Lake Wobegon Days (23 page)

One night, she and I snuck over to the Tollefsons’ after their lights went out and left a half-bushel of tomatoes on their back step.

On this morning in August when I am thirteen, it’s hot by ten o’clock. I poked along over the Post Toasties as long as I could, then my mother sent me out to pick tomatoes. Rudy and Phyllis were already out there. I picked one and threw it at a crab apple tree. It made a good
splat.
The tree was full of little crab apples we’d have to deal with eventually, and a few of them fell. My brother and sister stood up and looked: what did you
do?
we’re gonna tell.

I picked the biggest tomato I saw and took out a few more crab apples. Then I threw a tomato at my brother. He whipped one back at me. We ducked down by the vines, heaving tomatoes at each other. My sister, who was a good person, said, “You’re going to get it.” She bent over and kept on picking.

What a target! She was seventeen, a girl with big hips, and bending over, she looked like the side of a barn.

I picked up a tomato so big it sat on the ground. It looked like it had sat there for a week. The underside was brown. Small white worms lived in it. It was very juicy. I had to handle it carefully to keep from spilling it on myself. I stood up and took aim, and went into the wind-up, when my mother at the kitchen window called my name in a sharp voice. I had to decide quickly. I decided.

A rotten Big Boy hitting the target is a memorable sound. Like a fat man doing a bellyflop, and followed by a whoop and a yell from the tomatoee. She came after me faster than I knew she could run, and I took off for the house, but she grabbed my shirt and was about to brain me when Mother yelled “Phyllis!” and my sister, who was a
good person, obeyed and let go and burst into tears. I guess she knew that the pleasure of obedience is pretty thin compared to the pleasure of hearing a rotten tomato hit someone in the rear end.
^*

“Look at what he did!” she said, but Mother just said that that was enough of
that
and to get back to work. That was fine with me. Later Phyllis caught me coming out of the bathroom and pinched me. In my baby picture, still displayed on the piano, she held me on her lap and looked down at me with pure devotion. I couldn’t help telling her how much her attitude had changed. I told her not to be so unhappy. “Life is what you make it,” I said. “You should get out and enjoy yourself more.” As I said it, I jumped back in the bathroom and locked the door. She pounded on it, then pretended to go downstairs, but I could tell fake footsteps and I stayed put. “I can hear you breathing,” I said. I stayed put for all of one
Reader’s Digest
and part of another. A door slammed downstairs. My mother called my name. I yelled for help. She came upstairs. “She’s hiding. She’s after me,” I said. “Don’t be silly,” Mother said, “there’s nobody here but me.”

The all-time biggest tomato ever raised in town was Irene Bunsen’s in 1978, the year the Whippets beat Albany when Wayne Tommerdahl whacked the ole tomato into the eighth row of soybeans with the bases loaded in the ninth. One day in early July, Irene saw that her tomato had championship potential, which in a town full of fierce competitors who’ve seen some biggies was a tomato to get excited about, particularly for Irene, who was known for her black thumb because she had bad luck with marigolds. Everyone else’s would come up like a drill team and Irene’s got sick and drooped, and some women made cutting remarks such as, “Gee, you’re the first person I ever knew who had trouble with marigolds. Mine grow like weeds.”

The contender tomato was situated high on the plant, which she had staked up, so she was worried it might lose its grip. She pounded in two more stakes and made a little hammock out of mosquito netting for the tomato to lie in. It weighed close to twenty ounces. Her sister Arlene grew a two-pounder once, but Clarence ate it before the jury arrived, so it didn’t count. The record was twenty-four.

Irene nursed it up to twenty-two. She was so proud of it, you’d’ve thought she made it in her basement. You’d’ve thought she invented tomatoes. She tore the other tomatoes off the plant on the theory they were taking nourishment away from the champ. She rigged a hanky to protect it from sunburn and one night she woke up in a storm and ran out to make sure it wouldn’t blow down. Clint woke up when she left and looked out the window. He saw her in the flashes of lightning, kneeling by the tomato plant, holding onto the stakes.

