Authors: Garrison Keillor
Pastor Tommerdahl again, with a few remarks. He spoke about the gallant men of the First Minnesota who held their position at Gettysburg against the rebel onslaught, our own men falling and dying in the tall grass that July afternoon and their comrades coming forward to repel the Confederate charge with bayonets, wrestling with the enemy in hand-to-hand combat—as his raspy voice went on and on, I let my mind drift away to my grandfather, born in 1860, three years before Gettysburg, in New Brunswick, his father’s family having gone there from England about the time of the American Revolution. His mother’s fled there about the same time from America. Her ancestors were loyal subjects of the King, who lived in Connecticut and Massachusetts and lost everything in the war except the clothes on their backs. School had taught us to regard the Loyalists as turncoats, like the Confederates, who fought on the side of Error, but I imagined them as farmers like my uncles, who had gone along minding their own business until one day someone like Miss Lewis had butted in and told them to shape up or else, and they refused.
The disobedience of my ancestors was a wonderful thought; I imagined myself back there with them. Taking up a rifle and fighting against America! Shooting at George Washington, the Father of Our Country! Shooting the white wig right off his head! A terrible wicked idea, it made me shiver to think it but I kept right on thinking. Standing in the row of condemned children, heads hanging, awaiting our humiliation—suddenly gunfire from the line of trees! Miss Lewis clutches her bosom and falls to the gravel, and enemy troops swarm
up the hill—but they aren’t enemies! They’re my relatives! They hoist me up to their shoulders. “You’re safe now,” they say.
And then it happened. I felt her bony finger on my shoulder. I took two steps forward. Faces grinned at me from the crowd. My brother smirked. The Knutes smiled, their rifles in hand. I looked down at the dirt and let fly with the psalm, my heart pounding in my ears, and when I got to “I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever,” I expected to fall down dead. I stepped back, watching the spot in the dirt where I would fall. Miss Lewis then led the crowd in “America,” a confident first verse followed by a second and third that were inaudible except for the sextet who had hymnals, and after a moment of silence, I heard the Oya holler, the slap of hands on rifle butts, the clinks of the bolts, and then the guns went off with a mighty blast so close that we felt the heat and the ladies’ sextet scattered in shrieks, and we heard the shots rip through leaves.
Some ripped through the leaves of the oak tree where Harold Olson sat on a lower branch with his bugle, waiting to sound Taps, picked for this honor on the basis of ability and citizenship. He jumped ten feet and ran down the hill and stopped and tried to play Taps from there, but after being shot at, his concentration was gone—it didn’t sound like Taps, it sounded like someone had picked up a bugle and was trying it out. He fooled with Taps for a while and quit. The Oya yelled, “Company dismissed!” Little boys dove in to grab the brass shell casings. My Aunt Flo put her arms around me. She said that the Twenty-third Psalm was the best part of the whole program and she was so proud of me she could hardly stand it. We walked around the cemetery, looking up our dead relatives.
For the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953, Miss Lewis brought a radio to school and we listened to it at our desks. The horse troops clopped by and battalions of drums, then a band of bagpipes, which we had never heard before, and so she drew a picture on the blackboard. We recognized it instantly as a penis and scrotum, and so did she when she heard the buzz and stepped back for a look, so she made the bag rounder and made the pipe stand up, which fascinated us even more, and finally she erased it and turned and said, her face glowing, “Small minds think small thoughts.” Soon another bagpipe band
marched by, and Jim whispered to me, “They’re playing their pants.” That made stuff come out my nose. “Leave the room right now,” she said. I went out in the hall and sat on the top stair and looked down the stairwell. Three flights to the basement. Above the stairs, a round window divided into four panes by a wooden cross, its crossbars flared out in the molded frame. The stairwell looked like the front of a church—Westminster Abbey, maybe, although through the window I could see roofs of stores on Main Street and the lake. That, I imagined, was the Atlantic Ocean.
Elizabeth II ascended the stairs slowly, in time to faraway music. She wore a gold crown encrusted with diamonds, a long white dress, a mink coat, golden slippers, and carried a jeweled scepter under her arm like a twirler’s baton. Behind her came ladies and a footman holding a radio on a cushion and an archbishop praying, and when she reached the landing below me, she looked up and gave me a dazzling smile. She climbed the stairs until she stood before me, I not daring to look up, staring at my black Keds. She said, “You of all my subjects have been truly faithful and good, and so I hereby do make you my knight forever and ever, and grant you your heart’s desire.” And she touched the top of my head with the scepter and was gone.
