Lake Wobegon Days (15 page)

Most of all, he was a good worker,
steady
(one of the finest words one man could say about another); he didn’t slack off; he was good for twelve, fifteen hours of work a day. He was generous in trading work with his neighbors, he didn’t keep a count of it, and when he worked for them, it was the same as working for himself. They called him, he came, and he carried his end and some of theirs. Clarence Bunsen said that Roman Winkler could not be convicted of horse theft anywhere in Mist County if they found the horses in his bedroom.

He had to be a good worker, the farm being poor as it was, though you couldn’t tell it from looking at that clean white house, the red barn and the row of outbuildings (granary, pig barn, chicken coop, tractor shed, and tool shed) which was as trim and well-kept as an Army post though he got no help from his brother Leon.

Neither brother ever married, so far as we knew (though Leon spent a few years in the Philippines with the Navy and hinted at other arrangements there). For almost all of Leon’s life, they lived under the same roof.

Leon, the younger, was slight of build, had thin wrists and delicate fingers and went around in jeans, a blue sweater, and a stocking cap. He had a faraway look in his eye so that, talking to him, eventually you’d look over your shoulder to see what he saw back there, and he had the ability to look at work for days at a time. Some days he stayed in bed until afternoon. Bed, after all, was where he found himself when he woke up, he felt fine there, and he could think of no reason to get out, because his bookcase was by the bed, and books were all he needed. He could crawl into a book and pull the covers over him and stay until it got dark, and then go back to sleep. He bought books at auctions, he bought them C.O.D., and every week he came to town with Roman and hauled a bagful out of the library.

Being Roman’s brother, he was not talked about, only a little, and that mostly pretty tolerant, even when he went off on one of his bright ideas, which didn’t last more than a day or two. Once he decided to put on
Coriolanus
and talked four people into coming to a rehearsal, which he forgot to attend. Another time he started to build an oceangoing yacht in the barn, then loaded potatoes in the hull. The boat broke up and Roman used the lumber to make a ramp to load hogs on the truck.

Drink wasn’t his problem, inspiration was. Once he sat all night under Hazel Bunsen’s bedroom window, presumably thinking about her, which frightened Hazel, who was young and practical, but he got over her sometime around breakfast and walked home.

When they were younger, the brothers had some fierce arguments about work and responsibility, but as they got old, they were able to say it all in a few words. “Oh,
Leon.
” “Ah, Roman.”

Roman farmed, kept house, cooked, did laundry, did everything but make Leon’s bed in the morning, though Leon said in his own defense that sometimes he was on the verge of doing chores only to find that Roman had already. He also said that Roman tried to make more of the farm than it was, which was true. Whatever God intended that land to be, it certainly wasn’t a showplace for seed corn or the home of purebred Poland hogs. Roman worked, Leon said, as if he could by sheer effort pull the corn up out of the ground and make it grow. Leon said that he worked, too. On a book, though he wasn’t ready to show it to anyone, which would distill the wisdom of the ages
into a single volume. This book, when finished, would change people’s minds about him, but he was in no hurry to finish it, knowing that work that lasts comes slow.

Then one day Leon announced he was leaving home, at the age of sixty-two. Roman had dreams at night in which he rounded up pigs who were loose in the corn, and they kept Leon awake. So he went over the hill and made him a sod house in the meadow. Dug down six feet and put up walls of turf blocks and laid old lumber across the top and laid on a sod roof, and he moved in with his books and bed and a woodstove. “My brother who lives in the dirt,” Roman said, but he was lonely without him and came down in the evening with Leon’s hot supper in a pie tin.

