I liked to sit on our front steps and watch the big yellow streetcars go by, the conductor clanging his dishpan bell, the long upright arm in the rear with the little wheel that rode on the electric overhead wire, sparking as it rolled. Mother and I often rode the Bloomington car downtown and she gave me coins to drop into the glass farebox, the coins dinging on the little metal flanges, and we sat in the woven-straw seats and women smiled at me, chubby-cheeked, and once the conductor in full uniform saluted me and called me Winnie—I was a dead ringer for Winston Churchill. And we rolled downtown to the department stores smelling of new clothes and perfume and floor wax and soup from the basement cafeteria, the elevators operated by uniformed women with white gloves, visions of elegance and comfort, and a man in a suit who knelt at my feet and slipped shoes on them, one after another, until Mother saw what she liked. And then we walked to the library.
One day, while Mother was visiting Mrs. Lindahl up the street, I stole money from her change jar so I could ride the streetcar downtown. Having ridden it with her, I had seen how it was done. You simply climbed the steps, grabbing onto a pole, and dropped your money in the glass box and took a seat. The motorman would throw the big wooden lever and the car would roll north and we’d wind up on the avenue of Powers and Donaldson’s and Dayton’s department stores, from which I could find my way to the public library and climb the stairs and look at the magnificent enormous picture books, of which they had hundreds at the library, spread across long tables, free for the looking. That was the extent of my plan.
Before leaving for Mrs. Lindahl’s, Mother told me to swat some flies and I had swatted them. The change jar was shaped like a strawberry, sitting on the counter by the toaster. I lifted the lid with the stem and grabbed a fistful of change. I headed down the back stairs and walked down the alley to catch the streetcar at 38th Street.
My mother told this streetcar story now and then, even as she got into her nineties, and once in Scotland, in Pitlochry, I went for a walk and got a powerful sense of the past, smelling coal smoke, and the acrid tang brought back Bloomington Avenue, the alley, the luncheonette. The past brought vividly to life by air pollution. My streetcar adventure was a large event in my life, maybe not so important as the apple that fell on young Isaac Newton’s head, but important.
So I stuck my hand in the strawberry-shaped change dish, stole a fistful of change, scooted out the back door and down a wooden staircase and up the alley past the little white garages lining either side. I was afraid of dogs, but none came after me. I got to 38th Street, intending to catch a streetcar, and walked by a luncheonette just as a strange man opened the door. He held the door open. He said, “Good morning.”
It was simple synchronicity. The friendly man said hello and held the door open for me and, politely, I entered. On a minor turn of fate hangs a lifetime. I walked into the luncheonette, a storefront the size of a one-car garage, and climbed up on a stool at the counter, and the cook asked what I wanted and I said, “A cheeseburger.” I put my change down on the counter and he took a few coins and put the patty on the griddle and it hissed and flames flared up. A man sat a few stools away, gazing out the window. The cook was smoking a cigarette, and the smell of tobacco smoke was new to me. Dance music played on the jukebox. It was all quite new. The cook set the patty in a bun on a white plate, and I noticed he’d forgotten the cheese and I pointed this out just as I felt a big hand on my shoulder. It was Dad. He pushed the plate away. I said to the counterman, “But I wanted cheese.” Dad led me out by the hand. I said, “But I paid for it!” I tried to go back, and Dad pulled me along back home. Mother was waiting by our garage, looking distressed. She handed Dad a yardstick and told him to give me a whipping and marched up the back stairs and into the kitchen. He and I sat in the garage on the bumper of our 1941 Ford sedan not looking at each other and he said something mournful about my having caused Mother worry and after a while he stood up and I followed him up the stairs to the kitchen. Dad was not a whipper. I was sent to my room, an enjoyable little closet with my books, my pencils and paper. Philip and Judy came home from school and were told what I’d done and they looked at me with, I thought, new respect.
(Had the man at the luncheonette not opened the door, maybe I catch a streetcar and ride downtown, get lost, maybe I step into the street, a truck honks, a man shouts, a big dog barks, I stand, weeping, and a policeman takes me home and my terrified mother, stricken with guilt, is watchful of me ever after and I grow up sensing the world as hostile and perilous and I take a cautious course in life, a job as a stock boy at Dayton’s from which I retire at 65, single, childless, and move into a high-rise and watch a good deal of television, but it didn’t turn out that way.)
