Lake Wobegon Days

by Garrison Keillor

  It was in the morning that the notion of the inmate hiding in the shadows came back to mind. She had to make herself unlock the back door, and the fifty feet to the garbage can was a long walk. She pried off the lid and chucked the package in and was about to run back in the house when she noticed how quiet it was.

  She couldn’t hear a voice, not a car, not even a dog bark. No footsteps on gravel, no screen door slapping. Only the lanyard dinging against the flagpole at Our Lady church across the alley. She waited for some other sound and heard nothing. Then it occurred to her that the Second Coming had taken place. Jesus had come during the night to take His loved ones to heaven, they had all risen up from their beds to meet Him in the air. She alone was left on earth to suffer, she and Don who was probably around there someplace, crouching, holding a gun, chuckling to himself. God had forsaken her because her sins were so great, and soon would come the Judgment when she would be found wanting and be cast into the fiery lake.

  The back screen door of the rectory squeaked and Father Emil stepped out in his black short-sleeved shirt, carrying a package of garbage and a garden trowel. He let the door slap shut and came down the walk, limping slightly, and a few feet short of his garbage can, he saw her. He said, “Good morning, Mary.” She said, “Good morning, Father.”

  So he had been left behind, too. She wondered about Sister Francis. Were all the Sisters sitting in their kitchen eating Grape-Nuts, unaware of what had happened?

  Mrs. Magendanz had said last night that she thought there was a Book of Life where the names of the saved were written and she thought it was here on earth. A hardcover book. “I have a feeling,” she said. “It came to me the other day when I was ironing. It’s some sort of directory, that people think is something else, like a phone book, but it’s the Book of Life. I know my name is written in it, I can tell you that for a fact.” Mrs. Mueller always thought of Mrs. Magendanz as not quite right in the head, but sometimes those people come to possess wisdom. Mrs. Magendanz once healed a bad burn on her own foot by holding it and praying five hundred times, “Heal this foot,” and when she let go, she said, you couldn’t tell it ever had been burned, the redness was gone. If Jesus had come during the night, she thought Mrs. Magendanz would know about it even if she hadn’t gone herself.

  Father picked a few raspberries and ate them, and had a look at the onion row and the tiny cabbages and the shoots of cucumber vines, and he knelt down by his tomatoes and went to work hilling them up.

  She called across the alley. “Father, is Sister Francis around?”

  “In the church.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Saw her myself two minutes ago.”

  “And it was her—you’re sure.”

  “Something wrong?” He stood up and peered across at her.

  “No, I guess not.”

  “How about a tomato?”

  The one he held out to her was slightly green, so she chose a little red one from high on the vine, wiped it on her dress, and bit off half of it. It was so good, and then the bright sunshine made her sneeze.

  “God bless you,” said Father.

  The smell of warm dirt came up to her and the sweet taste of tomato, and then she knew what she was going to do—she was going to clean out those snowball bushes. She never really had liked them big droopy things. And she was going to water her yard and sit and read the Gospel of John.

  That morning, David Ingqvist made his pastoral rounds, starting with Eric Tollerud, who was okay and thought he would be reading more of the Bible now. Mr. Berge didn’t want to talk when David got to his house; he felt grippy and he needed a drink. Joyce Johnson said she didn’t know what had come over her last night, but she felt okay, though her husband was mad at her. He said she had barked like a dog.

  David’s fourth stop was Bert Thorvaldson’s, John’s grandpa. He was sitting on his porch, sick about a tree. His majestic elm, as old as the twentieth century, had taken ill two years before and now was dead. He had treated it with coffee grounds the summer before and it put out some leaves, but now it was dead, and Carl Krebsbach was coming to cut it down. “Maybe there’s something I didn’t think of, some medicine they got,” he said to David sitting next to him on the porch swing. “Once there were two magnificent things here, Eloise and that tree. Now they’re both gone.” He didn’t mention that his eyes were going bad and that one eye shot off sparks. Without Eloise he was lost in the house. Old man with papery skin, sparks in one eye, sleeping in a strange bed, and now his yard was becoming a desert. David had never made a pastoral call in regard to the death of a tree. He recited the Twenty-third Psalm and led Bert inside. He put on water for coffee. The old man sat at the table and when the chainsaw cut into the tree, he went stiff and didn’t move until it was over, and then he thanked David for coming. “Tusen takk, tusen takk.”