As it closed in on the record, she checked it twice a day for bugs and whatnot, and it was during a routine check that she bumped the
hammock. The champ took a dive, hit the deck, and split wide open. Irene ran in the house and called her sister who ran right over. Irene was bawling so hard she couldn’t see, so Arlene went out and scooped up the remains and went to work. She stuffed its insides back in, patched it with masking tape, and took a basting syringe and replenished its bodily liquids. She put it in a plastic bag, and they took it in to Ralph for the weigh-in.

“It looks like it blew up,” he said.

Arlene said, “Well, that’s between you and me. It had a little accident, but it’s still a tomato. Weigh it.”

Twenty-five ounces. If you added three for all it went through, it’d be twenty-eight, but twenty-five was good enough for the record.

The next year, there were no remarks about Irene and her fatal effect on plants. Nobody looked at her yard and said, “Look at that. Her marigolds don’t even bloom.” Irene didn’t plant marigolds. She put in tulip bulbs, bought from a nursery in North Dakota, a special breed that can take any punishment and stay on their feet, a cross between the Hardy Mojave and the famous Yukon Yellow, the tulip of the tundra. Her tomatoes didn’t do so well the next year, but as Clint said, once you’ve produced the all-time champion, you have nothing more to prove. You’re No. 1. You can sit back and let the others try to beat your mark.

Buster’s hair grew back. My sister forgot about the tomato. She went with Wally Pilcher for a few months, they drove around in his Ford, she gave him a wallet-sized photo of herself looking up in a dreamy way, it rode around on Wally’s big butt. I didn’t like him because he had one long eyebrow and he called me Sport. I put a potato in his tailpipe. One day mother got a block of ice and turned the electric fan on it and we sat in the cool breeze, drinking iced tea, like royalty.

“It’s so hot I can hardly get my breath,” she said.

“I don’t think it’s healthy to get so hot,” I said. “I’ll bet we could find a used air conditioner in St. Cloud. You see ads in the paper all the time.”

“You stopped breathing once when you were five weeks old. Did I ever tell you that?”

No, she certainly hadn’t.

“I was about to take a bath and then I thought I’d better check the crib, so I went in and you weren’t moving at all. I thought you were dead. I snatched you up and tore out of the house to the Jensens and pounded on the door, and right then you let out a cry. Anyway, we took you to the doctor.

“What did the doctor say?”

“He wasn’t sure. He didn’t think it was a seizure. I guess it was just one of those things that happens sometimes.” Then she got up to make a salad for supper.

That’s how Mother told stories. Never enough detail, and she always left you hanging at the end. If she had gone ahead and run the bath water, I’d be dead right now. And it was “just one of those things that happens sometimes”? I felt a little weak myself. I had about gotten over the fear that I’d stop breathing during the night, all those years I used to remind myself to breathe, and now this. So it
wasn’t
dumb to think that your breath could stop at any time. It could happen right now, sitting on a white kitchen chair in a cool breeze and drinking iced tea. Fall over dead on the linoleum. Thirteen years old, dead.

Three years before, the Heglunds brought their boy home from the doctor with six months to live. He and I had been friends once, then he threw a rock at me and we drifted apart, and soon after he came down sick with the flu. Or so they thought until the doctor had a look and heard a ratchety sound in his heart. There was nothing to be done about it. They put his bed against the upstairs window so he could look out, and one day our class got out of school to go stand in the street and wave at him. It was August but the Heglunds got him a Christmas tree, and all his relatives sent presents, including a movie projector. One day he got a letter from the governor, which his sister brought to school: we all got to hold it. Nobody talked about him, it was too sad, and gradually we forgot about him. When he came back to school in December, nobody made a fuss over him. His death had pretty well worn out our interest in him, and we had nothing left for his resurrection. Mrs. Heglund told my mother that she got sick of him lying in bed, which was a mess, and one day she hauled him out and sent him to school, and the exposure to cold air improved him, and soon he was running around and being his usual dumb self.

