Lake Wobegon Days

by Garrison Keillor

  The first week of April is a good guess, though the car has sunk as early as late March and as late as the third week of April. Once it never went down. They parked it over the end of the long sandbar that comes off the point, the one that has ended a few fishing trips before they got to where they were biting, when the sandbar bit the boat and the fishermen pitched out in the mud. The Ford sat there in four inches of water, a sort of buoy, and the scholarship fund earned hundreds of dollars.

  In April, giant icicles let go of the eaves and crash to the ground. Bare pavement appears and Duane gets a screech out of his back tires he has waited all winter to hear. Birds arrive: the redwing blackbird (“o-ka-leeeee”), robin (“cheer up, cheer up, cheerily”), killdeer (“killdeer, killdeer”), and the Norwegian nuthatch (“I tink so, I tink so, probably”), a brownish-gray bird with a spot of white breast, which lives in barns and feeds on coffee grounds. It has been around all winter. “I tink so” is its spring song. The winter song is “I don’t know, I don’t know. Who can tell?”

  Who can tell? Sometimes we get a good blizzard in late April, even in May. Odd as it is and (like a misplaced parenthetical comment that makes no sense when later he said, “Don’t, darling. Please don’t. Please, Marie,” but she went ahead and did it anyway) daunting, still—this is Minnesota. “Spring? Don’t be nuts,” some people say even as the snow begins to melt. The backyards look as if giant bison were camped out there, lounging around. This stuff here—dogs didn’t do this, it’s too big, this is from a bison. It was a dog, though, who came shopping in the garbage can and spread the items out for inspection. Evidently he didn’t care for orange peels, coffee grounds, brown lettuce, old fruitcake, or rotten potatoes.

  So warm, but still you have to dress warmly. This is the season for colds. My parka was inherited from Mr. Hoglund, who died in 1947—I wear a dead man’s jacket. All of us get hot during recess, and soon there is a pile of parkas in the corner of the playground.

  Out on the country road, you can see the Norwegian bachelor farmers have hung out their sheets. “When a bachelor farmer begins to smell himself, you know winter’s over,” says Clarence. Barney bought his sheets for a quarter at the Lutheran rummage sale, which got them from Irene Bunsen because Clint said they gave him headaches at night. Hawaiian sheets with big swashes of tropical colors. If you saw Barney on the streets and wondered what kind of sheets he slept on, Hawaiian would be your last guess. His name is John; he was nicknamed Barney for his aroma. When I first saw his sheets flapping in the wind, I was four years old. I asked if we could stop. I thought it was a carnival and there were rides. In a few weeks, there will be—when the bachelors hitch up their Belgians and head out to the edge of the dry stubble. Drop the blade, cluck at the team, and off they go. The moldboard throws the turf over and releases the aroma of sweet black earth.

  The first week of April is darn early to get out in the field to cultivate. Roger Hedlund, who I went to school with and who looks almost exactly the same as then—same flat-top, same calm look as when he missed two free throws with one second remaining that lost the district championship for the Leonards in 1958—got out early the first year after his dad, Ivan, finally turned the farm over to him, got too close to the woods where the snow was melting, and got stuck and worked at it and got the Farmall dug down to the green clay, down to the axle. It took three neighbors with three tractors to haul him out. The ruts are still visible, a decade later, a trench from an ancient battle. Archeologists could dig down and find the lumber they used for traction.

  Embarrassing, to get stuck in your field. You’re out in the open, just like in basketball, and the sound of a giant Farmall submerging carries a long way. It’s not like a fart that you can pretend was something else. No spiders bark that loud.

  So now, as they sit in the Chatterbox and talk about getting in the fields, they stick it to Roger once more. “Ja, Roger may be getting out today and do some excavating.” “Ja, Roger, he plants deep.” They stick it to him harder because it’s so hard to get a rise out of Roger. He’s so calm. He won’t give them the satisfaction. He keeps it inside, like Ivan, who years ago blew up his old dairy barn, having built a new one, but Lord, to use as much dynamite as he did—he broke every window in his house and scattered lumber over half the country. People found boards from that barn for years after. And some of them took them back to him. “Here, Ivan, I believe this is yours.”

