Lake Wobegon Days

by Garrison Keillor

  “You didn’t,” Lyle said.

  “Of course I did. She didn’t have anything going for her, nothing. No fear. She wouldn’t run. She was just as trapped as if she was hitched to a tree. If she walked up to my cousins, they’d shoot her of course but they’d hit her in the rear end, and then she’d run, and she’d crawl off in the bushes and die for the rest of the day. I shot her in the back of the head and she dropped like a stone, she didn’t even twitch. I cleaned her and carried her to the truck. I gave her to the Dieners. I couldn’t see eating her myself. And I never went hunting with those jerks again.”

  This seemed brutal to Lyle, but also possibly heroic. The sureness of it. He knew what he had to do and he got up and did it before he changed his mind. But also brutal. He asked Carl how it felt, what were his feelings at the time. Carl said, “I don’t know what you mean.”

  Lyle asked his sister Margaret one day if she was ever worried that Carl might go over the edge. Lyle had read about guys who suddenly went crazy with a shotgun, which he didn’t mention to her, not wanting to alarm her, but he thought Carl was possibly the type.

  She said, “He went over the edge when he met me.”

  One fine day in 1957 they went to see Dracula at the Alhambra, which she had seen before, and right when the French doors were open in the young woman’s boudoir, the curtains blowing in, the mist rolling up from the moors, the bat flew in, and suddenly Dracula was bending over the bed—right then she leaned over and kissed Carl on the neck.

  She had thought of Carl as a calm fellow until then. In fact, it was one of her few remaining doubts about him as a husband, that he might be too calm. Other faults she had improved. He smoked so much at first he smelled like burnt toast, and his hair oil was 10W-30, and she changed all that and also helped him learn to eat food and converse at the same time, quite a trick for a boy from a big family whose only sound at dinner was rhythmic chewing and swallowing. It was hard getting him to say much, though, and she wondered if he might be a little on the dull side, a man with nerves of wood, until she kissed him on the neck and found out that he had deep reserves of nervous energy. In one second, he distributed the box of popcorn over six rows of seats.

  To Lyle, winter was frightening. He woke up cold in the morning. Somehow he and Janice didn’t make enough heat together, and then there was the slab of ice on the window that got thicker every day. It was too cold to get out the ladder and put on the storm window, and besides Carl might see him and come over and do it right. As he pulled on his pants (the floor was cold, too), he thought about the plumbing. They kept a trickle dripping out of each faucet at night to prevent frozen pipes, but you never could tell. A good pipe freeze could run a guy a few hundred bucks for new plumbing. Stumbling downstairs, he thought he caught the smell of dead car in the air. He cranked the thermostat up to eighty, and down below the old furnace creaked and throbbed in its bowels and shook like a dog shitting a peach pit. One day it too would die and what would he do then? He was in debt for ten other things already, including his wife’s orthodontist, a mealy-mouthed guy she met at a Catholic Action meeting who talked her into getting braces (they were cold, too). He owned money on the Chev (deceased). It’d be a cold day in hell before the bank would give him more, a schoolteacher with four kids and a wife with braces and a chickenfeed salary.

  In November, everything starts to go downhill, and you can’t stop it, it’s going to slide as far as it’s going to slide. Lyle’s philosophy of winter. Nature out of control. What scared him sometimes was the thought that others might be affected even more than he—Carl? Maybe not. Maybe an older gent, living alone, “a very quiet nice man” the dumb neighbors would tell police when it was all over, the sudden sniper attack from an upstairs window, the quiet old psychopath picking off children with his .22 as they trudged home in the twilight. A man did that once, maybe North Dakota. He was innocent on grounds of being wacko. There were a number of little houses in town whose windows were dark. Who lived there and what was going through their minds? In the olden days, minds snapped in winter like twigs and the authorities sent wagons out to the small towns and farms to round up cases for the asylum, so what was—And then he heard the kitchen door open. Big boots and a jingle of keys. “Hey!” he yelled. The door slammed. By the time he got to the kitchen, he heard his car start up. Carl revved it a couple times.

