Lake Wobegon Days (24 page)

In 1975, Jack Krueger worked all spring and summer to start a Country Club in town. A loan guarantee under the Rural Recreation Development Program got the ball rolling, and Jack took an option on
forty acres of Old Man Tollerud’s pasture and woodlot. No investors stepped forward for weeks; people wanted to know who else had signed up—they didn’t want to be the first; the membership fee was $1,000. Maybe it’d sell better if they knew what they were buying, thought Jack, so he paced off two hundred yards on the pasture, put a can in a hole, mowed the grass short and Roto-tilled three sand traps. He invited prospects to try their hand. Mr. Tollerud, however, refused to remove the Holstein hazards, and when the first foursome approached the tee, cows moved in for a closer look. Clint Bunsen’s ball hit one amidships, and she turned her head and gave him a look as if she’d heard someone curse. They played the hole and then came back and played it again. Clarence Bunsen told Jack, “I can’t imagine doing this all afternoon.” But, as he told Clint later, it was the principle of the thing. A golf club would be the first organization that it cost a pile of money to join. Sons of Knute you get in for $10 initiation and eating a raw egg and memorizing a few lines of Norwegian. Church you join when you’re born, for nothing. “If I had a thousand dollars and I wanted people to know I had it, I wouldn’t have to join a club, I could walk around town with the money on a forked stick,” Clarence said. “I could wave it right in people’s faces.” Because he wouldn’t join, Clint didn’t, and when Clint didn’t, people thought it might be fishy, and by August, the Holsteins had trampled the first hole. You couldn’t tell it had ever been.

“Nothing ever changes in this town,” said Jack. “It’s hard to get people interested. You set off the fire alarm and they just get up and go to lunch.”

The fire siren goes off at noon and six every day but Saturday (noon only) and Sunday (
Be still and know that I am God
). That is how we tell time, that and the progress of the sun across our sky. Some people wear a watch—on the one hand. On the other hand they don’t look at it very often.

As children we got so we could tell time by the sun pretty well, and would know by the light in the room when we opened our eyes that it was seven o’clock and time to get up for school, and later that it was almost ten and then almost noon and almost three o’clock and time to be dismissed. School ran strictly by clocks, the old Regulators
that Mr. Hamburger was always fiddling with, adding and subtracting paper clips on the pendulum to achieve perfect time, but we were sensitive to light, knowing how little was available to us as winter came on, and always knew what time it was—as anyone will who leads a regular life in a familiar place. My poor great-grandpa, when his house burned down
^*
when grandma left the bread baking in the summer kitchen oven to go visit the Berges and they built the new one facing west instead of south: they say he was confused the rest of his life and never got straightened out even when he set up his bed in the parlor (which faced north as his former bedroom had): he lived in a twilight world for some time and then moved in his mind to the house he’d grown up in, and in the end didn’t know one day from another until the day he died. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil,” but there’s more than one kind of shadow, and when a man loses track, it can kill him. Not even the siren could have saved my great-grandpa. He died of misdirection.

The siren isn’t set off by a clock but by Bud Mueller who takes a nap in the fire truck and sets his alarm clock for noon if the nap starts early. He gets up, pulls the siren lanyard, and goes back to snooze for another half hour. His breathing sounds like the cardboard flap you pin to the back wheel of your bike to make a motorcycle. At six, he sounds the siren on his way home to supper and usually is a few minutes fast.

