Leaving home, p.10
Leaving Home, page 10
Oh yes. We don’t talk about money, that is very clear. Except to say, “I got this window fan for four dollars; it’s brand-new except for this scratch, and you know those things run ten, twelve dollars.” Bargains yes, but salaries no.
So here was the secret. He opened the first envelope, 1956. Forty-five dollars. That was for a whole week. Not much for a good mechanic. Forty-five dollars and five kids: it explained all that scrimping, his mother darning socks and canning tomatoes. When the old man forked over their allowance, he counted the two quarters twice to make sure he wasn’t overpaying. It explained why he was such a pack rat, saving tinfoil, string, paper, rags—once Daryl looked around for string and found a box full of corks, another of bits of wire, and one box with hundreds of odd jigsaw-puzzle pieces, labeled “Puzzle: Misc.”
It dawned on him that he wasn’t adopted, he was their boy all right. He’d inherited their frugality and stoicism. If his paper plate fell apart, he’d try to save it, even if his hand was burning. Same as his dad. They raised him to bear up under hardship and sadness and disappointment and disaster, but what if you’re brought up to be stoic and your life turns out lucky—you’re in love with your wife, you’re lucky in your children, and life is lovely to you—what then? You’re ready to endure trouble and pain, and instead God sends you love—what do you do? He’d been worried about inheriting the farm, meanwhile God had given him six beautiful children. What happens if you expect the worst and you get the best? Thank you, Lord, he thought. Thank you for sending me up here to the bedroom. It was wrong to come, but thank you for sending me.
He heard Lulu tiptoe in, and when she brushed against his leg he was sorry for chasing her out. He scratched her head. It didn’t feel catlike. He looked down and saw the white stripes down its back.
The skunk sniffed his hand, wondering where the catfood was. Then it raised its head and sniffed the spilled perfume. It raised its tail, sensing an adversary. It walked toward the window. It seemed edgy.
“Easy, easy,” he said. If he opened the window wider, it might go out on the roof and find a route down the oak tree to the ground. He was opening the window wider when he heard the feet padding up the stairs. He hollered, “No, Shep, no!” and raised his leg to climb out the window as the dog burst into the room, barking. The skunk turned and attacked. Daryl went out the window, but not quite fast enough. He tore off all his clothes and threw them down to the ground, and climbed back in. The bedroom smelled so strong he couldn’t bear it. The skunk was under the bed. He ran down and got the shotgun and loaded it. Daryl was almost dying of the smell, but he crept into the bedroom. He heard the skunk grunt, trying to squeeze out more juice. Daryl aimed and fired. Feathers exploded and me skunk dropped down dead.
He carried it out on a shovel and buried it, but that didn’t help very much: the deceased was still very much a part of the Tollerud house when his parents arrived home a little while later. Daryl sat on the porch steps, bare naked except for a newspaper. He smelled so bad, he didn’t care about modesty. Ruby said, “Oh dear. Are you all right?” She stopped, twenty feet away. She thought he looked naked, but he smelled so bad she didn’t care to come closer.
His dad said, “You know, Daryl, I think you were right about Seattle.”
And they left. They didn’t take clothes with them. They went straight out the driveway.
That was Tuesday. Daryl has been living at his parents’ house all week. But life is good. I’m sure he still believes this. Life is good, friends. It’s even better if you stay away from Daryl, but basically life is good.
LYLE’S ROOF
It has been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon. On Tuesday, Carl Krebsbach’s brother-in-law Lyle tried to start his lawnmower, which had died because the grass was so high that he hadn’t cut sooner because it’d rained so much, and a shingle fell off his roof. He looked up and another one slid off and almost creamed him. There was white mossy stuff on the underside of the shingles, and though it was asphalt, it was soft, like a living thing, and it crumbled in his hands. It had held on to the roof as long as it could and then it died. A dead shingle.