  David had another call next door, to see the Tollefson boy, but he decided to let it go until another day. John’s mother had read a letter in Dear Abby about a boy who sounded like hers, who sat around in his room and was curt with people and carried a chip on his shoulder and wasn’t making something of himself, and Abby recommended seeking help from the family minister, so she called David.

  David glanced at Dear Abby now and then, and it alarmed him how often she recommended ministers. “Talk to your minister,” she’d say to the fourteen-year-old girl in love with the fifty-one-year-old auto mechanic (married) who is in prison for rape. Why did Abby assume that a minister could deal with this? The poor old guy is in his study, paging through Revelations, when the door flies open and a teenage girl in a tank top bursts in weeping with passion for an older, married felon three times her age—what is the good reverend to do? Try to interest her in two weeks of handicrafts at Camp Tonawanda?

  Poor man. Things were fairly clear to him a moment before, and now, as she pours out her love for Vince, her belief in his innocence, the fact that his wife never loved him, never really loved him, not like she, Trish, can love him, and the fact that despite his age and their never having met except in letters there is something indescribably sacred and precious between them, all Pastor can think of is, “You’re crazy! Don’t be ridiculous!” Thou shalt not be ridiculous. Paul says, “See then that ye walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise, redeeming the time, because the days are evil.” How does this apply specifically to Trish, in love by mail, or to the Tollefson boy sitting in his room and forming a grudge against the world? When Paul wrote that wonderful sentence, he probably was sitting in an upper room in Athens; it was late at night, quiet, and all the fools were asleep. He could write the simple truth, and no fool was around to say, “Huh? What do you mean? Are you saying I shouldn’t go for the world long-distance walking-backward record? But I know I can do it! I’m good at it! I can walk backward for miles!”

  A worse accident than John’s collision with the rock garden happened years ago after Greg Diener came home from the Cities, having been dismissed at the frankfurter plant. His boss thought that running the weenie-stuffer wasn’t just a job but an opportunity, a calling, and he fired Greg for his bad attitude. Greg didn’t mind. He settled back in with his folks. His room had become a sewing room, but he cleared the patterns off the bed and got caught up on sleep, and after three weeks was feeling much better.

  “What do you want to do?” his mom asked. He didn’t know. He said he was trying to find out.

  “When are you going to try harder?”

  “Don’t you love me?” he said. “Don’t you want me here?”

  The Dieners set a deadline for Greg to become less relaxed. He wasn’t happy about all the pressure they were putting on him. He was on the verge of making maybe the biggest decision of his life up to that point—what to do—and instead of helping him, they were making it harder.

  One night, he and a friend of his from Carl, Minnesota, bought four six-packs of Grain Belt at the Sidetrack Tap. Wally thought it was for a party, he didn’t know they were going to drink it themsel
ves.

  Parked in the friend’s pink Olds beside the Great Northern tracks across from the elevator, it took them only three hours to finish off the supply, during which they became as relaxed as two dishrags, but when the friend, whose name Greg had now forgotten, saw Gary and LeRoy drive by, he said, “Cops! Oh, God!” and headed the other way fast, with his headlights off to avoid notice. Greg didn’t think it was a good idea to drive so fast in the dark but he didn’t know how to phrase this.

  They didn’t go far. Where the road turns left, they went straight, into the lumberyard. Dark shapes whizzed past like in a bad dream, and then one came straight at them, and when they woke up sometime later, there were two 3 × 8s in the car. Two boards sticking in the windshield and out the rear window, between the two of them.