Leon didn’t lack for visitors the last few years. He planted flowers on the roof, which bloomed beautifully in the summer and also in the winter, germinated by the heat of the stove. People drove out to see it, a patch of bright colors in the snow, and dropped in to see him. He climbed out of bed, marked his place in the book, snipped off some roots from his ceiling, and boiled up tea. He died in a bed full of books, with an encyclopedia on his chest, open to a page of pictures of flowers. Roman pulled the covers over his face, hauled out the woodstove, hitched the team to the two main timbers, clucked twice, and buried Leon under a ton of dirt. After a couple years, rains had leveled the mound, and Roman, who was forgetful in his old age, plowed the meadow and planted corn. In that one patch, he got the corn he always wanted, seven and eight feet high, like a squadron of soldiers. “
Ja
, that’s the best I ever had,” he said. “I just wish that my brother Leon could be here to see it.”

Jonson Ingqvist drove a black Buick touring car with leather upholstery though his home was only two blocks from the bank, and he kept a lake home on Sunfish Bay a quarter-mile from home, and he was said to own fourteen suits, all of them blue. In 1908, he went to Minneapolis for the big Hallingdal picnic, having promised his mother he’d look up her old friends and tell them she was sick and hadn’t long but knew she would see them in Heaven. He wore a white linen suit, a white
shirt, a straw hat, and a gold stickpin, and on his hip he carried a silver flask of brandy. He knew he would need it, spending a day with his countrymen. He walked from his hotel to the Milwaukee Depot and when he boarded the train to Minnehaha Park, his heart sank, it was as if he had lost everything he had worked for and been thrown back into a former life. The car was packed, so was the next one, with families carrying boxes and baskets that smelled of fried pork and meatballs. The people smelled of lye soap. They were as excited as if it were a train to Niagara Falls and all jabbering in a language he only knew how to be polite in. The park was less than five miles away, but Jonson wished the train had a first-class car where he could sit and talk to men in English.

The picnickers rushed off the train at Minnehaha station and made a beeline for the pavilion to claim a good table. He strolled across the bridge over the creek and had a look at the Falls and hiked along the creek to the Mississippi and back, and by then, the speeches had begun, the worst part of the ordeal. One gasbag after another climbed up on the platform, struck a pose, and launched into a hymn to Norwegian virtue that would have made angels blush, but, judging from the applause, was received by the crowd as no more than their due—grocers, millhands, streetcar conductors, journeymen carpenters, all turned their faces toward the sun of Norwegianness, even the ones in back who couldn’t hear a single word of it—and after an hour, Jonson walked away and into the bushes and drew out the flask. “She will see you in heaven,” he mumbled.

About six years ago, Lake Wobegon High decided to cut out commencement speeches by the valedictorian, salutatorian, and class orator because they all sounded the same. That was the year Charlene Holm made valedictorian. Her family marched to school, and the manure hit the ventilator. They wanted her in plain view with a gold tassel and words coming out of her mouth. As it turned out, Charlene’s speech was on “Service to Others” and was based on Christ’s words to the rich young man: “Give all that you have to the poor and follow me.” The Holms thought it was the greatest speech ever given in English. Her dad didn’t hear a word of it, he was taking 8mm color movies. But you can forgive the Holms their pride, if you remember back to 1926.

In 1926, Norwegian royalty visited Lake Wobegon, arranged by Jonson Ingqvist, who was a big contributor to the Republican party and knew the governor well enough so the governor had once been to his home for coffee one afternoon and a hundred children stood out on the front lawn to watch him drink it. So when Jonson heard that King Haakon VII would be visiting Minnesota, he put in his bid with the governor and got the King, for almost two hours, 2:30 to 3:45
P.M.
, on May 14, 1926. The town learned about it in early April, and people got down to serious yard work.

The Germans pooh-poohed the visit at first. They pointed out that King Haakon VII wasn’t even Norwegian, he was a Danish prince whom the Norwegian parliament had imported when Norway split off from Sweden in 1905. And this was America, where every person is as good as another. But when the good Norwegians of Lake Wobegon thought of the King coming to visit, they got so excited they had to sit down.

