Lake Wobegon Summer 1956

by Garrison Keillor

  He left this sentence hanging for the crowd to contemplate, while he bent over and whispered to Earl, and then he said, “And what would a family be without love?

  “That’s where it all starts, doesn’t it.”

  The crowd was dreading what was to come. And sure enough, it was “Let Me Call You Sweetheart,” and with the first notes of that moldy old song, the audience started to get restive and the folks in back started migrating toward the refreshments. The Happy Hoofer in the green-striped camp chair was pretty burned up. He had been huffing to himself and now he yelled something at the stage, something pretty rough, and he struggled to his feet, cursing. He had been nipping at a beverage of some sort and was glassy-eyed and cotton-mouthed but he managed to tell Jim Dandy to go to hell and the sooner the better. The brother-in-law tried to pull him back down but the Hoofer wasn’t having any of it. He told the Doo Dads they were the sorriest piece of business he’d seen in his life and an insult to the town and as for singing, he’d heard drunks in a bar do better than this and how dare they sing the national anthem—he’d never seen any of them around the Legion—no, sir—and had they been to Korea or Okinawa or Guadalcanal or the Philippines? Frankly he doubted it. Buncha draft-dodgers standing up there making fun of this country.

  The crowd was awestruck. Simply awestruck. They had never seen anybody do this before, stand up and yell at people at the microphone.

  The brother-in-law said to me, “He’s gone through a lot lately.”

  And then the Hoofer bent down and pulled off his shoe and cocked his arm and pegged it straight at Jim Dandy, hard, and it caromed off the mike and konked him hard on the noggin.

  “You had no cause to do that,” said Jim Dandy. “No cause. We’re doing our best up here.” He bent and picked up the shoe and flung it high in the air, out into the crowd. “You’re drunk and you better sit down before you fall down.”

  The Hoofer said he’d rather be a little drunk than an idiot by birth like Jim Dandy. He offered to come up on stage and knock his teeth down his throat.

  “I think it’s time for your friends to calm you down, mister.” But Jim Dandy was looking out in the crowd to where the man’s shoe was being passed slowly forward. It was a big brown shoe and people laughed to see it go by. A woman in the front row handed it to the Hoofer, and he wound up again, as if to throw, and Jim Dandy ducked, and the crowd hooted and clapped. Having sat in the hot sun and endured the Doo Dads, now here was some entertainment at last. The Hoofer turned and took a deep bow and there was heavy applause, far beyond what had been heard previously. The Hoofer bowed again, deeply, and whipped the shoe between his legs and hit Jim Dandy just below the belt, and J.D. leaped off the stage onto the man and grabbed him around the neck and they rolled around in the grass for a minute, punching and kneeing each other, until several men stepped in and pulled them apart, and the Hoofer got the last punch and clipped J.D. in the beezer and drew blood. J.D. looked shell-shocked.

  “You fight about as well as you sing, ya big nancy,” the Hoofer yelled. He was having the time of his life. It was his big day. “No wonder the Army wouldn’t draft ya. You’re nuthin’ but a cake-eater! “ And he turned away in sheer triumph and a Legion guy popped up on stage and yelled “How about a big hand for the Doo Dads, ladies and gentlemen!” and there was a very small shriveled shaky hand for the Doo Dads, and then we all turned around and hightailed it out of there, every single one of us.

  That afternoon, Ding made a speech in the dugout before the game. He said, “Gentlemen! Listen up. Some of you apparently are hard-of-hearing, so pardon me if I repeat myself. We have certain rules on this team and let me bring these to your attention.

  “Number one. There is no gambling by any player on any game in which he is engaged! This goes for every last one of you. Don’t let me hear otherwise or your butt will be out the door faster than you can say Grandma Moses.

  “Number two. Drinking in the dugout. Let’s keep it down to a minimum. If you can’t remember how many strikes are on you, you’ve had too much. Remember what happened last year. I’m referring to the occasions when someone took a swing and the bat went sailing into deep center field. Let us have an understanding on this matter. A wooden bat in the hands of a drunk is a lethal weapon.

  “Spitting. A little ptui is fine but I don’t want to look up and see you guys standing around with a couple quarts of brown stuff squirting out of you. That stuff kills grass, especially if you’ve been drinking. Use the coffee can in the dugout. Please. That’s what it’s there for.