  In Lake Wobegon, we don’t forget mistakes. I know I remember those free throws like he just missed them. It was March 1958. He didn’t cry, didn’t swear, didn’t even look at the floor. He just went back on defense for that one remaining second. Looked for his man as his man heaved the ball into the crowd. We all sat there stunned, our eyes filled with tears, but Roger looked—well, like Roger. He seemed surprised it was over. He was ready to play four more quarters.

  We were favored to win that game against Bowlus, they were nothing, a joke, so most of us didn’t bother to go to the game. We were saving up for the trip to State and a weekend at the Curtis Hotel, which was what should have happened, but the boys stood around, threw the ball away, took dumb shots, and then Roger came to the line for two, the Leonards down 51-50. The first shot hit the front of the rim, the second wasn’t even close.

  So now, as he pulls his cap on his head, takes a last slug of coffee, stands, turns, and tosses his wadded-up napkin into the garbage can twenty feet away, everybody at the table thinks the same thing. They don’t say it, but they think it.

  On the first real warm day, you can sit on the back steps in your PJs before church, drink coffee, study the backyard which was such a dump a week ago you wouldn’t have wanted to be buried back there, but with the tulips coming on strong and a faint green haze on the lilacs, a person can see that this is not the moon but Earth, a planet named for its finely ground rock containing organic material that, given sunlight and moisture, can produce plant life that may support advanced life forms such as Catholics or Lutherans. School windows open and faint wisps of talk drift out and some choral music. Rototillers start up, and the first whap of a ball in a glove is heard. Sometimes the scratch of a match is heard, struck by someone who had vowed to put the Luckies away for Lent. The sulphur flares up, the coffin nail glows, the delicious smoke rushes into the poor man’s suffering body, and he sighs with delight, emitting a cloud. After finishing the cigarette, he calls himself a terrible name.

  On the first real warm Sunday, attendance is down at church, people deciding that, God being everywhere, they can worship anywhere—what Fr. Emil calls “the Protestant fallacy”; he strolls around after Mass, surprising some absentees who were busy worshiping with rakes and didn’t see him coming.* “Oh! Father! My gosh! Didn’t see you! Good morning.”

  “Yes. Almost afternoon. Funny how the morning just slips away, don’t it?”

  “Yeah, that’s right, Father. That’s for sure.”

  “Such a beautiful day, it’d be a shame to have to be indoors on a day like this, now wouldn’t it?”

  “Well, that’s true, Father. You got a point there.”

  Mrs. Schwab is in her yard Sunday morning, working up a show of peonies, the giant double whites she put in last year, but she’s not resting on her peonies, she’s expanding west toward the clotheslines, digging a kidney-shaped bed for her western peony annex where she’ll put in yellows and reds. She doesn’t care for delicate blooms, she goes for the gorgeous Las Vegas floor-show-type flowers. Tiger lilies, snowballs, asters, and dahlias. Flowers that sag under the weight of their fabulous hats. Big American Beauties and giant mums that when you see them you can almost hear the Casa Loma orchestra. The yard movement in Lake Wobegon has been toward the activity yard, but Mrs. Schwab carries on the old show-yard tradition. You’d no sooner toss a softball around in it than in her living room. Too many ornaments for one thing, and then, too, you wouldn’t want to track in on a lawn so carefully edged and pruned and preened and combed. That’s Mr. Schwab’s job. He’s already mowed and r
aked and dug out the dead spots and resodded. The birdbath has fresh water. The two iron lawn chairs are out, with the molded scallops on the backs that keep you from slouching. The bricks laid diagonally in a trench to make a border around the beds—he’s retrenched, relaid them. The B.V.M. sitting on her platform of rocks with the porcelain bandshell overhead—the plastic tent has been removed and the shrine cleaned. And soon Mrs. Schwab’s flowers will burst into blossom, and the Mr. and Mrs. will take their seats and enjoy the breeze that brings them steady whiffs of extravagance—she in her yellow peony dress, he in his luau shirt, listening to the ball game, snoozing, a white hanky on his bald head, she with a Reader’s Digest Condensed Book, snoozing—both of them sitting up suddenly now and then to examine the garden. Is something out of place? Did they detect a brown leaf, a stone in the grass, a dead stick? Was that a deadly garden pest moving around in the flowers—is it time to get the bug bomb, move in on the flanker? No, it’s only a butterfly, cruising through the blossoms. It is perfect. It is the paradise yard they worked for, their heart’s desire, the garden of love.