At noon, as the siren dies slowly at the end of its long scream, almost everyone in town puts down one thing and picks up another. Fr. Emil picks up his breviary and prays for the poor people. “My God, rich people have the time to praise You if they want to, but the poor people are so busy, accept their work as praise because, my God, they don’t have time for everything.” A lot of poor people knock off work right then and have them some dinner, such as the Commercial Hot Beef Sandwich at the Chatterbox: two slices white
bread, two big dollops mashed potato, three chunks pot roast, and dark gravy poured over everything—you also get string beans and a slab of pie—$1.75. The Chatterbox gets as loud as the school lunchroom at noon with all the good eaters piling in, and sometimes the siren sets off an alarm in Dorothy. She straightens up, standing over the gravy pot with a ladle in her hand, and looks like she could brain somebody with it. She is a big lady and with that hairnet on, her head looks like a helmet. The big booths in back are full of hefty guys jammed in tight—they roll Horse with dice out of leather cups and turn and holler at guys lumbering in the front door, so there is dice clatter and loud volleys of talk across the room and the crash of plates—she looks like she could clear the room in about eleven seconds flat. “You know, I think I’d sell this place for about half of what anyone in his right mind would want to pay for it,” she says to nobody in particular. It’s packed today because it rained so hard last night nobody could get into the fields this morning and a lot of them wound up in town. Big butts of pear-shaped gents in coveralls lined up on the stools like the 1938 Chicago Bears as seen by Bronko Nagurski. Platters of the Commercial on the counter (“Twenty-six years I stood back here and watch them eat—if I got some hogs and a trough, I’d feel right at home”: Dorothy) and big forkloads of chow hover above the gorge, meanwhile Al who hasn’t yet got his dinner hunkers at the end and clears the phlegm from his head with one expert snort. It’s a deep liquidy snort of a sort that Flora would never allow at home, but here at the Box he cuts loose as if it were no more than a little cough, a mere
ahem
, and then he eases up one cheek and releases a whistle of a fart. Bob next to him is offended. “Take a dump while you’re at it,” he says. “Gotta eat first,” says Al.

Carl Lundberg eats alone, a hot beef sandwich plus a BLT plus apple pie. He’s feeling sour and a good lunch might cheer him up. None of the Lundbergs slept well last night. The heat makes them nervous and jumpy, even in their sleep. Lundbergs always were restless in bed, except Betty, but then she was an Olson before she married Carl. She’s the type who lies on her back, folds her hands, and wakes up eight hours later without a wrinkle, even in bed with Carl who swims in his sleep. He treads water in heavy seas, yelling to search planes overhead. So do Carl, Jr., Benny, Wilbur, and Donny, who
sleep upstairs in the Lundbergs’ little house, four big boys in bunkbeds. In daytime, they’re placid enough, all big-boned, phlegmatic (“Those Lundbergs,” my grandma said, “they can sit with the best of them”), but at night they toss and turn and holler out and sometimes go for walks.

Something about hot sticky weather brings the Lundbergs out at night. When Gary and LeRoy make the midnight round in the cruiser, they’re never surprised to see a Lundberg lumbering down the street. Once Donny sleepwalked all the way to the ballpark and crouched behind the plate, calling for the fast one. They’ve climbed fences in their sleep, gotten into gardens, tramped on tomatoes, knocked over beanpoles. Wilbur woke up in a tree once. And in a town where nobody locks the doors or knows where the keys are, some people have been awakened by a Lundberg on the premises, coming up the stairs in his shorts.

Even restless and afoot, they’re sound sleepers. You have to shake a Lundberg and yell at him, and then when he wakes up, he’s never in a good mood. He’s apt to shake you back and yell, “What are you doing t’me? Getcha hands offa me!”

One hot night, four Lundbergs took a hike, aroused by thunder and lightning, aroused but not awakened. Their neighbor Mrs. Thorvaldson, widow of Senator K.’s brother Harry, called the constables. Carl, Jr., had pitched into her marigolds and the other three were moving around on her lawn. “They’re having dreams, and I don’t want to be part of it,” she said.

Gary and LeRoy hauled Carl, Jr., out of the flowers and herded the others to their own yard and, rather than wake them, tied clothesline to their ankles and tethered them to a tree. Of course, when Carl walked to the end of his rope, he fell like a load of bricks. He awoke then, mad about the rope, the light in his face—“This isn’t right,” he said, as LeRoy untied him. “You got no
right
tying up people in their sleep. We were
asleep.
You woke us up.
You
can’t do that.”

LeRoy said he was sorry. “Sorry!” Carl said. “Sorry isn’t good enough.” Next day, he had forgotten the whole thing. When Dorothy asked him how he was, he said, “I didn’t sleep too well last night. Somebody put sticks in my bed. I got scratches all up and down my legs. I don’t know. Sometimes I wonder.”