Exposure to heat was killing me; August 12, 101°: why? Dallas,
98°. Miami, 96°. You don’t have to be Einstein to see the unfairness of it. What happened to the forces of nature that socked us with −30° six months ago, were they on vacation? By rights, we should be cool and comfortable, being so far north, but instead we woke up and at eight o’clock the last of the cool was burning off, the State Farm thermometer out the window over the sink was slowly percolating to the top. Sitting eating soggy Cheerios on the morning of a hot one, a day that promised nothing but a lawn to mow and then a blank afternoon reading back issues of the
Geographic
, I knew that summer was an experiment that didn’t work. It looked good in May as things warmed up and Miss Lewis’s classroom turned rank and sour, and for a few weeks of June a person could fill his time with projects, but by August summer was dragging on the ground and only a good thunderstorm could bring it to life. Standing in the dormer window as black and purple clouds boiled up in the west, I pretended I was the captain of the house, sailing straight into it, and when the lightning came closer, blazing bolts ripped the sky and the bomb went off at the same instant and Mother yelled at everyone to go to the basement, I stayed on deck and secretly wished for a tornado.

Father Emil’s vacation is in August; his fifteenth annual bus tour of Civil War battlefields, he is now the senior member of his bus. They added Nashville this year, otherwise it was the same. “You keep discovering new things every year, though,” he says, and he finds to his surprise he is becoming more sympathetic to the Confederacy, partly the work of sweet-talking waitresses who say, “Hah yew doin’? C’d ah git yew s’m pah? Mo’ cawfee, honey?” The tour spent a night in a town east of Knoxville, and he walked to a tavern across the highway from a revival tent and sat in the dark, where a man told him a long story about a man who kept three wives for twenty years and none of them knew about the others. The man in the dark was a son of the second wife. He said, “Daddy was too much for one woman. I guess he was the best-loved man who ever was. We just all wrapped ourselves around him. When he finally got sick, he just went off and shot hisself. He didn’t do it at home, though, I’ll say that for him. He didn’t want to make his family have to clean up after him.” When Father left, it was two hours later, and across the highway they were singing at
the tops of their voices about the love of Jesus. The South was wrong, but nothing is simple. Lee coming home to commit treason for friends he didn’t agree with: was that right? Maybe, Father thought when he was on vacation. He walked from monument to monument, green pasture once heaped with the dead; he wondered about his own troops: would they march so far on pitiful rations, with no decent shoes? His fellow passengers complained about heat, air-conditioning, too much salt on the chicken, poor TV reception in motels. Riding down from the Blue Ridge to Chancellorsville, where the hapless Hooker was whipped by an army half its size under Lee, where Stonewall Jackson was mortally wounded, and on to Fredericksburg, scene of Burnside’s humiliation—history and tragic blunders and terrible slaughter on every hand wherever you looked—a woman in the seat in front of him said, “I tried to watch
Donahue
this morning, it was like it was coming from the moon.” A force of thirty-six tourists but he doubted they had the wherewithal to hold up a gas station.

With Father’s return imminent, the parish bade farewell to his sub, Father Frank. The Kruegers threw a cocktail party for him in their backyard where they have a concrete patio and a glass-top table with umbrella (green-striped) attached. The guest list was small; not many Catholics in town are comfortable around a priest in a sportshirt and yellow shorts, drinking gin and saying,
“Damn
, this is good, Jack.
Dry.
Mmmmm. What did you do? Just
think
about vermouth, for Christ’s sake?” For his farewell homily, Father Frank developed the Twenty-third Psalm into a golf course where He maketh the ball to lie in the fairway and leadeth it around the water hazards. Yea. Though we walk through the rough, we will fear no bogey, for He prepareth the green before us in the presence of sand traps, and our putt runneth over to the cup and dwells there. Father Frank is on the back nine of life these days and thinks it’s the best part of the course. He looks good. Close-cropped gray hair, good tan, and—well, should you say this about a priest? Should you even think it?—good legs. Hell, yes! he’d say, just because I’m a priest doesn’t mean you can’t look! He hugs women and gives them a good smack on the lips.