Lake Wobegon Days Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  LAKE WOBEGON DAYS

  Garrison Keillor was born in Anoka, Minnesota, and is the host and writer of A Prairie Home Companion. He is the author of nine books, all published by Penguin, including Wobegon Boy and Lake Wobegon Summer 1956. A teacher at the University of Minnesota and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he lives in St. Paul with his wife and daughter.

  LAKE

  WOBEGON

  DAYS

  GARRISON

  KEILLOR

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario,

  Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124,

  Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park,

  New Delhi – 110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand

  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank,

  Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin Inc. 1985

  Published in Penguin Books 1986

  40 39

  Copyright © Garrison Keillor, 1985

  All rights reserved

  Portions of this book appeared originally in The Atlantic Monthly.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Keillor, Garrison.

  Lake Wobegon days.

  I. Title.

  [PS3561.E3755L3 1986b] 813’.54 86-798

  ISBN: 978-1-101-64028-9

  Printed in the United States of America

  Set in Janson Alternate

  Illustrations by Mike Lynch

  Courtesy of Groveland Gallery

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  PREFACE

  In the spring of 1974, I got $6000 from the New Yorker for writing a piece about the Grand Ole Opry, the most money I had ever seen, and so my wife and small son and I left home in St. Paul and got on the Empire Builder and headed for San Francisco to visit our friends, not knowing that this windfall would be most of my earnings for the year. I had never been west beyond Idaho, where I went to Bible conferences in my youth. We got a Pullman compartment and left Minneapolis late at night, awoke west of Fargo, watched the prairie roll by as we ate a good breakfast and lunch, and as the train headed into the northern Rockies, I sat in the bar car and took out a couple of stories from my briefcase and worked on them, a successful American author who provided good things for his family. In Sand Point, Idaho, late the second night, close to where the Bible conferences took place, we derailed coming through a freight yard. The train had slowed to a crawl so none of us were hurt—our Pullman car simply screeched and swayed and bumped along the ties a little way—and we packed our suitcase and climbed out. We stood around a long time in the dark and got on an old bus that smelled of engine fumes, and headed for Portland, where we would catch the southbound Coast Starlight for San Francisco. My wife dozed next to me, the little boy lay across our laps and slept, and I sat and thought about the extravagance of this trip, the foolishness—one stroke of good luck, the Opry story, and I was blowing a big wad of the proceeds on what? False luxury, which was now derailed. The motive was good, to try to put a little life and color into a disappearing marriage, but I thought about the expense as we chugged across Washington, and the magnificence of the Columbia valley was lost on me, and reaching Portland at last, I made up my mind to finish up the new stories right away and sell both of them to the New Yorker and cut my losses. An hour later, I lost them both in the Portland train station.

  I took my son to the men’s room and set the briefcase down while we peed and washed our hands, and then we went to the cafeteria for breakfast. A few bites into the scrambled eggs I remembered the briefcase, went to get it and it was gone. We had an hour before the southbound arrived. We spent it looking in every trash basket in the station, outside the station, and for several blocks around. I was sure that the thief, finding nothing but manuscripts in the briefcase, would chuck it, and I kept telling him to, but he didn’t chuck it where I could see it, and then our time was up and we climbed on the train. I felt so bad I didn’t want to look out the window. I looked straight at the wall of our compartment, and as we rode south the two lost stories seemed funnier and funnier to me, the best work I had ever done in my life; I wept for them, and my misery somehow erased them from mind so that when I got out a pad of paper a couple hundred miles later, I couldn’t re-create even a faint outline.

  To make me feel better, we trooped up to the dining car and ordered steaks all around and Manhattans for the grownups, which only made me worry about extravagance again, which now I was even less in a position to afford. By the time we got to San Francisco, the two stories loomed as two lost landmarks of American comic prose, a loss to the entire nation, and I was ready to go home.

  Our California friends were sympathetic and encouraging, and so were my friends in Minnesota when we got home two weeks later. People always are encouraging about a terrible loss, so that sometimes the loser would like to strangle them. People tell you about other writers who lost stories, Hemingway, Carlyle, great men who triumphed over misfortune—“You’ll go on and write something even better,” they say, not knowing how good those stories were. I still have the two three-by-five file cards on which, bumping along on the train, I wrote everything I could remember about the stories: one is entitled “Lucky Man” and the notes describe a man who feels fortunate despite terrible things that happen to him. Even now, looking at it, I faintly recall what a fine work it was. The other is entitled “Lake Wobegon Memoir,” and the notes are sparse: “Clarence and Arlene Bunsen,” “the runaway car,” “Wednesday night prayer meeting,” and “Legion club dance” are the extent of it. The lost story shone so brilliantly in dim memory that every new attempt at it looked pale and impoverished before I got to the first sentence.