In the booth across from Carl, Harold and Marlys Diener sit on one side, wedged in by Willard Diener, and across from them are Rollie Hochstetter and brother Walter. “If Harold don’t treat you right, you give me a call,” Willard says to Marlys with a friendly leer.
You big dummy
, she thinks. She is crushed between them and can hardly handle her fork and finish her lemon meringue pie. She just mentioned to Harold that she wants to go to St. Cloud and see a movie, she doesn’t care which one, they haven’t been to a movie for months without the kids along. They are slowly getting over a big argument of months before, March in fact. He got so mad he threw the Bible out the bedroom window right through the glass. She was showing him the verse where it says, Husbands love your wives, or words to that effect. He grabbed it and threw it. The argument started out to be about breakfast: he was going to make French toast and didn’t put oil in the frying pan, and she said, “Don’t you know how to do this?” and he said, “It’s not my job.” He talked about wives being obedient to husbands, so she wanted to show him the other side. He threw it out the window. It was
cold
out, so he had to spend an hour cleaning shards of glass out of the window and cutting a new pane and installing it, which didn’t improve his disposition, and that night after supper he said, “If you’d spend a little less time at your mother’s gabbing and a little more around here, this place’d be something a person could call
home.
”

“Sometimes I think Mother’s
is
my home,” she replied.

“Well, anytime you decide, you just let me know.”

“Well, maybe I’m in the process of deciding.”

They had gone to the bedroom so the children wouldn’t hear. They were in there for fifteen or twenty minutes, then Dawn came in. “Daddy, Todd broke the biffy,” she said.

The little boy had dropped his Brussels sprouts in the toilet and covered them up with a couple pounds of toilet paper, and then flushed, and flushed again, flooding the bathroom floor. Harold got a clothes hanger and fished the glop out of the bowl, and Marlys mopped. He said, “This always happens. If you’d just pay attention to the kids once in a while, maybe they’d learn something about discipline.”

“I can’t do everything myself!” she said. She slammed the door shut
and yelled some more things at him—she forgot what she said, but something connected, something she had been saving up for a long time, and when he heard it, he said, “That’s it. I don’t have to take this anymore.”

He marched straight to the front door and threw it open. A blast of cold air hit him. She was right behind him, saying, “Go ahead! Walk out! Leave us! I don’t care!” Behind her, peeking around her, were the kids. They never heard this sort of talk, they weren’t allowed to go to movies that featured this sort of dialogue—only to family movies.

Harold turned and marched past them to the bedroom. He felt ridiculous. He had been about to utter his exit line, “You don’t need to tell
me
you don’t care, I
know
you don’t care,” when he remembered it was March and he was barefooted. He was going to say the line and slam the door. Instead, he had to go back for socks. He yanked clothes out of the drawer and threw them on the floor, looking for his long wool socks, meanwhile he kept repeating himself:

“I’ve had it. A man can only take so much.”

“There’s a limit to how much a man can take.”

“I’ve come to the end of my rope.”

“A man can take just so much and no more.”

The children drifted away. Marlys went to make coffee. The moment was lost for him. He wandered into the kitchen to ask if she had seen his wool socks, and she said no, would he like a cup of coffee? He said okay. “To go?” she whispered. He didn’t hear her. After a while, he said, “Sometimes I don’t know what keeps us together.”

“If it wasn’t for winter, I think I’d be a divorced woman,” she told her mother the next day. Her mother said, “You keep your house so cold. You oughta turn up the heat so you can wear your good nightie.”

That
wasn’t the problem.

Crushed between Harold and Willard, their elbows in her side, Willard breathing on her, she felt like
that
was something she deserved a little vacation from. Even the night he came so close to leaving, Harold had
that
on his mind about ten minutes later. She went to bed with her back turned to him and wouldn’t roll over, but the bed had a trough down the middle (from
that
), and when she was half asleep and her grip on the mattress loosened, she fell into the trough and there he was, waiting.

“What movie you going to see?” Willard said. “Maybe I’ll come and keep you company.”

“Anything that doesn’t have naked people in it,” Harold said. “Marlys sees naked people and it makes her sick.”

“Depends on the person,” she said. Willard thought that was the funniest thing he ever heard in his life.

Fr. Emil comes in for lunch. Harold: “Shhhh. Father hear us talk, we’ll be here till Tuesday.” With Father is Father Willetz, visiting from St. Cloud, a priest who wears a turtleneck. Father stands by the coatrack, pretending to read the auction notices and ballroom posters. Actually he is scouting the room for the right place to sit, a strategic problem for a priest who simply wants to eat lunch and not necessarily be asked what he thinks about those Benedictines who got hold of St. Mary’s in Finseth. St. Mary’s was a gorgeous church until the Benedictines came through and told people they ought to clean out the statuary and the high altar, which the people did, and do you know what they used for an altar? A
lunch
table! From the cafeteria! Set right out on the floor where everybody could see it—why? Why tear the church apart so you can see the priest say Mass?