Pilgrims

by Garrison Keillor

  “Are you happy?” he said.

  She said she was, knowing from experience that when your lover asks you if you’re happy, you shouldn’t wait too long to answer. If you think about it and do the math, count your blessings, assess your griefs, come up with a projection, an adjusted net total, he will be hurt and after ten seconds he’ll ask what’s wrong and when you say, Nothing, he’ll say, Yes, something is wrong, terribly wrong, and he’ll go veering off into horrible Minnesota self-accusation—I’ve failed you. I am a bad husband, a lousy lover, a failure as a father, a discredit to my race. I deserve to be dragged through the dirt and hurled into outer darkness—so she said, “Yes.”

  “Are you really?”

  And she was. At that moment she was. He fell asleep in her happiness and gently she extricated herself from his arms and padded downstairs. There was a full moon and the snowy lawns of Lake Wobegon glimmered in the dark. A man in a white leather jacket trimmed with fur who for a moment she imagined was Gussie walked down the street. He walked with a long stride for one who was walking on ice and his head was up and he appeared to be singing.

  EPILOGUE

  The story done, the pilgrims gone

  Back across the Atlantic ocean

  To shaded street and house and lawn,

  Familiar objects of devotion,

  And yet, nearby the Pantheon,

  Walks Marjorie Krebsbach here and there,

  Wearing white, her locomotion

  Undetected in the crowded square,

  The buses and the packed cafés.

  She drifts by, her dark hair

  Tied in a coral clip, amazed

  Still by the perpetual ordinary

  Yik-yak of Italian days,

  The usual fare and the customary

  Rattle and hum of things,

  The coffee and chocolate, and rosemary

  And oregano and thyme seasonings

  Of that enormous pizza that the waiter

  With the long nose and sweet smile brings

  To the tourists. It is the liberator

  Of Rome—Gussie, twenty-three—

  Permitted by his Creator

  To fly the underworld and be

  Mortal for one week of the year.

  He smiles at her: “Marjorie,

  Welcome. What brings you here?”

  “To find love,” she replies.

  “I died for love, my dear.”

  “I know.”

  “It was a surprise,

  Of course. I was enjoying a paradise

  Of passion, her lips, her warm thighs,

  And what I’d been led to think was a vice

  Was rather delicious. Then good-bye

  And out the door. The patch of ice

  Was there. I slipped and my

  Feet flew up, my head hit the ground,

  And I proceeded to die,

  And now I lie beneath a burial mound.

  And in honesty I must admit

  That in sixty years I haven’t found

  A reason for my early exit

  Other than pure divine comedy.

  Would you care for chocolate?”

  “Why yes, I would,” said she.

  He broke a Hershey bar in two.

  “Remember a farmer named Ivar Quie?”

  He said, “A bachelor too.

  An old Norwegian, cold and sour,

  Who married late and who

  Carved gargoyles of horrific power

  To put all rivals to flight,

  Meanwhile Alison, his spring flower,

  Put her red dress on and bright

  Jewels and rouged her face aglow

  And went a-dancing one night

  In town, where he refused to go.

  She was the beauty of that town—

  Him they did not care to know

  With his red eyes and wooden frown.

  They knew his ferocious jealousy

  And when in her red gown

  She laughed and made free

  With her conversation, they knew

  Enough to carefully

  Dance a polka or two

  With her. Never a waltz. But one

  Night a man who was new

  In town danced with Alison,

  Not seeing, at the window, Ivar’s face

  As he turned, dashed home for his gun.

  The train whistle blew and he raced

  It to the crossing and came close

  But finished in second place

  And for years thereafter his ghost

  Followed her from café to hotel

  To bedrooms coast-to-coast

  And suffering the pangs of hell

  Whenever she was kissed

  Or sung to or touched or fell

  Into someone’s arms, he raised his fist

  And screeched his fiery breath.

  I am not St. John the Evangelist

  Nor steeped in wisdom, not yet,

  But I know this to be true:

  Either we love or we die a living death.

  We take one or the other avenue.

  And I took one, which I do not regret,

  And recommend it to you.”

  “I was cheated—” Margie began to cry.

  “Life has slipped through my hands.

  What can I do?” “So was I,

  Cheated of life, but here’s your chance

  To make your way anew

  And restore your lost romance.”

  She said, “Tell me what to do.”

  “Love can only be restored

  By practicing love. The daily labor

  Of love—offering it to the Lord

  And to yourself and to your neighbor.”

  And then he smiled and pointed toward

  The blue sky. “Everything you need

  To know, you know already.

  I wish you well. Godspeed.

  God give you a keen eye and steady

  Heart.” And he waved and walked on

  Into the crowd around the Pantheon,

  Past the man reading a book over his spaghetti,

  Wearing a shirt, LAKE WOBEGON.

