Lake Wobegon Days (53 page)

Mr. Berge has wept before at revival meetings, and so have you, but this time is different because it’s
now.
Everything has come together at this moment, your life is balanced on it like a man on the high wire, and a flood of sins, your entire wretched history, pours from you as the Christ appears, patient and loving, at his hour of suffering. On the Mount of Olives, he prays for the Father’s mercy until sweat falls off him like blood, while his poor disciples, who have been arguing about which one of them might betray him, fall asleep, even Peter, who will in a few short hours deny that he ever knew Jesus—but you will not, you will rise from the sleepers and say,
Lord I believe.

This, in a way, you do—not the long walk down to the rail—Norwegians don’t do that, too dramatic—but in your heart, there is a voiceless prayer. Christ, have mercy. Lord, have mercy. Let your light shine on me. Lord, lift me. Lord, feed me. Mercy, dear Lord, on my soul. And some light does shine—

Verna played “Almost Persuaded” through this agony, and then “Just as I Am”—Bob began to sing, “Just as I am, without one plea, but that Thy blood was shed for me,” and everyone stood up. All the verses. The organ quavered and the voices rang out. The old familiar altar hymn, so well used for years that people know the words and sing their parts from memory, they sound like a choir, so sweet, so true, and then the long closing prayer. “We thank Thee, Lord, for Thy great love to us,” Bob intones, and shortly your mind drifts one more time. Perhaps to the ceiling and the circles of light from the four globes hanging on chains—perhaps it’s time to do a little painting at home. Strip the wallpaper off your dining room ceiling, see if one coat of Sherwin-Williams won’t do the job. Your wife deserves a little work from you. Your shoulders touch as the distant voice drones on, and her bare shoulders come to mind, from the motel in Schroeder, but now she is even more beautiful in the pale evening light as she carefully
folds her blouse and then leans forward and unhitches her bra, a simple motion you’ve observed ten thousand times (“When we’ve made love ten thousand times, bright shining as the sun …”) but never found so graceful as now, in sweet memory, and Bob says, “In Jesus’ name, Amen.” And everyone turns for the door, and out you go into the night that is now charged with such tenderness and feeling, you and the others who wept with you, every star in the sky shines on your head, every cricket sings, the air you breathe is like wine, and the spot where you stand, beside the steps, beside your wife, is in the palm of God’s hand who knows the number of hairs on your head, each of them alive and tingling, and He will never leave you.

Mrs. Mueller walked Mrs. Magendanz home, then walked the two blocks to her little house. She was not afraid, not even when she reached for the light switch and touched her cat, John, perched on the easy chair, who leaped and crashed into a vase. She simply cleaned it up and went to bed. She woke up twice, hearing noises, but went back to sleep.

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 themselves.

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.