  “That’s hard on the carburetor,” Lyle thought. He went upstairs to take a shower so he wouldn’t have to thank him.

  January, olden days. Jim and I were in the woods by the lake, talking about bears, and I was so scared, I had to pee. I unzipped my pants and took it out—he said, “Don’t! It’ll freeze! In midair!” just as I made the golden arc, and for one split second, I imagined it freezing and got so scared, I almost crapped. Even now, I sit up straight at the memory.

  “Watch out for icicles,” my mother said, but she didn’t mean that icicle, she meant the fifty- and hundred-pounders that hung from the eaves, that came to a wicked sharp point. “One of those falls down, it could go right through your head.” A huge one hung over the back door, and I thought about it when I put my boots on and stood with my hand on the knob. A boy on his way to school! A good boy! Being careful to slam the door shut behind him, he loosens the giant icicle and its point, sharp as an ice pick, slams all the way through his skull and down into his heart, the huge butt of the missile splitting his head like a tomato. “He didn’t stand a chance,” the sheriff said, standing over the small, still form, one white hand still clutching a bookbag that contained the dead boy’s assignments, which were posthumously awarded gold stars.

  I left the house fast, escaping that death, but other deaths waited for me. Icicles in the trees: you couldn’t watch out for them and watch out for holes and bear traps. Holes in the ice on the river: you couldn’t see them under the snow, but one misstep and suddenly you’d be in freezing water under the ice, no way to come up for air. Holes in the ice on the lake: we fished in them with a dropline, but what if a giant snapper yanked on the line and pulled you through? It was a small hole, and all your flesh would come off.

  Older children told stories about pump handles and kids who put their tongues on them. You put your tongue on a pump handle when it’s so bitterly cold, the spit freezes, you’re stuck there. Then either they pull you away, ripping your tongue off, or else pitch a tent over you and wait for spring and hope for the best. It scared us little kids, the thought that one day during recess we might forget and put our tongue on the handle—who knows how these things happen? Maybe an older kid would make us do it. Maybe we would just forget—one moment of carelessness, and glurrp, you’re stuck, and the teacher has to grab your head and, rrrrrrip, there’s your little red tongue hanging from the handle. When you’re little you believe that evil can somehow reach out and suck you in, so maybe you’d be lured toward that pump—maybe it would speak, “Hey kid, c’mere. Stick out your tongue,” and put you in a trance.

  So we little kids stayed away from behind the school where the pump was, and when we went out for recess, we kept our mouths shut. We did this, knowing also that a person who breathes through his mouth can freeze his lungs. You should always breathe through your nose: the nose warms up the air. You swallow air so cold through your mouth, suddenly there is a little chunk of ice in your chest where your lungs were. There are no last words when a person dies that way. You stand frozen in your tracks, a little blood leaks out your mouth, and you topple over in the snow.

  One January morning, Rollie Hochstetter went in to town for a new belt for his woodsaw and got back home to find a couple dozen chickens, ducks, and geese strewn on the snow between the henhouse and the tool shed, their throats ripped open and blood spattered around where they’d been dragged and shaken, and all the other livestock in an uproar, even the Holsteins who looked like they’d been to the horror show. A pack of wild dogs did it. Rollie found dog tracks, and his neighbors said they had seen big dogs roaming in the woods, former pets who went bad, w
ho hit Rollie’s because he had no dog to guard the place since Rex died.

  It was a caution to all, especially to us children who walk to Sunnyvale School just west of Rollie’s, some of us with a half-mile hike each way. A lot crosses your mind when you’re eight years old and the light is dim and the road goes through dark woods and there are wild dogs around, even if older children are with you.

  In fact, it’s worse with older children. They’re the ones who say, as you trudge down the hill toward the ravine, “It’s breakfast time for those dogs, you know. They’re probably real hungry now. You know, they can smell food miles away. And they can tear your flesh off in about two minutes.”

