Liberty

by Garrison Keillor

  He walked down the middle of the street, cigarette in hand, clipboard in the other, white pants with gold buttons down the sides, a flowered shirt.

  Hispanic. Soy un hombre. Un hombre valiente. The Nordic mists lift, a path appears in the shining wood, the path that leads away from the snowdrifts and blighted faces and scraggly trees to the moist green headlands and delta and rainforest valleys. My brown-skinned people, mi glorioso amigos, where are you? Welcome your lost brother kidnapped by the fierce northern tribes, sold into slavery by the lies of his own grandpapa. Bring him a wineskin, a good robust vino, not the pale cosseted Burgundies or the effeminate Pinot Noirs but something with teeth and hair, a Rioja. To hell with AA and the self-righteous in recovery and long live the reprobate! Viva banditos!

  And then he heard Lyle say, “Lordy, Lordy, feast your eyes on that.” And turned and saw her walking slowly up the street, tall and lithe and lovely in her long green pants and a loose silk blouse, walking hand in hand with a smiley-faced man in khaki shorts, glasses on a chain around his neck, a Red Sox cap, a T-shirt with some dumb thing written on it which you couldn’t read unless you got up close to him and why would you want to? They were strolling along, killing time, pretending not to know they were being observed. She stops to look in the window of the hardware store and a display of hammers on a pegboard. She puts on her dark glasses and turns, brushing her hair back from her face.

  “She’s not from around here, is she?” said Lyle.

  “That’s the woman who carried the torch in the parade last year. The Statue of Liberty,” said Carl.

  Angelica, the goddess of liberty, and a dork in shorts—Clint’s heart burned, tears came to his eyes. Jealousy. Yellow jealousy. She had told him she was coming with Kevin but it hadn’t dawned on him until right now that she liked somebody else better than she liked him. Him in the ridiculous mariachi outfit. God help us.

  18. THE PEOPLE, YES

  Nine a.m. and firecrackers were popping all over town. Signs were up: PARADE POSTPONED UNTIL 4. “LIVING FLAG” AT 2:30. PLEASE TAKE PART—THANK YOU FOR COMING. The Boy Scout brigade was out, red flags flapping, directing traffic streaming into town from the south. The Scouts looked like androids. Cars swish-swashed by and a string of motorcycles revving and rumbling, carrying fat old men with ponytails—PRAIRIE PORKERS stitched on their leather vests. The Scouts waved them up the hill to the high school and then to the fields around the grain elevator and to Mr. Hansen’s pasture north of town where Holsteins once grazed, chewing thoughtfully, thinking back on the wrong turns they’d made that led them to a life in the dairy business. They were gone now. Mr. Hansen gave up dairy farming after a failed suicide attempt. He jumped from a silo, hoping to hit the barbed wire fence and slice himself in half, but landed in a pool of manure instead. What others had thought was Mr. Hansen’s strong character turned out to be depression, and one month after Dr. DeHaven put him on Lucitol the clouds opened and Mr. Hansen sold the cows for hamburger and let his hair grow long and spent his days watching interview shows on TV, hoping to sharpen his conversational skills which had dwindled to murmurs over the years. He was watching The Bob Roberts Show this morning on Fox whose guest was a movie starlet just out of detox who felt her life was just starting anew. So was Mr. Hansen’s. He was learning to converse. And he called Clint on the phone.

  “It’s a new life, Clint. I’m all done grumping about the dairy business and I’m seeing the beauty of the everyday. Like flowers and stuff. What you up to?”

  Clint was on his way from where the Civil War cannoneers were setting up their sandbagged emplacement on the sledding hill behind the high school and heading down to see the Percheron horses arriving at the football field, ten big trailers of them and four more on the way. He did not want to hear about Hansen’s renaissance or whatever it was—he had skipped an emergency meeting of the Committee to go and visit the horses—Viola was worried about security issues, since some unknown persons had been spotted on Elm Street ducking behind things and she wanted Clint to ask the governor to call out a unit of the National Guard. Instead he swung around to Leonards Field where the teamsters were guiding a great gray Percheron out of a trailer and down a long ramp to join four others who stood quietly, skin rippling with pleasure, heads up, sniffing the air, ears up, alert.