  Crocuses, tulips, and those little blue and yellow flowers, what they call Norwegian incarnations, up by May 17, Syttende Mai, and the incarnation of Elmer, asleep in the canvas hammock. He makes a handsome bulge, a great pendulous form like a fat cocoon about to drop its load and become a butterfly. Other people rake as he snoozes, including Pastor Ingqvist across the alley, who wishes he had let his sleeping lawn lie. Matted down, it looked grasslike, but raking opened it up for analysis and he can see that the crabgrass and quackgrass prospered mightily last year, while the bluegrass and Bermuda fainted and grew weary, and now serious measures are called for, but the Building Committee, which is the steward of the parsonage and its lawn, is made up of farmers who don’t take grass seriously, including Mr. Tollerud, who said, “A little spraying, that’s the ticket,” although a herbicide now would only result in total destruction. Pastor Ingqvist would like to take grass less seriously, but his neighbors are church members whose lawns are clipped, weed-free, dense, dark green, and whom he often sees on their knees fighting off the invasion of false lawn from their minister. They look at him with (he thinks) reproach for not doing more good works with his grass. Meanwhile, Elmer, who hangs in the breeze sawing lumber, has an okay lawn, not the Yard of the Month, but a darned good piece of turf. He throws some seed on it every spring and it jumps right up. Mrs. Elmer tends her shrubs and flowers like she was the Fourth Musketeer: she wields her trowel and clippers and whacks them around a little, and they stand up and grow like crazy for her.

  Over a block, on Lilac Street, Ella Anderson cleans out her flower beds, her first venture out of doors since before Thanksgiving. Her bad hip can’t navigate on ice, and now after four months cooped up, her arthritis is so bad, she is having to learn a new stand-up style of gardening.

  Horrible to imagine: kneeling down, getting stuck, having to wait for someone to walk by, and calling out, Help, help me. Horrifying. If Henry were right there, she could say, “Oh, heavens, my legs went to sleep. Give us a hand up, dear,” and it’d be a little joke, but Henry’s inside and miles and years away. Calling for help from someone she barely knew would be an emergency, and Charlotte’d find out and call a family meeting. “This has gone on too long, Mother. It’s time we did something about you and Dad. I’m worried sick about you there by yourselves.” Ella doesn’t want a meeting, though she’d like to have more visitors. Just her and Henry in the house, and his mind comes and goes, not that he’s such bad company either way. When his mind goes is when hers gets sharper. At any moment, he’s apt to think he’s on the Burlington Zephyr from Chicago to St. Paul and ask, “Where are we now?” and she has to think fast and describe what’s going by the window. Not just “Oh, fields. The river. Looks like a town coming up”—he wants to know what crops, what town—he may be gone in the head but he knows the old Zephyr route, and if she skips a stop and says, “We’re coming into Pepin, dear,” he’ll say, “You mean you didn’t tell me when we went through Fountain City? You should have woke me up.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, dear. This is Fountain City.”

  “Oh, yes. Well, I should have recognized it myself. Fountain City. Lovely town. I have a cousin lives here, I ought to look him up one of these days.”

  The cousin died at St. Mihiel, south of Verdun, in General Pershing’s army. Henry never mentions him in the lucid moments, but during his spells, there’s Frank, twenty years old and selling shoes and exciting the women of Fountain City, and so Henry is eighteen, which means that she hasn’t met him yet, and the woman riding the train with him is someone else he calls “dear”—who is she? It takes presence of mind to keep things straight—and she looks out the window and says, “We’re passing a little farm, dear, a dairy farm it looks like, with Golden Guernseys, and now we’re catching up to a truck on the highway, with two boys and a collie riding in back, and now we’re coming into a narrow ravine and way up in the sky are two hawks, circling.”

  Ella is the only one who can give Henry this train trip. If Charlotte were here and he asked what town were they going through, it would be an emergency. Charlotte would have a fit and call a doctor. To Ella, Charlotte’s faith in doctors is made of the same stuff as Henry’s trip on the train.