  “They are more afraid of us than we are of them,” you say, but you know it’s not possible for a creature to be more afraid than this. “Not when they’re hungry, they aren’t,” they say. “When they’re hungry, they can run as fast as forty-three miles per hour, and they go straight for the throat, like this—” and someone screams in your ear and grabs your neck. Cut it out! Leave me alone!

  You look down the road to the dark ravine, watching for slight branch movement, as if spotting the dogs would make a difference. You are dressed in a heavy snowsuit and boots like two club feet. You couldn’t outrun a snow snake. Then they say, “If they do come, I think we should give them one of the little kids and maybe they’ll let the rest of us go.” And then one of them yells, “Here they come!” and they push you down in the ditch and everyone gallops down the road and through the ravine, girls screaming, lunchboxes banging.

  Oh, yes, I remember that very well. I remember who did it, and I’m sure they remember too. I don’t get letters from those older children saying, “Sure enjoy your show. Remember me? We went to school together.” They know I remember.

  Winter is absolute silence, the cold swallows up sound except for your feet crunching and your heart pounding. And sharp cracks in the distance, which could be ice or trees or could be the earth itself. A planet with hot molten rock at the middle, that is frozen solid at the top—something has to give. The earth cracks wide open and people disappear in it. Limbs fall off trees and pin you to the ground. You walk into deep holes full of snow. You step into a bear trap covered with snow. Snap! it breaks your leg. You step into a deep hole, and there’s a bear in it, a bear who has eaten nothing but dirt for weeks. He chews your arms off first and then eats your head.

  Of course, if the Communists came, there wouldn’t be anything you could do. They would line us up in the playground and give us a choice: either say you don’t believe in God or else put your tongue on the pump handle. What would you do then? You could say, “I don’t believe in God,” and cross your fingers, but then how would God feel? Maybe He would turn you into a pillar of salt, like Lot’s wife. Or an icicle.

  After sixth grade, I left Sunnyvale and rode the bus in to Lake Wobegon High in town, where Mr. Detman was principal, a man who looked as if wild dogs were after him and a giant icicle hung over his head. Worry ate at Mr. Detman. He yelled at us when we ran downstairs, believing we would fall and break our necks and die on the landing. He imagined pupils choking on food and wouldn’t allow meat in the lunchroom unless it was ground up. He had his own winter fear—that a blizzard would sweep in and school buses be marooned on the roads and children perish, so, in October, he announced that each pupil who lived in the country would be assigned a Storm Home in town. If a blizzard struck during school, we’d go to our Storm Home.

  Mine was the Kloeckls’, an old couple who lived in a little green cottage by the lake. She kept a rock garden on the lake side, with terraces of alyssum, pansies, petunias, moss roses, rising to a statue of the Blessed Virgin seated, and around her feet a bed of marigolds. It was a magical garden, perfectly arranged; the ivy on the trellis seemed to move up in formation, platoons of asters and irises along the drive, and three cast-iron deer grazed in front: it looked like the home of the kindly old couple that the children lost in the forest suddenly come upon in a clearing and know they are lucky to be in a story with a happy ending. That was how I felt about the Kloeckls, after I got their name on a slip of paper and walked by their house and inspected it, though my family might have wondered about my assignment to a Catholic home, had they known. We were suspicious of Catholics, enough to wonder if perhaps the Pope had ordered them to take in little Protestant children during blizzards and make them say the Rosary for their suppers. But I imagined the Kloeckls had personally chosen me as their storm child because they liked me. “Him!” they had told Mr. Detman. “In the event of a blizzard, we want that boy! The skinny one with the thick glasses!”

  No blizzard came during school hours that year, all the snowstorms were convenient evening or weekend ones, and I never got to stay with the Kloeckls, but they were often in my thoughts and they grew large in my imagination. My Storm Home. Blizzards aren’t the only storms and not the worst by any means. I could imagine worse things. If the worst should come, I could go to the Kloeckls and knock on their door. “Hello,” I’d say. “I’m your storm child.”

