Lutherans also get a sermon about sacrifice, which the late Pastor Tommerdahl did so well every year, entitling it “The True Meaning of Christmas,” and if you went to church with visions of sugarplums dancing in your head, he stopped the music. Santa Claus was not prominent in his theology. He had a gift of making you feel you’d better go home and give all the presents to the poor and spend Christmas with a bowl of soup, and not too many noodles in it either. He preached the straight gospel, and as he said, the gospel is meant to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. He certainly afflicted the Lutherans.
I only heard his sermon one year, and I liked it, being afflicted by Christmas, knowing how much I was about to receive and how little I had to give. I was ten, my assets came to eight bucks, I had twelve people on my list and had already spent three dollars on one of them: my father, who would receive a Swank toiletries kit with Swank shaving lotion, Swank deodorant, Swank cologne, Swank bath soap on a rope, and Swank hair tonic, an inspired gift. I walked into Detwiler’s Drugstore and there it was, the exotic Swank aroma that would complete his life and bring out the Charles Boyer in him, so I said, “Wrap it up,” and was happy to be bringing romance into his life until the cash register rang and I realized I had five bucks left and eleven people to go, which came to forty-five cents apiece. Even back then forty-five cents was small change.
I imagined a man walking up and giving me fifty dollars. He was fat and old and had a kind face. “Here,” he said, and made me promise I wouldn’t tell anyone. I promised. He gave me two crisp new twenty-five-dollar bills, a rarity in themselves and probably worth thousands. A Brink’s truck raced through town, hit a bump, and a bag fell out at my feet. I called the Brink’s office, and they said, “Nope. No money missing here. Guess it’s your lucky day, son.” Crystal Sugar called and said that the “Name the Lake Home” contest winner was me, and would I like the lake home (named Mallowmarsh) or the cash equivalent, fifteen grand?
But there’s nothing like a sermon against materialism to make a person feel better about having less. God watches over us and loves us no less for knowing what we can’t afford. I took the five dollars and bought small bottles of Swank lotion for the others, which smelled as wonderful as his. If you splashed a few drops on your face, you left a trail through the house, and when you came to a room, they knew you were coming. It announced you, like Milton Cross announced the opera.
Dad was so moved by his gift, he put it away for safekeeping, and thanks to careful rationing over the years, still has most of his Swank left.
Father Emil still has the bottle of Napoleon brandy.
I still have wax drippings on the front of my blue peacoat.
The Herald-Star still prints the photo of Main Street at night, snowy, the decorations lit, and underneath, the caption “O little town of Wobegon, how still we see thee lie”—the same photo I saw in the paper when I was a boy. That’s Carl’s old Chevy in front of Skoglund’s, the one he traded in on the Chevy before the Chevy he’s got now. He’s sorry he traded it in because the new one is nothing but heartache. The one in the photo ran like a dream.
The Christmas pageant at Our Lady has changed a little since Sister Arvonne took the helm. Under Sister Brunnhilde, it was as formal as a waltz, but it had a flaw in that the speaking parts were awarded to the quietest, best-behaved children, while the rambunctious were assigned to stand in silent adoration, which often meant that the speakers of glad tidings were stricken with terror and had to be hissed at from the wings while a heavenly multitude stood by and smirked and poked each other.
Sister Arvonne is a reverent woman, like Sister Brunnhilde, but is much smaller and light on her feet, so her reverence takes other forms than kneeling, such as reform, for example. It was Arvonne who took the pruning shears and whacked the convent lilacs into shape; overgrown bushes that had been sloughing off for years she cut back and the next spring they got down to the business of blooming. So did she when the new edict came down on nun dress. She put her wimple on the bust of Newman and developed a taste for pants suits. Some old Catholische thought it was the end of the world, but looking at her, they could see it wasn’t. She zipped around like it was eight o’clock in the morning. Around the same time, the new liturgy was greeted with a long low moan from the faithful and even from the unfaithful—Arvonne’s sister Rosalie who had not uttered a Pater Noster since the early days of the Eisenhower administration nevertheless mourned the Latin mass as if it were her dear departed mother—but Arvonne didn’t pause for a moment. “English,” she told Rosalie, “is an excellent language. Look at Shakespeare. Look at Milton—hell, if a Congregationalist could write like that, think what you could do if you actually knew something.”