People have been mentioning the roof to Lyle for years, in a roundabout sort of way. You can’t stand and flat tell a man his house is falling apart. Carl says, “You know, if you’d like me to, I could climb up on your roof and check some of those shingles, they look like they might be loose”—but Lyle is leery of accepting help lest the person helping him think the reason he needs help is that he’s stupid.
Lyle thought he better climb up and have a look. He doesn’t have a long enough ladder, and he didn’t want to borrow Carl’s and involve Carl, so Lyle thought he’d go to the attic and look at it from underneath. He looked for his flashlight. He had an idea he’d left it in the corner of the basement when he looked at the water pump. It was dark in there, so he couldn’t see if the flashlight was there or not, and he didn’t want to go in there, because he could hear water running and the pump is electrical. So he went to put in a fuse so the light would work and he could look for the flashlight. He found a couple dozen old fuses on the fusebox, waiting to be healed, and none worked, so he unscrewed one from another socket and put it in and there was screeching and screaming behind him. He turned and saw a skillsaw making sparks on the concrete floor coming straight for him, and he grabbed for the fuse and touched something that made his whole body feel for one moment like a piece of history, pulled his hand back, and the saw came to the end of its cord and yanked it and stopped. It was all quiet except for the water-pump moan—the same sound he’d gone to check on when he left the flashlight back in there. But now it was louder. And it smelled of something burning.
Five disasters in five minutes, including attempts on his life by a shingle and a skillsaw, and all on a summer afternoon. Now comes fall, and after that life starts to get serious. He went to start the lawnmower again and had an idea: why not dig up this sod and put it on the roof? He’d seen that in the National Geographic, from Iceland or somewhere, some cold country. If the roof could grow moss, why not grass? People would laugh at him, but then they laugh at him now—so what’s the difference? The difference is that, in a couple years, they’d see what a brilliant idea it is.
He would have to give this some careful thought.
He couldn’t think while mowing, so he sat down to think in his lawn chair, and soon he was dreaming: something about green grass but not on a roof.
* * *
One man who’s noticed Lyle’s roof is Clarence Bunsen, who takes long early-morning walks for his heart. At 6:00 A.M., in the early light, this little town is so shining and perfect, so fresh, so still, if you took eleventh-grade English from Miss Heinemann you would think of Wordsworth:
There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Appareled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;—
Turn wheresoe’er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.
Clarence walks up Taft Street to where it becomes the road to the dump, and on mornings when he feels worse he walks farther.
This summer Bunsen Motors isn’t taking in enough money to keep four people on the payroll: Clarence and Clint Bunsen, and Stanley and Earl, plus Marlys Diener doing part-time bookkeeping. They’re not selling the Fords they used to. People are driving forty and fifty miles to buy a car at a big dealer, they don’t have the loyalty to the home town that they used to have, and they’re not even ashamed to display the foreign dealer’s nameplate on the trunk: there it is, big as sin, Ogilvie Toyota, Saint Cloud. Who is Ogilvie? Does he go to the Lutheran church? Does he go to any church? They don’t know him. For all they know, he could be in Las Vegas, running around with showgirls and eating spoonfuls of cocaine; meanwhile, Clarence, their neighbor and friend, who if they were suddenly in deep water he’d be there to help, is in some fairly deep water of his own. He’s got to borrow seven thousand dollars to get through September. Wednesday he saw parked in front of the Chatterbox a brand-new red Ford Bronco 2 that Harold Diener, husband of Marlys, had bought in Minneapolis. Clarence was sick. It broke his heart. But he tried not to show it. He admired the car. “That’s nice, Harold,” he said. “That’s real good. Four-wheel drive. That’ll be handy when winter comes. You sure know your cars, Harold. I oughta hire you as a salesman.”
The rainbow comes and goes,
And lovely is the rose;
The moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare;
Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair;
The sunshine is a glorious birth;
But yet I know, where’er I go,
That there hath passed away a glory from the earth.