Processions often occurred to me when I was alone, or I walked in one if I happened to be walking at the time, to school or home from school or to the lake. Crowds clapped silently from the ditches, and great men looked down from reviewing stands on the housetops. Honor guards snapped to attention,
Hup-thunk-bam!
“Sir—” the captain said. “At ease, Captain,” said I. The band played “Minnesota, Hail To Thee.” I walked with a slight limp from my war wounds, carrying a softball bat—“You’re wounded, sir. Let me—” “I’m all right, Captain. Others have suffered far worse than I.” “Yes, sir.” My voice echoed in the vast stadium amid the silent throng: “I am-m-m-m deeply-ly-ly-ly hon-on-on-on-ored,” and indeed I was deeply and continually honored wherever I went, whenever I was alone.
Life in a small town offered so little real ceremony. Every morning we Boy Scouts raised Old Glory in front of school, a satisfying moment, the triangle unfolded, the eyelets clipped to the lanyard, salutes all around, and up she went, snapping in the wind, but so short—why not
a prayer, a speech, a few maneuvers, some rifle shots? We of the school safety patrol got to wear Sam Browne belts and carry red “Stop” flags on poles; at my post on the corner of Main and McKinley, I made little kids stand and wait until something big like a truck came along so I could stop it and march them across, but only little kids would wait; the bigger ones just laughed and ran across the street.
I was eleven. A bad age for a boy so starved for ceremony, because as I got good at it, other kids were losing interest. My older sister and her friends had gone in for weddings in the woods, dress-up affairs, and I’d be usher one day and ringbearer another, then once got promoted to minister, stood on a stump, held a candle, and said “Dearly beloved” and read from Corinthians, and was
good
, but then they got interested in bike-riding with boys, which didn’t include me.
Little kids weren’t much fun because I had to tell them everything to do, which is all right if you’re playing Army but not if you are King Vincent I of Altrusia ascending the throne in a royal-blue chenille robe—then the Altrusians are supposed to pay homage and lay precious gifts at your feet and make good bows and go down on bended knee and back away from the throne bowing, and it ruins the occasion if King Vincent has to tell them
how
to pay homage, they are supposed to just do it. I was extremely good at these events and couldn’t see why other kids weren’t. You’d go along in the ceremony—this time it’s Crazy Horse and the Sioux Chieftains in a council of war, asking the Great Spirit to bless them as they go after the cowboys—and everyone is doing a fairly good job of talking Indian and tossing the sacred dirt to the four winds and passing the war pipe, then one kid says, “Let’s do something else. Let’s go swimming,” and it ruins it. Or one of them turns and shoots you. “What are you
doing?
You can’t shoot people here!” I yelled. “You’re dead,” he said. Two of the Tollefsons and Karen Skoglund and I played office on the Skoglunds’ back porch; they had two desks, two telephones, and good paper from Skoglund’s dimestore, receipts and bills and carbons, but they scribbled any old thing and expected you to believe it, then didn’t bother to add up the numbers right. Karen was president, of course, which was fine, but when she got tired of office work and went in to watch television, she told us we had to stay. “You’ve got to get out those shipments,” she said. I quit.
When I was twelve, the summer of 1954, Jim and his brother Sheldon and I held Senate hearings for a week in their basement where they had a Ping-Pong table. It was Jim’s idea—he had seen this on television and knew how it went—but I was a better Senator McCarthy than him, so he became a detective who helped the committee and Sheldon, of course, was a Communist. He was good at it—we had him dead to rights, piles of proof that he spied and gave secrets to the Russians, most of the proof
in writing!
and he sat there across the table with a gooseneck lamp aimed at him and lied his head off. Then he was Senator McCarthy and I was a Communist, a General John LaClaire who committed treason from the very heart of the Pentagon, a desperate criminal and atheist who sneered at the Committee and then one day during hard questioning about his chummy correspondence with Stalin—the Committee had birthday cards in its possession—he leaped up and pulled a .45 automatic and was shot down dead by Senator McCarthy and sprawled across the table, his soul gone to hell. That day, the Committee adjourned, its job done, and we spent part of August as detectives on the trail of three classmates whom we suspected of smoking cigarettes in the woods. We found a few butts near the old fort on Adams Hill and kept up surveillance for a day or two, then laid a trap. We left fresh cigarettes on a tree stump, cigarettes we had put cat hairs into, and observed our suspects for signs of nausea. We caught one, Paul, and made him confess. It was a good summer.
