Lake Wobegon Days (17 page)

If people were to live by comparison shopping, the town would go bust. It cannot compete with other places item by item. Nothing in town is quite as good as it appears to be somewhere else. If you live there, you have to take it as a whole. That’s loyalty.

This is why Judy Ingqvist does not sing “Holy City” on Sunday morning, although everyone says she sounds great on “Holy City”—it’s not her wish to sound great, though she is the leading soprano; it’s her wish that all the sopranos sound at least okay. So she sings quietly. One Sunday when the Ingqvists went to the Black Hills on vacation, a young, white-knuckled seminarian filled in; he gave a forty-five minute sermon and had a lot of sermon left over when finally three deacons cleared their throats simultaneously. They sounded like German shepherds barking, and their barks meant that the congregation now knew that he was bright and he had nothing more to prove to them. The young man looked on the sermon as free enterprise.
^*
You
work like hell on it and come up a winner. He wanted to give it all the best that was in him, of which he had more than he needed. He was opening a Higgledy-Piggledy of theology, and the barks were meant to remind him where he was: in Lake Wobegon, where smart doesn’t count for so much. A minister has to be able to read a clock. At noon, it’s time to go home and turn up the pot roast and get the peas out of the freezer. Everybody gets their pot roast at Ralph’s. It’s not the tenderest meat in the Ninth Federal Reserve District, but after you bake it for four hours until it falls apart in shreds, what’s the difference?

So what’s special about this town is not smarts either. It counted zero when you worked for Bud on the road crew, as I did one summer. He said, “Don’t get smart with me,” and he meant it. One week I was wrestling with great ideas in dimly lit college classrooms, the next I was home shoveling gravel in the sun, just another worker. I’d studied the workers in humanities class, spent a whole week on the labor movement as it related to ideals of American individualism, and I thought it was pretty funny to sing “Solidarity Forever” while patching potholes, but he didn’t, he told me to quit smarting off. Work was serious business, and everybody was supposed to do it—
hard
work, unless of course you thought you were too good for it, in which case to hell with you. Bud’s wife kept telling him to retire, he said, but he wasn’t going to; all the geezers he’d known who decided to take it easy were flat on their backs a few months later with all their friends commenting on how natural they looked. Bud believed that when you feel bad, you get out of bed and put your boots on. “A little hard work never killed anybody,” he told us, I suppose, about fifteen thousand times. Lean on your shovel for one second to straighten your back, and there was Bud to remind you. It would have been satisfying to choke him on the spot. We had the tar right there, just throw the old coot in and cook him and use him for fill. But he was so strong he might have taken the whole bunch of us. Once he said to me, “Here, take the other end of this.” It was the hoist for the backhoe. I lifted my end, and right then I went from a 34- to a 36-inch sleeve. I thought my back
was going to break. “Heavy?” he said.
Nooo.
“Want to set her down?”
Nooo. That’s okay.
“Well, better set her down, cause this is where she goes.”
Okay.
All my bones had been reset, making me a slightly curved person. “Next time try lifting with your legs,” he said.

People who visit Lake Wobegon come to see somebody, otherwise they missed the turn on the highway and are lost.
Ausländers
, the Germans call them. They don’t come for Toast ’n Jelly Days, or the Germans’ quadrennial Gesuffa Days, or Krazy Daze, or the Feast Day of St. Francis, or the three-day Mist County Fair with its exciting Death Leap from the top of the grandstand to the arms of the haystack for only ten cents. What’s special about here isn’t special enough to draw a major crowd, though Flag Day—you could drive a long way on June 14 to find another like it.

Flag Day, as we know it, was the idea of Herman Hochstetter, Rollie’s dad, who ran the dry goods store and ran Armistice Day, the Fourth of July, and Flag Day. For the Fourth, he organized a doubleloop parade around the block which allowed people to take turns marching and watching. On Armistice Day, everyone stepped outside at 11
A.M.
and stood in silence for two minutes as Our Lady’s bell tolled eleven times.

Flag Day was his favorite. For a modest price, he would install a bracket on your house to hold a pole to hang your flag on, or he would drill a hole in the sidewalk in front of your store with his drill gun powered by a. 22 shell.
Bam!
And in went the flag. On patriotic days, flags flew all over; there were flags on the tall poles, flags on the short, flags in the brackets on the pillars and the porches, and if you were flagless you could expect to hear from Herman. His hairy arm around your shoulder, his poochlike face close to yours, he would say how proud he was that so many people were proud of their country, leaving you to see the obvious, that you were a gap in the ranks.

In June 1944, the day after D-Day, a salesman from Fisher Hat called on Herman and offered a good deal on red and blue baseball caps. “Do you have white also?” Herman asked. The salesman thought that white caps could be had for the same wonderful price. Herman ordered two hundred red, two hundred white, and one hundred blue. By the end of the year, he still had four hundred and eighty-six caps.
The inspiration of the Living Flag was born from that overstock.

On June 14, 1945, a month after V-E Day, a good crowd assembled in front of the Central Building in response to Herman’s ad in the paper:

His wife Louise handed out the caps, and Herman stood on a stepladder and told people where to stand. He lined up the reds and whites into stripes, then got the blues into their square. Mr. Hanson climbed up on the roof of the Central Building and took a photograph, they sang the national anthem, and then the Living Flag dispersed. The photograph appeared in the paper the next week. Herman kept the caps.

