Lake Wobegon Days (32 page)

A reference, perhaps, to Father’s part in the town council debate on installing a community TV antenna on the water tower. He was going to stay away, and then he heard that Principle was melting among the Protestants so he felt obliged to carry the ball. Long ago, he used to ask his parishioners to sign a pledge to turn their TVs to the wall at 5
P.M.
Friday and leave them turned until Sunday after Mass, but it didn’t work out. People turned their TVs toward the wall at such an angle that the picture was received by a mirror and transmitted back to them. More houses every year put up ugly thirty-foot antennas to pull in St. Cloud. So he went and gave a speech against television. Television dulls the moral senses, breaks up the family, distracts people from religious obligations, and tempts children with all manner of junk. Pastor Ingqvist then gave the case for educational programs and
went out of his way to mention the Pope’s visit to New York, the extensive TV coverage, the value of watching this, etc. Father Emil said that if you want to know what the Holy Father said, you could find it in
The Catholic Bulletin;
if you just want to see him climb in and out of limousines, then watch TV. Clint Bunsen said he doubted they could afford it anyway with Bud needing a new hydraulic lift for the snowplow. Bob Peterson said if the snow plowing went like last year, people would be spending lots of time indoors and needing entertainment. Bud challenged him to name one day when the streets weren’t clear by noon. Bob said there were so many it was hard to pick just one. Clint called for order. Then Harvey spoke about the danger of electrocution. Since time immemorial, boys have climbed the water tower. It’s dangerous, it’s wrong, but sooner or later a boy must do it, and with a TV antenna, there is always the danger of electricity getting loose. The water tower sweats, so all you’d need would be a few volts, and boys would fall like flies. “Then we’ll be
on
television,” he said. “They’ll all come with their cameras to take pictures of the service in the gymnasium and those little white coffins all in a row.” The vote was four opposed, one abstention.

Saturday. Opening day of duck hunting. At three
A.M.
a basement light shines in the squat brick lodge of the Sons of Knute where Elmer is brewing three giant pots of coffee, a special Knutes blend, double-strength with two raw eggs per pot, guaranteed to open a dead man’s eyes. Other necessities have been hauled the day before to the Pete Peterson Memorial Blind—two fourteen-foot fiberglass duck decoys, a duckboat to retrieve the kill, carpet strips for the blind—and Edgar is bringing the brandy. Elmer had a good golden retriever once, named Duke, but he got too fond of coffee laced with brandy; two years ago he plunged in and paddled out for a dead duck and chewed it up and couldn’t be trusted again. The giant decoys were borrowed by Pete Peterson (1910-1978) from his friend Walt who built them for the 1972 Minneapolis Duck Show and who didn’t need them back. Walt’s theory was that ducks fly too high to see life-sized decoys, that giant decoys would appear life-sized from cruising altitude (though making
the lake seem dramatically smaller by comparison) and thus would exert greater draw. Each decoy can hold two hunters, but unfortunately, the immense superstructure makes the vessels unseaworthy, and they leak slightly, due to the holes in the bottom for the uprights, and the hunters within—one of whom puts his head and shoulders in the duck’s head (which the other rotates with a hand-crank) and fires through the nostrils on the bill, an awkward shot at best, made more so by the tendency of the decoy to tip when a large man, excited by quacking aloft, jumps to his feet and pokes his shotgun out and begins to blast—tend to gel wet and discouraged. A third decoy, the U.S.S.
Pete
, sank with Gus aboard in the fall of 1974. Gus heard incoming mallards and jumped to his hunting station, the
Pete
rolled to starboard, and Gus, trying to right it, stuck his big foot through the fiberglass shell and she descended into the drink tail first and he had to blow the head off to get out.

The Memorial Blind, named for the unlucky man whose lakeshore property it was dug into, is a trench with a bench where eight can sit camouflaged by haybales and wait for their prey. But the thought of eight Knutes firing guns from that small space is too much even for them, so four marksmen occupy the blind, two serve as ballast in the decoys, and the others, eight or ten, remain in the weeds behind the lines, ready to provide supporting fire. Opening Day morning is chilly and often rainy, and they need the brandy to keep warm, and more coffee to keep sober, and brandy in
that
coffee to keep calm and also because the coffee tastes better if it’s well-laced, so by sunrise a Knute is in a fraternal mood, full of loyalty to his pals of the mystic order of the hunt and to departed friends now manning the pearly blinds in the duck shoot in the sky, such as Pete Peterson.

Poor Pete. Cancer got him. He always knew it would and in his last years kept a desperate watch for signs of it—the Seven Danger Signs was taped to his bathroom mirror—but without much hope: every day revealed a possible sign, something unusual, a little change of weight, a thickening, a
slight
lump,
some
soreness, a redness of the stool, a sore that was slow to heal (older guys heal slower)—then, that fateful Friday, he felt a definite lump on the back of his head and was dizzy and found blood on his toothbrush. Lois was off to clean the church and he panicked—jumped in the car in his pants and T-shirt—
it was Dr. DeHaven’s day off and besides, Dr. DeHaven didn’t believe his cancer theory—so he headed for St. Cloud to a new doctor, and only a panicky man would have passed that semi the way they said he did, on a long right-hand curve going up the hill toward Avon, and there he suddenly met his end and found his peace in the grille of a gravel truck.

“It was his time,” said Elmer at the time, reflecting the general Knute philosophy of death as a lottery, and yet they miss him so much every year, the Duck Hunter’s Duck Hunter. A man who lived for the hunt, lived by the lake about a beer can’s throw from the blind, and took his gun to bed with him in season, the bedroom window being a four-foot single-pane spring-action sash-loaded window that dropped into its housing when he yanked the rope tied to the bedpost, permitting a good shot from a mattress position. His last fall, he bagged two from bed with one shell in a heavy drizzle an hour before dawn, barely awake, his head still on the pillow—that’s how good a shot he was. Lois jumped three feet straight up, she yelled, “What in the name of creation!” and hit the floor and was at the door in one jump. “Mergansers,” he said.