  “Profanity. I’m hearing much too much of it on the field. Put a damper on it. This is a family game. Let’s not be throwing cuss words and dirty talk around in front of small children. And let’s have a little less grabbing your crotch out there. You get set in the batter’s box and right away you gotta reach down for the family jewels. Some of you guys reach down there so much, it’s surprising you still got two of em left. If there are adjustments to be made in the gonad department, take care of it in the dugout. Let’s not look like a bunch of savages and sexual perverts. Okay, let’s go play ball.”

  And they did, and that afternoon, Roger set down the Freeport Flyers 4-1 and looked every bit the up-and-comer and future Yankee, the way he strode on to the field, the sureness of his warm-up pitches, the cocky way with the resin bag, everything bespoke great confidence.

  After the game, he climbed up to the press box, his hair soaked, a sweatshirt around his neck, his elbow wrapped in a towel, and Jim Dandy poured him three fingers of whiskey in a Dixie cup.

  “There was one of those scouts here today,” J.D. said. “Little sawed-off guy, dark glasses, in a nifty blue blazer. Stuck around for three innings. He was taking notes and he was looking at you, buddy.”

  “My fastball didn’t get going until the fourth inning.”

  “It looked good from up here.”

  “The change-up was getting them, though.”

  “And that’s your money pitch, the change-up.”

  “How did your show go today?” said Roger. “I had to miss it.”

  “It went great. Crowd went nuts. We did five songs and they went nuts for every one.” He glanced at me. “That old hometown loyalty. There’s nothing like it.”

  By six that evening, families had staked out the best vantage points on the lakeshore and were deep into the bratwurst and beer, there was smoke and mustard and the sweetness of malt and hops in the air, and a double Ferris wheel turned and a merry-go-round in the middle of Main Street and folks in the buckets of the Tilt-a-Whirl hurtled past the windows of Skoglund’s Five & Dime store and the Mercantile. Kids tore up and down the sidewalks, gangs of girls stalked gangs of boys, waving their sparklers. Grandmas and grandpas promenaded on the sidewalks, and little boys darted out of the shadows to throw firecrackers at their feet and see the old folks jump, which some did and others were too deaf to notice. Kids raced up and down the beach, kids splashed in the water. A motorboat skimmed past with a girl in a red two-piece suit on skis. People turned and looked. Nobody from here, that’s for sure. David Magendanz, who had just lost the blueberry-pie-eating contest to a fireman from Millet, thirteen pies to eleven, walked slowly by, stunned, red-faced, wondering if he was really going to do what he felt like he was about to do, and if he was, where should he go to do it. There were several exciting dogfights and rumors of a gang from the Cities, youths with shaved heads and teeth filed to sharp points, riding motorcycles, swinging tire chains, but they were nowhere to be seen. At dusk, the fireworks team of the Volunteer Fire Department headed out on the lake in two pontoon boats lashed together, big cartons of bombs and rockets on deck. They anchored in the bay, and dark figures climbed around on deck with flashlights. Roger and Kate and I were parked in the Pontiac behind Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery, facing the lake, me in the back seat, him kissing her.

  “I should probably be on my way,” I said.

  He put his arm around Kate and got her crushed up next to him, his arm tigh
t around her, and he kissed her hard. I said that I’d be running along and hoped they’d have a nice evening. Neither of them tried to persuade me to stay. In fact, I wasn’t sure they knew I was there. It didn’t seem that they did.

  Something was going on lower down, on the trouser level, and Kate whimpered, and he got more excited and shifted himself to the edge of the seat, almost facing her, and put his head down and started kissing the front of her.

  It occurred to me that I might wish to stay and observe and take notes.

  Her left shoulder was bare now. He had undone the buttons and she was working on his shirt and his hands were busy below and he was saying, O God my God I love you you are so beautiful, and his mouth was all over her face and neck and she lifted up a little and I believe he slipped her skirt off her and his hands were working away in that area.

  It occurred to me now that if I opened the door I might shock them both and make him mad at me. So I sat tight.

