and coasted off down the hill. They coasted very slowly. Bud laughed. “Well,” he said, “you ask a question, you get an answer.” He studied the hole. “Don’t be afraid to dig down around Frank,” he said. “It’s only dust, you know.”

  Clarence’s one clear memory of Virgil was from a family trip out West, when Clarence was nine or ten. He remembered eating hamburgers in buns (his family always had them on bread) and leaving the cafe and his father put him up on his lap and let him drive the car. His mother said, “Clinton, he’s only nine!” Or ten. In Nevada, they stopped at Virgil’s house, a little white house, and Virgil came out to see them. They stood around, and he didn’t invite them in. Aunt Ginny wasn’t feeling well. They all went for a walk. It was hot and the air smelled of gasoline. They walked along some railroad tracks and past a water tank, and next thing, Virgil was forty, fifty feet out in front of them. Walking like he forgot they were there. That night, they stayed in tourist cabins. “Uncle Virgil doesn’t have room for all of us,” his mother explained. His father snorted. He said, “Virgil never did have room.” Years later, from his father, Clarence heard a passing reference to bad blood between Virgil and Clarence’s grandfather, which had to do with cattle and led to Virgil moving away and which apparently never got patched up.

  Clarence put himself out for the funeral, as several people remarked to him afterward: “This was real good of you, Clarence. You did the right thing.” He made four big sprays of evergreen and dug up enough about Uncle Virgil to make a decent obituary and when Pastor Ingqvist said he couldn’t stay for the graveside service, Clarence handled that himself. He read the Twenty-third Psalm, and then, even though it gave him a bad case of the shakes, he faced them, all sixteen of them, and said, “Uncle Virgil left here when I was pretty little and I only saw him once after that, so I don’t have much to say about him. I do know that it was because of an argument that he left. I wish I knew more. I’m glad to have him back and I hope that he is finally at rest. I hope that all of us will take a lesson from it, to settle our arguments as quick as we can. I say this especially to the younger ones. Life is short. The Bible says, don’t let the sun go down upon your wrath. Settle these things. It isn’t true that time heals all wounds, sometimes they get worse if you don’t do something about them. I didn’t mean to talk this much, but I know I’ve done things to make people mad and I ask you to forgive me for them and I forgive you for anything you ever did to me.” He stopped, not certain how he should end it. Finally, he just reached for the ropes. They lowered Virgil into his grave and shoveled in the dirt and made a nice mound over him. They shook hands and got in their cars and went home to supper.

  Eloise was a little put out with Bud afterward. “I don’t see why Clarence had to help with the grave,” she said. “That’s your job, after all.”

  “I didn’t make him. But I’ll tell you this, they don’t pay me enough to get away with treating me like a servant.”

  She said, “But servants always get paid less.”

  He said, “Well, there’s the problem, isn’t it.”

  Clarence sat in his green easy chair and Arlene fixed him a cup of Sanka. She kissed him on the top of his head. “You did good, honey,” she said.

  “I went down there early so I could have a look at him,” he said. “The coffin was sealed shut and I had to get a clawhammer to pry it open. It was stuffed with those green pads, like house-movers use. I pulled those out and there he was and, you know, I didn’t recognize him at all. It was like I’d never seen him before in my life. A complete stranger. All I had to show it was my uncle was a piece of paper with his name on it. Like an invoice. You know, my dad never wrote to him, never talked about him. Something about cattle—he and Grandpa thought Virgil cheated them, and that was the end of him. Stopping to see him in Nevada, that was Mother’s idea, and I remember her trying to be friendly and Dad and Virgil not saying more than two words to each other. When my cousin called, she offered me $500 to take care of the funeral. My God. She was surprised I wouldn’t take it. She said it’d cost her twice that to hire a funeral director. Good Lord.”

