Lake Wobegon Days (35 page)

Bud was the only customer. He had been out with the plow, but there wasn’t much he could do. The state plows weren’t out yet, he said. So he sat and drank coffee. “She’s going to be a hard winter,” he said to Dorothy. “You can tell by watching the squirrels. The way they
walk around hunched over. They know. They’re thinking about it.”

“You say that every year. I’d like to know what an easy winter is. I don’t believe I’ve been in one.”

“Well, your winter of ’35 was a mild winter. Or was it ’38? One of the two. School never closed and I don’t believe we got more than forty inches of snow.”

Forty inches is above my bosom, Dede thought.

“It was nothing like ’51 or ’65. Whew! Sixty-five.”

Dorothy swabbed the deck and tried to recall 1965.

“Remember the water main froze?” Bud laughed at this grim memory; he had to put his coffee down. He wiped his eyes. The main froze solid, cutting off water to the north side of town. It was Saturday evening. People who were taking baths didn’t notice it but the showers started running boiling hot, and people had to jump out. He wished he’d been there to see it. Soap all over them. Yelling. Thinking someone had flushed a toilet. People take water for granted. It comes out of a tap like some God-given right. Some of them had to get dressed, covered with dry soap, and drive to their mother’s on the south side to rinse off. That was the night they appreciated old Bud for once. It was thirty-five below, he had to jump-start the backhoe. He knew right where the trouble was, it was exactly where he had told them for years it would be if they didn’t spend the money to re-lay the line, and that’s where she was all right. It took him three hours to uncover the pipe, the ground was so hard. Men standing around the hole with flashlights, utterly useless. The sort of help who watch you do it and then when the pipe appears, they all yell, “I think you got it, Bud!” Thirty feet of pipe he uncovered and laid hot coals on, and then it was two in the morning and hardly a soul around. Gone to bed so they could get up for church. Oh yeah. Go to church. Real good. But they hadn’t called Father Emil or Pastor Ingqvist when the water went out, now did they? No sir. Church is a comfort, all right, but your water and your sewer, those are necessities. And roads. People can skip church, but they do not skip water or sewer. When it really comes down to it, it comes down to plumbing. And plowing in the winter. But you got a bunch of windbags on the town council who don’t know pipe from a hole in the ground, want to spend money on a library but think water and sewer is some sort of natural fact, like a river, what can you do?
This museum of antiques they call a system, you just do what you can and hope for the best. And you hope that when the thing falls apart the members of the town council are sitting on their toilets reading books from the library. Man in the can reading
Giants in the Earth.
Goes to flush, no water. Goes and gets water, pours it in, but the pipe is clogged, and his mess runs out all over the floor. Right then is when he finds out something. Then he wakes up finally.

The council’s annual debate on snowplowing and the use of street salt came in October. Item 3, Line 2, Additional Expenditures; Salt: $287.38. The War of the Roses. Ladies of the Garden Club were present as were some gentlemen who own ancient cars, to cry out against salting the streets to melt the ice. Salt eats car bodies, it kills grass and flowers. Salt the street, then it snows again, Bud plows, and the blade throws the salt on your lawn, and your roses gasp and shudder in their deep sleep and give up the ghost. Ladies speak against the salt holocaust, and then Florian stands up and says a few words about his ’66 Chevy. Forty-two thousand miles on her—he has two doormats glued to his garage floor where, when the car is parked, they’re in place to wipe your feet on before you climb in—she’s like new all over, not a spot of rust. Salt will destroy this car as surely as if you took a hammer to it. Ella Anderson speaks up for tulips. Then Mrs. Langen in behalf of the cemetery, where the dead rest in their pleasant garden, attended by lovely plants which speak to us of the promise of resurrection and eternal life. Salt will turn the cemetery into a dump. When this happens, she thinks she will move elsewhere. There is no need for salt, it is simply a lazy man’s scheme for getting out of snowplowing—and all eyes turn to Bud, the czar of salt, and once again Line 2 is defeated on a voice vote.

This year, Bud didn’t go. Eloise wouldn’t let him. His blood pressure has been up, and the doctor took him off salt last spring, and she was afraid the annual salt talk would make blood come out his eyeballs. Bud has said his piece on salt many times and it’s like talking to a stone wall. Plowing cannot remove ice. Sand can’t do the job alone. You need salt. Otherwise, you come to January and old people are trapped at home as surely as if you nailed the doors shut, sidewalks are deadly, streets are sheer suicide, and he (Bud) just hopes that when someone goes sailing off an icy road into a tree, that it is someone from the
Garden Club and that, in the last moment before her body is hurled through the broken windshield like meat into a grinder, she thinks about the importance of road maintenance.