  Hansen: “I just need to share this with someone. You ever have moments like this? When you think, ‘Aha! Now I get it.’? You ever thave those Aha moments?”

  Clint: “I don’t think so.”

  The Percherons gave an air of majesty to this grassy plain and he wouldn’t have been surprised if a procession of bishops and dukes arrived in crimson and lapis, followed by a king and a pope or two. The horse descending had white markings on his forehead and fetlocks and a short stump of tail. He placed his feet carefully on the hard rubber tread, his powerful thigh muscles easing him down. There was no skittishness—he had negotiated this ramp before—and his great calm eyes took in the entire scene and noted Clint’s approach and the dignified look in his eye was that of a duke awaiting a serf. Once a warhorse bred to keep his head in the clangor of battle, now consigned to pulling wagons, the great beast heaved a deep horsely sigh and chuffed in a welcoming way as Clint reached up and touched the tender black nose and the solemn forehead.

  Daddy was fearful of horses but fascinated nonetheless, and once, chatting with the cowboy star Rex Ryder, Grand Marshal of the 1956 parade, seated atop his horse Blazing Star, Daddy coolly raised his barker’s cane and stroked the horse’s underside, and the animal’s penis emerged as long as your arm, brown and speckled. There were children around and they gaped and snickered and boys punched each other’s shoulders and girls turned away in disgust, but there it was, the unspeakable thing out in the open for the whole town to see.

  The voice of Hansen was in his ear, talking about how free he was to travel now and do as he liked, but the man did not sound free at all. He’d gotten out of prison but he was sitting with his back against the gray stone walls and what was the difference?

  The teamsters kept to their work, and Clint walked along the line of horses tethered to a long rope stretched between posts pounded into the running track. Two girls on stepstools braided a horse’s mane. A man poured molasses into a bucket of mash. Little bands of horse admirers straggled along the line, fathers and their broods, old codgers in snap-brim hats, couples in shorts and sneakers, cameras popping, pinprick flashes. No locals. Lake Wobegon wasn’t horse country. Horses were something rich people did, or teenage girls. Nothing for serious people. Too much trouble.

  The horses stood under canvas tarps strung taut to shade them from the sun, plastic buckets of water at each place and the horse’s name on a wooden shingle hung from the tarp, a long line of proud stalwarts—Ira, Soupy, Good Son, Robin, Eric, Aristotle, Hudson, Royal Bill, Irv, Jack, Lancelot, Quentin, Trinity, Leo, Pharaoh, Oscar, Leeds, Cochise, Cougar, Daniel, Aramis, Thomas, Merlin, Chester, and Calvin Bud, who raised his great head thoughtfully as if he could speak and chose not to at this particular time. “I am not from here,” Clint said. “I am Spanish. My people brought horses to North America. They were poets at heart, singers, wanderers, so they valued their mobility. They were civilized people who knew when society gets stale. I may be leaving, who knows when, perhaps tonight. I am tired of sarcasm. I’m looking for a more merciful way of living.” The horse listened to his confession with supreme gravity, though chewing corn. He licked the white froth from his lips and waited for Clint to say more.

  “The firemen are all mad at me because I said there was no need to blast the siren every time there’s an emergency call. The firemen all have pagers and that works just fine. They love the siren for the drama and everybody gets excited and sees them hustling off to whatever it is and it makes them look like heroes.

  But it’s a pain in the butt. So I said so, and those guys are never going to forgive me for it. Damn it, you pay a high price for speaking your mind in this town.”

  The
horse regarded him with sympathy and Clint stroked the long forehead and scratched up around the forelock. He wanted to put his arms around the horse and feel its head next to his own. “I did all I could do here. Married, raised kids, buried both my parents, fixed thousands of cars and started cars on cold mornings, flooded the ice rink and got up early in the morning to coach peewee hockey, shoveled old people’s sidewalks, cleaned the church, gave money to some who needed it, bought rounds of beer when it was my turn, ate dinner at people’s houses and tried to make conversation though I didn’t care that much for them, was president of the Boosters Club, and for the past six years I ran the Fourth of July. And now I need to do something for myself.” The horse seemed to understand.