  We were parked by Ralph’s garbage cans, about a hundred feet from the water, and in front of us a little crowd of families sat on blankets on the dirt under the maple and poplar trees, the kids waving little sparklers. Roger now seemed to have lowered his trousers and she was doing something to him that made him particularly joyful.

  I was not certain what I should do. Whether to stay or to leave. I tried easing the door open and the handle made a big clunk. I scrunched down and tried not to look at them. Visions of Uncle Sugar came to mind. My great patron, the giver of gifts, the man who made me a published writer. I knew what he wanted of me—to throw the door open and run and find him and tell him—and I could not do that. Roger’s head had now disappeared below the seat back and Kate was helping him unhitch her bra and she tossed it over her shoulder and it landed beside me and now the pace of things started to pick up, the murmuring and the moaning, it sounded like a race to the finish line, and that was when the first rocket went up and then a volley of rockets, shooting straight up into the cosmos, rockets whipping in low trajectories across the water, mighty booms and phosphorus showers of yellow and green and red and lilac, and a bomb went off that lit up the interior of the car, and Kate gasped, and I heard him say, “Let’s get out of here and go someplace.” And he yanked on his pants, and I eased the door open and dropped out onto the ground and crawled away, and the Pontiac roared, and he threw it into reverse, and backed up, the rear door hanging wide open, and he raced away as the orange Chinese Fountain went up and Eruption of Vesuvius, the Shelling of the Emperor’s Palace and Destruction of Peking, and finally the finale, the Cascades of Liberty, spluttered into the lake.

  As the crowd turned away, a storm front slipped into town. It got cool fast, and lightning flashed to the west, and then, as the crowds broke and hightailed it home, the rains came down, sheets of rain, and I galloped the last block along Green Street in the rain, and up the sidewalk, the porch lit up, a waterfall from the eaves, a steady thrumming on the roof.

  Daddy had come home after the parade, avoiding the Doo Dads debacle, and watched the fireworks from the front steps. He wanted to be where he could see if a stray rocket landed on our roof and get up there with a hose before the whole house was reduced to smoking cinders and his family became a clutch of paupers begging for charity in the streets. The rain took a big load off his mind.

  “It was the best fireworks ever,” said Mother. She had watched with Flo, sitting on a blanket in the park.

  —I saw you with Kate and Roger, she said. What are they up to? You should have invited them over.

  —They had other plans.

  —Did they go out afterward?

  —Yes.

  —They say where they were going?

  —Not to me they didn’t. They were in a hurry.

  —Uncle Sugar asked me if you knew and I said I’d ask. Is there something you’re not telling?

  —About what?

  She sighed and went back behind her newspaper. “I meant to tell you,” she said. “They arrested Ricky and Dede. At Yellowstone Park.”

  The young lovers had hitchhiked to Yellowstone and decided to see Old Faithful, and while they sat and waited for the geyser to go up, a woman recognized them, and park rangers arrested them, and they were to be flown back to Minnesota, and Ricky might be charged with kidnapping and auto theft.

  “Well, at least they didn’t get shot to death,” said Mother. “Thank God.”

  She resumed reading, and a moment later she said, “It’s good that they can get away and relax.”

  “Ricky and Dede?”

  “Ike and Mamie.”

  Ike and Mamie were vacationing in Colorado and Ike went fishing in a creek, old man in rubber waders, up to his waist, casting, a long-billed cap on his old bald head.

  Kate and Roger were relaxing somewhere. Lying naked in some secret place along the lake, their great frenzy spent, holding hands, looking up at the sky. I wasn’t going to tell anybody, I knew that, even though Grandpa looked down from heaven at the iniquity of the thing and was trying to get my attention and get me to do the right thing, I was not going to do it, and that was that. Rain gurgled in the downspouts and whispered in the grass, a car whished down the wet black street.

  22

  The Del Ray

  The Doo Dads, in their white suits and white bucks and black shirts and white ties, are swaying in unison, doing a finger-poppin version of “My Girl” at the fashionable Del Ray Ballroom (“You’re A-OK at the Del Ray”), and Kate and I are dancing, close, her head on my left shoulder, my face in her neck, my nose grazing the short hairs.

