Pilgrims

by Garrison Keillor

  “The carabinieri have pulled up in front,” reported Wally. “I’m not talking that loud,” said Clint. “It’s the acoustics,” Irene hissed. The pilgrims got hold of Clint who kept saying, “I was not talking that loud!” and herded him out the doors and down the steps. Four officers of the law stood around the car labeled carabinieri, its blue lights flashing, and waited for further instructions. The pilgrims maneuvered Clint around behind a fountain, the one with naked nymphs and giant sea turtles.

  Arthur got confused about his directions—this was before we had GPS and Magellan and these Australian women guiding us around the backroads—and he saw a café all lit up called Lilies of the Valley Café and she said, “Stop right here.” And she went in and came out with two big bags of food. It was a Chinese café run by Christians and the owners had felt that the Lord was about to send special visitors, and when Ruthie walked in, they emptied their larder and gave her buckets of Kung Pao chicken and Chinese barbecued ribs and a rather spicy shrimp dish, a whole gallon of it.

  Arthur and Ruthie were new to Chinese food, but this was divinely sent for their refreshment, and they chewed on the ribs as Arthur drove, and they tore into the shrimp dish, which scorched their palates, but still, they knew it was God’s Will that they partake. They drove on, in tears, sobbing from acid reflux, trying to fathom what God was showing them, thinking they might be the first martyrs to perish from seasoning, and then Arthur slammed on the brakes and there in the road stood a fifteen-foot alligator.

  Arthur pulled over and Ruthie said, “Thank you, Jesus. Thy Will be done, Lord.” The gator stood twenty feet away, blinking its big yellow eyes, flexing its claws. She cried out, “Lord, Thy Will be done and if I am to join You today in heavenly glory, I give praise for it.” When she opened the car door, the gator smelled the food in the car and lumbered over and Arthur rolled down the window and tossed out the big bag of ribs and the bucket of spicy shrimp and the gator scarfed it all down and stood motionless for a long moment and groaned a mighty groan as if something powerful were underway in his lower digestive tract. He lay down and ate some grass and he gave Ruthie a baleful look where she stood praying for her deliverance into Glory at the Lord’s right hand, and the gator gagged a few times, and then his bowels opened, and he slid away leaving behind a trail of greenish scat. It was Arthur who noticed the slip of paper poking out of a pool of green poop, and it was Ruthie who picked it up. It said “At all times, let us give thanks, and again I say unto you, let us give thanks.” And on the other side, “Lilies of the Valley, noon to 9 P.M., M–Sat. Free delivery.”

  Irene poked Mr. Keillor who stood a few feet from Clint, writing quickly in his notebook. “That’s not for you,” she said. “Leave it alone. For crying out loud.”

  “So what happened to these people?” said Lyle. “I don’t think I ever met them.”

  “They never returned to Lake Wobegon. The experience convinced Ruthie that God could not be known through the language of men, only by miraculous revelation, and they left the Sanctified Brethren and settled in Florida and became sun worshippers. Someone ran into them a few years ago and they looked like petrified people except they could walk and talk. Their skin was dark brown and horny and crinkly like an alligator’s. And that’s all I know. I suppose they’re dead. This was years ago.”

  By now, they had scooted across the piazza under their umbrellas to an outdoor café and were drinking red wine and they clapped for Clint as the story came to an end. A heckuva story, with nudity, religion, marriage, mysticism, gator poop, and Chinese takeout in one tale. It was still raining hard, but it didn’t matter. Their long table was covered by two tan canvas umbrellas twelve feet in diameter as the rain poured down. The big menu card posted on the sidewalk showed pictures of the entrees, in case you didn’t know what lasagne was. Carl ordered two bottles of Amarone. “It’s our wedding anniversary,” he said, and everyone clapped. “Speech! Speech!” said Wally. “Don’t tell us everything!” said Daryl. The waiter brought a chocolate cake with HAPPY ANNIVERSARY MARGIE & CARL in green icing. Eloise’s doing, judging by her proprietary air. She snatched the knife from the waiter and cut twelve slabs and flopped them onto pie plates and ordered a gallon of vanilla ice cream. “Presto!” she cried. “Or pronto!”