  I started a radio show in July, “A Prairie Home Companion,” a live musical-variety show like the Opry. I struggled on as a writer, started a novel that stumbled along for a thousand pages and then tipped over dead. My wife and I split up in 1976. Somehow the r
adio show kept going, perhaps because I had no illusion that I was good at it, and I brought in Lake Wobegon as the home of a weekly monologue, hoping that one Saturday night, standing on stage, I would look into the lights and my lost story would come down the beam and land in my head. Eleven years later, I am still waiting for it.

  It has been a good run and I’m a very lucky man, I think. One pretty good idea for gainful employment eleven years ago is still my livelihood, thanks to my longtime colleagues, Margaret Moos, William H. Kling, Lynne Cruise, and Richard (“Butch”) Thompson, all patrons of the lost cause of live radio, and other friends in and out of the business who gave me so much good advice. I am indebted to Kathryn Court, the editor of this book, and to my agent, Ellen Levine, and to a parade of others going back to my teachers George Hage, John Rogers, Deloyd Hochstetter, Fern Moehlenbrock, and Estelle Shaver. I’m grateful to them. All the same, I wish I hadn’t lost that story in the Portland lavatory, and I am still waiting for it to come back. I believe it was a story given to me as in a dream, that if found and people heard it they might discover something they too were looking for all these years, and I foolishly forgot it while washing my hands and don’t know what to do to get it back. Sometimes, standing in the wings, I feel that story brush against my face and think I’ll remember it—maybe if I closed my eyes it would land on my shoulder like one of the Performing Gospel Birds. This book, while not nearly so fine, will have to suffice until it returns.

  Dogs don’t lie, and why should I?

  Strangers come, they growl and bark.

  They know their loved ones in the dark.

  Now let me, by night or day,

  Be just as full of truth as they.

  LAKE

  WOBEGON

  DAYS

  Table of Contents

  Home

  New Albion

  Forebears

  Sumus Quod Sumus

  Protestant

  Summer

  School

  Fall

  Winter

  News

  Spring

  Revival

  HOME

  The town of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota,* lies on the shore against Adams Hill, looking east across the blue-green water to the dark woods. From the south, the highway aims for the lake, bends hard left by the magnificent concrete Grecian grain silos, and eases over a leg of the hill past the SLOW CHILDREN sign, bringing the traveler in on Main Street toward the town’s one traffic light, which is almost always green. A few surviving elms shade the street. Along the ragged dirt path between the asphalt and the grass, a child slowly walks to Ralph’s Grocery, kicking an asphalt chunk ahead of him. It is a chunk that after four blocks he is now mesmerized by, to which he is completely dedicated. At Bunsen Motors, the sidewalk begins. A breeze off the lake brings a sweet air of mud and rotting wood, a slight fishy smell, and picks up the sweetness of old grease, a sharp whiff of gasoline, fresh tires, spring dust, and, from across the street, the faint essence of tuna hotdish at the Chatterbox Cafe. A stout figure in green coveralls disappears inside. The boy kicks the chunk at the curb, once, twice, then lofts it over the curb and sidewalk across the concrete to the island of Pure Oil pumps. He jumps three times on the Bunsen bell hose, making three dings back in the dark garage. The mayor of Lake Wobegon, Clint Bunsen, peers out from the grease pit, under a black Ford pickup. His brother Clarence, wiping the showroom glass (BUNSEN MOTORS—FORD—NEW & USED—SALES & SERVICE) with an old blue shirt, knocks on the window. The showroom is empty. The boy follows the chunk a few doors north to Ralph’s window, which displays a mournful cardboard pig, his body marked with the names of cuts. An old man sits on Ralph’s bench, white hair as fine as spun glass poking out under his green feed cap, his grizzled chin on his skinny chest, snoozing, the afternoon sun now reaching under the faded brown canvas awning up to his belt. He is not Ralph. Ralph is the thin man in the white apron who has stepped out the back door of the store, away from the meat counter, to get a breath of fresh, meatless air. He stands on a rickety porch that looks across the lake, a stone’s throw away. The beach there is stony; the sandy beach is two blocks to the north. A girl, perhaps one of his, stands on the diving dock, plugs her nose, and executes a perfect cannonball, and he hears the dull thunsh. A quarter-mile away, a silver boat sits off the weeds in Sunfish Bay, a man in a bright blue jacket waves his pole; the line is hooked on weeds.* The sun makes a trail of shimmering lights across the water. It would make quite a picture if you had the right lens, which nobody in this town has got.

  The lake is 678.2 acres, a little more than a section, fed by cold springs and drained from the southeast by a creek, the Lake Wobegon River, which flows to the Sauk which joins the Mississippi. In 1836, an Italian count waded up the creek, towing his canoe, and camped on the lake shore, where he imagined for a moment that he was the hero who had found the true headwaters of the Mississippi. Then something about the place made him decide he was wrong. He was right, we’re not the headwaters, but what made him jump to that conclusion? What has made so many others look at us and think, It doesn’t start here!?

