Lake Wobegon Days (45 page)

The Sons of Knute Ice Melt contest starts on Groundhog Day, when they tow Mr. Berge’s maroon 1949 Ford onto the lake, park it forty yards offshore with a long chain around the rear axle, and wait for spring. It’s the car Mr. Berge was driving one warm March day when he hung a right at the dam and headed out to his fish house to check the dropline, forgetting he had hauled in the house three weeks before because the ice was melting. Now, the ice was even thinner, though covered with fresh snow. The car slowed down suddenly a hundred yards out, and when he gunned it she stopped dead and dropped a foot as if all four tires went flat. He couldn’t open the door so he cranked down the window and climbed out and crawled up on the roof. His cries for help brought out the Volunteer Fire Department, which sent him one end of a rope tied to his dog Mike and dragged both of them through the slush back to shore. The car sank a few days later in six feet of water. They got a chain on her that summer, though, and winched her out. Mr. Berge, who had made some extravagant promises to God while lying on the roof, donated the car to the lodge, and so
every year the Ford has repeated its sinking routine for charity. You guess the day and hour she will go down, at a dollar per guess, The winner gets a boat, and the profits go to the Sons of Knute Shining Star scholarship fund to send kids to college and make them more brilliant than Mr. Berge, who, like anyone who ever did a dumb thing in a small town, was reminded of it ever afterward. “Good night, then,” he says when he leaves the Sidetrack Tap. “Good night then,” they say. “You go right home now, don’t stop on the way. And keep off the ice then.”

The first week of April is a good guess, though the car has sunk as early as late March and as late as the third week of April. Once it never went down. They parked it over the end of the long sandbar that comes off the point, the one that has ended a few fishing trips before they got to where they were biting, when the sandbar bit the boat and the fishermen pitched out in the mud. The Ford sat there in four inches of water, a sort of buoy, and the scholarship fund earned hundreds of dollars.

In April, giant icicles let go of the eaves and crash to the ground. Bare pavement appears and Duane gets a screech out of his back tires he has waited all winter to hear. Birds arrive: the redwing blackbird (“o-ka-leeeee”), robin (“cheer up, cheer up, cheerily”), killdeer (“killdeer, killdeer”), and the Norwegian nuthatch (“I tink so, I tink so, probably”), a brownish-gray bird with a spot of white breast, which lives in barns and feeds on coffee grounds. It has been around all winter. “I tink so” is its spring song. The winter song is “I don’t know, I don’t know. Who can tell?”

Who can tell? Sometimes we get a good blizzard in late April, even in May. Odd as it is and (like a misplaced parenthetical comment that makes no sense when later he said, “Don’t, darling. Please don’t. Please, Marie,” but she went ahead and did it anyway) daunting, still—this is Minnesota. “Spring? Don’t be nuts,” some people say even as the snow begins to melt. The backyards look as if giant bison were camped out there, lounging around. This stuff here—dogs didn’t do this, it’s too big, this is from a bison. It was a dog, though, who came shopping in the garbage can and spread the items out for inspection. Evidently he didn’t care for orange peels, coffee grounds, brown lettuce, old fruitcake,
or
rotten potatoes.

So warm, but still you have to dress warmly. This is the season for colds. My parka was inherited from Mr. Hoglund, who died in 1947—I wear a dead man’s jacket. All of us get hot during recess, and soon there is a pile of parkas in the corner of the playground.

Out on the country road, you can see the Norwegian bachelor farmers have hung out their sheets. “When a bachelor farmer begins to smell himself, you know winter’s over,” says Clarence. Barney bought his sheets for a quarter at the Lutheran rummage sale, which got them from Irene Bunsen because Clint said they gave him headaches at night. Hawaiian sheets with big swashes of tropical colors. If you saw Barney on the streets and wondered what kind of sheets he slept on, Hawaiian would be your last guess. His name is John; he was nicknamed Barney for his aroma. When I first saw his sheets flapping in the wind, I was four years old. I asked if we could stop. I thought it was a carnival and there were rides. In a few weeks, there will be—when the bachelors hitch up their Belgians and head out to the edge of the dry stubble. Drop the blade, cluck at the team, and off they go. The moldboard throws the turf over and releases the aroma of sweet black earth.

The first week of April is darn early to get out in the field to cultivate. Roger Hedlund, who I went to school with and who looks almost exactly the same as then—same flat-top, same calm look as when he missed two free throws with one second remaining that lost the district championship for the Leonards in 1958—got out early the first year after his dad, Ivan, finally turned the farm over to him, got too close to the woods where the snow was melting, and got stuck and worked at it and got the Farmall dug down to the green clay, down to the axle. It took three neighbors with three tractors to haul him out. The ruts are still visible, a decade later, a trench from an ancient battle. Archeologists could dig down and find the lumber they used for traction.

Embarrassing, to get stuck in your field. You’re out in the open, just like in basketball, and the sound of a giant Farmall submerging carries a long way. It’s not like a fart that you can pretend was something else. No spiders bark that loud.

So now, as they sit in the Chatterbox and talk about getting in the fields, they stick it to Roger once more. “
Ja
, Roger may be getting out
today and do some excavating.” “
Ja
, Roger, he plants deep.” They stick it to him harder because it’s so hard to get a rise out of Roger. He’s so calm. He won’t give them the satisfaction. He keeps it inside, like Ivan, who years ago blew up his old dairy barn, having built a new one, but Lord, to use as much dynamite as he did—he broke every window in his house and scattered lumber over half the country. People found boards from that barn for years after. And some of them took them back to him. “Here, Ivan, I believe this is yours.”