Funerals, however, were my favorite. Funerals expressed my deepest feelings at the time; grief, of course, and the sadness of life, but also bravery and great dignity—funerals were dignified because we had a real corpse—our black spaniel, Cappy, and a series of cats, and a parakeet named Pete. Other people held funerals for paper dolls such as Hedy Lamarr, but we thought that was childish. We had the real goods.
Our funerals were based on the funeral of Aunt May, who died an old, old lady, of cancer, and whose funeral was the first our parents let us attend. I was seven. My mother didn’t think I should go because it might be “too much” for me, and the words “too much” rang out in my ear:
too much?
I had had far too little, I thought that too much would be just about enough. She and Dad discussed it quietly on the
front porch one Sunday afternoon while I wiped dishes. I liked to walk around while I wiped and, taking a pass by the open door, heard my name spoken in Dad’s low voice and stopped and knelt by the window. He was saying I had reached the age of accountability and the funeral might turn my mind toward eternal things. “Well,” she said, “I don’t know,” and I knew I was going to get to go.
My mind had been on eternal things for a while, at least on death, the door to eternity. I knew that dead people were buried in boxes in the ground, and I often wondered what they did there, in the dark with no food, no radio, no books. Grownups did have, I knew, an ability to sit still for a long time, but death seemed like quite a feat even for them, even knowing that the Lord would come and get them and they would fly up to heaven.
Aunt May lay in Lundberg’s Funeral Home, which was also the Lundbergs’ home. They lived on the second floor and in back. Mary Ellen Lundberg was eleven and was in my sister’s class. She and her sister Leila sang at funerals, including Aunt May’s, their blond hair in curls and their white dresses ironed and black shoes shined, “Asleep in Jesus, blessed sleep” and “Called From Above.” Mary Ellen said that dead bodies are cold and hard, the blood is all drained out of them, and sometimes they sit up in the coffin. But Aunt May didn’t look like she was going anywhere. My dad held me up to look at her. “It’s like being asleep,” he whispered, but to me she looked no more asleep than a piece of lumber. She looked dead as a doornail.
We sat in back of the long room filled with black folding chairs, so still you could hear the old ladies fanning themselves. Dry coughs and solemn whispers, and faint odor of flowers and mothballs. Men in their blue Sunday suits. They walked softly, hardly letting their feet touch the floor. When Mr. Lundberg shut the lid on Aunt May, he did it as if she was made of spun glass and might shatter. Mrs. Lundberg played the organ softly, pumping the pedals, the bellows wheezing, and then Mary Ellen and Leila (Leila who punched me in the stomach once) sang in tiny voices, “Abide with me, fast falls the eventide.” And Uncle Al got up to read about the corruptible putting on incorruption in a voice I never heard before, not like his voice at all but thin, like the voice of a ghost.
I imagined my own self dead and lying in a coffin, this solemn
crowd gathered here in honor of me, and me a little ghost sitting by my big dad, enjoying the elaborate delicacy and gentleness of my funeral. Standing outside waiting to ride up to the cemetery and then at the cemetery and later at Flo’s house, people who never said boo to me before did now and put a hand on my head, petted me like a cat. May’s brother Roy, an old man who once yelled at me for coming in his yard to get a baseball, put his old hand on my head as he talked to Dad, and scratched my hair and kneaded my neck muscles. “You got a good boy here,” he said. Ordinarily, men like Roy weren’t sweet like that, but sweetness was all over that funeral, even Leila was sweet. She said, “You should come and play in our yard sometime, we got a swing,” evidently thinking I was all broken up over Aunt May, but I wasn’t, I was enjoying every minute of it.
Our funerals did not quite achieve the Aunt May standard, hard as we tried. For one thing, Mother made us do it right away when the dead body was found, no time to plan things properly, we had to get busy and dig a hole. For another, our funerals attracted a few who laughed out loud during the service, and when we told them to beat it, they said, “It’s just a dumb old cat!” We could’ve killed them. Especially the Krebsbachs, who sang off-key on purpose and when we put the box in the hole, they sang under their breaths, “The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, the worms play pinochle on your snout.” But we did our best.