Pontoon (22 page)

K
yle returned to school in the fall, as a history major, and somebody lit a fire under him, combustion was achieved, and he rocketed onto the Dean’s List and aimed himself toward
summa cum laude
and vanished into the library. He was gone from September through June, visited Barbara for a weekend with Sarah in tow, kept his nose in a book, was preoccupied, unapproachable except one night when Barbara told the pontoon story and they laughed a lot, then he left in the morning and spent the summer in summer school, then did his senior year at the London School of Economics, and pretty much disappeared from Barbara’s life. Kyle was not a big letter-writer. A few lines by e-mail was all he could manage.
I’m fine. Busy. Frantic. Sort of. Have
a paper due in a week. Talk to you soon. When are you going to sell the
house?
Sarah sent occasional longer dispatches—
You’d have been
proud of your son if you’d seen him read his paper on Woodrow Wilson
last night. I don’t know if he told you but he won the Abingdon
Prize which is given out by the American Union Society here (6,000
pounds—yippee!) and you’re supposed to present the prize-winning
paper so he did. It was held at the Marlborough Hotel and the 
ambassador was there and the Archbishop of Canterbury and Julian
Barnes and people from the BBC and Kyle was so unbelievably cool in
his three-piece suit (ten pounds, used) and acted like it was nothing, but
me, I was so scared I had to go to the loo and put a paper sack over my
head. But that’s done and now we’re off to Copenhagen. He got a fellowship
to the World Health Organization. I assume he told you
.

Raoul died two years later, while on a cruise to the Aegean. His daughter Carmen called Barbara and told her. He was traveling alone and landed in Ephesus and e-mailed her from the hotel that he was under the weather and in the morning he called a cab and went to a hospital and died at noon, alone. The American consul took care of everything. Raoul was cremated and the ashes were in the mail. Carmen was busy cleaning out her father’s house on Aldrich Avenue and found a note from him saying to make sure Barbara got the green bowling ball.

Oliver died. His great heart gave out one day at work and a customer came in and found his body on the floor of the men’s room. He and Barbara had parted company. The issue was marriage. He wasn’t ready. He had to deal with some things. He couldn’t tell her what they were. Things. So she wished him well and bade him goodbye and only heard about his death six months later from Dorothy—who saw a story in the
St. Cloud Times
. He was wedged in between the door and the sink and they had to remove the door to get him out.

That was the day Barbara finally sold her house. She didn’t get the price she wanted, but it was an okay price, and the buyers were nice, two dentists, a man and his wife. Dorothy said, “So what you going to do now?”
I’m thinking I’ll go see what Georgia
looks like
. So word got around and one by one, people called her and wished her well. “Good for you,” said Luanne. Wobegonians
are folks who steer a steady course and make fun of people with Big Ideas but by God they admire gumption. They might not say so in so many words, not wanting to encourage their kids to jump the tracks, but they found it darned fascinating that she had
no
ide
a
whatsoever where she would be one month from now, no idea, no
sir
. And one day soon after that, the angel visited her on her back porch. She was lying on the porch swing, dreaming. She was pretty sure it was a dream. It felt like one. She heard the clacking of his golden curls and he stood radiant and polite by the screen door and said, “Nice town. What’s it like here?”

She said, “You’re asking me?”

He explained that angels are not omniscient and that in fact their knowledge is extremely limited. The only people he met were dead people and there wasn’t much to be learned from them except that they weren’t ready to go yet.

“Well, now you’ve met one more,” she said.

He shook his curls
clackclackclack
and said, “No, no, no—this is purely a social call.”

“Thank you very much. Then I’m going to Georgia and start a new life,” she said.

“No, you’re not,” he said. “You’re going to—” And then he caught himself. “Sorry, I am not supposed to say.”

“Where am I going?” she said.

The angel’s face went blank, as if his brain had shut down, and then it rebooted and his face resumed its beatific shine. “I know a joke about heaven and hell,” he said. “The one with the Baptists.” His face darkened. “No, I forgot that one,” he said. “Do you remember it? It had hellfire in it. A good joke.” She pointed to the door. “Go,” she said. She opened the door. He was making her nervous. “If you’re not here on business, then good-bye and good
luck,” she said. She had no need of a joke from an angel at the moment. But the moment he disappeared, another walked into the room, a woman in a faint blue print dress and big black shoes, her hair tied back in a bun, and in her big rough hands was a glass globe. She spoke in a voice so low Barbara could barely understand her. “I came over from Norway when I was nineteen,” she said. “I went to Central High School for eight months and then they sent me out to the prairie to teach in a school. I passed the test. It was an easy test. They made it easy because nobody else was willing to go to western North Dakota and teach. This was in 1887.”

“Speak up,” said Barbara. “I can’t hear you.”

“I was betrothed to Olav Olavsson back in Melby, the only man I ever loved, and he couldn’t come to America because his mother was dying and if he left it would kill her. So he had to wait for her to die on her own. I understood that very well. I knew about rules. I had to leave because my mother was making me insane. So that was that. I went to North Dakota and lived with a family who I didn’t like at all. The wife was sick with tuberculosis and I thought the man would take advantage of me. So I slept in the schoolhouse, with a gun, and I bathed in the river, though it was winter. In the spring I filed for a homestead that someone had abandoned two miles from school. I moved into the shack, which was 10x12, with a woodstove, a chair, a table, a bed, and a copy of the Bible. I hired a man to plow forty acres. It was land that had never felt a plow before, and I walked across the cool earth in my bare feet, and the man came walking after me. He asked me if I was betrothed and I said, yes. And he said, To whom? And I said, Olav Olavsson. And I ran as fast as I could to the shack
and closed the door and put the chair against it. He stood out there begging me to talk to him.”

