Lake Wobegon Days (33 page)

“It looks like rain for tomorrow,” Bud said. “That’s why I didn’t want to wait. You ever dig a grave in the rain? It feels like you’re digging your own.” Clarence worked the pick and Bud shoveled. The two little Diener boys rode up on their bikes and sat down to watch. The men took turns in the hole. The plot was between Clarence’s Uncle Frank, the oldest boy who never married, and an Alphonse Herberger whom he had never heard of: 1881-1924. It was going to be a tight fit, they could see as they got down to four feet, and Bud said he hoped Virgil was the sort who got along. Clarence was sweating. He shuddered each time he raised the pick and brought it down. Pieces of what looked to be Frank’s coffin kept turning up beneath his feet and he was afraid of bringing up a bone. The boys were hoping for just that. They peered down when Clarence climbed out. “What do dead people look like when they’ve been buried a long time?” one asked.

Bud leaned on his shovel and sucked his teeth and looked at them thoughtfully. “Weeel, we don’t ordinarily dig them up to find out,” he said, “but ever so often now and then we have to, like with the boy—what was his name now? The one who died of diphtheria? You remember, Clarence. Oh, well. Anyway, he was about your age. A wonderful boy. He had a brown collie dog used to follow him like a shadow and the two of them liked to swim together and they’d go fishing and in the winter they slid down the hill, you never saw a boy and a dog so close as those two were. Well, the boy got sick, and he just got worse and worse. He was too Weak to walk but they hitched that dog up to a wagon and he pulled the boy around town every day until one day he was too sick even for that and one week later he was dead.”

“Well, of course, his parents were heartbroken and his brothers and sisters. They sat around crying their eyes out for two days, looking at that poor child lying in the coffin, but the collie dog took it even harder. He wouldn’t eat a bite, he didn’t sleep, he just sat by the coffin and cried, the way dogs do, moaning, and when the boy was buried, the dog lay on his grave and wouldn’t leave, so they left him here.”

“Well, sir, it was two days after the burial, the dog came tearing down the hill like he was crazy, barking and yipping and wouldn’t quit. They tied him up but he kept on until finally the father said, ‘I believe he wants us to follow him,’ and sure enough. They untied him and he took off for the cemetery and stood on the boy’s grave and howled, and when the people got up there, the dog began to dig in the dirt. The father said, ‘He’s trying to tell us something,’ so they got shovels and dug as fast as they could, and got down to the little coffin and lifted it out and opened it up.”

“Well, sir, what they saw inside, it just tore their hearts out, it was so horrible. People took one look and turned away, sick. The boy’s eyes were wide open and his face looked like he was screaming. His face was all bloody and so was his hands. He had clawed the cloth off the lid and scratched the wood and had torn off half his clothes and scratched his face to ribbons. You see, they had buried him alive.”

The Diener boys did not move a muscle as Bud told them this: they looked as if he had clubbed them over the head. Clarence got back in the hole to pick some more.

“His father was never the same after that. He completely lost his mind. He became like a little child. Every day he sat in the yard and just hummed and talked to hisself and the dog sat there with him. It was the saddest thing you ever saw. And now the boy and his father and his dog are all dead, buried up there around back of the maple tree. I can show you their grave if you want to see it.”

The boys whispered, No, they didn’t want to. They picked up their bikes and coasted off down the hill. They coasted very slowly. Bud laughed. “Well,” he said, “you ask a question, you get an answer.” He studied the hole. “Don’t be afraid to dig down around Frank,” he said. “It’s only dust, you know.”

Clarence’s one clear memory of Virgil was from a family trip out West, when Clarence was nine or ten. He remembered eating hamburgers in buns (his family always had them on bread) and leaving the cafe and his father put him up on his lap and let him drive the car. His mother said, “Clinton, he’s only nine!” Or ten. In Nevada, they stopped at Virgil’s house, a little white house, and Virgil came out to see them. They stood around, and he didn’t invite them in. Aunt Ginny wasn’t feeling well. They all went for a walk. It was hot and
the air smelled of gasoline. They walked along some railroad tracks and past a water tank, and next thing, Virgil was forty, fifty feet out in front of them. Walking like he forgot they were there. That night, they stayed in tourist cabins. “Uncle Virgil doesn’t have room for all of us,” his mother explained. His father snorted. He said, “Virgil never did have room.” Years later, from his father, Clarence heard a passing reference to bad blood between Virgil and Clarence’s grandfather, which had to do with cattle and led to Virgil moving away and which apparently never got patched up.