  “You from the Parade Committee?” He jumped. One of the teamsters stood behind him. A big man with a gray ponytail and a big honker of a nose. “Right,” said Clint. “What can I do for you?”

  “We were told there would be hot meals.”

  “I’ll take care of it right away.” He got on the walkie-talkie to Donnie Krebsbach who patched him through to Dorothy at the café. “Fourteen egg sandwiches with bacon. And coffee. And hash browns. Have Carl or whoever bring it up to the football field. Make it two dozen. And some apples for the horses.”

  “Just want you to know—you run a great parade,” the man said. “I know, I’ve been in enough of ’em. These things are dying off, like everything else. People blame it on the kids, I blame it on us. Slacking off. Not doing things the way they need to be done. But this one is. And I want to thank you.” And he put his calloused hand in Clint’s own and they shook, gravely. “Like the pants too,” he said. The man turned away and then turned back—“You don’t remember me but I served with you in the Navy. Payne’s the name. Art Payne. We took a course at the Presidio together. San Francisco. I remember you specifically because I saw you coming into Cheyenne’s house as I was going out. Chinese woman. You remember. She was quite a girl, wasn’t she. I wonder what became of her. Guess she got old like the rest of us, huh?”

  He didn’t want to look at the man. “I don’t know any Cheyenne,” he said. “Sorry.”

  “Well, you did back then. She was on Lincoln Avenue up above a dry cleaner’s. Little room with beaded curtains and a little ivory Buddha and incense burning and a red bedspread. Bought a red bedspread for my wife a few years back with gold dragons embroidered on it. Made a difference, if you know what I mean.”

  “I was only there for a few months,” Clint said apropos of nothing whatsoever.

  “She was quite a girl. Such beautiful hands. She had so much love in her. You can’t fake that stuff. I never forgot her. Sorry you did.”

  Old fat man with a ponytail and earrings, somebody’s grandpa, too old to be thinking about his rutting days. But it was nice to think about Cheyenne again.

  The four circus wagons had arrived from Baraboo the night before. Men were hosing the dust off them and wiping them down and waxing them—the gaudy red and gold, the mirrors, the gilt, the silver tassels, and the giddy carvings of exotic beasts, pyramids, Indians, Indian sultans, a chariot, an acrobat with pencil-thin legs, a bald eagle, statuesque ladies with bosoms like shelves, lions and elephants, a racehorse named Dan Patch, Aztecs, dolphins, Old Glory, goddesses, wizards and swamis, dragons, Greek temples, and half-naked beauties, and down deep he felt dazzled by the lavish foolishness of it, this wild concoction of color and mythology swirling by—how irresistible when he was a boy and the Cole Brothers rolled into town on a Saturday in August—Come away from the cornfields, boys, and duck into the big tent for just two bits, the fourth part of a dollar, and see things You Had Not Dared To Dream—They Will Appear Before Your Very Eyes!! He was trudging off to mow the neighbor’s lawn and then a 4-H softball game which he hated because he was no good at third base and then he detoured toward the train depot in hopes of seeing the wagons and there they were and then suddenly the day had a high point. And now here he was, years later, all sorts of pleasures available, and yet sorrow seems almost permanent, life impenetrable. And the circus wagons irresistible. Just as they had been to Daddy. The great wagons rumbling along, sunburst wheels turning, drawn by the Percherons in gilt trappings, the teamsters in silk cracking their big whips, and the band atop blasting away, or a calliope wailing and steam billowing from the stack.

  He called up to Art’s and got Viola Tors who said Irene was busy swamping out the bathrooms. “Tell her it’s her husband,” said Clint.

  “She knows it’s her husband. She wants to know what you want.”

  “I want to talk to her.”

  “About what?”

  “Never mind.” He’d only wanted her to come look at the horses. Two more long trailers had just pulled up and Leonards Field was a scene of medieval glory.

  The camera crew from CNN had not shown up so far, said Viola, though LeRoy had posted signs on the state highway—LAKE WOBEGON—WELCOME CNN!!!! Still no sign of them nor any other members of the press. “I guess we’re not news anymore,” said Viola. “We were news last year and not this year. That’s how it works. Unless somebody goes berserk with an automatic weapon and shoots fifteen or twenty people.”