Sister Brunnhilde had directed the pageant forever, and, massive woman that she was, seemed permanently in place, like a living pulpit, but Sister Arvonne bided her time, listened to Sister complain about how unappreciated and unacknowledged this annual burden was, sympathized with her, drew her out, and when she had drawn Sister so far out that she couldn’t go back, Sister Arvonne sweetly sliced off the limb and took over.
She set out to cut down on smirking by creating more speaking roles. She brought in Zacharias and Elizabeth and tried to write some lines for Joseph:
No room?? But my wife is great with child!
Here, Mary. You lie down and I’ll get the swaddling clothes.
Should we put the baby in the manger?
Is it a boy or a girl?
The last one appealed to her in a way, but all of them struck her as forced somehow and she gave up on him. She had never been clear about Joseph. The shepherds, too, were a problem. They had only one line, and as she well knew from her own acting experience, one line is harder than a hundred. You practice “Let us go to Bethlehem and see this thing which is come to pass, which the Lord has made known unto us” a hundred times, and yet there’s no telling what will come out when it’s your turn to shine. Intense rehearsal of one line may drive it deeper into the brain, to where you can’t remember it that night and can’t forget it for the rest of your life. She gave the shepherds a good speech from the Book of Isaiah.
“They’ll never remember it,” said Sister Brunnhilde who came to rehearsal one day to help out. “It’s too complicated. They’re all mumbling. Nobody will hear a word they’re saying.”
“It’ll be beautiful. Besides, everybody knows the story anyway,” said Sister Arvonne, and she was right, of course.
A cloud of incense drifted down the center aisle behind Zacharias as he marched forward, praising God, his short arms upraised, swinging the censer like a bell, and the cloud enveloped him where he knelt at the steps to the altar, when the angel Gabriel jumped out and shouted, “Fear not!” Gabriel, exceedingly well dressed, announced that Z. would have a son, named John, who would be great in the sight of the Lord. “I am an old man!” cried Zacharias. And Gabriel struck him dumb, for his unbelief. His wife, Elizabeth, also old, helped him away, and you could tell that she believed they’d have a baby, she was counting the days. When the Blessed Virgin came in to grind corn, you could see that she was very shy, and you hoped the angel would speak softly. He waited in the shadows, adjusting his magnificent wings, grooming himself, and then walked up behind her. “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed are thou among women.” She fell down. He told her, “And behold thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name Jesus.” He told her about Elizabeth, which seemed to make her feel better. She said, still lying on the floor, “Behold the handmaid of the Lord; let it be according to thy word.”
Elizabeth helped her up, and they hugged each other. Mary said the Magnificat. John was born and Zacharias recovered his tongue and gave a speech about the tender mercy of God who had visited his people, to give light to them who sit in darkness in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace. And then the lights went out for a spooky minute or two, during which you knew something had gone
wrong and everything was about to come to a big crashing halt, but the lights came on and there was the manger and Mary and Joseph. Shepherds were lounging a little way away, where the angel made his third appearance, illumined by powerful beams, and cried, “Fear not!” and they all fell down. A heavenly choir joined him in song. Wise men appeared, coming up the aisle, uncertain whether they were doing the right thing. “Where is he that is born King of the Jews? For we have seen his star in the east and are come to worship him.” They met the gang of shepherds going west and all went in together and knelt down at the manger. Gifts were given, prayers said, and some of the shepherds remembered most of the long prophetic passage from Isaiah. “Behold the Lamb of God who taketh away the sins of the world,” one said.
And then silence. The children huddled together on their knees, heads bowed, such a peaceful sight and yet you wondered if it was the end or what came next—nobody moved, Mary and Joseph knelt like statues, nobody said a word. They remained in perfect adoration until the organ began to play and then, remembering that it was time to go, they got up and left, and the pageant was over.*
The tree enters a few days before Christmas, a fresh one bought from Mr. Fjerde or Mr. Munch, two adjoining bachelor farmers who share a small forest of evergreens where you can cut one for yourself. Mr. Fjerde is a silent man, and when you bang on his door, your tree in hand, he won’t even tell you the price; he waits to hear your offer and then nods or looks studious until you come up a dollar. But Mr. Munch will talk your ear off, and to hear him tell it, he never meant to raise Christmas trees, they simply snuck into his property one day, and if he ever has the time he’ll clean them out with a backhoe.
