Lake Wobegon Days

by Garrison Keillor

  neither are trees or rocks,

  White lacy clouds, the glow of early morn, lakes, clumps

  of grass, meadowlarks, bullfrogs, clods of mother earth,

  corona of moon, cougars, the leaping spermatozoa.

  I have walked among them, I have absorbed, I have remembered them all unto myself.

  O unutterable arboreal wisdom!

  He woke up early, ten or eleven, read Walt over coffee to prime the pump, and hit the legal pad until he was overwhelmed by how much had come out and how much more there was, and had to go out and hoe the tomatoes to settle himself down.

  He wrote a story entitled “The Story Writer,” about a young man named Nils Sjogren who holes up in a rooming house to write and becomes weary of his endless egoism.

  He sat for a long time looking at the white page filled with words until it became a meaningless blur. Suddenly he realized he was extremely tired of writing about himself, about his view of things. Suddenly it occurred to him that all he had ever done was think about himself. Slowly he reached for the box of matches. He lit one and held it to the corner of the paper and watched it burst into flame and curl up into black ash. He thought it was one of the best things he had ever done.

  Then, for want of a better idea, he sent Nils to a bar and got him drunk. Nils drank “more whiskies than he could remember” and stood on a bar stool and delivered a speech explaining that his spirit had been crushed by small minds. “You tell me to be neat! I say neatness is the death of the soul! You tell me to take out the garbage! If I took out the garbage, there wouldn’t be much left! You tell me to be on time! What you know about time, you could tell in one second! You tell me to cut the grass! You say it’s getting long! Of course it’s getting long! That is the beauty of life! Of which you know nothing! Nada!” Then Nils left Tinyburg for the oilfields of Venezuela.

  The search for No. 3, despair, led him to write “The Story Writer,” and then, the same afternoon, to go to the Sidetrack Tap to get drunk himself. It was a Wednesday, he was in the mood for an experience after hours at the desk, he was down to less than three dollars and in a mood to blow it, and besides, his parents would be going to church that night and wouldn’t be home to see him stagger in.

  The Sidetrack wasn’t much as despair goes, but it was convenient, and his mother had told him since he was a child never to go in there, a recommendation in itself. She said it was an evil place and quoted Scripture to prove it: “Men love darkness rather than light because their deeds are evil.” And the Sidetrack certainly was dim. When he was twelve, he’d gone in for a glass of water, which Wally gave him, and when his mother found out, she decided maybe Scripture wasn’t caution enough. She said, “You drink out of a glass down there, you’re asking for diseases I’d rather not even talk about. Filth! It’s a filthy place!” And he knew she was right. A child’s sense of smell is acute, like a dog’s, and the odor of stale beer and smoke from the Sidetrack when the door opened almost knocked him over as a boy.* Once he walked by the door just as Arne Bjornson fell out, and it frightened the boy, how awful the man looked, his face dead, and how he smelled—he stank as bad as Bill Tollerud, who had a bet with another boy in seventh grade to see who could go longer without taking his gym clothes home to be washed. The bet went on into eighth grade. Bill was the winner.

  By that Wednesday, a week after the crash, Mrs. Mueller was recovered from the shock and able to concentrate on what really troubled her, the prospect of sudden violent death. That morning, she unlocked the two deadbolts on her back door and stuck her head out, half expecting someone to chop it off with an axe, perhaps an inmate from Sandstone prison who had escaped in the night. She had not heard of an escape on the Maxwell House News that morning, though there was an item about an old lady taken hostage in Florida that gave her the creeps. A psychopath had jumped out from the flower bed when the old lady went to hang up clothes, and he hauled her indoors and tied her with clothesline to her own kitchen table and kept her there for thirty-six hours until sharpshooters plugged him through the heart. Imagine! she thought. The state of things today.

  Mrs. Mueller has lived alone in this one-bedroom stucco house since the late Mr. Mueller died in 1951 of a ruptured blood vessel. He was putting up curtain rods one minute and the next he was dead on the floor. He was forty-seven. Now she was sixty-eight. That was how she wanted to go, too, quick, no trouble, no pain. Certainly not at the hand of a psychopath. Once in Minneapolis she thought a man was going to kill her. He almost crashed into her when she made a left-hand turn into a Super America, then he made a violent U-turn, squealed up to the pumps, jumped out, and screamed abuse at her. She was in her car, her doors were locked, and she turned on the radio to drown him out, she was so scared. The news was on: an item about a plane crash that killed fourteen people. She has never set foot on a plane,* but it seemed to go right along with the horrible face in the window saying he hoped she rotted in bell. You go up in planes, you go to Minneapolis, you take your life in your hands. You’re not even safe in your own backyard.