  Charlotte is fifty-three and heavy, taking after the women on Henry’s side, who became dumplings by middle age, but Charlotte doesn’t feel like a dumpling, she’s worried sick about her health. She’ll drive a hundred miles to see a new specialist she’s heard about, practicing all the way her speech about her symptoms, which remain constant, like the route of the Zephyr. Ella knows them like she knows that Pepin comes after Fountain City: feeling tired all the time, dizzy, nauseated, gas pains, backache, headaches, cramps, constipation, white tongue, shortness of breath, poor circulation in the legs, what feels like a lump here and here. “If I knew everything that was wrong with me, I’d be dead by morning,” thinks Ella. Instead, in the morning, she gets up, using a new technique of sitting on the edge of the bed and falling forward and catching the dresser and pulling herself up. Sixty-some years ago she used to climb trees. This is more adventurous.

  She wishes more people would come and talk to her and tell her things as she tells Henry what’s out the window. His window on 1918 is open, and hers on May 1984 is stuck half-shut and she needs a little help. So she has put out a sign, written on cardboard with big Magic Marker letters and tacked to a picket and stuck in the flower bed. VISITORS WELCOME. FREE COFFEE. COME IN.

  When Charlotte heard about it from her friend Mrs. Magnusson, she had a fit. She called up her mother, in tears, and said, “I visit you. I come over there every chance I get. What more can I do? How can you embarrass me like this? You couldn’t have told me before you did it? Can’t you see how foolish it makes me look? It makes me look terrible! Now please take it down. Please.”

  Poor Charlotte, she takes everything so personal. She lives in a trailer park near St. Cloud. (“It’s not a trailer park, Mother. They’re mobile homes. You should try it, you’d like it.”) She and her husband, Roy. Charlotte suffered a miscarriage in 1956 and they have no children. Roy fell off a scaffold ten years ago and hasn’t worked since. Charlotte is a secretary at a clinic. They don’t respect her there, they treat her like dirt and have for almost twenty-five years. Some days, when Ella’s phone rings at five-thirty, she lets it ring until it stops, knowing Charlotte is calling with news of outrageous things they did to her at work, especially the office manager, Bernetta Grinnell, who is thirty-one, stacked, dumb as dirt, and has been out to get Charlotte for years. Bernetta is sleeping with one of the doctors. Charlotte knows the score and Bernetta knows that she knows, so there you are. Bernetta dumps everything on Charlotte’s desk, then takes credit for the work. She gets away with murder. She takes two hours at lunch, and she steals from petty cash. She lies about Charlotte to the doctors, so Charlotte hasn’t gotten a decent raise for years. It’s terrible.

 
“You should quit, dear,” Ella has told her a couple hundred times. “Oh, sure. Quit. That’s easy for you to say,” Charlotte says. “Can’t you see? That’s exactly what she wants me to do. I’m not going to give her the satisfaction.”

  Everything happens to Charlotte. Boys throw toilet paper on her little yard. Why would they do it? Neighbors’ dogs pester her. The manager of the trailer park refuses to do anything. He’s a stupid good-for-nothing who sits in his office and drinks beer all day. She’s afraid of him. He has threatened her. Then there’s Clifford, her hairdresser. She’s gone to him for fifteen years, and he’s terrible. She tells him how she wants it, and then he goes and does it exactly opposite. She looks a fright. She hates to look in a mirror afterward, for fear she’ll have a stroke. She suffers from high blood pressure anyway, and almost any one of these things, the neighbors or Clifford or Bernetta, could finish her off any day. She has talked about her problems to her minister, but he’s no use at all. Sits around with his nose in a book, acts like he’s better than everyone else, and when she tells him things, he sits there and smirks at her. Smirks! He’s supposed to help her and comfort her! Instead he sits and smirks! One of these days, she is going to slap his face.

  “I’m getting old,” she told Ella on the phone. “I’m so old, and what have I done with my life? Nothing.” When she was seventeen, Charlotte won the American Legion Auxiliary District Essay Contest with five hundred words on the topic, “America the Beautiful,” and got $15. Now, many years later, that success comes back to haunt her. “I should have been a writer,” she says. “I don’t know why I didn’t. I wish I had gotten more encouragement.” Charlotte reads two or three novels a week and is sure she could write better ones if she had the time. She has good ideas, but ideas aren’t enough. You need an in. She knows that. She wasn’t born yesterday.