Clarence put himself out for the funeral, as several people remarked to him afterward: “This was real good of you, Clarence. You did the right thing.” He made four big sprays of evergreen and dug up enough about Uncle Virgil to make a decent obituary and when Pastor Ingqvist said he couldn’t stay for the graveside service, Clarence handled that himself. He read the Twenty-third Psalm, and then, even though it gave him a bad case of the shakes, he faced them, all sixteen of them, and said, “Uncle Virgil left here when I was pretty little and I only saw him once after that, so I don’t have much to say about him. I do know that it was because of an argument that he left. I wish I knew more. I’m glad to have him back and I hope that he is finally at rest. I hope that all of us will take a lesson from it, to settle our arguments as quick as we can. I say this especially to the younger ones. Life is short. The Bible says, don’t let the sun go down upon your wrath. Settle these things. It isn’t true that time heals all wounds, sometimes they get worse if you don’t do something about them. I didn’t mean to talk this much, but I know I’ve done things to make people mad and I ask you to forgive me for them and I forgive you for anything you ever did to me.” He stopped, not certain how he should end it. Finally, he just reached for the ropes. They lowered Virgil into his grave and shoveled in the dirt and made a nice mound over him. They shook hands and got in their cars and went home to supper.

Eloise was a little put out with Bud afterward. “I don’t see why Clarence had to help with the grave,” she said. “That’s your job, after all.”

“I didn’t make him. But I’ll tell you this, they don’t pay me enough to get away with treating me like a servant.”

She said, “But servants always get paid less.”

He said, “Well, there’s the problem, isn’t it.”

Clarence sat in his green easy chair and Arlene fixed him a cup of Sanka. She kissed him on the top of his head. “You did good, honey,” she said.

“I went down there early so I could have a look at him,” he said. “The coffin was sealed shut and I had to get a clawhammer to pry it open. It was stuffed with those green pads, like house-movers use. I pulled those out and there he was and, you know, I didn’t recognize him at all. It was like I’d never seen him before in my life. A complete stranger. All I had to show it was my uncle was a piece of paper with his name on it. Like an invoice. You know, my dad never wrote to him, never talked about him. Something about cattle—he and Grandpa thought Virgil cheated them, and that was the end of him. Stopping to see him in Nevada, that was Mother’s idea, and I remember her trying to be friendly and Dad and Virgil not saying more than two words to each other. When my cousin called, she offered me $500 to take care of the funeral. My God. She was surprised I wouldn’t take it. She said it’d cost her twice that to hire a funeral director. Good Lord.”

“So I slow down and roll down my window and I says, ‘Do you need a ride?’ and he says, ‘No, I’m running.’ Well, I could see that. That’s why I offered. So then I go on to Ralph’s and head home and there he is again—running back the way he come. I know they do this but I can’t see it: why would you run so hard to get to where you were in the first place?”

“Beer an’ a bump. And don’t give me that Jim Beam. Last time I drank it, I got so damn sick I was afraid I’d die. And then I was afraid I wouldn’t.”

“Wayne, you’re so dumb, you
deserve
to be a Democrat.”

“Look at yourself, Oscar. You’re drunk, you’re personally repulsive, and you believe in Reagan. What’s left for you, Oscar? Next thing you’ll be living in your car, eating bugs off the grille.”

“I don’t have to take that from you, you—”

“You! Wayne! Out!”

“How come me? I didn’t start it! Throw
him
out!”

“He hasn’t finished his beer.”

“Wally, these nuts are
rotten.
Lookit this!”

“So get some other ones.”

“You eat a whole bag of nuts and you don’t know they’re rotten?”

“Lookit this! Jeez!”