Mayor Clint Bunsen sat through an hour of argument, trying to keep it from veering off into greener pastures. “I’m opposed to salt, too,” said old Mr. Diener, “but I don’t think it’s the greatest danger we face here—which is (and I think everyone knows it): what is going on now in our schools. The other day—” and Clint no sooner put out that fire when Mrs. Langen got going on the need for a War Memorial. She knew for a fact that the Army was
giving
away old artillery pieces for use as monuments, and why the council couldn’t get one, she had no idea—Salt was too mundane for these philosophers, they wanted to get at the big issues. “Excuse me,” he kept saying, “but the motion on the floor right now is to spend money on salt.”

He thought about the legislature in St. Paul. People have told him he should run. Senators sit in big armchairs at mahogany desks and bat around millions of dollars. The councilmen sit on folding chairs behind a folding table and listen to endless discussion of $287.38. Mr. Diener suggests that the salt money could be donated for cancer research instead; this terrible disease rages through the land, killing young and old alike including some dear friends of his whom he recalls with tears in his eyes, and though $287.38 may not seem like much, he quotes a poem (“For want of a nail, the shoe was lost”) to show that little things may be crucial.

They voted 4-1 against salt, Clint being the one in favor. Councilman Diener, nephew of Mr. Diener, moved that in the interest of avoiding bitterness and rancor they make the vote unanimous. They voted 3-1 for unanimity, Councilman Bauser abstaining.
^*

In Minneapolis, a fleet of orange snow plows and salt trucks moved out of the city truckyard at three
A.M
. Thanksgiving morning. The snow had stopped and the wind let up. State plows were out on the highways, a string of flashing blue lights moved along I-94 north from downtown along the river. The city crews started downtown, clearing the streets and salting them and loading snow into dump trucks. When Christine stirred at seven, Sixth Street was black and dry in front of the Dyckman Hotel, though she didn’t know it. On the bedside table was a card advertising the Thanksgiving buffet at the Dyckman’s Chateau de Paris restaurant. A happy family sat at a gleaming table admiring the huge turkey as a friendly waiter hovered overhead. The tablecloth was snowy white, no spills. The children were handsome and beautifully dressed. Candles glowed. All you could eat for $12.95. Wine from the Chateau cellar. Flaming desserts. Arturo and His Boulevard Violins. Keith and the children were asleep. Christine eased out of bed and into the bathroom and ran a hot bath. A telephone hung on the wall. She called home. “It doesn’t look like we’ll make it,” she said. “It looks like we’ll be up on Friday.”

She called Chip in St. Paul and Corinne in Edina, and they both said, Fine, dinner at the hotel sounded good. Meet at ten for brunch, take a walk, go to a movie, eat dinner at five.

That was the plan until the others drove downtown and noticed that the streets were really in pretty good shape. They had gone to bed hearing dire warnings on WCCO—“No travel advised”—and woke up to hear “No unnecessary travel advised,” but now WCCO, the Good Neighbor to the Great Northwest, was sounding less dogmatic about it, and Charlie Johnson was taking calls on “Party Line” from listeners who advanced their own views of weather conditions, more liberal than the official line. “How does it look out there?” he asked. “Not so bad, Charlie. Pretty good. Wind’s died down, and the plow went by about an hour ago.” He pointed out that the weather bureau still advised no unnecessary travel. “Well, she looks pretty good here,” they said. “I think we’re going to go.”

The Ingqvist children met in the hotel lobby at ten and decided they would feel bad spending Thanksgiving there with the roads looking good. Corinne said, “The folks listen to ’CCO. They’d never say so but they’d feel terrible if they knew that we could’ve come and just didn’t. You know Mom. She’s crazy about holidays. I’ll bet she’s got the turkey in the oven already and she’s already got her pies out of the freezer.”

“Think we should call?” Keith asked.

“Naw,” said Chip. “Let’s surprise them.”

As it turned out, Virginia did have her pies out of the freezer, but they were Swanson’s frozen chicken pot pies. At one o’clock, she was sliding them into a 450-degree oven when Hjalmar yelled, “Guess what?”

She had no idea. Something on television?

“They’re here.”

“Who? Is this a joke?” Then she heard them coming through the door. It was them all right. The grandchildren tore in, and there were coats to be taken off and boots, and hugs and kisses all around, and in all the pandemonium, it took the children awhile to notice that something was different. The house smelled different. It didn’t smell like Thanksgiving; it smelled like room freshener.