“Would you mind speaking up?” said Barbara. “And who are you?”

“He was lonely and I understood that but I didn’t want to talk to him. On the night before I left Melby for Bergen to board the ship to America, Olav and I had taken off our clothes and lay together in a bed upstairs under the roof, side by side, naked, so that we would remember each other for as many years as we would be apart. I promised him then that I would wait for his mother to die. She was in the next room and heard me say it and she screamed at me that she had no intention of dying and that I could never have her son.

“The man who plowed the field kept coming back day after day and he followed me to school. He begged me just to hold his hand, or to cook him a squirrel. I said no. I remembered Olav and how his body felt next to mine. The man drowned himself in the river. I lived in that shack for five years, read every book I could find, saved every nickel I earned, planted a garden every year, raised wheat and clover, built a barn, bought a horse and wagon, and I remembered Olav Olavsson. After five years, I got title to the land and sold it and that was our nest egg when his mother died and he sailed to America. I took a train to Chicago and married him a week before Christmas and we spent the night in a hotel by the lake, the waves were crashing on the shore.”

“Are you related to me?” asked Barbara.

“Olav got sick from something he ate and he never got better. He was homesick. I told him I would take him back home and we got on a ship in Montreal bound for Oslo. It was a little ship and
this was in January and the crossing was terrible. We lay in our bunks and were too weak to move. We thought we would die. One night, he reached over to me and he said, ‘I’m not sorry about a thing that’s happened to us. I would do it all again, exactly the same.’ And that night he died in his sleep. We buried him in the sea and I went back to Oslo and on the way back to Melby, I slept in an inn and someone tried to take my money, a bag with thousands of dollars in it. I had tied it to my ankle and they cut the cord but I woke up and screamed and scared them away. And so I came back home seven years later and I moved in with my mother. She was meaner than ever. She hated me for having left her. She called me by an old nickname I hated—Goat.”

“What did you do?”

“What could I do? I kept going. So much misery and trouble, it must lead to something better. And so I cleaned and baked and did laundry and then one day, to my great surprise, I threw myself into the sea and drowned. I thought, ‘This is not right.’ But there it was. Done.”

“Are you an ancestor of mine?”

She didn’t get the answer to that. She woke up and the phone was ringing. It rang three times before she could locate it and say hello and it was the mover, he was at the back door, the truck was pulled up in the backyard, he was ready to go.

So was she. Too many ghosts around here, too much history, the mutterings of old worn-out people, even the dogs were tired. Winter was not the problem. She knew that. Dark and cold and you’re lonely as a hoot owl but you’re used to it. Then spring comes and all that giddy insect music and you think maybe now your life
will burgeon and prosper and leaf out and you won’t always be this naked little scared person, maybe now you will follow your dreams and be true to yourself no matter what anybody thinks—and then you remember people who were like that and how much you couldn’t stand to be around them. Life is a feast but we are only human, we’re not tapeworms. The world is a paradise but there are mosquitoes. Winter kills off the weaker strains and leaves us with ferocious ones the size of hummingbirds that bug repellent does not repel, it only irritates. Our cutworms will eat lawn chairs and garden hose. You take a snooze outdoors and they will eat the sneakers off your feet and the mosquitoes will drain you of blood. You doze off in the sweet sunshine and you never wake up. This has happened time and time again. And so we are not a lighthearted Mediterranean people. We’re Lutherans, even the Catholics are. And though one doesn’t like to generalize about Lutherans, one thing is most certainly true of every last one of them: the low point of their year is summer vacation. They are suspicious of pleasure. An old Norwegian ugly as a toad meets a pale raven-haired beauty who hugs him and kisses him and takes him home to her father, the richest man in the county, and there is a lavish wedding and the couple retire to their French chateau by the lake, a wedding gift from her father, and the pale young beauty takes the old man upstairs and pours him a glass of Chateau Lafite Rothschild 1963 and a minute later appears in her diaphanous nightgown and sits beside him on the bed and says, What do you think, my darling. He says: it could be worse, that is for sure.

Okay
, she thought.
Get me out of here, Mother, before I change
my mind. I can’t bear it
. All of these lonely stoics and their elaborate rituals of reticence and self-effacement that everyone
struggles against and finally surrenders to but not her. She would pick up and leave and try again somewhere else. The way to do it was to do it. And that’s exactly what she did. She left the mover her cell phone number so he could find out where to ship the stuff and she got in the car and she drove out of town, south, along the river, aiming to make Winona by nightfall and maybe stop there or maybe keep driving, heading for Columbus unless something better presented itself along the way, she was prepared to be lucky. “Isn’t this the deal?” said Mother. “In a car and heading somewhere and looking for adventure. Aren’t we something. Heaven knows what we’ll find but you know everything is fifty-fifty. Either you get there or you don’t.” And then she was quiet. She fell asleep. And then she was gone. Night fell and Wisconsin passed in the dark, Chicago a distant glow in the sky, and the white stripes raced by, and the radio played one great song after another.

Garrison Keillor lives in St Paul, Minnesota, home of
A Prairie Home Companion
, his radio show that has been on the air since 1974. He wrote and appeared in Robert Altman’s final film,
A Prairie Home Companion
and is the author of many books including the Lake Wobegon novels, the most recent of which was
The
New York Times
bestseller,
Liberty.