  “Art’s gone to Montana,” said Clint. Viola laughed. “I don’t think Art could knock off more than two or three. He’d lose interest.”

  He wished people wouldn’t make jokes like that. You say a dark thought out loud and it floats away on the breeze and it can be inhaled by some loner living in his camper at an abandoned farmsite who suffered some humiliation years before—maybe he missed a crucial free throw against Lake Wobegon and was jeered by the Leonards fans and had been chewing on it ever since, replaying the game over and over in his mind, and finally decided to load up his AK-47 and hang two bandoliers over his shoulders to make a big X on his chest and hook some smoke grenades to his belt and blacken his face and head over to Lake Wobegon and see how much collateral damage he can visit on the civilian population before he is eliminated.

  And then he smelled her smell, a sort of cucumber-based aroma, and turned and she was running toward him, shopping bag in hand. She whooped and took his hands in hers and twirled him, against his will, in a circle, her head thrown back, laughing. “Oh Bunny, I’m so glad I found you, how are you?” She kissed him on the lips. “I adore you. You rock my world. Do you know that? I think about you all the time.”

  “Could we go somewhere private?” he said. “Where’s what’s-his-name?”

  “Oh, screw ’em. I can kiss you if I want to.”

  She said Kevin had gone off somewhere to park his camper. Good, Clint thought. Maybe he’ll knock the manifold loose and carbon monoxide will give him the peace he’s looking for.

  “What is this stupid paper somebody gave me?” she said. She waved a blue paper at him. It was a warranty “to be signed by all parade participants . . . affirming under penalty of all future rights and privileges whatsoever, that the signer is not participating for any purpose other than patriotic and is obligated to uphold all local rules and regulations, and that nudity is strictly prohibited at all times, and the Parade Committee hereinafter reserves the right to reject and or eject any person who violates this understanding in whole or in part.” It was signed by Mr. Diener, Chairman of the Security Committee.

  “This little weasel with the swept-back hairdo sidled up to me and told me to sign it,” she said. “You asking all the tuba players to sign? Is Miss Pork going to have to sign? Or just me?”

  “I will look into it,” said Clint.

  He started to explain about northern European people, then thought, I am not one of them. Soy de España. Mi sangre es el español. Soy del pueblo español. I am of the Spanish people. He put his hand on her shoulder and it slid along the wing of her back and down her spine, and came to rest on Angelica’s lower back. The Boy Scouts across the street turned and looked. Myrtle and Florian stood on the corner, gazing his way. Hands off her, Bunsen! Mr. Berge was behind them, dazed from drink, staring over their should
er. Cliff stood in the doorway of the Mercantile, talking to Ralph, both of them watching Clint. Thought balloons rose over their heads: There is the man who said in Adult Bible Study Class that he did not believe that God condemns His children and there is no hell, and look at him, he has

  a girlfriend. The Magendanz family cruised by in their green Chevy van, all eyes on Clint with his hand on the back of the red-haired woman. Blue geese overhead put on the brakes and dove down for a look, squirrels paused in their labors, a fish jumped and looked his way.

  “Oh,” she said. She fished in her purse.

  Clint removed his arm from around Angelica’s lower back.

  “I brought you something”—she handed him a newspaper clipping—“Thought you should see this.”

  DNA LAB FINED FOR FALSIFYING REPORTS

  The owner of the Phoenix Heredity Institute pleaded guilty to mail fraud yesterday for having falsely informed 152 clients in northern states that they were Hispanic.

  U.S. District Judge Stephanie Cervantes ordered the PHI to pay fines totaling fifty thousand dollars and to refund the victims’ money.

  Arturo Georgio, owner of the company, said that night-shift lab workers, as a prank, had decided to make purebred Scandinavian and German clients into Hispanics. “Those employees have all resigned,” he said.

  “We are all in favor of diversity,” said Judge Cervantes, “but this is not the way to achieve it.”

  I am an ordinary old white man of the soybean-raising north. I ran many races and never finished higher than third or fourth I thought I had sprung from the olive orchards of Spain No, I am a Great Lover lost on this vast frozen plain.