Leaving home, p.24
Leaving Home, page 24
Arlene picked up her sister Irene and they drove up to the cemetery and sat in the car. June 10 is the anniversary of their mother’s death. Lutherans don’t ordinarily observe such days but the girls do because it would have pleased their mother, Mrs. Holm, so much. She was impossible to please when she was alive, but now that she is gone and her spirit recedes into the shadows, the girls are able to satisfy her with this annual trek to sit under the tree that shades her—she always burned easily, Mother did, and always needed shade. The tree’s roots reach down where Mother lies, so in a sense Mother is shading herself, like a lady with a parasol. They sat in the car in the rain for fifteen minutes, thinking their own thoughts, and Arlene said, “Seventeen years. Do you know that I still sometimes pick up a phone to call somebody and forget and dial Mother’s old number? A couple named Ferguson has it. After years of me saying, Oh I’m sorry, I have the wrong number, we finally introduced ourselves. And do you know, she sounds a lot like Mother.”
The rain patted on the roof and ran down the windshield. Irene held a bunch of yellow and blue irises. “Do you know that I still hear her sometimes—I’m washing dishes or ironing, something simple, and I hear her say, Ob Irene you’re doing that all wrong, here let me, and my hands tighten on the dishcloth, I grab the iron. The simplest things. Putting toast in the toaster. Boiling an egg. Oh Irene, that’s not bow to do that, here I’ll show you. I still hear it. Never when I’m trying to do needlepoint, or make a soufflé”—always when I’m pulling a weed, hanging a picture. Oh that’s not straight, Irene, here. What’s the matter with you? Oh you don’t put on a pillowcase like that.” She began to sniffle. “Oh this is so crazy. I don’t know why it has to be like this.” She cried and Arlene cried and they held hands, the rain streaming down the glass. And then Irene bounded out of the car and ran up on the grass and heaved the bouquet as far as she could toward their mother’s grave. It hit the tree and fell apart in a shower of wet irises and dropped on the grass.
The noon siren went off and a lot of damp happy people trooped in to lunch, including Florian Krebsbach and his son Carl. Carl couldn’t work at the Bausers’ because of the rain so he went to his dad’s garage, Krebsbach’s Chev, and helped out with the annual parts inventory. His brother-in-law Lyle was there too. Carl didn’t want to work at Bausers’ anyway, it was a bad job, taking off their porch and modernizing the house with aluminum siding. The porch sags, so Bob wants it out. Carl ripped out the floor Tuesday, painfully, feeling like a vandal (when a car drove by, he stopped), leaving the roof for Wednesday in case Bob got converted overnight. Inventory was fun. Counting bearings, bushings, grommets and gizmos and thingamabobs, calling out the count for Florian to write down. 121 lugnuts! Three repeaters! A box of shanksnaps! Two extensogrips, one left, one right! One Folger’s drip grind coffee can full of nuts and bolts, some iron, some brass! Like playing Captain May I. Lyle and Ronnie and Ernie and Carl roamed the storeroom, the library of parts, and Dad sat at his old desk, the pigeonholes stuffed full of slips of paper to remind him of things he has to do that he has managed to put off until it was no longer necessary. A trophy shelf of defeated obligations, each hole stuffed with pigeons that Florian the Great Postponer has successfully escaped. The inventory shows once again that Krebsbach’s is in chaos. “I donno, I can’t figure this out,” Florian says, “this don’t make sense. Look at this, boys.” And the boys look: carburetor parts missing, floormats, doorknobs, wiper blades—all the numbers are there but nothing adds up against last year’s inventory. He says, “I donno. It’s too much for me. Pop always said it was Frank who had the head for business and Pop was right.” Florian is happy. He rips the inventory sheet off the pad and carefully folds it down the middle lengthwise and into thirds, and finds room in the last pigeonhole to stuff it in. He looks up at them and shakes his head. “One of these days I am going to come in on a Saturday morning and get this desk straightened out. Now let’s go have some dinner.”
Rain fell all morning and everyone was in a festive mood, the Chatterbox was packed for dinner. A bunch of Norwegian bachelor farmers piled into the back booth and had mushroom soup and liverwurst sandwiches. “Looks like this may keep up all day,” one said. “Yeah, that’s what they’re sayin.” If a drought were to kill off his crops, a bachelor farmer might be forced to contemplate marriage, the last refuge for men unable to fend for themselves, just as poor Mr. Hauge did in the drought of ’59. He married a Saint Cloud woman and died six months later and not from excitement. To them, rain means that life continues, and they cleared their throats like happy lions, Braagbbbbb.
Mayor Clint Bunsen sat with Rollie and Louise and Marlys Diener and Mr. Berge and By Tollefson, a tight fit. Clint had thought he was going to have to order a ban on watering lawns, it was so dry and the level in the water tower was getting low, or so he thought. Its depth gauge broke back in 1968 when the water level got so low that the float arm snapped, and now Clint tests the level by getting a strong boy to throw a baseball way up there and hit it, the tone telling him how full it is, but this spring he couldn’t find a boy with a good enough arm to reach the tank, so Clint himself had to climb up the ladder—Bud gets nosebleeds past twenty feet and has to come down and stuff cotton in his nose—and he climbed high above the roofs and trees and banged on the tank with a hammer. It rang like a deep bell tolling for the dead, wonnnngggg. Wonnnnnggg. Now with the rain watering them, the tank is filling up, and soon it’ll sound like wedding bells.
