Lake Wobegon Days (25 page)

Fr. Emil has been asked about St. Mary’s often enough, by sitting near the wrong people who feel obliged to make conversation on holy things. He says a prayer, asking God to grant him a secular lunch. He reads the wall—

Bill Larson and his Stearns County Cavaliers are playing the St. Anna Coliseum. Johnny (Mr. Sway) Swendson (formerly of “Let’s Get Together!” on WCCO) coming in August. A thank-you note from the Bloodmobile.
^*
A wedding dance at the Avon Ballroom on July 22nd for Mary Paterek and Virgil Loucks (imagine, a youth
named Virgil, he must be the youngest Virgil in Minnesota, maybe the last of the Virgil line). An auction of household goods July 14 (and some farm machinery and misc.) at the Albert Diener farm, lunch on the grounds, three o’clock sharp. Albert is seventy-two. He never thought this would happen to him, his legs getting weak.

“Father?” says Father Willetz.

“Sorry.” There’s an empty booth across the floor from the jukebox. Father Emil knows that with him sitting there, nobody will play music.

For three weeks of agony last February, Dorothy was gone on vacation to Tucson, and her cousin Flo from Burnsville, who is too nervous to run around at noon with a dozen orders in her head, filled in. “I don’t know how you do it,” she told Dorothy, arid she was right, she didn’t. Flo has her own way, a daily menu like a hot-lunch program—you plunk down your $2.50 and get Luau Pork Chops with pineapple and marshmallow dainties and cherry-cola Jell-O salad, or, if it’s Tuesday, Tuna Mandalay with Broccoli Hollywood, End of the Trail Bean Salad, and Yum Yum Bars or Ting-A-Lings (your choice). Liver casserole au gratin appeared once, and Chicken Surprise and potato-chip cookies. Flo herself did not eat lunch, or drink coffee. Her coffee had an oil slick on top.

Good old Norwegian cooking: you don’t read much about that, or about good old Norwegian hospitality. At Art’s Bait & Night O’Rest Motel, guests find the cabins are small, the chairs are hard, and the floors are studded with exposed nails. For decoration, an exciting wildlife picture, and for relaxation, you get two cast-iron lawn chairs with a scallop shell that makes a twenty-four-hour impression on your back, even through a shirt. In Cabin One is a hand-lettered sign tacked to the wall beside the door. “Close the damn Door,” it says. In Cabin Two, you will read, “Don’t clean Fish on the Picnic tables. How many Times do I have to Repeat myself? Use the table by the Botehouse. That’s What it’s there for. Anyone caught Cleaning Fish on Picnic Tables gets thrown out bag + baggage. This means You. For Pete Sake, use your goddamn Head.” Underneath that gruff exterior is a man who means every word he says. Every summer you will see at least one car hightailing it out of Art’s with a red-faced man at the wheel and the back seat full of scared children. The man is livid. If Bambi walked
out of the woods, he might not swerve to miss her. At the end of Art’s long dirt road, he turns east on the gravel, skidding half sideways, the back wheels spinning, stones flying like they were shot from guns, and he stomps it and hits eighty on the quarter-mile straightaway to Hansens’, hits the brake, and takes that long deceptive turn around Sunfish Bay sliding up into the left lane, his wife saying, “Stop. Stop right here and let us all out.” What has burned his bacon is the utter shame of it. The humiliation. He caught the sunnies about a hundred yards off the dock, one, two, three, four, big ones, and rowed back to show them off. He was so excited, he cleaned them right away for breakfast, on the picnic table, intending to wash it off afterward. Then a skinny, sawed-off sonuvabitch with a face like a bloodhound’s came up from behind, grabbed the knife away from him, and said, “Get the hell out of here. You got five minutes and then I get the shotgun.” He waved the knife at him. The man was berserk, one of those psycho-rural types you see in movies, unshaven, drooling brown spit, who take in city-folk for the night so they can murder them in their beds. A vacation is ruined. He had to run around the cabin throwing stuff into suitcases, hustling sleepy kids into the car, grabbing up wet swimsuits and towels, while his wife said, “Can’t you just talk to him?” and the maniac stood outside the door saying, “If you can’t read a simple goddam sign and follow one simple goddam instruction, then you can just get your fat butt the hell out of here.” Right in front of the children. And he wouldn’t give back the knife. Careening along the dirt road, the dad’s gorge begins to rise for good, and down the straightaway, he completely rethinks his position on gun control. The speedway turns are to compensate for his not decking the man on the spot and cutting his scrawny throat. Oscar Hansen has seen a lot of cars almost spin out on the long turn and come up through his barbed wire. He’s thought about putting up a sign:

Other residents come to mind as people who if you were showing a friend from college around town and you saw them you would grab his arm and make a hard U-turn, such as Mr. Berge, not because he
might be drunk but because whether drunk or sober he might blow his nose with his index finger the old farmer way. Farmers still do this in the field, though most of them know that town is a different situation, but not Mr. Berge and his friends, the Norwegian bachelor farmers. Their only concession to town is a slight duck of the head for modesty’s sake. To them, the one-hand blow is in the same league with spitting, which they also do, and scratching in the private regions. They never learned the trick of reaching down deep in your pocket and feeling around for a dime until you solve the problem. When ill at ease, such as when meeting your friend, they are apt to do all three in quick succession, spit, blow, and scratch—
p-thoo, snarf, ahhhhh
—no more self-conscious than a dog.

“It’s better to apologize than to ask permission,” says Clarence, arguing for greater boldness in life. The bachelor farmers, however, do neither. On a warm day, six of them may roost on the plank bench in front of Ralph’s, in peaceful defiance of Lutheranism, chewing, sipping, snarfling, and p-thooing, until he chases them away to the Sidetrack Tap (they’re bad advertising for a grocery store, the heftiness of them seems to recommend a light diet) and then they may not go. Mr. Munch may just spit on the sidewalk, study it, and say, “I don’t see no sign says No Sitting.” “You get up, I’ll paint one for you,” says Ralph. They may wait a good long time before they go.

“Tellwiddem,” says Mr. Fjerde.

“Tellwid
all uvem,”
says Mr. Munch.

The Norwegian bachelor’s password.
Tellwitcha.

We are all crazy in their eyes. All the trouble we go to for nothing:
ridiculous.
Louie emerging from his job at the bank, white shirt and blue bow tie, shiny brown shoes, delicately stepping across the street for lunch:
dumb bastard.
Byron Tollefson bending over grass, pulling the odd stuff out:
stoopid.
Your college chum, gesturing at the cornices of brick facades and saying, “Marvelous!”:
talks like a goddam woman.

In time, you learn not to die of shame, as you did at sixteen and eighteen and twenty-one, when you meet one while in the company of a fine friend—you learn to let the friend figure things out for himself, you don’t yank him into Skoglund’s to look at postcards until the coast is clear. Which is odd, considering that it’s true, as Clarence
once said: in their hearts, the bachelor farmers are all sixteen years old. Painfully shy, perpetually disgruntled, elderly teenagers leaning against a wall, watching the parade through the eyes of the last honest men in America:
ridiculous.
Clarence mentioned this when I was eighteen and complaining about my father’s lawn compulsions—grass is
meant
to get long, it’s part of nature, nature
is
growth. “You should talk to the Norwegian bachelors, you have a lot in common,” he said. I said to myself:
ridiculous.

It’s noon of a July day, not a cloud in sight; and a long stone’s throw from the Box, a long beanpole of a kid with hair the color of wet straw stands in the front door of the big green house and holds a cup of coffee. In his pajamas, still, at noon. The Tollefson house, the green one with two cast-iron deer peacefully grazing in front of the dark screened porch, a rusted Monkey Wards swing set in back. The Tollefson boy who has been up until two in the morning for weeks reading books, still basking in the glow of graduation and getting the Sons of Knute Shining Star Award (a $200 scholarship). His mother, Frances, is still basking, too, and that’s why, when she comes up behind him, she touches him lightly on the shoulder and says gently, “Still in your pajamas, Johnny?”