  Daryl rose to make a toast. “I grew up on a farm where nobody would ever talk about what a good year they had, if they had a good year, which sometimes they did, despite themselves. It was considered bad luck to celebrate. It was too much like boasting. So there was plenty of grumbling and grousing, fretting and fuming, bellyaching, wailing, and gnashing of teeth, and lots of sarcasm and ridicule and caustic comment, but they’d never admit success. My dad was a dark Norwegian, don’t you know. Failure was inevitable. No such thing as progress. A good year just meant the postponement of disaster. The posse is going to catch up with you eventually. That’s the philosophy we all grew up with.”

  “Get to the point,” said Marilyn. “Don’t give us your life story.”

  “So we tried to escape from that, and brought up our kids to believe in creativity and self-expression and being happy. My dad, if there was something I said I wanted, he’d say, ‘People in hell want ice water.’ That was his philosophy: You want it, you’re not going to get it. I wasn’t brought up to be happy, I was brought up to do the right thing. But if you did the right thing, you weren’t praised for it, you weren’t allowed to feel good about it, because there was no such thing as success. Success was just the postponement of disaster. My kids are happier than I was. Lois sent me a picture of her with her friends in her backyard in Santa Barbara, flowering bushes under the trees and a table with white linen and a platter of salmon with dill and lemon and whole-wheat couscous and her crusty bread rolls with chunks of brie—”

  Marilyn: “Wind it up, pal.”

  “And we always worry about Lois and why doesn’t she have a husband and kids by now, and here she is with four others, all of them tanned and grinning and raising their glasses, and they’re happy, damn it, and they know it and they dare to be happy instead of grumbling and grousing the way I do and the way so many of us do.”

  Marilyn: “Just make the damn toast.”

  He raised his glass. “I’m only saying, congratulations to Carl and Margie for a great marriage and I wish you happiness.” He sat down, to murmurs of agreement.

  “Let’s hear from the bride and groom,” said Marilyn.

  Carl and Margie looked at each other. She said, “We’ve been accused of having a great marriage. What do you have to say?” He said, “You go first.”

  She was feeling good about the red wine. A hearty Italian red wine and it did something for her that coffee could not. Her chest was filled with warmth, her head with light. She felt almost emboldened to stand up and sing

  When the world seems to shine like you’ve had too much wine

  That’s amore… .

  Instead, she stood up and told the story of Darlene and the Saskatchewan man she met on WebMatch who drove down to meet her for dinner and how could you deny a guy willing to drive 1,100 miles for the privilege of meeting you? His name was Orville Bledsoe and he had enormous eyebrows and wore a green plaid sport coat with suspenders and had a belly on him big as an anvil. But she went out for dinner with him at the Moonlite Bay Supper Club and it was clear that he loved her. He was too shy to say so, but he did. He was humming to himself and winking and blushing and he wrote “Sweetheart” on his napkin and passed it to her. But she couldn’t love those eyebrows or that enormous gut. He talked about how wonderful Saskatchewan was and his house on the creek and his six dogs and his snowmobile and she could tell he was imagining her living there with him and it simply wasn’t going to be. She said good night, grateful that he didn’t lunge at her, and when he called at midnight she let it go to voice mail. “I hope you had as good a time as I did,” he whispered. “You are magnificent.” She met him for breakfast the next morning and brought two loaves of banana bread as a goingaway gift.
He stood by his pickup truck and said good-bye and he knew that this was good-bye and that all of his hints about taking a fishing trip to the Yukon were for naught and his heart was broken, he knew she was the love of his life and there would be no other, so his eyes were full of tears, and just above were those eyebrows. Actually one continuous eyebrow, like his head had cracked and someone had put a strip of black tape across it. He put a hand on her shoulder and leaned in to kiss her, that big hard belly up against her, and she turned her head and his lips grazed her cheek and she felt his teardrops land on her cheek. Burning hot tears. It left a red mark.

  Marilyn took out a hanky and wiped her eyes. Eloise was crying too.

  “What are you trying to say?” said Daryl, pouring himself another glass of wine. They had finished off the two bottles of Amarone and Carl was looking around for the waiter.