Dad sang me a song that night as I lay in bed. He loved old sad songs and he sang:
Where is my wandering boy tonight,
The boy of my tenderest care?
The boy that was once my joy and light,
The child of my love and prayer?
My heart o’erflows for I love him he knows.
Oh where is my boy tonight?
I was touched by the song. My dad never said he loved us, but there he had sung it in a song. I’m sure he told Mother that he loved her, but men back then kept their affections to themselves lest they betray weakness. Brethren men spoke of God’s love, of course, but none of them ever looked at me and said, “I love you” and I would’ve been embarrassed if one had. This is still rare in Minnesota. My friend George Latimer said, “I love you” to me not long ago, but he was 85 and it was the cocktail hour and it was over the phone during a pandemic and he was feeling blue and it was snowing and George is a liberal Democrat.
The next day was Sunday, and we walked to the Grace & Truth Gospel Hall at 3701 14th Avenue for Sunday School and the Remembrance Meeting. Aunt Marion saw me and put a hand on my shoulder and said, “I understand you like cheeseburgers. If you want one, you can come to my house and I’ll make you one. With cheese. For free.” And she laughed and laughed and so did Uncle Bill. Aunt Elsie said something similar. My bad deed was amusing to them. My dad had told them the story. The thief was now a character in a humorous story. Even my mother laughed about it. She loved the Lord and yet she enjoyed comedians like her rascally brother George, who had left the Brethren for ungodly Lutheranism, but he could make her laugh out loud. My uncles weren’t so amused by the cheeseburger, but the aunts remembered it for weeks. They loved me and their laughter was proof of it. It was as simple as that.
Elsie and Don (Myrna and Earl).
A delicious confection of love and comedy, tasted when I was almost five. And so the die was cast. Brethren were opposed to shows, but thanks to Dad’s lenience and my aunts’ appreciation I grew up and became a show myself. Many years later, doing Prairie Home at the State Fair grandstand, knowing they were in the crowd, I put Aunt Elsie and Uncle Don into the Lake Wobegon monologue as Myrna and Earl, a story in which she entered her apple pie in the Fair’s baking contest held at the grandstand, and while the judges looked at the finalists, Myrna stood and modestly disparaged her pie, the crust especially, as Elsie tended to do, and so she won a red ribbon instead of blue, though the winner was more pudding than pie.
Eleanor and Grandma Dora, 1949.
Don and Elsie came backstage afterward and were clearly delighted though also faintly embarrassed at being made much of, even under pseudonyms. She asked if I remembered the luncheonette, and I did and I still do. She was my mother’s closest friend. They spoke every day on the phone until Elsie died, and that phone call was Grace’s steadying pleasure. She and Elsie were the younger, more ebullient sisters in the midst of Brethren austerity, two slender girls grinning at the end of the panoramic photograph of hawk-faced men and bearded preachers and their dour wives. She was my beloved aunt, jittery on the outside, strong on the inside, and she and Don went into the Lord’s work and ministered to far-flung isolated Brethren. When she lay dying, Don cared for her at home until the very end and was put of
f by suggestions that she go into hospice: “Of course I’ll take care of her,” he said. “I love her.” When I need to clear my vision as a Christian, I don’t read St. Augustine, I just think of Elsie and Don on my way to St. Michael’s, arriving late this morning just in time for confession, and there’s not room in the pew for a tall man to kneel comfortably so I twist into position, which reminds me of trying to make love in the back seat of an old VW—not where my mind should be right now—her name was Sarah, she had a laughing fit, which let the air out of the moment so there is no sin to repent of there, only the memory of a failed attempt, and in the prayers I whisper her name, and in the prayers for the departed, I envision the two girls in summer dresses in the photograph and I say their names, Grace and Elsie, Elsie and Grace.