  It was six a.m. of what the radio said would be a perfect day, already warm under a partly cloudy sky and a sweet scent of grass in the air and the dew on her snowball bushes. The Tollefson boy’s tire marks were healing over. The tulips were still bright and the peonies were coming right along. She saw one tulip had keeled over, but otherwise the flowers were all present and accounted for. The fallen tulip made her think inmate for two seconds—had he put his big foot there and was he now crouched around the corner of the house, a length of garden hose in hand, waiting for her to turn her back? No, he was not. Nobody was there. The hose was coiled over the faucet where she left it.

  Mrs. Mueller knew him as Don. She had thought of him so often, seen him coming at her, been grabbed and hustled indoors and thrown onto the sofa, and always he said, “Don’t scream and you won’t get hurt,” and once he told her his name. Don. He wore dirty dungarees, sneakers, a black T-shirt, and dark glasses. He smoked cigarettes, which he stamped out on her floor. He pulled the blinds and paced like an animal. He rummaged in her dresser, throwing clothes on the floor. Sometimes he had a gun and other times a butcher knife, and once he had a screwdriver. He made her cook for him. He demanded whiskey. She had none. He got mad and threw a glass at her. He threatened to cut her throat and throw her in a closet. Sometimes he grabbed her by the arm and said “Get in there!” and shoved her toward the next room. Always he said, before he left, “Don’t tell anybody or I’ll come back and kill you,” and she never had told. She knew he was not a real person but she was afraid he would become real. She thought she should tell Earl. The subject, however, never came up. There is a man and he is going to come and kill me one of these days: that wouldn’t go over so well with Earl. “How do you know, Mother?” I know.

  Mrs. Mueller’s trip out the back door was to put a package of garbage in the garbage can. She had wrapped it the afternoon before, a milk carton full of her slight scraps—dollops of melon pulp, two grapefruit shells, burnt frozen dinner, a stale heel of bread, and a whole box of figs, a year old, a gift from a grandchild—and had thought to take it out then, but the shadows in the yard looked funny, as if they might include one of a man standing beside the house, waiting for the lock to click. One click and he’d spring like a tiger and be inside with her. She left the package on the table in the mud room.

  Now she descended the back steps, peering ahead to the dim place alongside the garage, the walk between the lilacs and the garage, and the alley. So thin, her arms and legs like branches of a crab apple tree, her skin like waxed paper, and her small dark eyes darting from bush to bush.

  That night, after supper, John put on a clean shirt and hiked down to the Sidetrack, taking his legal pad with him to record his impressions. His first one was of gloom and musty smells and deep darkness, the orange and purple jukebox, beer signs, bright green felt. He stood inside the door, waiting for his eyes to focus, thinking of a cave in which small hairy animals sit and chew
each other’s ears off. Three figures stood at the pool table and gawked at him.

  “Chonny! Chonny my boy! What you doing here?” It was Mr. Berge, sitting on the stool nearest the door. His baggy old-man pants almost dropped off him as he stood up to shake hands, and he hoisted them up a foot. “Lemme buy you a beer! How you been, Chonny! No! Better yet! A beer and a bump!”

  Wally set up a glass of beer and a shot of whiskey next to Mr. Berge’s. John had been thinking he’d have a vodka sour, it being a drink he knew about first-hand from the Matador Lounge in St. Cloud, but he wasn’t going to betray inexperience in front of this bunch. He sat next to Mr. Berge, who had fished two crumpled dollar bills from his pocket, and he put the shotglass to his lips, and tossed the whiskey back—or some of it partly back, until he coughed, and a few drops went up his nose, and his eyes filled with tears. It tasted like acid. He turned away so Mr. Berge wouldn’t see. Then the beer. He never had liked beer. Beer parties were big deals at school: twenty carloads of students out at an abandoned granite quarry, a beer keg in every trunk, radios blasting, and beautiful women careening into the bushes to throw up. Beer made him think he was drinking something that had died.