  “I think it’s sort of a miracle when two people get together, even if you have all the usual problems—you have to remember what a miracle it was that started you out. Two people joining up and worried they’re making a huge mistake but they have all the right ideas about making a feast of love—”

  “Hogwash,” said Irene. She stood up. “I’ve had two glasses of wine,” she said, “so take that into account, but—you remember my brother Richard. What a bookworm he was, and girls scared him to death. He was brilliant, went to Carleton, then Berkeley, loved San Francisco, lived in the Sunset neighborhood, and everyone assumed he was gay, especially gay men, but he wasn’t. Every day, some beautiful man would make eyes at my brother, touch his arm, ask him out for coffee, compliment him on his hair, but all the time he was longing to speak to a young woman who always sat at her laptop in the corner of a coffee shop called The Beanery and never looked up. He was afraid to walk over and introduce himself because he was thirty years older, maybe more. He gazed at her from across the room, and drank espresso until his stomach burned. Finally, in a torment of jealousy because a young bearded man sat down next to her and spoke to her, he followed her home, got her name off the mailbox, and arranged for a Poetry Telegram—a messenger dressed up like Dionysus in a golden tunic and sandals, with golden hair, knocked at her door, as Richard watched from across the street and when she opened it, the messenger cried, ‘Come live with me and be my love midst valleys, woods, and fields, and we will all the pleasures prove that this brief summer yields!’ and opened a box and released five hundred golden butterflies that flew up in a cloud, and he had the card with Richard’s name on it, but she didn’t care, she put her arms around the god and cried, told him how much it meant to her, and invited him up. Richard stood across the street for two and a half hours. He saw them in her apartment window and then it went dark. That was four years ago and he is still in love with her.”

  Daryl held up his hand. “And the moral of the story is what?”

  “Don’t count on it. It can go either way. At any time. What you call love and romance may just be the cosmos playing games with you.”

  Evelyn shook her head. “What?” said Irene. Evelyn snorted and looked away. “Say your piece,” said Irene.

  Evelyn stood up and looked up and down the table and said, “This may surprise you, but my first husband—”

  Her first husband? Did she say “my first husband”?

  “She was married to a guy in Willmar for a year,” said Wally.

  “Three months,” said Evelyn. “Anyway, he loved repairing radios, and he was good at it, too. I didn’t know until I married him that his house was full of radios. We courted on the porch; he never invited me inside. We were married by a justice of the peace in Morris and we drove home at top speed and into the house we went and I was expecting him to—well, you know what I was expecting. But what he wanted to show me was how he’d rigged up a battery-powered radio you could use to turn another radio on. It was the forerunner of the remote. He was thrilled by this. ‘Look,’ he said—I was standing there in my slip and garters—‘you can turn it on without getting out of bed.’ And he explained how it worked. It took him awhile and by that time I was naked as a jaybird and lying in bed, but it didn’t matter to him. He wanted me to know what a great thing he’d done. And then he had to demonstrate it. Except it didn’t work. Which, of course, got him going, trying to fix it. He got out his screwdriver and took it apart and fussed with it for a while, and didn’t notice that I’d gotten out of bed and dressed. I said, ‘I’m going to my mother’s for awhile.’ ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘I’ll have this fixed in a jiffy.’ ‘Take your time,’ I said, and I went to Mother’s. Heard from him a month later. He’d gone to Chicago to buy parts. I don’t know where he went from there. I got the marriage annulled three months later and married Walter.”

  “I know nothing about electronics,” said Wally. “That was a selling point right there.”

  Margie’s cell phone rang. She got it out of her pocket. Mr. Keillor was calling her. Where was he? He had not come across the piazza with them.

  “Oh God, no, don’t answer it, let him stew in his own juices,” said Irene, but Margie did. “Where are you?” she said. “You disappeared. We’re at a café in the Piazza Navona. Come and join us.”

  Mr. Keillor had been taken into custody by the police. He had tried to explain that it was not he who was shouting a ribald story in the church, but they shushed him and told him that he could either spend the night in jail with the pickpockets and male prostitutes, or he could pay his fine there and then. Two hundred euros. That’s why he was calling. He had no money or identification. His billfold had been stolen inside the church.