  Both of them had bad headaches, but not from the lumber. It had slammed into the car in the one exact spot it could’ve without killing them instantly. They weren’t scratched. Not even a sliver. They sat in the front seat staring straight ahead and tears ran down their cheeks. They climbed out and put, their arms around each other and tried to walk. They sat down on the ground. The sun was coming up. There were two boats on the lake. Light pastel clouds hung in the sky. The friend said, “I’m going to do something good with my life.” Greg didn’t know what he was going to do, but he wanted to yell to the fishermen and tell them that he was okay.

  On the same spot where those two got a snootful, in May 1942 the middle Olson boy parked under the Cottonwood tree in his dad’s Ford pickup with a waitress from Mom and Dad’s Cafe named Tina, whom he had taken to see James Cagney in The Fighting 69th that night at the Alhambra (renamed the Victory) and whom he had admired for weeks for the blouses she wore, which were the lowest-cut in those parts. They talked about her boyfriend for a while—he had been shipped to Hawaii—and then the boy reached for the gold medallion that hung from a long chain around her neck, curious to see what it said. When his fingers touched her skin, he saw a flash and felt a rumble as the four-story grain elevator a hundred yards away across the tracks went up in an explosion that was felt all the way north to Brainerd. The historic elevator, the pride of Wobegon and its prosperity, burst in a pillar of flame five hundred feet in the air, and jagged chunks of timber fell like bombs on the town. She jumped out and dove under the truck, and he sat looking at the shattered windshield, knowing that he was the cause of it all. “I did it,” he said. “It was me.”

  Two days later, the American heroes of Corregidor surrendered and the Philippines fell to the Japanese.

  “Anything that ever happened to me is happening to other people,” says Clarence. “Somewhere in the world right now, a kid is looking at something and thinking, “I’m going to remember this for the rest of my life.’ And it’s the same thing that I looked at forty years ago, whatever it was.”

  If that is true and our lives are being lived over and over by others, I don’t know if I should laugh or cry.

  If that is true, somewhere a boy rides next to his father in a car, his eyes level with the top of the dashboard, and pulls back slightly on the window crank which lowers the wing flaps and makes the Ford rise toward the clouds. He tests this principle with his right hand out the window, feeling the lift. He sees that the clouds are following this car; so is the sun. The car is under his power and is the center of the world. The button on the glove compartment fires two machine guns mounted over the fenders. There is also a flame thrower. He can wipe out anybody he sees, such as older boys up ahead playing football in Potvin’s front yard who recently laughed at him. The plane zooms past them, zoom!, and silent guns fire and that whole gang falls dead, he doesn’t bother to look back, he knows.

  Somewhere a boy eats his bran flakes and his dad says, “I had to get up in the night to get me a blanket. It was kinda chilly last night.”

  “Ja,” says his mother, “I don’t know but what we might get another frost.”

  “Ja, I remember it was ’57, wasn’t it, or ’58, we got a frost around now.”

  “Maybe we oughta lay down straw around those strawberries.”

  “Ja, you never can tell.”

  He eats his bran flakes in silence, gritting his teeth. Why do they always talk about weather and say the same dumb things?

  “What’s the matter witcha? Cat got your tongue?”

  “Nothing.”

  This boy is a good reader; his parents are proud of him. (“Whatcha reading there?” “Nothing”) He has now come to the end of the Flambeau Family Series, all twelve books, some of which he read twice, trying to hold off on The Flambeaus and the Case of the Temple Emeralds, but at last was forced to finish, and now faces a life with no further adventures. Emile and Eileen don’t talk about late frost; their Manhattan penthouse is well above the frost line; they talk about ideas, about books and music, and, yes, even sex, because they are intelligent and literate and treat their son, Tony, as a mature person. “Oh, Tony darling, while you’re up, would you fix me a martini?” Eileen called from the balcony. “Have it in a jiff, Eileen,” the young man replied. This sort of thing never happens in his house. “Oh, Tony darling, I just had the most wonderful idea! Let’s go to Paris, just the three of us—it’s so beautiful this time of year!” Beauty is a big thing to the Flambeaus’; they fill their lives with it, unlike his folks, whose lives are filled with dread—“Ja, you never can tell”: their slogan, they ought to have it chiseled on their tombstone: “You never can tell.” Why can’t we be more like the Flambeaus? We couldn’t be exactly like them, of course—Emile’s Nobel Prize in medicine, Eileen’s former career on the Broadway stage—but couldn’t we capture some of their grace and eat breakfast this fine May morning and talk of something other than frost?

