Lake Wobegon Days (9 page)

“The stove! We have to let the fire go out! He’ll know it’s a joke if he opens the door and the cabin’s warm!” Some argued that, no, you
can
die in a warm room, suffocate from poison gases given off by stoves, but of course
he
might not think of that, so they let the fire go out, and then as the chill quickly came over them and an hour passed and no Reithman came, they gave up the idea and started up the fire. It was dark now. The boys whose idea death had been were now talking about sending a messenger to the College.

After some debate, on the afternoon of the second day, they voted to send Weiss. He was the only volunteer. They gave him one end of a ball of twine and out he went, the wind so strong he could hardly stand. He fought his way uphill, missed the path and had to struggle through deep drifts and thick brush, where the end of the string tore from his mitted hand, and he panicked, broke into a gallop, ran into the gale so fierce he couldn’t hear himself scream, ran, fell, ran again, hit a tree, and finally ran full tilt into the porch of Main, which caught him at the knees, and dragged himself to the door and crawled in.

He lay on the floor, too tired to move. He noticed the strange light in the cold chapel, as if he were underwater, a luminous predawn light, and saw a faint corona around the window above the pulpit. And then he heard breathing that was not his own, and stood up, and saw the bear sitting in the doorway to the gallery, and he turned away and fouled his pants and sat down.

The bear made no movement toward him and made no sound except for its breathing, which was rough like the rasp of sandpaper. Spit fell from its mouth and froze into a pale milky beard. Its eyes were dim green coals. It was an immense bear, or seemed so to him who had never seen a bear, and staring at it, he could not move where he sat, not even to scratch his nose. The bear seemed to hold him in the power of its evil gaze and in the musky odor of bear. He sat, thinking no thought but that his death was close at hand.

In Carlyle, when the twine went slack, the students knew he was lost and would die. Some started to go after him and had to be held back by classmates; others stood a few feet outside the door and shouted and shouted his name, “Weiss! Weiss!” The wind was so strong they couldn’t see their hands in front of their faces. Still, they took turns calling to him and whistling and clapping and beating on the eaves with a board, and others knelt in the long dark hall and wept and prayed for him, even after night fell and after they had crawled into beds together to keep warm, they prayed, and one would open the door and shout, long into the night.

The morning of the third day, they woke up and saw the storm had blown itself out. They wasted no time; all piled out the door and climbed single-file up the path through drifts five and six feet high and broke into the chapel and found him under the pulpit, wrapped in a drape he had torn off the wall, half-frozen, wide-awake, and he told them about the bear. When they didn’t believe him, he showed them his pants.

On December 10, the question of foreign immigration was debated by members of the Phileopolis club, the affirmative team winning 12-7, nineteen students being all who remained, the others having left. The bear in the chapel had frightened everybody, and then the bear didn’t go away even after they set off rockets and blew a bugle and banged on a drum. Its tracks were found outside Dr. Watt’s house, then on the lawn by Main, then in a circle around Emerson, and then students began to withdraw from the College, one by one, two by two, hauling their trunks to the road to hail a ride to Little Falls and the daily coach to St. Paul. Even Dr. Watt could not stop them. After the first visitation, after paths had been shoveled and the supply of firewood replenished, Dr. Watt spoke at morning chapel a marathon sermon that left his congregation as weak as if they had spent the time struggling through snowdrifts. “His opening prayer consumed twenty-six minutes,” Mr. Reithman noted, “and touched on many points of Old Testament history.”

Though they didn’t know it, it was a desperate Henry who faced them. His wife had announced at the height of the storm her intention to return to Boston. She had announced this several times before and in better weather, and now she announced it finally and asked him for
five hundred dollars. She had suffered, she said, from his neglect. He was silent around her; he sat reading Bible commentaries and writing his sermons and staring into the fire. Outside their home, she said, he was voluble and manly and kept a cheerful disposition, but once in the door, he collapsed into a dark and impenetrable mood, and whenever she spoke, he didn’t respond. He did not respond to her affections, he did not appear to recognize her. “How can you be so generous with others, even utter strangers, and here in your house with your own wife be so cold, so removed?” she wondered. “Your better nature you show to the world, and your dark nature you show to me and to me alone! All I see is darkness and brooding and silence. Have you no love left for me?” She stood over him as she spoke, and he couldn’t look at her. He said nothing. She wept, she knelt and touched his knee, then her voice turned quiet and resolute and she demanded the money—all this without a word from Henry.

Dr. Watt’s sermon began with Christ’s suffering on the cross, and it proceeded to other suffering of those faithful to Him, of Stephen and other apostles and martyrs, and it went back to the prophets and their foreknowledge of that suffering, and to the Psalmist and the Children of Israel and to Job, and here Dr. Watt himself was exhausted but he beat on and began to talk about the bear as a messenger of God. God uses animals to work His Will, sometimes happily as with the dove of Noah and the birds who fed Elijah and the lions who proved Daniel’s faith and the swine who received the demons cast out, but also as instruments of judgment as in the case of the bear who came out of the woods to devour the children who mocked God’s servant Elisha for his baldness. As he delved into Elisha’s career, it became terribly evident to all that the President, now freed from his text and moving away from the pulpit and into the aisle and bracing himself with one hand against pew after pew and speaking thunderously, considered himself to be Elisha and was searching the chapel for those children who had mocked him in their hearts, to whom God had sent the bear as punishment. He couldn’t stop himself. He recited his many efforts in their behalf, his dedication, his hard work, and their offenses, their indolence, their unworthiness. “Why?” he shouted. “Why? Why has thou forsaken me?” Nobody made an attempt to stop him. Everyone in the room was making his own plan for escape.