“They grow like goddam weeds, you know,” he says, “and they eat the hell out of your soil—that’s good soil there, a guy oughta be doing something with it, it’s a shame to let it go like I have. Goddam, I think next spring I maybe oughta get in there with some herbicide, get them cleaned out. Or I could burn them. Ja, I think maybe I’ll burn them.”
Mother can’t bear to hear swearing, so she sits in the car with the windows rolled up and a choir singing on the radio. “You stay here,” she tells me, but I go with Dad up to Mr. Munch’s back door for the thrill of it. Bachelor farmers disobey almost every rule my parents ever laid down; the yard is full of junk under the snow, including a broken-down sofa, a washing machine, an old icebox leaning against a tree with its doors hanging open and more junk inside it. A hill of old tin cans sits about a can’s throw from the back door. Mr. Munch is unshaven, a cloud of white hair on his head; his clothes are dirty, brown juice runs down his chin, his breath smells of liquor. “He’s not fit to live with decent people,” Mother told me when I asked why he lived alone. And yet he seems to have gotten away with it; he is as old as my grandpa. God hasn’t struck him with lightning, the way you might think.
He ducks into his little house to get two dollars’ change from his cigar box, and I see that he does not clean his room either. Old breakfast scraps on the plate on the table—what a luxury to get up and walk away from a meal! He carefully counts out the two dollars into Dad’s hand, and says, “You be careful with that tree now. Those things are like explosives, you know. I sold these people a tree, I think it was last year, and two days later they was all dead. It blew up one night and burned them all so you couldn’t tell one from the other. I tell you I wouldn’t have one if you paid me. Even fresh—they can go off like a bomb, you know. Boom! Just like that.”
“Merry Christmas,” Dad said.
“God help you,” said Mr. Munch.
News of incendiary Christmas trees was no news to Mother. She knew all about fire hazards. Oily rags never spent a night in our house. A paintbrush in a can of thinner was allowed half an hour to get clean, and then the thinner went down the drain with fifty gallons of water behind it. Extension cords that looked frayed or suspicious were bound up in Scotch cellophane tape. A jar of flour sat on the counter by the stove, ready in case of fire; once, the gas flame under the spaghetti sauce flared up and Mother went for her flour, but we ate the sauce anyway—“It’s only flour,” she said, “same as in the noodles”—though it stuck to the roofs of our mouths like Elmer’s glue. Any unusual sound from the furnace, a wheeze or sigh, and she could see (1) fuel oil leaking on the floor and making an immense dark pool creeping closer and closer to the pilot, or (2) carbon monoxide drifting up the ducts and flowing invisibly into our lives. Our fireplace was used only under supervision, and even after she had doused the coals with water, she often couldn’t sleep and tiptoed down and laid on another quart or two.
As a result, I grew up with a passion for fire and sometimes lit a few farmer matches in my room for the sheer pleasure of it, and one year, two days before Christmas, when the Mortensons’ house burned down (they didn’t know that the tree caused it, but it could’ve) when I was staying at Uncle Frank’s farm, I felt terrible for having missed it. I also felt bad for wanting to have seen it, because they lost everything in the fire including all their presents, an awful tragedy, but nonetheless one I was sorry to miss.
Dad’s fear was that Christmas would throw him into the poorhouse. Mother felt that each of us should get one big present every year in addition to the socks, Rook game, paddleball set, model, ocarina, shirt, miscellaneous gifts: one big one, like a printing press or a trike or Lincoln logs. Dad thought the ocarina should be enough for anybody. He for one had never been given a toy as a child but made his own toys, as everyone did then, out of blocks of wood and string and whatnot, and was content with them, so the thought that a boy needed a large tin garage with gas pumps out front and crank-operated elevator to take the cars up to the parking deck was ridiculous to him and showed lack of imagination. “I don’t want to know,” he said when Mother walked in with a shopping bag full, but then he had a look, and one look made him miserable. “Twelve dollars? Twelve dollars?” He believed that spending was a tendency that easily got out of hand, that only his regular disapproval kept Mother from buying out the store. It all began with Roosevelt who plunged the country into debt and now thrift was out the window and it was “Live for today and forget about tomorrow” with people spending money they didn’t have for junk they could do without and Christmas was a symptom of it. He went into the Mercantile to buy a pair of work socks and saw a German music box that made him wonder what the world was coming to. Eight dollars for a piece of junk that played “Silent Night,” which was maybe worth seventy-five cents, but there was Florian Krebsbach buying the thing who owed money to a list of people as long as your arm. That was Christmas for you.