In Norway, their ancestors had been dirt poor and never saw royalty, let alone hung around with them, so the King’s visit was a sign that they had made good in America. At the same time, they had been so busy making good, they had begun to forget old Norway. So the King’s visit was like the past coming to greet them, as if their grandfather rose from the dead and came to shake their hand and say, “You done good. I’m proud.”

They set to work making themselves worthy. They polished up their Norwegian. They bought new clothes. They painted. They fixed up. In 1926, most farmers came to town in wagons, so they cleaned up Main Street and said, “No more horses there until after the visit.” They created a Norwegian children’s choir where none had been before, and drilled those children in six Norwegian songs. (The children, now almost seventy, still remember the words.) And each of them imagined the long black car pulling up at their house, and the tall man walking up to their door to “wisit,” and the bows and the curtsies, and he sits down at their table and has his krummkake and coffee and he says,
“Smake saa god. Vaer saa god. Du er saa snille. Mange takk. Mange mange takk.”
(“It tastes so good. Very good. You are so kind. Many thanks.”)

Then came the bad news. Mr. Ingqvist decided that since the visit
would be so short and the King’s schedule was busy, the sensible thing would be to let him lie down and rest. Why show him things he’d seen a thousand times before? Why sing him songs he knew already? No, the King deserved true hospitality. He’d come to town, sit a moment with the Ingqvists, and then he could go upstairs and have a nap. No choir, no crowds. Quiet. The King should have quiet.

To Mr. Ingqvist this was a simple, sensible, humane decision, and he’d invited the King, so there was no more to be said.

Then Mrs. Ingqvist decided they would invite some of her family, the Tollefsons, and then the Berges got in and the Olesons, and soon there were twelve people who would have coffee with the King and then sit quietly downstairs while he rested. The Rognes family, Paul and Florence, was devastated, and never forgave the insult. Paul never did business with Mr. Ingqvist again, which wasn’t easy since he owned the bank. Florence was Mrs. Ingqvist’s cousin, they were best friends as girls, and they didn’t speak after that. It was soon after that Mrs. Rognes began her career, domineering the Ladies’ Circle at church. Mrs. Holm, mother of Charlene, is Florence’s daughter.

It didn’t change matters much when, the day before the visit, the King got sick in Minneapolis and couldn’t come. He’d been in America one week and had attended six
lutefisk
dinners and was resting in his suite at the Nicollet Hotel. It was only three years after President Warren G. Harding had died from eating something on a tour, and the governor was horrified at the thought of the King expiring in Minnesota of an excess of hospitality, so he was put on toast and tea, and a Norwegian count named Carl was sent in his place. Then Mr. Ingqvist changed his mind. Count Carl wouldn’t be tired, so they could go ahead and have a big do.

Count Carl was a big bear of a man with heavy black eyebrows and a rumbling voice, and was a good eater. They gave him a dinner at the Sons of Knute lodge and he ate everything put before him. Then the children’s choir sang their six songs, and with the first note of music, Count Carl’s head fell to his chest and he slept the sleep of the innocent. He snored through the presentation and awoke with the applause and jumped up and took a bow. He spoke for five minutes in Norwegian, got in his car, and left. If he noticed how nice the yards looked, he didn’t mention it to anybody.

This changed nothing. People were humiliated by the original insult. This hurt has diminished gradually as the people who weren’t invited have died. Now almost all of them are dead.

Last year, a little act of forgiveness took place at Lake Wobegon Lutheran, in the basement, in the furnace room. Luther Rognes, Florence’s oldest son, came up from the Cities for the dedication of the new gas furnace that he donated. He decided to name it for his parents, so he and Pastor David Ingqvist, the great-nephew of Jonson Ingqvist, held a small ceremony. They drilled four holes above the little Window that looks in at the pilot light and attached a simple brass plate: The Paul and Florence Rognes Memorial Furnace. Luther had a bottle of brandy. He poured a little into two Dixie cups and smashed the rest against the furnace. “Well,” said Pastor Ingqvist, “I think you christened it. Tell me this,” he said, “do you want an announcement in the church bulletin?”