Five boys left immediately after chapel with the father of one of them, who had come in a wagon with clean laundry. Dr. Watt didn’t come out to say good-bye.

That afternoon, fresh tracks were found by two students returning from cutting wood, and a band of five led by Mr. Reithman with a rifle marched off to find the beast’s den and to kill it. The bear was large and black, judging from the footprints and the tufts of hair found in bushes, and their long trek only determined that he had been circling the College, approaching as near as a hundred feet to Carlyle and Emerson, and that he had been joined by a second bear and perhaps a third. That night, a guard was posted in the belfry. “A sleepless night for all,” wrote Mr. Reithman, “due in some part to choruses of ursine snorts and growls which the wakeful addressed to those who slept, some of whom awoke to find tufts of bear fur on their pillows.”

Mrs. Watt left on the 13th to spend Christmas with friends in St. Paul, four boys leaving with her. Dr. Watt explained to Mr. Reithman that she was nervous and preoccupied due to lack of feminine company, and he was sending her away lest she lose her senses. Mrs. Watt handed Mr. Reithman a note as he helped her into the sleigh. The note begged him to pray for her and to put food out for the bear. Instead, a trap baited with jelly and syrup was rigged close to the fresher circumference of tracks. It was found licked clean but unsprung on the morning of the 14th. A nearby tree showed deep claw marks to the height of ten feet.

On the 15th, Dr. Watt announced in chapel that Christmas vacation would be spent at the College in academic pursuits. Six boys left on foot in the afternoon, leaving baggage behind and a student body of four souls: Borden, Smith, Godfrey, and Weiss. The four “are in a desperate state, afraid to disobey, afraid to remain,” wrote Mr. Reithman in his journal. “They enrolled here expecting much and are reluctant to abandon ship, though I have argued with them. I believe they trust me too much and think that matters will improve so long as I remain. God help me. I must go and take them with me. Our President is crazed.”

He told Dr. Watt that the College must be closed. Dr. Watt replied that he would sooner kill himself. “It is no time to be giving in to fear,” he cried. “This institution is the only one! It stands alone, friendless,
far from any sympathetic soul! If we retreat now, sir, we permit ignorance to stand unchallenged for years to come!”

On the afternoon of the 18th, shots were heard from the woods and shouts—a Mr. Slocum from town ran out from the trees and yelled to the lookout, “I have killed him!” They followed him back the way he had come and found the bear humped in a pile as if he had tried to gather himself for one last leap. His blood lay steaming on the snow, bright red, a great burst of it.

Mr. Slocum took the skin for himself and four big steaks. He hacked off the head and said he would come back for it. Four boys and Mr. Reithman put the rest of the meat on a sled and hauled it to Main, and that night they ate a good part of it themselves—Dr. Watt said he had no stomach for bear—roasting it over an open fire, a feast that got livelier as it lasted on into the night. They ate with their fingers half-cooked bear meat and sang song after song, and piled more wood on the fire, until the flames nearly reached the treetops. They piled every stick of wood they could find on the fire and went off for more, and evidently that was when the second bear attacked.

Two boys, Emmett Borden and Alton Smith, had found a fallen birch and were carrying it back toward the bonfire when they heard crashing behind them and dropped their load and ran. The bear pursued and caught them just short of the fire, where a third boy, Miles Godfrey, watched in horror. Emmett was bit in the throat and perished on the spot. Alton, a brilliant student who later embarked on a distinguished career in public life, suffered gashes on the chest and shoulders from the animal’s trying to drag him away, and bore scars to the day of his death in 1908. Miles Godfrey was thrown to the ground and his foot nearly chewed to the bone, but recovered, and eventually made his fortune in the grain trade in Minneapolis and Chicago. Mr. Reithman hurled chunks of ice at the beast and drove it away. Mr. Weiss was not present, having gone to bed. Mr. Reithman obtained a new position at Carleton College in Northfield and taught there for fifteen more years until his untimely death in a boating accident. Mr. Weiss remained at Albion College until the spring, his mind unhinged, and had to be removed to the state asylum at St. Peter, where he lived until his decease, the date of which is not known.

The winter of the bears ushered in the Panic of 1857, when Minnesota Life Insurance & Trust Company gravely and gracefully crashed and banks in St. Paul stopped dealing in legal tender; when the investors of the New Albion Land Company opened the treasurer’s strongbox and found dried grass, some gravel, and a few feathers; and when every piece of paper held by New Albion speculators became a piece of paper. Deflation was followed by a plague of dysentery. The grasshoppers came in August, from the west, a black funnel cloud of them on the 7th, the sky turning black with bugs on the 12th. Those who had scorned speculation in favor of honest labor now found their crops destroyed by the infestation.

That August, the poet Putnam wrote:

He and Madame Juliet were among the escapees, many of whom went to California, to a town named Albion City in the mountains east of Sacramento, where there was said to be quite a lot of gold remaining in certain abandoned sites that a brother of Mr. Halliwell knew about. The Putnams went south to St. Louis, where she had friends in the theater.

About half of the residents had left New Albion by 1858, the year that Minnesota achieved statehood, including Dr. Watt. His last act as President was a letter to a Mr. Waters who had applied to him for a teaching job.