Action is slow in the blind. Seven
A.M.
and only clouds have flown over and birds too small to shoot, nonmeaty birds like sparrows and those white-breasted ones, and the hunters are thinking of former days. “It was better hunting before you had jet planes,” says Mr. Nordberg. “Something about the sound, it’s hell on ducks. It ruins their instincts, you know, so they don’t fly bunched up so much in formation, you get more loners than you used to.”

“Well, that’s the trend everywhere you look now,” says Elmer, and indeed this seems true, of man as well as duck. Everyone out for himself, no loyalty, no interest in others, just grab whatever you can get. It’s sad to think about the way things have gone downhill. “I’m glad I don’t have much longer,” says Mr. Nordberg. “I’m glad I lived when I did. I’d hate to be young and have that to look forward to.” Tears come to his eyes as he says it. “There were no times like the old times.” This reminds Elmer of Pete. He stands up stiffly and proposes a toast to their old friend. Mr. Berge is asleep and Swanny doesn’t feel so good. He has been sitting on a hemorrhoid the size of a Concord grape, no position gives him relief, and all the anesthetic he has put
away has not helped either. Elmer and Mr. Nordberg haul in the decoys and Bob and Cully climb out. Ivar and Phil, Johnny, Gus, and Sig and Bernie come up from the rear. Edgar pulls the last bottle out of the Porta-Bar chest. “To Pete,” he says. “God love him.” They pass the bottle around. It truly does seem like the end. Of these grizzled old comrades in their big jackets and brown ponchos, gray-haired veterans of so many hunts, good pals and true, the finest men by God that you could ever hope to meet—who knows which ones will never see another October? They all are well into heart-attack country now, where life’s road gets steep and a man is easily winded. Women go on and on but men drop like flies around this age. “To all of the brothers who have gone before, God love them,” says Elmer.

“Ike. George. Val—” Mr. Berge stops. The roll of the dead is too long, and he’s afraid he will forget one. The bottle goes around again, a shorter trip as they are standing closer, shoulder to shoulder. Edgar says they should buy a Last Man bottle and bury it in the blind for the survivor to come out and have a toot on in their memory. “It wouldn’t last long, somebody’d sneak out and finish her up,” says Cully looking at Mr. Berge who is insulted. “This is no time for that kind of talk. My God. You can’t be decent then keep your mouth shut for Chrissake.”

Elmer feels so tired he’d like to curl up in the car and sleep all day. “You’ll outlive us all,” says Edgar to Mr. Berge, trying to cheer him up. “The hell I will. Cully will and he can buy his own bottle. I ain’t paying for it.”

Cully goes off to take a leak. Swanny has to go home and get in a sitz bath. He came in Edgar’s car so Edgar has to go too and Bernie. Sig and Ivar think they’ll be going. “Why? What’s the rush?” says Elmer. Well, they just think they may as well. “
Why?
What’s the problem? Afraid the wife’s gonna chew your ass?”

Well, no, Sig says, it’s just that he came out to hunt, not to stand around and get soused—“
Soused! Soused?
You got your nerve to stand there and say that! I dare you to say it again! Look at me and say it! Look at me! You’re saying I’m drunk then have the decency to look me in the eye!” Johnny steps in between Sig and Elmer. “I’m going,” says Phil. “I never saw the likes of you guys. What would Pete think? He’d be ashamed.” Phil leaves and Sig decides to go with, and Johnny. Cully comes back and goes with them. That leaves Elmer and Gus.
They sit down in the blind. “What are you thinking?” asks Gus. “Let’s hang it up.” “You know,” says Elmer, “I don’t think nothing is ever going to be what it was ever again. We’ve about seen the last of it. I’m getting too damn old.”

Uncle Virgil Bunsen, a former Knute, died during hunting season so the Knutes honor guard was in good form for the graveside salute, and attendance was good what with hunting being poor. His death caught almost everyone by surprise, though: they hadn’t known he was alive. He moved to Nevada in 1925 and didn’t keep in touch, so not many people at his funeral knew him well enough to feel as bad as they knew they ought to. They went to be sociable. The few who wept did it out of custom and because they didn’t want to pass up the opportunity.

Clarence had got the news on Monday from his cousin Denise, Virgil’s daughter, who asked Clarence to handle the arrangements because she couldn’t be there. “I think Dad would’ve wanted to be buried up there; he hated Nevada. Anyway, Burt and I have to go to Hawaii for two weeks. It’s something we’ve been planning for a long time and, anyway, I want to remember Dad the way he was. I can’t see what good it would do me to be there, I don’t know anybody and funerals depress me. I think we have to look ahead. Not look back. You know.”

Who was Burt? Her husband, Clarence guessed, but which one? The last he heard she was married to a Ray. And where was Aunt Ginny? “Oh, she died about six years ago,” Denise said. “I thought Dad wrote to you.”

The upshot was that he had to get up at six
A.M.
and go to the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport, find a certain freight terminal, sign a receipt for Uncle Virgil, and talk a young man in a suit into letting him put the box in the panel truck instead of hiring a hearse. The man told him that he was only an assistant manager and didn’t make the rules. He said, “Would you want people hauling you in an old truck after you pass on?” Clarence said, “It depends who the people are.” Back home, he dropped off the box at Lundberg’s Funeral Home and went to persuade Pastor Ingqvist to give Uncle Virgil the benefit of
the doubt and provide a Christian burial, then he called Elmer about the honor guard, and about four o’clock he headed up to the cemetery with Bud to help dig.