5
At the Farm
AFTER THE LUNCHEONETTE, I was sent up to Grandma Keillor and Uncle Jim’s. I was put on the Zephyr bus to Anoka and Uncle Jim picked me up by the Baptist church and drove me out to the farm and there was Grandma in the doorway, smelling of lavender, her silvery hair pinned up in a proper bun. She hugged me and commented on how tall I was. I adored my grandma. A few years later, when I needed glasses, I picked out a pair of octagonal wire-rims just like hers.
We sat in the kitchen where she was baking bread, flames flickering in the woodstove when she lifted up a lid and tossed in a log. She said she’d heard that I liked to read and she approved of that. The farm was a long step back into the past: kerosene lanterns, no running water but a hand pump in the kitchen where I caught cold water in my hands and splashed it on my face and washed with Lava soap and rinsed. Chickens ran loose in the yard, and an evil goose lay in wait for a child to snap at, cows grazed in the pasture between the big red barn and Trott Brook. It was dark at night. No yard lights. The outhouse out back. Everything was a lot like it had been in the 1880s, and if you awoke in the middle of the night needing to do your business, there was a nice enamel pot with a lid under the bed, no need to go to the biffy. No radio, so there was plenty of silence. For entertainment, we stood around the pump organ and sang about the little rosewood casket sitting on a marble stand with a package of love letters written in a faded hand.
Grandma whistles under her breath, a tuneless music. She cuts me a slice of warm yeasty bread and pours me a cup of Salada tea. Her fingers are knotted at the knuckles. She is a woman of firm beliefs. If you leave your windows open at night, you won’t get sick. Chew your food thirty times before you swallow. There’s no need for herbs if the ingredients are good. You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. And once I heard her say, “The colored are better looking, more intelligent, more talented, harder working, more honest, and more loving toward their families than Caucasians.” I was impressed. Her grandfather had been a federal administrator in the South after the Civil War, during Reconstruction, and she got her ideas about people of color from him.
The schoolhouse where Dora Powell taught and James Keillor went to court her.
She had taught in the big frame schoolhouse across the road forty years before, and there Grandpa had gone to court her. He was on the school board. They married and had eight children: Ruth, Robert, James, Josephine, John, Lawrence, Elizabeth, and Eleanor. He was strict, and at supper each child was required to stand up and give an account of his or her day, for their father’s reproof or commendation. People remembered that about him, and also his love of books, seeing him raking hay, the horses’ reins in his left hand, a book in his right. He died in 1933 of a neurological ailment exacerbated by smoke inhalation the day the house burned down. At his funeral, the preacher chose as his text, “For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God,” and some neighbors were offended that he’d speak of James Keillor that way.
The school across the road wasn’t a school anymore so my cousins Susie and Janice and Rachel and I played school there. The Brethren held Meeting there on Sunday morning and we sat in formation, facing the table in the middle with the pitcher of wine and loaf of bread, me next to Grandma next to Uncle Jim, the tall regulator clock tick-tocking on the wall. A Model T Ford was parked in the yard and the cousins and I liked to sit in it and rock back and forth and sing, “Go tell Grandma the old gray goose is dead” and the song about the death of a cat and tears ran down our cheeks.
After lunch, Uncle Jim hitched up Prince and Ned to go bring in the hay. He put his hands under my arms and hoisted me up on Prince, my legs spread wide on the broad back, arms around the neck, my face pressed against the mane, the two great ears twitching above. Jim boarded the hayrack and chucked to the team and they trotted across the yard, the hayrack creaking and groaning, harness jingling. They paused at the gate and Jim jumped down and unlatched it and swung it open, and the team and I went rocking along down the lane and into the meadow where the hay lay in windrows where he had mowed it that morning and they stopped. I swung a leg back over Prince’s back and slid down his flank and climbed up on the rack to do my job. The horses started forward at a slow walk and my gentle uncle, shirtless in his blue coveralls, forked billows of hay up on the rack and I stomped on it to pack it down and make a nice firm load, no words between us, each with his work to do. We did four windrows; the load was four feet high and fairly firm, and he spoke to the team and they headed back for the barn. He gave me two ears of dried corn from the corncrib, and I held them up to each horse in turn who wrapped his horse lips around it and with great delicacy took it in his teeth and crunched it.