  Her skin so soft and fair

  My face buried in her hair

  I don’t care if I ever go home

  I could spend the night alone

  With My Girl

  All my old friends—out the door

  All the things I did before

  Ever since she took my hand

  I’ve been living in the land

  Of My Girl

  “Take me out on the veranda,” she whispers, and we step outdoors into the glittering summer night, a long trail of light etched from the moon across Lake Elmo to us, and she whispers, “You’re driving me mad, the way you put your lips on my neck. Making me think crazy thoughts. There’s a whole wild side of me that nobody knows. Except you.”

  The Doo Dads are singing inside, and we slip behind a potted palm and we kiss, her tongue fluttering in my mouth, and she says, “I want to be yours. Tonight.”

  “We can’t. We’re cousins.”

  “We’re not really,” she whispers. Our faces an inch apart, our eyes meet unblinking. She says, “I’m adopted. Mother told me. Last week. I was left in a basket on the parsonage steps. My daddy was an Indian and my mama was a minister’s daughter. Or so they think.”

  A few minutes later, we stand in the shadows beside the bathhouse. In the lighted windows of the ballroom, our friends go on dancing.

  “Maybe we’re too young to be in love,” I say. “Maybe we should wait.”

  And she tugs on her zipper and her dress falls into the sand and she drops her bra and steps out of her panties. “Be naked with me,” she says. So I follow suit. She leads me into the warm water and we float together and paddle lazily out to the diving dock and embrace in its shadows, her proud young breasts pressed against me.

  “God created our bodies, what is the sin in enjoying them?” she says.

  “What if they find out?” I say, my manhood thickening.

  She kisses me hard and I grab hold of her firm young buttocks and our bodies meet and then she gasps as we are united and she moans and thrusts against me, my hardness inside her, and she thrusts again and again and again and now her fingernails are deep in my back and her teeth in my lower lip as her body trembles violently and she throws her head back and shrieks—

  I could not decide what she should shriek. I left it unfinished.

  The big sister came home the day after the Fourth, in a state of anguish. She had gone off to a Bible confer
ence in the Apostle Islands on Lake Superior with Uncle LeRoy and Aunt Lois and, as Sanctified Brethren liked to do on car trips, Lois and the sister rolled up Gospel tracts in bright yellow or red or blue cellophane and tossed them out by rural mailboxes so that when folks came to get their mail they’d see the shiny thing on the ground, unwrap it, and read the tract, entitled Where Will You Spend Eternity? and be convicted of their sins and accept the Lord as their personal Saviour. LeRoy, as the driver, was exempt from this duty. As they drove along, Lois and the sister tossed out a few hundred tracts, and then LeRoy started kidding them and referred to it as “gospel bombing,” and made a whistling and exploding sound when Lois tossed one, and if he saw a farmer up ahead he’d yell, “Git him! Git that sucker!” and step on the gas, which the sister felt was not behavior that glorified the Lord, and then, after fifty miles or so, as tedium set in, Lois gave up tossing tracts and sat in a stupor listening to the radio, a worldly station, not a Christian one, and the poor sister was left with sole responsibility for the souls of the people of northern Wisconsin. Before, she’d been tossing only to the left side of the car, and now she was responsible for both sides, and LeRoy was driving too fast for accurate tract-tossing, 70 and 75 mph. She planted herself in the middle of the back seat, wraping the tracts as fast as she could, and threw left and right as they flew past mailboxes; meanwhile, LeRoy and Lois were playing the Alphabet Game and 20 Questions in the front seat as if it were a joyride. The car was hot, the seats sticky, the road a narrow concrete ribbon with asphalt seams that thumped on the tires, and when a semi went by, it almost blew them into the ditch, and somewhere around Hayward, the sister simply felt she couldn’t throw one more tract. She begged LeRoy to stop so she could rest and he said, “We’ll stop in a little while,” and kept right on driving. She was so tired she couldn’t make her arm throw and she slumped in the seat, her head resting against the window, and up ahead she saw a man standing at a mailbox looking at mail. She prayed for strength to throw one more tract, and she sat, arms limp at her sides, as he flew past and she caught a glimpse of his face and it was a face full of weariness with sin and hunger for the Gospel. This man in Hayward, Wisconsin, might die and face an eternity in hellfire because she was unable to bestir herself and throw out the lifeline of Good News.