  “So I slow down and roll down my window and I says, ‘Do you need a ride?’ and he says, ‘No, I’m running.’ Well, I could see that. That’s why I offered. So then I go on to Ralph’s and head home and there he is again—running back the way he come. I know they do this but I can’t see it: why would you run so hard to get to where you were in the first place?”

  “Beer an’ a bump. And don’t give me that Jim Beam. Last time I drank it, I got so damn sick I was afraid I’d die. And then I was afraid I wouldn’t.”

  “Wayne, you’re so dumb, you deserve to be a Democrat.”

  “Look at yourself, Oscar. You’re drunk, you’re personally repulsive, and you believe in Reagan. What’s left for you, Oscar? Next thing you’ll be living in your car, eating bugs off the grille.”

  “I don’t have to take that from you, you—”

  “You! Wayne! Out!”

  “How come me? I didn’t start it! Throw him out!”

  “He hasn’t finished his beer.”

  “Wally, these nuts are rotten. Lookit this!”

  “So get some other ones.”

  “You eat a whole bag of nuts and you don’t know they’re rotten?”

  “Lookit this! Jeez!”

  “I read an article in the Minneapolis paper about rotten nuts. It affects your sex life. That’s the truth.”

  “There’s a chestnut tree out there and he’s getting them chestnuts and I know it and he knows I know it too. Damn Norskie’s so damn stubborn: I followed him out there one day last fall and he drives around all damn afternoon rather than have me find out where the damn thing is. Cheap sonofabitch. I don’t know how some people can go to church on Sunday!”

  “I tell you, the price is so ridiculous—next year I’m putting in forty acres of zinnias. I’m sick of looking at corn. Long as I’m gonna go broke anyway, may as well have fun doing it. Put in zinnias
and sit out there in a lawn chair and read the paper.”

  “Wally! This beer’s flat, dammit. What you trying to do to me? I work all day and the old lady chews me out for coming down here and now you’re trying to keep me sober?”

  A good night at the Sidetrack Tap: Mr. Berge has borrowed ten bucks from Senator K. and won two more at pinochle, and now he is up and dancing to Rusty Hintges’s old song: “I can’t wait to drive you home, Just call me Mr. Smith. Tonight it’s time for love, And baby, you’re the one I’m with.” Rusty grew up near here and Mr. Berge once gave him bus fare to Nashville and years later got a box of 45s from him in payment, including this one, but it’s not the memory of old Rusty that warms his heart, it’s the fact that ten minutes ago two young women walked in and sat by him at the bar. Not so beautiful by day, perhaps, but in dim light they look like movie stars. Mr. Berge, who doesn’t draw much attention from women including his wife, is thrilled to pieces. One is Roxanne and the other Suzie. They’re from St. Cloud. Just driving through. He insists on buying them beers, which guarantees him five minutes, and he starts out with a couple of Ole and Lena jokes, which they like okay, so he tells them a dirtier one, about Ole and Lena’s wedding night. He gives them cigarettes. He offers to give them a ride home. “We got a car,” says Susie. “Well, I could give the other one a ride home then,” he says. “You don’t live together do you?” Actually, they do. “Well, maybe you could give me a ride, then,” he says. Their attention is wandering. He offers to dance with one of them, but they don’t want to dance. “I dance pretty good,” he says, and gets up and dances.

  In his own mind, having had a few, he dances real good, but Merle laughs at him. “Hey, Berge, how’s your wife and my kids?” The girls think this is pretty funny. He hitches up his pants and sits down. Merle has moved in at the other end, next to Suzie. “This is Merle,” Mr. Berge announces, “Merle is my best buddy, ain’t that right?” Merle snorts. “These ladies are from St. Cloud, now ain’t that a deal, Merle? We don’t get all that many of you up here. God, you’re so pretty. Anybody tell you that before? You remind me of the Soderberg Sisters. Ever hear of them? God, they were pretty. Talented? Jeez, they had it all. Ja, they went right from here to the National Barn Dance. Did you know that? Huh?”