  “Oh, it’s a helluva deal, ain’t it, Chonny. Ja, we’re having fun now, you betcha,” Mr. Berge cried. “Ja, I was so surprised you come in, I coulda shit my pants. Wally! Don’t let these glasses sit empty like that! Whatsa matter wicha? Ja, Chonny, it’s good to see ya. Good to see ya. Put her there, buddy. Ja. Ja, I always like your dad, thought he was a good guy. Good guy, Chonny. Ja, lot of people say those Tollefsons, they walk around with their noses in the air, those Tollefsons they think their shit don’t stink, but you know, I never thought that. I always thought, hell, they’re people just like anybody else, like to have a good time. Ja. So here you are. Ja, it’s good to see ya.”

  It occurred to John that it didn’t make sense bringing the legal pad along to record impressions, his main one being a hardening behind the eyes. He took microscopic sips of the second whiskey. He wanted a glass of water. He felt like he was coming down with something. Mr. Berge was yammering a mile a minute about something—it was hard to follow—about people all being the same. He hollered to Wally for another round. Wally muttered something but he brought the drinks. “Watch yourself, kid,” he said to John. “It’s a stormy night for sailors. Don’t let the ship go down.”

  John found a pencil and wrote, “Stormy—sailors—ship.” He thought he might use it in the story about Nils, where Nils is in the bar and gives the speech. Have the bartender say it. “Whatcha writing, a letter, Chonny?” Mr. Berge said. He leaned over to see and his breath hit John broadside, the worst breath he’d ever breathed, the breath of a badger who’d been in the dump all day.

  He stood up. The stool had cut off the circulation in his legs. They were asleep. He didn’t know if he could walk. “Gotta run. Thanks. See you,” he said, patting Mr. Berge on the shoulder, and turned toward the door. He leaned on it and in the blaze of hard sunlight he didn’t notice the two steps down—he walked into air, staggered and pitched forward toward the gutter, and in one sharp instant as he fell, saw clearly six feet away his Aunt Charlotte and Uncle Val—fell headlong like a tree cut off at the ankles and hit the pavement on his knees and one elbow—and then he stood up too soon and the blood left his head and he got woozy and fell sideways against the hood of a brown pickup.

  Charlotte and Val were dressed up with Bibles in hand, on their way to church. They stopped and tried to say something. Val said, “Johnny!” John said, “I tripped and fell.” “I’ll say you did,” Charlotte said. She started to reach for his arm, he took a step forward and a step back, she drew back. “Oh, Johnny,” she said. “Just look at you. Your shirt is ripped, you look like a crazy person.”

  “Why don’t you come with us to church? It’s going to be good. Bob and Verna are here,” Val said. John said he didn’t feel well. Val could see that. “Come tomorrow night, then,” he said. “Johnny,” Charlotte said, “do you ever stop and think what you’re doing to your mother? I hope you don’t let her see you like this. She’d just die if she saw you right now.”

  “It isn’t what you think. I fell.”

  “It always starts out small, Johnny, and then one thing leads to another. Please don’t drink. Please.”

  “Okay.”

  They walked away, then Charlotte turned. “I’m praying for you, Johnny.”

  “Thank you, Aunt Charlotte.”

  “Are you all right?”

  Actually, he was. He was starting to think this might be a good story. He’d change some details, of course. In the story, he’d be drunk—gone out drinking to forget a great personal sorrow, a wound, a wound of love—that’d be the title, “The Wound of Love”—and he’d stagger out the front door and be met by two Lutherans, Fran and Vern, who would bawl him out good, and the story would go on to reveal their essential hypocrisy and that of the entire town. He could work in Bob and Verna, the Bible-thumping evangelists, and get Mrs. Mueller in, too, except she’d be twenty-one, his lover, and he would die crashing into her rock garden, and that would be the ending.

  He thought of this, making his way home, and sat down at his desk and ripped off the top sheets of the legal pad, which were dirty and torn, and there was a clean sheet. A lovely sight, a clean sheet—and he wrote, bending over the page, gripping the pencil tightly, chewing on his tongue:

  James was fourteen years of age when his father was sent to prison for grand larceny, and it left a gap in his life that only he knew about.