Christine went back to the kitchen to help her mother make coffee. She said, “Were you thinking we wouldn’t make it?” Her mother ran water in the teakettle and got the coffee down from the cupboard. “You know,” she said, “there’s a recipe for macaroni and cheese I’ve
always been meaning to try. It’s the one where you boil up about three pounds of macaroni, and then you grate cheese on it. It only takes about ten minutes.”

Barbara Ann Bunsen and her husband Bill pulled into the Bunsen driveway about one-thirty. “We made love,” she explained to her mother. “Otherwise we would’ve been here earlier.”

“Well, it certainly is good for your complexion,” said her mother.

Bill had a new mustache that did not quite fill his upper lip. He held a casserole of refried beans that smelled of garlic. He took his time wiping his feet, not sure where he should go from the doormat (“Welcome”)—to the kitchen?—An easy chair? Stand and talk for a while, then sit down? “Come on in, make yourself at home,” said Clarence.
“Duane!”

Arlene snapped on the oven light where the bird sat, dark golden in its pan, glittering, and snapped it off.

“That,” she said, “is my twenty-eighth Thanksgiving turkey.”

“It’s perfect.”

“It’s a turkey anyway. I kind of lost interest after the tenth.”

“I like your glasses.”

“Thank you.”

They looked at each other. Barbara Ann wore blue jeans and an embroidered blue shirt. She was letting her dark brown hair grow long again. Arlene’s had dramatic gray streaks and she didn’t know what to do with it, or with her new glasses, only two weeks old: she took them off. Clear plastic frames, the only pair on the rack that didn’t look ludicrous on her, meanwhile Clifford handed her one after another, each worse than the others. “These are quite attractive,” he said. “These are real popular this year.” Cat’s-eyes with rhinestones, goggles, granny specs.
Why be picky at your age?
he seemed to be saying.

“Hi, Mama.”

They hugged each other.

“I love you,” they said. “I love
you.
”

“So,” said Clarence, sinking into the couch. Bill had sat in Clarence’s chair. “How’s that chair? Comfortable for you? What you been doing with yourself?” Then he remembered: drinks. Of course. “A drink!” he said. “You care for a drink?”

“Sure. What do you have?”

Clarence wasn’t sure. Some bottles down the basement in an old library bookcase. Did it matter? “How about brandy?” he said. He thought he could make up one of those. “Fine.”

Bill crossed his legs and tried to look comfortable. It was one-thirty. Four, five hours to go. Duane stuck his head in and saw him. “Oh, hi,” he said and disappeared.

At the in-laws’, Bill felt as if he had walked into the wrong class, medieval history instead of civics which he had studied for, and everyone but him knew the right answers. Names, dates, stories of which they only used the punch line (“I didn’t know that was your horse!”
“Svensk”
), obscure references. If his wife had been offered a brandy, she’d say, “Just up to the first bird,” referring to a childhood tumbler with four painted chickens down the side.
The whole town is like this
, he thought.
A cult.

Duane didn’t understand why he couldn’t invite a friend of
his
to Thanksgiving, someone
he
could talk to. The answer was, “Because they have their own families.”

“They see their families all the time. Maybe they’d like to get away once in a while.”

“Some other time.”

“But—”

“No.”

Everything in the kitchen was the same except the mixer was moved to the counter by the stove. Barbara Ann found, to her not very great surprise, that she knew it by heart; she got the colander out and rinsed strawberries; the meat platter was on top of the fridge, the gravy boat down behind the cereal, the sieve was nesting in the mixing bowls. She got out the big bowl, moved the mixer back to its old home by the toaster, and was about to mash the potatoes when, on an impulse, she opened the small cupboard high over the sink. There were the little china Pilgrims, their log cabin, two pine trees, and one surviving Indian who looked like Uncle Stan. The smoke was broken off the cabin chimney where she had dropped it while setting the table eighteen years ago. Four people at that dinner were now dead: Grandpa B., Ryman and Monie, Aunt Faith. Grandpa sat on the couch and took her for a ride on a horse on his knee: “
Up
the hill—clop, clop, clop—
and
down
the hill—clip-clop, clip-clop, clip-clop—and across the pasture, jiggety-jiggety-jig.” When she broke off the smoke, the Pilgrims had no fire, they sat around eating sandwiches and devilled eggs. Her father’s table grace was unchanged in her lifetime; it was: “Dear Heavenly Father, bless this food to our bodies and watch over all Thy children as we gather once again to give thanks for Thy love and Thy many gifts. Amen.” Still, she thought she would try to steer him away from bacon and toward yogurt.