Byron was happy, and like a true Norseman he showed it by complaining loudly. “No mushrooms in this soup,” he groaned. “It’s getting to be like everything else. You got decaffeinated coffee, soda pop with no sugar, pretty soon we’ll have chemical sweet corn. Taste fresh yearround, and it’ll be flat and round like a cracker. No salt, no sugar, no fat. You wait and see. It’s coming. I’m glad I won’t be here to see it but you’ll see—I was reading where by the year 2000 they’ll be cultivating without tractors, using low-frequency sound waves, and they’ll breed a dairy cow with no legs, a rectangular body you can stack a thousand or so in a warehouse the size of the school. It’ll give fifty, eighty, a hundred gallons a day on a bushel of grass clippings and a couple Demerol. This story said that when agriculture is fully capitalized for peak efficiency, all of rural Minnesota can be run by three hundred people, seventy-five to raise the crops and the rest to write the reports. I believe it. I believe it.”
Mr. Berge didn’t hear him, he was looking at Marlys. He took a spoonful of corn chowder and fell in love with her, her lovely bare shoulders and neck, her throat, the lovely spot where the collarbones join together, and he took a bite of liverwurst and tears of love came to his eyes, a brief powerful romance until it ended. “Yeah,” Rollie was saying, “we put in the last of the sweet corn yesterday. Two rows. Should take us through the middle of September.”
I look at them as I eat my cheese sandwich and don’t hear them anymore, they sit like a picture. Specks of rain on the big front window, a cool breeze through the screen door, raindrops in the puddles along the curb, rain out on the lake, which is so misty you can’t see the other shore, it’s like an ocean. Just as I imagined when I was little and we floated sticks offshore and bombed them with rocks. Now Lake Wobegon looks even more like an ocean, and through that mist I can sail to anywhere, including where I’m going, Copenhagen.
This is my last view of them for a while. If you see them before I do, say hello from me and give them my love. For now I’ll remember them as they are this moment, on a Wednesday in June, sitting with each other and listening to a summer rain that may yet save the crops. And the river may rise so that you and I can push our lovely rafts from shore and be lifted up over the rocks and at last see what is down there around the big bend where the cottonwood trees on shore are slowly falling, bowing to the river, the drops glistening on the dark green leaves.
Read Keillor’s latest works from Viking and Penguin
Love Me
The enterprising Larry Wyler is frustrated with life in St. Paul and his marriage to an earnest Democrat out to save the world. His bestselling novel, Spacious Skies, earns him a ticket to Manhattan, an apartment with a fabulous terrace and an office at The New Yorker magazine among the writers he admires and the legendary editor William Shawn. But that doesn’t save Wyler from writer’s block after his follow-up novel, Amber Waves of Grain, bombs badly (“Why did I write so much about soybeans in the first chapter?” he wonders). An invitation to write a newspaper advice column, “Ask Mr. Blue,” provides a much needed distraction. It’s a low rung on the literary ladder, but writing commonsense advice to the lonely and the frustrated initiates Larry’s own long recovery. He doles out wisdom to Exasperated, whose wife gives up her judgeship for figure skating; Nice Lady, who is abusive to the obese; and Secular Humanist, who suddenly notices his girlfriend is Amish. Slowly, painfully, Wyler finds a measure of clarity for his own life, and then he sets out to win back his wife’s affections.
Good Poems
An anthology of poems selected and arranged with marvelous style. Good Poems includes poems about lovers, children, failure, snow, death and transcendence, and the color yellow.
“The unerring ear that has earned Keillor admiration on public radio translates perfectly onto the page.”
—The Houston Chronicle
Explore Lake Wobegon with these titles from Penguin
Lake Wobegon Summer, 1956
Lake Wobegon Summer, 1956 depicts the most harrowing time of life in Lake Wobegon—adolescence. With his trademark gift for treading “a line delicate as a cobweb between satire and sentiment” (The Cleveland Plain Dealer), Garrison Keillor brilliantly captures postwar America and delivers an unforgettable comedy about a writer coming of age in the rural midwest.
In Search of Lake Wobegon
In the twenty-five years since Garrison Keillor first brought it to life, the rural Minnesota town of Lake Wobegon has become a national treasure. In this lavishly produced photography book, word and image combine to illuminate the real Minnesota town’s life, landscapes, and people who inspired its creation.
Lake Wobegon Days
A portrait of small-town American life emerges in a novel of humor, sadness and tenderness, songs and poems.
“Lake Wobegon Days is about the way our beliefs, desires and fears tail off into abstraction—and get renewed from time to time…this book, unfolding Mr. Keillor’s full design, is a genuine work of American history.”
—The New York Times
Wobegon Boy
John Tollefson, the son of Byron and Mary of Lake Wobegon, leaves Minnesota for upstate New York, to manage a public radio station at a college for academically challenged children of financially gifted parents. He makes a pleasant bachelor life for himself in New York. Yet, he feels rootless, restless, joined in no struggle, with nothing at stake. Can a romance with a historian named Alida Freeman give his life the nobility and grace it lacks?
“A masterful portrait of the sort of small-town world that many of us Americans believe we grew up in, or would have liked to.…A wonderfully readable tale.”
—The Washington Post Book World
Leaving Home
Revisit the beguiling comic world of Lake Wobegon. In this collection of Lake Wobegon monologues, Keillor tells readers more about some of the people from Lake Wobegon Days and introduces some new faces.
“Leaving Home is a book of exceptional charm…delightful…genuinely touching.”
—The Wall Street Journal
Garrison Keillor, Leaving Home