Years later I wrote a song about them, changing their names to Brownie and Pete, for the rhyme, and Chet Atkins and I did it on a tour: Oh the harness jingled on Brownie and Pete, two big Belgians with their dancing feet, pulling a hayrack down the pasture lane—I was six years old and I got to hold the reins. Uncle Jim up beside me, standing up on the rack. “Hold onto the crossbar, boy, push the branches back.” Their big feet dancing and their big backs shone, and they tossed their heads like thoroughbreds as we headed home. Chet’s drop-thumb style was perfect for the nobility of workhorses, their gait, the grace of their big hooves. It was one of the better songs I ever wrote, but you had to have ridden a workhorse to appreciate it and not many people have.
The horses pulled the hayrack up close alongside the barn, and I clambered up and opened the doors to the haymow and jumped into the great cathedral of barn, beams of sunlight from holes in the roof, golden motes of dust falling through the beams, some piles of hay across the floor of the mow. I took a pitchfork from near the door and went to work spreading the new hay around as Uncle Jim pitched it into the mow, and when he was done, he excused himself to go use the outhouse and I stood on a high promontory of hay and recited a poem to hear my voice reverberate under the arch of the roof. Breathes there the man with soul so dead who never to himself hath said, “This is my own, my native land”—whose heart hath ne’er within him burned as home his footsteps he hath turned from wandering on a foreign strand, and in my admiration of my own voice, I didn’t notice the open trapdoor and I dropped down into the cow pen below and bounced off the hindquarters of a cow in its stanchion and landed on concrete and skidded on fresh manure under the gate into the bull’s pen. He sniffed me and pushed at me with his great slimy nose as Uncle Jim came on the run. He whacked the bull’s hindquarters with a shovel and carried me into the house and lay me on the sofa. I touched my head. I was bleeding. Grandma brought wet brown paper to put on my wound—it had some medicinal value—I lay very still and didn’t cry and she put her face down next to mine and held my hand and sang to me a favorite song about the babes lost in the woods:
And when they were dead, the robins so red
Brought strawberry leaves and over them spread,
And all the night long, the branches among,
They mournfully whistled, and this was their song:
Poor babes in the woods.
I loved her whispery voice. She asked if I was all right. Yes, I said. She was worried and looked me in the eyes and said things for me to repea
t back to her. Uncle Jim went to town with big bags of corn to have them ground up for chicken feed. I wanted to go with him, but she wouldn’t let me. To make sure I hadn’t suffered brain injury, she asked me to recite a poem and I recited, Birdie with a yellow bill sat upon my windowsill, cocked his shining eye and said, “Wake up, wake up, you sleepyhead,” which she thought indicated no brain injury though in truth I did feel odd, but didn’t mention it. Something jarred loose in my brain. Years later, Mother said she worried about me from that time on, that I seemed elusive and quiet and developed the habit of hiding from the family. Perhaps hitting my head on concrete knocked something loose. The more I think about it, I do feel something loose up there, so I try not to think about it.
I went to the barn to help Uncle Jim with evening milking. He milked twelve cows, one by one, by hand, putting his forehead to the cow’s flank just ahead of the hind haunch and reaching for the immense udder and drawing the milk pinging into the steel pail squirt by squirt. I emptied the pail into the milk can and he moved to the next cow. The fresh milk smelled sweet and warm. When the can was full, he and I took it to the milk house and lowered it down into the cistern, into the cold water, to await the milk truck next day. Milk was his livelihood; the land was too poor for row crops. Other uncles were employed in shops and offices, and my dad on the mail car of a train; Uncle Jim raised hay, fed it to cows, and harvested their milk. He was of another world from ours, carrying on the past, a heroic burden. Farming wore my uncle out and he eventually found a job in town, working in a kitchen. He and I had the same hereditary heart problem, and he died of a heart attack at 59. My heart was surgically repaired at age 59, an operation that didn’t exist thirty years before when he had needed it. I hardly knew my soft-spoken uncle at all, but I feel connected to him, having gotten twenty years that were denied to him.
That Time of Year Page 4