  The woods are red oak, maple, some spruce and pine, birch, alder, and thick brush, except where cows have been put, which is like a park. The municipal boundaries take in quite a bit of pasture and cropland, including wheat, corn, oats, and alfalfa, and also the homes of some nine hundred souls, most of them small white frame houses sitting forward on their lots and boasting large tidy vegetable gardens and modest lawns, many featuring cast-iron deer, small windmills, clothespoles and clotheslines, various plaster animals such as squirrels and lambs and small elephants, white painted rocks at the end of the driveway, a nice bed of petunias planted within a white tire, and some with a shrine in the rock garden, the Blessed Virgin standing, demure, her eyes averted, arms slightly extended, above the peonies and marigolds. In the garden behind the nunnery next door to Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility, she stands on a brick pedestal, and her eyes meet yours with an expression of deep sympathy for the sufferings of the world, including this little town.

  It is a quiet town, where much of the day you could stand in the middle of Main Street and not be in anyone’s way—not forever, but for as long as a person would want to stand in the middle of a street. It’s a wide street; the early Yankee promoters thought they would need it wide to handle the crush of traffic. The double white stripe is for show, as are the two parking meters. Two was all they could afford. They meant to buy more meters with the revenue, but nobody puts nickels in them because parking nearby is free. Parking is diagonal.

  Merchants call it “downtown”; other people say “up town,” two words, as in “I’m going up town to get me some socks.”

  On Main between Elm and McKinley stand four two-story brick buildings on the north side, six on the south, and the Central Building, three stories, which has sandstone blocks with carved scallops above the third-floor windows.* Buildings include the “Ingqvist Block,” “Union Block,” “Security Block,” “Farmers Block,” and “Oleson Block,” their names carved in sandstone or granite tablets set in the fancy brickwork at the top. Latticed brickwork, brickwork meant to suggest battlements, and brick towers meant to look palatial. In 1889, they hung a man from a tower for stealing. He took it rather well. They were tired of him sneaking around lifting hardware off buggies, so they tied a rope to his belt and hoisted him up where they could keep an eye on him.

  Most men wear their belts low here, there being so many outstanding bellies, some big enough to have names of their own and be formally introduced. Those men don’t suck them in or hide them in loose shirts; they let them hang free, they pat them, they stroke them as they stand around and talk. How could a man be so vain as to ignore this old friend who’s been with him at the great moments of his life?

  The buildings are quite proud in their false fronts, trying to be everything that two stories can be and a little bit more. The first stories have newer fronts of aluminum and fake marble and stucco and fibe
rglass stonework, meant to make them modern. A child might have cut them off a cornflakes box and fastened them with two tabs, A and B, and added the ladies leaving the Chatterbox Cafe from their tuna sandwich lunch: three old ladies with wispy white hair, in sensible black shoes and long print dresses with the waist up under the bosom, and the fourth in a deep purple pant suit and purple pumps, wearing a jet-black wig. She too is seventy but looks like a thirty-four-year-old who led a very hard life. She is Carl Krebsbach’s mother, Myrtle, who, they say, enjoys two pink Daiquiris every Friday night and between the first and second hums “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” and does a turn that won her First Prize in a Knights of Columbus talent show in 1936 at the Alhambra Ballroom. It burned to the ground in 1955. “Myrtle has a natural talent, you know,” people have always told her, she says. “She had a chance to go on to Minneapolis.” Perhaps she is still considering the offer.

  Her husband Florian pulls his ’66 Chevy into a space between two pickups in front of the Clinic. To look at his car, you’d think it was 1966 now, not 1985; it’s so new, especially the backseat, which looks as if nobody ever sat there unless they were gift-wrapped. He is coming to see Dr. DeHaven about stomach pains that he thinks could be cancer, which he believes he has a tendency toward. Still, though he may be dying, he takes a minute to get a clean rag out of the trunk, soak it with gasoline, lift the hood, and wipe off the engine. He says she runs cooler when she’s clean, and it’s better if you don’t let the dirt get baked on. Nineteen years old, she has only 42,000 miles on her, as he will tell you if you admire how new she looks. “Got her in ’66. Just 42,000 miles on her.” It may be odd that a man should be so proud of having not gone far, but not so odd in this town. Under his Trojan Seed Corn cap pulled down tight on his head is the face of a boy, and when he talks his voice breaks, as if he hasn’t talked enough to get over adolescence completely. He has lived here all his life, time hardly exists for him, and when he looks at this street and when he sees his wife, he sees them brand-new, like this car. Later, driving the four blocks home at about trolling speed, having forgotten the misery of a rectal examination, he will notice a slight arrhythmic imperfection when the car idles, which he will spend an hour happily correcting.