  Some where a boy has spread a map on the hood of the old green Ford and is studying it with the help of his old man. The boy is wearing a white shirt and new tan corduroys; in the backseat are a suitcase and two heavy cardboard boxes, their tops folded shut. He’s going to take the back road to the blacktop and then straight south and pick up Highway 52 and go through St. Cloud, though the old man thinks he’d be better off heading east and then south on 10, or taking 52 to 152 and then South, either way avoiding St. Cloud, and just north of the Cities get on the Belt Line, avoiding the Cities, and swing east and south to 12 and then on to Chicago. “You go through the Cities, you can get hung up for hours,” his old man says. The boy listens, folds the map, walks around back of the house, and gives the woman who is weeding the radishes a little peck on the cheek. Shakes the man’s hand, gets in the car, backs out, waves, and is gone. He thinks he has avoided the Cities for much too long now, and he is going to drive straight through the center of them. His dad plans trips like he was crossing enemy lines, skirting the main forces, looking for gaps to break through into open country. Outside of town, on the back road, the boy guns the Ford down the hill past Hochstetters’ and up the long incline. Stones bang on the floorboard. The car leaps ahead at the crest and barrels toward Sunnyvale School, where two small boys sit in the shade on the west side. “Fifty-six Ford!” one yells. He is now ahead, four cars to two, on identification. The other boy waves at the Ford, which does not wave back, he is behind, two waves to three. As the Ford flies past trailing a cloud of dust, he stands and squeezes off an expert burst from his machine gun, hitting the gas tank, which blows up, enveloping the car in a ball of orange flame.

  Somewhere a man gets into his Buick in a blizzard even though he can barely see across the yard to the barn and his wife and child are pleading with him to please not go to town. On the county road, crashing into drifts like ocean waves, he realizes how foolish this trip is but he plows four miles to the Sidetrack Tap, runs in and buys a carton of Pall Malls. “An emergency run, huh?” says Wally, the old kidder. “No,” he says, lying, “I was in town anyway so I thought I might as well stock up.” It’s quiet in town, but a mile south of there, the wind comes up and suddenly he can’t see anything. He is damp with sweat. He can’t see the ditc
hes, can’t see the hood ornament. He drives slower, staring ahead for the slightest clues of road, until there is none—no sky, no horizon, only dazzling white—so he opens his door and leans out and looks for tire tracks: hanging from the steering wheel, leaning way down, his face a couple feet from the ground, hoping that nobody is driving toward him and doing likewise. Then, as the car slips off the road, he realizes that the track he is following is the track of his own left front tire heading into the deep ditch. The car eases down into the snow, and he squeezes out the window and climbs up onto the road. He is not too far from his neighbor’s house. He can see it almost, and the woods. A massed army of corn stands in the snowy field. Visibility is not so bad as in the car, where his heavy breathing was fogging the glass. He’s about a quarter-mile from home. The cigarettes, however, must be sitting on Wally’s counter. They certainly aren’t in the car. A pretty dumb trip. Town was a long way to go in a blizzard for the pleasure of coming back home. He could have driven his car straight to the ditch and saved everyone the worry. But what a lucky man. Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have, which once you have it you may be smart enough to see is what you would have wanted had you known. He takes deep breaths and the cold air goes to his brain and makes him more sensible. He starts out on the short walk to the house where people love him and will be happy to see his face.

  * I. I don’t know what’s wrong with you.

  A. I never saw a person like you.

  1. I wasn’t like that.

  2. Your cousins don’t pull stuff like that.

  B. It doesn’t make sense.

  1. You have no sense of responsibility at all.

  2. We’ve given you everything we possibly could,

  a. Food on the table and a roof over your head