“I read an article in the Minneapolis paper about rotten nuts. It affects your sex life. That’s the truth.”

“There’s a chestnut tree out there and he’s getting them chestnuts and I know it and he knows I know it too. Damn Norskie’s so damn stubborn: I followed him out there one day last fall and he drives around all damn afternoon rather than have me find out where the damn thing is. Cheap sonofabitch. I don’t know how some people can go to church on Sunday!”

“I tell you, the price is so ridiculous—next year I’m putting in forty acres of zinnias. I’m sick of looking at corn. Long as I’m gonna go broke anyway, may as well have fun doing it. Put in zinnias and sit out there in a lawn chair and read the paper.”

“Wally! This
beer’s
flat, dammit. What you trying to do to me? I work all day and the old lady chews me out for coming down here and now you’re trying to keep me sober?”

A good night at the Sidetrack Tap: Mr. Berge has borrowed ten bucks from Senator K. and won two more at pinochle, and now he is up and dancing to Rusty Hintges’s old song: “I can’t wait to drive you home, Just call me Mr. Smith. Tonight it’s time for love, And baby, you’re the one I’m with.” Rusty grew up near here and Mr. Berge once gave him bus fare to Nashville and years later got a box of 45s from him in payment, including this one, but it’s not the memory of old Rusty that warms his heart, it’s the fact that ten minutes ago two young women walked in and sat by him at the bar. Not so beautiful by day, perhaps, but in dim light they look like movie stars. Mr. Berge, who doesn’t draw much attention from women including his wife, is thrilled to pieces. One is Roxanne and the other Suzie. They’re from St. Cloud. Just driving through. He insists on buying them beers, which guarantees him five minutes, and he starts out with a couple of Ole and Lena jokes, which they like okay, so he tells them a dirtier one, about Ole
and Lena’s wedding night. He gives them cigarettes. He offers to give them a ride home. “We got a car,” says Susie. “Well, I could give the other one a ride home then,” he says. “You don’t live together do you?” Actually, they do. “Well, maybe you could give me a ride, then,” he says. Their attention is wandering. He offers to dance with one of them, but they don’t want to dance. “I dance pretty good,” he says, and gets up and dances.

In his own mind, having had a few, he dances
real
good, but Merle laughs at him. “Hey, Berge, how’s your wife and my kids?” The girls think this is pretty funny. He hitches up his pants and sits down. Merle has moved in at the other end, next to Suzie. “This is Merle,” Mr. Berge announces, “Merle is my best buddy, ain’t that right?” Merle snorts. “These ladies are from St. Cloud, now ain’t that a deal, Merle? We don’t get all that many of you up here. God, you’re so pretty. Anybody tell you that before? You remind me of the Soderberg Sisters. Ever hear of them? God, they were pretty. Talented? Jeez, they had it all.
Ja
, they went right from here to the National Barn Dance. Did you know that? Huh?”

The girls never heard of the National Barn Dance so they don’t know what a great compliment it is to be compared to the Soderberg Sisters. “I used to know ’em both quite well,” Mr. Berge plunges on, feeling his way. “I used to take ’em around to dances when I was a bartender at the Moonlite Bay supper club.” Moonlite Bay burned to the ground in 1954, but for Mr. Berge, it still is the ultimate in swank. Memories of the dance floor with spring suspension, Eddie Flores and His Saxophone Troubadors onstage behind little band desks, and forty booths with tablecloths and candles in glass bowls that reflected in the mirror on the back bar. O fabulous Moonlite Bay … but Merle leans forward and laughs at him. “You never bartended at Moonlite Bay!” he says. “I was in there a hundred times and I never saw your ass in there.”

“I never saw
your
ass in there! And I bartended there for three years! I was there when Tommy bartended! Jerry Heinrich! Mike Gutknecht! Ask anybody!”

“You’re such a big liar,” says Merle, “you gotta get your neighbor to call your dog!” The girls think this is funny. Merle says to Suzie, “Where’d you find him? Out in the ditch?”

Mr. Berge plays it cool, he doesn’t want to scare them. He tries to stare Merle down. “What you so quiet about?” says Merle.