He flinches as if she were a snake. He sighs. “The answer to your question, Mother, is yes. These are my pajamas and I’m in them.”

“Would you like a little lunch?”

“No, I’m not hungry.”

“I could fix you breakfast.”

“I just said I’m not hungry.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing is wrong.”

“Are you sure?”

He sighs. He’s cornered with her there behind him. He walks over to the brown cane chair by the porch swing and slouches down in it. It’s hard to get comfortable if you’re tall, you have to ease down until you balance on a particular vertebra a few notches above the coccyx. He finds the bone he wants, puts his feet up on the swing, sets his sad
blue eyes on the Krebsbach house across the street, and wishes she would leave him alone. Why is it the people who follow you around asking what’s wrong are the ones who wouldn’t know if you told them?

What’s wrong is this—and it isn’t this exactly, this is only one thing of many—it’s his mother’s plan that at two o’clock they pick up his grandma and Aunt Mary and his uncle Senator K. Thorvaldson, and the whole motley bunch drive to St. Cloud to see him register at St. Cloud State College for fall quarter.

“It’s only registration! It’s like getting a driver’s license! It takes ten minutes! What’s the big deal?” he said to her three days ago when she announced this idea.

“I thought you’d be pleased. They’re so proud of you. They want to be there.”

How do you tell your mother that there’s something funny about your old relatives? They talk funny, and they look funny. It’s less noticeable in Lake Wobegon, but put them in a big city like St. Cloud and
everybody sees it
, like they have signs around their necks that say “Hick.” People in St. Cloud have some shine to them and look comfortable in their clothes as they stroll along St. Germaine, going about their business affairs, and if you asked one of them for directions to a good restaurant, they’d tell you that, but his old relatives dress up like scarecrows, Uncle Senator wears baggy black pants and an old white shirt buttoned up to the neck and no tie and hightop kangaroo shoes, and if you asked him for directions he’d give you the story of his life.

For three days they’ve gone around and around.

“Why don’t you and
them
go register? You don’t need me.”

“Oh, Johnny, it’s such a little thing.”

“If it’s so little, how come they have to go?”

“I can’t tell them they can’t come now, they’d be so hurt.”

“Well, you should’ve thought of that when you invited them.”

His dad said, “If we’re not good enough to be seen with you in public, then maybe it’s time you started packing.”

“I don’t see what that has to do with the fact that I am perfectly capable of going to St. Cloud without taking my whole family along.”

“There’s a lot you don’t see and I doubt if you ever will.”

“I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean.”

Why couldn’t his family be more like the Flambeaus? Emile and Eileen Flambeau in the Flambeau Family mystery series he has read every one of which twice. Emile is a Nobel laureate microbiologist whose travels around the world in search of elusive viruses seem to put him time after time in the vicinity of violent crimes committed by rings of dope smugglers, whom Emile brings to justice with the use of superior intelligence, his own and that of his wife, the former screen star, and his teenage son, Tony Flambeau. The Flambeaus live in a spacious apartment at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel overlooking Central Park in Manhattan, where they relax and have fun after their strenuous adventures, and what impresses him is the way Emile and Eileen treat Tony as a mature person and also the way the Flambeaus do what they
feel
like doing—
when
they feel like doing it, not like in Lake Wobegon. There is no noon siren in Manhattan when everyone has to sit down immediately and eat a hot beef sandwich, no six o’clock siren when you dig into a tuna casserole made with cream of mushroom soup. The Flambeaus keep irregular hours. Once they went to Chinatown at three in the morning for shark fin soup, and another time they went for a long walk together down Fifth Avenue and dropped in at Xenon and danced and went to a movie and wound up sailing out through the Verrazano Strait in the
Ginny B.
as the sun rose over the Atlantic. It’s the little things that impress him about the Flambeaus, such as Tony’s sixteenth birthday, when Eileen said, “Tony, Emile and I would love it if you’d join us for a glass of wine on the balcony,” and Tony said, “Thanks, Eileen. Should I open the Pouilly-Fuissé?” To call your parents by their first names, to sit around drinking fine wine with them—this never happens in Lake Wobegon!