In Lake Wobegon, we don’t forget mistakes. I know I remember those free throws like he just missed them. It was March 1958. He didn’t cry, didn’t swear, didn’t even look at the floor. He just went back on defense for that one remaining second. Looked for his man as his man heaved the ball into the crowd. We all sat there stunned, our eyes filled with tears, but Roger looked—well, like Roger. He seemed surprised it was over. He was ready to play four more quarters.

We were favored to win that game against Bowlus, they were nothing, a joke, so most of us didn’t bother to go to the game. We were saving up for the trip to State and a weekend at the Curtis Hotel, which was what should have happened, but the boys stood around, threw the ball away, took dumb shots, and then Roger came to the line for two, the Leonards down 51-50. The first shot hit the front of the rim, the second wasn’t even close.

So now, as he pulls his cap on his head, takes a last slug of coffee, stands, turns, and tosses his wadded-up napkin into the garbage can twenty feet away, everybody at the table thinks the same thing. They don’t say it, but they think it.

On the first real warm day, you can sit on the back steps in your PJs before church, drink coffee, study the backyard which was such a dump a week ago you wouldn’t have wanted to be buried back there, but with the tulips coming on strong and a faint green haze on the lilacs, a person can see that this is not the moon but Earth, a planet named for its finely ground rock containing organic material that, given sunlight and moisture, can produce plant life that may support advanced life forms such as Catholics or Lutherans. School windows open and faint wisps of talk drift out and some choral music. Rototillers start up, and the first
whap
of a ball in a glove is heard. Sometimes the scratch of a match is heard, struck by someone who had
vowed to put the Luckies away for Lent. The sulphur flares up, the coffin nail glows, the delicious smoke rushes into the poor man’s suffering body, and he sighs with delight, emitting a cloud. After finishing the cigarette, he calls himself a terrible name.

On the first real warm Sunday, attendance is down at church, people deciding that, God being everywhere, they can worship anywhere—what Fr. Emil calls “the Protestant fallacy”; he strolls around after Mass, surprising some absentees who were busy worshiping with rakes and didn’t see him coming.
^*
“Oh! Father! My gosh! Didn’t see you! Good morning.”

“Yes. Almost afternoon. Funny how the morning just slips away, don’t it?”

“Yeah, that’s right, Father. That’s for sure.”

“Such a beautiful day, it’d be a shame to have to be indoors on a day like this, now wouldn’t it?”

“Well, that’s true, Father. You got a point there.”

Mrs. Schwab is in her yard Sunday morning, working up a show of peonies, the giant double whites she put in last year, but she’s not resting on her peonies, she’s expanding west toward the clotheslines, digging a kidney-shaped bed for her western peony annex where she’ll put in yellows and reds. She doesn’t care for delicate blooms, she goes for the gorgeous Las Vegas floor-show-type flowers. Tiger lilies, snowballs, asters, and dahlias. Flowers that sag under the weight of their fabulous hats. Big American Beauties and giant mums that when you see them you can almost hear the Casa Loma orchestra. The yard movement in Lake Wobegon has been toward the activity yard, but Mrs. Schwab carries on the old show-yard tradition. You’d no sooner toss a softball around in it than in her living room. Too many ornaments
for one thing, and then, too, you wouldn’t want to track in on a lawn so carefully edged and pruned and preened and combed. That’s Mr. Schwab’s job. He’s already mowed and raked and dug out the dead spots and resodded. The birdbath has fresh water. The two iron lawn chairs are out, with the molded scallops on the backs that keep you from slouching. The bricks laid diagonally in a trench to make a border around the beds—he’s retrenched, relaid them. The B.V.M. sitting on her platform of rocks with the porcelain bandshell overhead—the plastic tent has been removed and the shrine cleaned. And soon Mrs. Schwab’s flowers will burst into blossom, and the Mr. and Mrs. will take their seats and enjoy the breeze that brings them steady whiffs of extravagance—she in her yellow peony dress, he in his luau shirt, listening to the ball game, snoozing, a white hanky on his bald head, she with a
Reader’s Digest
Condensed Book, snoozing—both of them sitting up suddenly now and then to examine the garden. Is something out of place? Did they detect a brown leaf, a stone in the grass, a dead stick? Was that a deadly garden pest moving around in the flowers—is it time to get the bug bomb, move in on the flanker? No, it’s only a butterfly, cruising through the blossoms. It is perfect. It is the paradise yard they worked for, their heart’s desire, the garden of love.

Crocuses, tulips, and those little blue and yellow flowers, what they call Norwegian incarnations, up by May 17,
Syttende Mai
, and the incarnation of Elmer, asleep in the canvas hammock. He makes a handsome bulge, a great pendulous form like a fat cocoon about to drop its load and become a butterfly. Other people rake as he snoozes, including Pastor Ingqvist across the alley, who wishes he had let his sleeping lawn lie. Matted down, it looked grasslike, but raking opened it up for analysis and he can see that the crabgrass and quackgrass prospered mightily last year, while the bluegrass and Bermuda fainted and grew weary, and now serious measures are called for, but the Building Committee, which is the steward of the parsonage and its lawn, is made up of farmers who don’t take grass seriously, including Mr. Tollerud, who said, “A little spraying, that’s the ticket,” although a herbicide now would only result in total destruction. Pastor Ingqvist would like to take grass less seriously, but his neighbors are church members whose lawns are clipped, weed-free, dense, dark green, and whom he often sees on their knees fighting off the invasion of false
lawn from their minister. They look at him with (he thinks) reproach for not doing more good works with his grass. Meanwhile, Elmer, who hangs in the breeze sawing lumber, has an okay lawn, not the Yard of the Month, but a darned good piece of turf. He throws some seed on it every spring and it jumps right up. Mrs. Elmer tends her shrubs and flowers like she was the Fourth Musketeer: she wields her trowel and clippers and whacks them around a little, and they stand up and grow like crazy for her.