  Margie explained his predicament to the pilgrims and put a fifty-euro bill in an empty breadbasket and passed it. Irene put in a five and Wally a ten. “Oh come on, people. Give it up. It’s only money.” Daryl put in fifty and Father Wilmer forty and then Clint dropped in a hundred and headed off in the rain, ransom in hand, to rescue the poor man from prison.

  The waiter brought two big bowls of olives and a basket of bread and poured olive oil onto a plate to dip the bread in.

  “I would like to make a speech,” said Father Wilmer. He rose unsteadily to his feet and grasped the table. “It was three years ago when my sister Willa was supposed to come up from Chicago to visit. The weepy one with the hammertoes. I love her dearly, but you have to keep your distance with her or she’ll take over your life. I was a little worried because she was talking about wanting to leave Chicago and what it means to be family and how we have to stick together as we get older. So I was afraid she was thinking about moving in with me. A week before she was due, I was driving back from giving Last Rites for the fourteenth time to Mr. Hudepohl and I ran into a big buck on the county road coming past Hansen’s. He leaped up into my headlights and whammo, the airbag blew up big and pink and I slammed into it and the car slid into the ditch. I sat there in shock and Frank Sinatra was singing—

  I’ve got you under my skin

  I’ve got you deep in the heart of me

  “The impact turned the radio on. And then the airbag deflated and I was looking into the big brown eyes of a dead deer, his head had bashed through the windshield, his antlers had missed me by inches. My cell phone rang and it was Willa, saying, ‘Where are you? You said you’d call me an hour ago. I’ve been worried sick. Why can’t you call if you say you’re going to call? All I’m asking for is a little consideration.’ And then she heard Frank singing and she said, ‘Are you in a bar?’ And that was how I got Lyme disease. I was laid up with aches and a high fever and the doctor said it must be the flu that’s going around except this didn’t go around, it stayed put. It took six months out of my life.” He stopped and looked down at the olives and cleared his throat.

  Out of the night that covers me,

  Black as the Pit from pole to pole,

  I am the master of my fate;

  I am the captain of my soul.

  “Or something like that… . I forgot what I was going to say,” he said.

  “Maybe it’ll come to you later,”
said Carl.

  “No, you know what you were going to say,” said Eloise. “Tell them what you told me last night.” He looked at her, blushing.

  She said, “Father fell in love with that nurse who took care of him. Suzanne. And he’s still in love with her and she’s waiting for him to decide what he’s going to do about it.”

  They sat, stunned by the news. Their priest, deliberating whether to pull off the collar and be flesh and blood like the rest of them.

  “I’m not good enough for her, I know that,” he murmured. “We don’t want to rush into anything.” He was in tears. Suzanne made him bacon spinach salad with vinaigrette dressing and latte with a touch of caramel. She was a gentle woman who wrote poems in a journal with an Elliot Porter photograph of a tree on each left-hand page. She sat at his bedside and sang to him as she played a guitar, and before his afternoon nap she read Thackeray to him, and every night she poured him a glass of chardonnay with overtones of fescue, goldenrod, meadowlark, and Gorgonzola. And then one night she crawled into bed beside him and said, “Is this okay?” It was more than okay. It was truly splendid.

  Father confessed all. He’d been to a therapist who gave him a test—he flashed slides on the wall and you said what you felt about each one, dread, fear, mild dismay, and so forth. “I suffer from demophobia, or fear of crowds,” said Father. “Also, monophobia, the fear of being alone. And theophobia, the fear of God. I am the last person in the world who should be in the priesthood. The absolute last! I am scared in the pulpit, and scared at night in the rectory, and also I think God is going to punish me for being a bad priest.” Suzanne was his great consolation. She was unmarried, 47, smart, sweet, and they liked to go for rides in her car and take pictures of old deserted farm sites. To avoid suspicion, they rendezvoused on a deserted stretch of country road near Holdingford and he parked his car in a dry creekbed and covered it with branches. He wanted to marry her but she was agnostic and felt very guilty about keeping company with a Catholic, what with the church’s long history of persecution and intolerance.