In the flush of victory, people were happy to do as told and stand in place, but in 1946 and 1947, dissension cropped up in the ranks: people complained about the heat and about Herman—what gave
him
the idea he could order
them
around? “People! Please! I need your attention! You blue people, keep your hats on! Please! Stripe No. 4, you’re sagging! You reds, you’re up here! We got too many white people, we need more red ones! Let’s do this without talking, people! I can’t get you straight if you keep moving around! Some of you are not paying attention! Everybody shut up! Please!”

One cause of resentment was the fact that none of them got to see the Flag they were in; the picture in the paper was black and white. Only Herman and Mr. Hanson got to see the real Flag, and some boys too short to be needed down below. People wanted a chance to go up to the roof and witness the spectacle for themselves.

“How can you go up there if you’re supposed to be down here?” Herman said. “You go up there to look, you got nothing to look at. Isn’t it enough to know that you’re doing your part?”

On Flag Day, 1949, just as Herman said, “That’s it! Hold it now!” one of the reds made a break for it—dashed up four flights of stairs to the roof and leaned over and had a long look. Even with the hole he
left behind, it was a magnificent sight. The Living Flag filled the street below. A perfect Flag! The reds so brilliant! He couldn’t take his eyes off it. “Get down here! We need a picture!” Herman yelled up to him. “How does it look?” people yelled up to him. “Unbelievable! I can’t describe it!” he said.

So then everyone had to have a look. “No!” Herman said, but they took a vote and it was unanimous. One by one, members of the Living Flag went up to the roof and admired it. It
was
marvelous! It brought tears to the eyes, it made one reflect on this great country and on Lake Wobegon’s place in it. One wanted to stand up there all afternoon and just drink it in. So, as the first hour passed, and only forty of the five hundred had been to the top, the others got more and more restless. “Hurry up! Quit dawdling!
You’ve
seen it! Get down here and give someone else a chance!” Herman sent people up in groups of four, and then ten, but after two hours, the Living Flag became the Sitting Flag and then began to erode, as the members who had had a look thought about heading home to supper, which infuriated the ones who hadn’t. “Ten more minutes!” Herman cried, but ten minutes became twenty and thirty, and people snuck off and the Flag that remained for the last viewer was a Flag shot through by cannon fire.

In 1950, the Sons of Knute took over Flag Day. Herman gave them the boxes of caps. Since then, the Knutes have achieved several good Flags, though most years the attendance was poor. You need at least four hundred to make a good one. Some years the Knutes made a “no-look” rule, other years they held a lottery. One year they experimented with a large mirror held by two men over the edge of the roof, but when people leaned back and looked up, the Flag disappeared, of course.

Our family was dirt poor, which I figured out as a child from the fact we had such a bad vacuum. When you vacuumed the living room, it would groan and stop and you had to sit and wait for it to groan and start up, then vacuum like mad before it quit again, but it didn’t have good suction either. You had to stuff the hairballs into it. I also knew it because Donald Hoglund told me. He asked me how much my dad earned, and I said a thousand dollars, the most money I could imagine, and he shrieked, “You’re poor! You’re poor!” So we were. And, in a town where everyone was either Lutheran or Catholic, we were neither one. We were Sanctified Brethren, a sect so tiny that nobody but us and God knew about it, so when kids asked what I was, I just said Protestant. It was too much to explain, like having six toes. You would rather keep your shoes on.

Grandpa Cotten was once tempted toward Lutheranism by a preacher who gave a rousing sermon on grace that Grandpa heard as a young man while taking Aunt Esther’s dog home who had chased a Model T across town. He sat down on the church steps and listened
to the voice boom out the open windows until he made up his mind to go in and unite with the truth, but he took one look from the vestibule and left. “He was dressed up like the pope of Rome,” said Grandpa, “and the altar and the paintings and the gold candlesticks—my gosh, it was just a big show. And he was reading the whole darn thing off a page, like an actor.”

Jesus said, “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them,” and the Brethren believed that was enough. We met in Uncle Al’s and Aunt Flo’s bare living room with plain folding chairs arranged facing in toward the middle. No clergyman in a black smock. No organ or piano, for that would make one person too prominent. No upholstery, it would lead to complacency. No picture of Jesus, He was in our hearts. The faithful sat down at the appointed hour and waited for the Spirit to move one of them to speak or to pray or to give out a hymn from our Little Flock hymnal. No musical notation, for music must come from the heart and not off a page. We sang the texts to a tune that fit the meter, of the many tunes we all knew. The idea of reading a prayer was sacrilege to us—“if a man can’t remember what he wants to say to God, let him sit down and think a little harder,” Grandpa said.

“There’s the Lord’s Prayer,” said Aunt Esther meekly. We were sitting on the porch after Sunday dinner. Esther and Harvey were visiting from Minneapolis and had attended Lake Wobegon Lutheran, she having turned Lutheran when she married him, a subject that was never brought up in our family.

“You call that prayer? Sitting and reciting like a bunch of schoolchildren?”