You live in a small town, you learn about people. You learn that certain people, if they say they’ll be there to teach school on Tuesday, they’ll be there, and some people won’t, and if you call them up Tuesday evening, they’ll say, “Oh, you meant this Tuesday.” It’s always the same ones who are prompt and faithful and dependable, and if they’re ten minutes late you should call the police, and always the same others who say, “Are you sure today is Tuesday? But yesterday was— Oh yeah, it was Monday, wasn’t it? Well…do you still need me?”
School started on Tuesday and suddenly it became awful quiet. All the air went out of the tire, the kids disappeared with their goofy ideas and dumb jokes and there was nothing left downtown but business, and not much of that. There was hardly a car on Main Street, you would’ve had to wait around to get in a traffic accident. At Krebsbach Chev, Florian was in a dark mood. Clarence came up and poured himself a cup of coffee, and Florian got ready to say, “Whatcha put cream in coffee for? Ruins it. I thought only women did that.” But Clarence took his black, leaned against the parts counter, and said, “Jeez, what a week. Only Tuesday and it feels like Friday. I’ll bet I don’t sell one car.”
That afternoon, at a quarter of four, Florian stepped out of the Chatterbox Cafe and turned to his left to go up to the garage. As he turned, he heard wheels behind him. He looked back and there was the Best boy coming on fast on his ten-speed. Florian ducked to his left, the Best boy went to his right, and they crashed. Florian fell over and the boy landed a little ways away. Florian sat up, making sure he was not killed, and asked, “Are you all right?”
The boy waited for Florian to yell at him and, when Florian didn’t, went home to be yelled at by his folks for riding on the sidewalk and knocking down an old man, but they didn’t either, and at school on Wednesday he was still waiting to be yelled at. He thought that perhaps Florian would be the speaker at assembly and talk about bike safety. He was sure Florian would write a letter to the editor—“I was walking along the sidewalk one day last week when one of our grade-school boys attempted to kill me. Isn’t it time we stop coddling these vicious children and start putting some of them behind bars as an example to the others?”
The reason he didn’t get yelled at is, ever since Florian forgot Myrtle at the truckstop on their way to the Cities, he’s expected something to happen to him, and being knocked down by a bike was much easier than other things he imagined.
It’s a primitive sense of justice: you do bad, and your Creator smacks you one—but there it is. One day you’re daydreaming at the wheel, you smash into someone’s rear end. She gets out of her car, looks at the busted taillight, and smiles. She’s relieved; she says, “Well, it could’ve been a lot worse.” You’ve just run into a guilty person. She did something in the past twenty-four hours that made her think the universe would land on her with both feet. She’d be covered with boils, wrapped in burlap, sitting in the ashes, flies on her, and lightning coming closer and closer, but all it is is a taillight. Not bad. She smiles and drives away. Now you start to feel guilty. Days later, the Best boy is still hearing footsteps, waiting for the big hand to grab him and spin him around and the voice to say, “Why you—”
Sometimes it’s hard to get into trouble in this little town. There was an old guy years ago got so depressed he decided to kill himself, and he got a flask of whiskey and went down to the lake to throw himself in and drown. But he couldn’t cut a hole in the ice. It had been a cold winter. He had some whiskey and he banged on the ice with his ax but couldn’t cut a hole. He had more whiskey, and then he opened up a hole big enough to stick his hand in, and he drank the rest of the whiskey and took off all his clothes except his boots. He hiked off naked into the dim winter night and felt sleepy and then heard voices—women, he thought—and was scared he’d be seen and ran back and got his clothes on. He went home, slept, and woke up with a hangover worse than death and was resurrected from the hangover and decided to live. That’s a true story from long ago. I believe it’s true, except about the boots, but he died in 1978, so it’s too late to check.
It rained more this week, a heavy rain that fell straight down, and eventually Lyle found his flashlight and looked up in the attic under the roof, which has been leaking for a long time into the plastic buckets in his daughters’ bedroom, and he was astounded how awful it looked. Not just wet but slimy, slippery, like a place where mutant creatures come from, shiny green things with empty eyes reaching out for us. For two years Carl has told him he ought to fix his roof, which made Lyle furious but it also made Lyle nervous because Carl knows about these things. Lyle teaches science at the high school; he knows about the stratosphere, the ecosphere, the atmosphere, genetics, the cosmos, but not about roofs.