The twin perils of the poorhouse and the exploding tree made for a vivid Christmas. Where the poorhouse was, I didn’t know, but I imagined it as a gray stone house with cold dank walls where people were sent as punishment for having too much fun. People who spent twelve dollars here and twelve dollars there, thinking there was more where that came from, suddenly had to face facts and go to the house and stay in it and be poor. I might go with Dad or I might be farmed out to relatives, if the relatives wanted me, which probably they wouldn’t, so I’d live in a little cell at the poorhouse and think about all the times I had begged for Dad to buy me things. I would eat rutabagas and raw potatoes and have no toys at all, like Little Benny in The Mysterious Gentleman; or, The Christmas Gruel; A True Story of an Orphan in the East London Slums, except that Little Benny was patient and never complained or asked anything for himself and was adopted by a kind benefactor and brought into a life of fabulous wealth and luxury in a Belgravia mansion, whereas I, a demanding and rebellious and ungrateful child, was heading in the opposite direction, toward the dim filthy room and the miserable pile of rags for a bed and the racking coughs of our poor parents, dying of consumption from hard labor to earn money to buy the junk I demanded.
On the other hand, the danger of Christmas-tree fire some night killing us all in our beds seemed to point toward a live-for-today philosophy, not that we necessarily should go whole-hog and buy e
verything in the Monkey Ward catalog, but certainly we could run up a few bills, knowing that any morning could find us lying in smoldering ruins, our blackened little bodies like burnt bacon that firemen would remove in small plastic bags. Simple justice demands that a person who dies suddenly, tragically, at a tender age, should have had some fun immediately prior to the catastrophe. If your mother yells at you and you go off on your bike feeling miserable and are crushed by a dump truck—that would be a much worse tragedy than if it had been your birthday and you had gotten nice presents, including the bike, and were killed in a good mood.
Then one Christmas I opened a long red package and found a chemistry set, exactly what I wanted, and sat and stared at it, afraid to look inside. For Mother to buy me one, given her feelings, was more than adventurous, it was sheer recklessness on her part, like a gift of Pall Malls and a bottle of whiskey. The year before, I tried to aim her toward the Wards deluxe woodburning kit, pointing out that I could earn money by making handsome Scripture plaques, but she said it was too dangerous. “You’ll burn down the house with it,” she said. So, a year later, to get a chemistry set, complete with Bunsen burner, fuel, a little jar marked “Sulphur,” and who knew what else, I didn’t dare show how happy I was. “Thank you,” I said, humbly, and put it aside and tried to look interested in what other people were getting, afraid that if I got too excited about chemistry, she’d want to have a closer look at it.
After a little elaborate politeness, thanking her for the nice socks and wonderful underwear, admiring my sister’s dollhouse, I slipped away to the basement and set up my laboratory on a card table next to the laundry tubs. The instruction book told how to make soap and other useful things I didn’t need, and omitted things I was interested in, such as gunpowder and aphrodisiacs, so I was on my own. I poured some liquid into a peanut butter jar and dumped some white powder in it—it bubbled. I poured a little bit on the table as an experiment and it hissed and ate a hole in the leather, which made me think, if it had spilled on me it would have eaten my hands off down to the wrists. Would it eat the jar? Would it eat the drain pipe? Had the makers of Junior Scientist included chemicals so deadly they might destroy a house? Upstairs, everybody was enjoying Parcheesi, unaware of the danger. I got out a tube of thin metal strips that I thought must be solder, and lit a match to melt some onto a plastic cowboy to give him a coat of armor, but instead the strip burst into fierce white flame as bright as the sun—I dropped it on the floor and stomped it to bits. My cowboy’s face was gone, his head a blackened blob drooped down on his chest—what I would look like if I kept fooling around. I packed away the chemistry set and stuck it on the shelf behind the pickled beets. Eight dollars wasted. My poor father. Little Benny sold matches on the streets of London in bitter weather to buy medicine for his sick father, but I was a boy who played with fire and came close to killing everybody. Poor me, too. My big present was a big joke. What was Mother thinking of?
Lake Wobegon Days Page 28