  Mr. Keillor studied the poem, sipping his coffee at the counter of the Chatterbox as Darlene passed by with a fresh pot. “Warm that up for you?” she said. “No thanks,” he said, by which he meant “Yes, please,” and so she warmed it up for him. Thanks. He thought about maybe inserting himself in the poem as the stranger who dances with Alison and drives her jealous husband to suicide but decided not to, nor change the story of Margie and make himself Paolo—it wouldn’t work. In his youth he had written a few stories in which a tall dark woman was in love with him and called him “Sweet darling” and whispered “Touch me, touch me” and told him that he drove her to frenzies of longing and when his sister found the story she screamed with delight and read it aloud to her friends and they were convulsed with laughter. So he wrote a story about his sister in which she was riding her bike home as fast as she could to tell Mother that he was kissing a girl and was struck by a garbage truck and up to heaven she went, and there was Jesus. He said, “How was your trip up?” and she said, “Jesus, my brother tells lies and gets away with murder and I personally think you ought to give him a bad disease, to show him he can’t get away with that stuff. I just don’t understand how he can get away with everything and I’ve been good all my life and I wind up getting mashed by a truck. Why? Where is the justice in that?” And Jesus puts His arm around her and says, “You’re in heaven. Enjoy yourself.” And she says, “I just want to know why he gets everything his way and there I am crushed under a truck full of tin cans and coffee grounds and potato peelings. It’s not right!” And she stamps her foot, and suddenly she isn’t in heaven anymore. She’s in a waiting room. No windows, no magazines. People in the next room sobbing. It’s hell. No lake of fire but every ten years a hoofy man with red feathers comes out and says, “It’ll be just a few more minutes.” It was a blasphemous story, as she pointed out
to him when she found it, and she told him he had turned away from God and would never find his way back, and fifty years later he was still thinking that maybe she was right.

  It was nine o’clock on a Tuesday morning and he was an hour late for breakfast at his mother’s house and still he sat as the time drifted away. And then in came Carl and Margie and took off their coats and went back and sat in a booth by the window. She wore a nice long black coat, like a heroine in a Tolstoy novel, and he wore his old gray car coat. They sat across the table from each other and she looked into his face and he gazed out the window. Why doesn’t he turn toward her and take her hand and kiss it?

  He’s in love with her. You can see it in his face. He has the stupid look of a man in love. Women in love look beatific as if Botticelli had painted them. Men in love look as if someone clubbed them with a baseball bat. He’s in love but he should talk to her and tell her that we do have the power to remake our days into gardens of delight, and though we were raised to believe in adversity, now we’re older and we don’t have to think that anymore.

  So you’re ambivalent. So is everyone else. Is it a bad thing? Yes and no. We all contain contradictory feelings. But touch her arm and feel the little hairs tremble as your skin brushes against them. The goodness of life is all around you, even in April when the snow is slow to melt.

  And now, rising from the stool, he tries to catch Margie’s eye to say, Hi, it’s me. Remember? You introduced me at Thanatopsis. We went to Rome. But she is gazing at her husband the carpenter. He made love to her last night so tenderly. A miracle of the ordinary kind. Nature leads us in that direction even after it no longer has use for our sperm; for there is still the urge to make life beautiful. So that is why they don’t speak, because there is nothing more to be said. And Mr. Keillor now realizes that he has left his billfold, his car keys, his cell phone, and his cash in some other pocket than any in these jeans or this coat. They are gone. He has no memory of having seen them lately. He checks again and again. Nothing. Darlene watches from inside the servers’ window in the kitchen. He must now ask Darlene to put it on his account and then hike up the hill to Mother’s and try to figure it out from there, how he’ll get back to St. Paul before three o’clock when he is supposed to do something, he can’t remember what.

  About the Author

  Garrison Keillor lives in St Paul, Minnesota, home of A Prairie Home Companion, his radio show that has been on the air since 1974. He wrote and appeared in Robert Altman’s final film, A Prairie Home Companion, and is the author of many books including the Lake Wobegon novels, the most recent of which were Pontoon and Liberty.

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  Liberty

  Good Poems (editor)

  Pontoon

  Love Me

  Lake Wobegon Summer 1956

  Me: The Jimmy (Big Boy) Valente Story

  Wobegon Boy

  The Book of Guys

  Radio Romance

  We Are Still Married

  Leaving Home

  Lake Wobegon Days

  Happy to Be Here

  Copyright

  First published in 2009

  by Faber and Faber Ltd

  Bloomsbury House

  74–77 Great Russell Street

  London WC1B 3DA

  This ebook edition first published in 2010

  All rights reserved

  © Garrison Keillor, 2010

  The right of Garrison Keillor to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  ISBN 978–0–571–25244–2