  “Oh, I know,” she’d say. “I was wondering when you’d come. Oh, it’s good to see you. How would you like a hot chocolate and an oatmeal cookie?”

  We’d sit at the table. “Looks like this storm is going to last awhile.”

  “Yes.”

  “Terrible storm. They say it’s going to get worse before it stops. I just pray for anyone who’s out in this.”

  “Yes.”

  “But we’re so glad to have you. I can’t tell you. Carl! Come down and see who’s here!”

  “Is it the storm child??”

  “Yes! Himself, in the flesh!”

  * L. W. Lutheran once bought (by mistake) twenty copies of (rehearsed for almost a week) a Christmas pageant entitled “The New Christmas,” in which, on page four, they found:

  And the spirit of truth came upon them, and it gave them a great brightness, and naturally they were worried. And the spirit of truth said, “Don’t worry. I’ve come with good news that should make you really happy, for there is born today a child who shall be a symbol of new beginnings and possibilities. And suddenly there was the spirit of truth a multitude of truths, praising goodness and saying, “It’s wonderful! Peace on earth and real understanding among people.”

  The purchase price was nonrefundable.

  NEWS

  The Lake Wobegon Herald-Star (formerly the Star, then the Sun, then bought by Harold Starr in 1944) is published every Tuesday and mailed second-class to some fifteen hundred subscribers, most of whom don’t live there anymore (and wouldn’t if you paid them) but who shell out $30 a year to read about it. They’re Harold’s bread and butter: retirees in Tampa and Tucson and San Diego, who keep track of old chums through the obituaries; and people who ran away from home to escape winter and much more, for whom the paper (a gift subscription from Mother) is fresh evidence of a life worth leaving; and then the ones lured away by the pleasures of school and good money, who can afford to be nostalgic.

  This ghostly crowd is fascinating to Harold, even their personal checks are fascinating, he wishes he could afford to hang onto them. Violet checks, emerald checks, russet, puce, buff, robin’s-egg blue, charcoal gray, fuchsia, lapis lazuli, saffron, apricot, peach, burgundy, tangerine; some are dappled, flecked, stippled, even scented (lilac, orange, pine), printed on a landscape, pictures of ocean or mountains (one printed on a pine forest so dark he could barely make out the amount); some come with a saying, “Work is love made visible (Gibran)” or “Have a nice day” or “The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want,” and one arrived with “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer—Thoreau” printed across the bottom in cursive type against a ferny background, it came from a former Leonard halfback now living on Bonnie Brae Drivein Fresno. Thestreets! Harold has readers on Melody Lane, Flamingo Way, Terpsichore Terrace,* West Danube Pass, Ventura Vista, Arcadia Crescent, Alabaster Boulevard—look at the checks
, it’s as if everyone who left town resolved never to live on a numbered street or an avenue named for a President or a common plant, nor on a Street or Avenue period, but on Lanes, Circles, Courts, Alleys, Places, Drives, Roads, Paths, Rows, Trails, with names like Edelweiss, Scherzo, Galaxy, Mylar, Sequoia, Majorca, Cicada, Catalpa, Vitalis, Larva, Ozone, Jasper, Eucalyptus, Fluorine, Acrilan, Andromeda—an atlas of the ideal and fantastic, from Apex, Bliss, and Camelot through Kenilworth, Londonderry, Malibu, Narcissus, to Walden, Xanadu, Yukon, and Zanzibar, plus all the forestry variations, Meadowglade, Mealdowdale, Meadowglen, -wood, -grove, -ridge. Look at this! A check from Earl’s boy, Arlen, the little turd who tried to set the woods on fire, now doing well on Ibis Parkway and writing cream-colored checks bearing a photo of himself and wife and kiddos. Arlen has gained a hundred pounds and has a caterpillar on his upper lip.