  Mrs. Mueller was one of two Catholics in town who attended the revival meetings of Brother Bob and Sister Verna of the World-Wide Fields of Harvest Ministry of Lincoln, Nebraska, at Lake Wobegon Lutheran church for five evenings, Tuesday through Saturday. To Bob, Mrs. Mueller was a great prize, a real living Catholic, and he courted her and her friend Mrs. Magendanz, assuring them he had nothing against the members of the Roman church, only the hierarchy. Father Emil thought of revivals as something that Protestants do to each other out of boredom with a theology that lacks substance, and he tucked a warning against it into his homily on the Third Sunday before Bob and the Second and the First, which only proved to Mrs. Mueller that the truth hurt. Even good men refused to see it. “Old Bob hits the nail on the head,” she told Mrs. Magendanz.

  The Ministry’s headquarters is in the basement of Bob’s sister Beatrice’s house, who is married to Pastor David Ingqvist’s wife Judy’s uncle, and from that loose connection comes an event that annually promises to tear the Lutheran church limb from limb. “The meetings were interesting and we praise God for His great love for us, as Bob so wonderfully brought out,” July wrote to her aunt one year, “but I do wonder if he sometimes gets carried away in his descriptions of death and damnation. And when he predicts that there will be more Lutherans in the lake of fire than there are stones in the fields, I consider that less than edifying.” (In response, Beatrice sent her “An Examination of So-Called ‘Lutheranism’: Fourteen False Doctrines Revealed in the Light of Scripture.”)

  To see a man get carried away is exactly why so many Lutherans love the Ministry, however, including Val and Charlotte; what Bob revives in them is the memory of swashbuckling preachers of their youth who roved through the old Norwegian Synod putting the fear of God into a generation that was slipping toward relaxation. Children of God-fearing parents were slipping—slipping away in Model-Ts, drifting away in the night, slipping into worldly dress, slipping into St. Cloud and Avon and Little Falls for needled beer at roadhouses and dancing to jungle music and playing slot machines; young men and women brought up to lead a godly life were drifting, drifting, asleep in the boat on the Niagara River drifting toward the cataract and sure death, and someone had to shout to wake them up. Scoffers at spiritual things, drunkards, fornicators, blasphemers, proud, shameless, foolish beyond belief: such persons cannot be gently reminded of the truth, somebody has to grab them and shake them hard, as the late Rev. Osterhus
did to Bernie Tollefson one hot summer night. Bernie ran with a loose crowd who drank at the Moonlite Bay roadhouse and boasted of having gotten girls in a family way, and Bernie came to church one Sunday night on a dare from his chums and sat in back and smirked at Rev. Osterhus until the evangelist would stand it no longer—he leaped from the pulpit! Dashed to the back pew! Seized the young man by the neck before he could slither away! Hauled him out and up to the altar! Threw him against the rail! The sinner fell weeping to the floor, and the man of God knelt over him, one knee in the small of his back, and prayed ferociously for light to dawn in his blackened soul. When Bernie stood up, he was reborn, and he yelled, “Thank you, Jesus!” over and over, tears pouring down his cheeks—“Now there was what I call preaching!” says John’s Uncle Val, Bernie’s brother, a deacon and Pastor Ingqvist’s faithful critic. He says of the pastor’s sermons, “He mumbles. He murmurs. It’s a lot of on-the-one-and-this, on-the-other-hand-that. He never comes straight out. He never puts the hay down where the goats can get it. It’s a lot of talk, and many a Sunday I’ve walked away with no idea what he said. Can’t remember even where he started from. You never had that problem with the old preachers. There was never a moment’s doubt. It was Repent or Be Damned. We need that. This guy, he tries to please everybody. Just once I wish he’d raise his voice and pound on the pulpit. That way I’d know he wasn’t talking in his sleep.”

  Bob and Verna drive a white van with hundreds of Scripture verses painted on it, such as “The wages of sin is death,” which is one thing that sets them apart from Pastor Ingqvist; his Ford station wagon has only one text, a bumper sticker: “Lake Wobegon, Gateway to Central Minnesota”—is that the mark of a man of God? The white gospel van draws plenty of stares with all that writing, which Verna painted free-hand, so it doesn’t look slick or professional but it’s the Word and, as Bob says, “Once you’ve seen the van, you can’t say you never heard the Gospel. You have no excuse. Anyone who’s seen it will have to answer to God someday.”