He climbed down from the attic, and he went downstairs to the furnace room and poured himself a stiff drink. No ice cubes or soda down there, just the bottle in the workbench. He wondered what to do. He didn’t want to ask Carl for help, he was tired of him helping, of coming home from school and finding his brother-in-law had got his sink apart—Lyle’s sink. He had another drink. Poor kids, living in a house that might fall down on their heads because their dad doesn’t know what to do.
He felt like going to bed but he went up to the bedroom and called someone. He took the phone to the end of the cord, took it into the closet, sat down on a pile of shoes, and tried to disguise his voice to make it sound sober.
“Father? Is this Father Conway? This is Lyle. You don’t know me but I live up here in Lake Wobegon, and I hate to bother you with something like this but I can’t talk to my priest about it, it’s something I’ve been embarrassed about for a long time— Yes? Well, I appreciate your saying that. I do. I’ll try. It’s just hard to find the words to say what I’ve been going through over this, but, anyway, it’s about my roof.
“No, I said ‘roof.’ It’s my roof. The roof on my house.”
There’s a story about Lyle’s house, as there is about most houses in town. That’s why old people walk so slow, because they’re remembering all the stories. I’m not that old but I know a lot because I used to hang out with old people back when there used to be real old people. Now everyone is sort of my age or younger, and most people don’t know much more than I do. It’s disappointing to become a leading authority in the field when you still have so much you want to learn. But I do know that Lyle’s house was built in 1889 by a carpenter named Swanson who started a milling business to make door and window frames.
He was tall and sported a fine black mustache and had three daughters who worshipped the ground he walked on, and after he died, they lived in the house, adoring his memory. When they got old, about thirty years ago, they couldn’t bear the thought of anybody else ever living in their father’s fine house. An ordinary two-story wood frame house to everyone else, but to them it was their father’s realm, the embodiment of his life and wisdom and goodness, and they wrote in their will that, after the last of them deceased, the house would be torn down.
Then they died: one, two, three, close together. Each death seemed to drain the life from the survivors, and the family collapsed, and a few weeks later, the heir to their estate, a nephew, the son of their ne’er-do-well brother, young Victor rode into town, his long black hair combed high on his head, and a lawyer at his side, to claim what was rightfully his. The entire town came to despise both of them within twenty-four hours. The town couldn’t decide which one they despised more. People had never agreed on anything so unanimously and heartily as that young Victor was despicable, heartless, and deserved to be cheated, and they set out to deprive him of that house.
The sisters’ will provided that, if the house wasn’t torn down within sixty days, then he wouldn’t inherit the rest of the estate, about forty thousand dollars in cash in the First Ingqvist State Bank. The town didn’t want to see the house torn down. It was a nice house, and if Victor didn’t tear it down, the forty thousand dollars went to the library. Victor said it was his house and he started to rip the roof off. The town council made him stop while they studied the matter, looking through the municipal ordinances hoping that their forefathers in their wisdom might have passed something usable that they could hammer him with, and found an odd little law, passed in 1889, that said that the demolition of a building must be completed within fourteen days. Victor had torn some roof off about five days before, and it was a week until the next council meeting. That left two days to tear it down in, and one of those days was a Sunday, so all he had was one day.
He did his best. He arrived early and his lawyer with him, with crowbars and big hammers, but his grandfather had built the house better than he knew, and by noon Victor could see he wasn’t going to make it. He’d made a lot of dents in it, busted windows, beat the dust out of it, pried off some boards, but he wasn’t going to be able to level it by nightfall, and so he would lose forty thousand dollars. He started to yell and run around like a madman, which meant he got even less done. His lawyer saw that he wouldn’t get paid and turned quiet and gloomy, and Victor went to pieces. He yelled out the window: “I’ll give you two thousand dollars to help me tear my house down!”
