4

Paradise

I was born in the great blizzard of 1942. February. It struck at noon, obliterating the roads, and the streetlights were turned on to assist the schoolchildren of Lake Wobegon in finding their way home. The country kids went to their assigned Storm Homes. Daddy was all set to drive Mother to the hospital in Willmar as soon as the pains got bad. The St. Cloud hospital was closer, but it was Catholic, and the nuns were known to put rosaries in the cribs of newborns and smear oil on their foreheads, and why go through all that nonsense? The radio bulletins said to stay home, and that only stiffened Daddy’s resolve to get to Willmar. Luckily, his old Packard wouldn’t start. Engine failure may have saved my life. There were ten-foot drifts of snow across the state highway and we could have run into a ditch and all three of us frozen to death. Or—I might have survived in Mother’s belly and been surgically extracted and put up for adoption. The Blizzard Baby—Tiny Survivor of Nature’s Frigid Onslaught—Adopted by America’s First Couple of Stage and Screen, Alfred L’Etoile and Jean du Nord, who read of infant’s plight in the papers—“Our hearts were touched. We had to help,” she sobbed—Private Plane Dispatched, Piloted by the Lone Eagle Himself, Colonel Lindbergh—Child United with New Mom and Dad in swank suite at Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, where the celebrated pair go before RKO cameras Monday to shoot And Away We Go! directed by Raoul Oahu. But the engine wouldn’t turn over, so Mother walked three blocks through the blizzard to Dr. Bjork’s house and had me there. Mrs. Bjork was a nurse, she did the delivery, and Dr. Bjork sat in the kitchen and finished his supper. According to Mother, it was liver and onions, and she was nauseated by the smell of frying liver forever afterward.

 

A child born in February / Is often stubborn and contrary / And if he’s born in heavy snow / Will follow his own way to go.

 

 

On Mother’s side, I am descended from pale bookkeepers with thick glasses and soft hands and pink-cheeked Methodists who lived with utmost caution, gingerly, regretfully, in little stucco bungalows in south Minneapolis around 38th Street and 42nd Avenue and rode the old yellow streetcar to work and once a year packed a trunk and rode the Great Northern Lakeshore Limited to their summer cabin on Lake Wobegon and waded into the water up to their waists and paddled around in the shallows and fretted about wasps and the dangers of botulism and black-widow spiders and bull snakes and lightning and escaped lunatics and were grateful to return to the city and their daily routine.

On Daddy’s side, I am descended from country people who woke before sunrise and clambered out of bed and dressed in coveralls or print dresses that smelled of lye soap and took their porcelain chamber pot to the outhouse and emptied it and washed their faces in cold water from a steel basin and made porridge and corn-bread for breakfast and after breakfast read a chapter of Scripture and said a prayer for their loved ones and the President of the United States and then went to their work outdoors, sun or snow, raising cows, pigs, and chickens, and corn and hay.

The farm was small, about 160 acres, in rolling sandy hills a few miles north of Lake Wobegon. Daddy grew up on the farm with his five brothers and sisters, and by the time I was old enough to figure out who was who, all of them had moved to town except Aunt Eva, who never married and stayed on the home place with Grandma. The land was rented to a neighboring farmer, Mr. Walberg, a man with immense black eyebrows. Grandma and Eva busied themselves cleaning and cooking and washing and tending the garden and raising chickens, as they had always done. Nothing had changed there in a hundred years except Grandma owned an old Studebaker, and they had a telephone and electric lights, though Grandma liked to keep kerosene lamps around, the sour smell reminding her of her girlhood.

When I was 3 years old, Daddy went away to Fort Lee, New Jersey, to serve in the United States Army as a paymaster’s clerk and Mother and I and the older brother and sister went to live on the farm, and thus began the paradise part of my life, my earliest memories. Mother and the Olders shared a bedroom, and Eva and I shared a bedroom. It was small, under the eaves, with a sloping ceiling, and I imagined we lived on a ship. The wallpaper pattern was little bouquets of blue flowers tied with pale-pink ribbons. The bed had a valley running down the middle, and we slept under a quilt and flannel sheets in winter, a blue chenille spread and percale sheets in summer, and Eva told me stories in her soft twang and sang me to sleep with sweet sad songs about the days of yore, “The Old Oaken Bucket,” and “Mother’s Not Dead, She’s Only Sleeping in the Baggage Car Ahead,” and the babes in the woods who lay down and died and the robins spread strawberry leaves over them, and the death of Old Rex, who found Little Jimmy in the storm and lay beside the sleeping form and thereby kept the child warm. When rescue came at break of day to the hollow where they lay the faithful dog had passed away. Somewhere around that time, I began to think of Eva as a mother. She wasn’t Mother, but she was the warm body who lay next to me and whose smell I loved. I took an old dress of hers and curled up with it for my afternoon nap. She was my Eva. My Queen of Heaven.

She was a fireplug of a woman, with thick legs and small hands and a flat face, who all her days went around in one of two or three identical cotton print dresses, or the ancient navy-blue thing she wore to town for the Breaking of Bread on Sunday morning. She had no children and so she belonged to me and was available for my adoration. She was perfectly nice to the Olders but she preferred me. She didn’t have to say so; it was quite clear.

She liked the same exact things I liked. Meat loaf. Fried-egg sandwiches. Devil’s-food cake. Fresh tomatoes from the garden eaten warm right off the vine. Sneaking up on people and listening to them. Farts. Talking late at night. We loved the same radio shows. Burns & Allen and Fibber McGee & Mollie and Lum & Abner and Footlight Favorites with the Radio Toe-Tappers and The Post Toasties Cavalcade with Spike Hopper and His Jazz Equestrians originating from the famous Tom-Tom Room at the Hotel Oglallah on New York’s fashionable West 49th Street. The Jiggs Wahpeton Show starring “the gal in the know,” gossip columnist Jiggs Wahpeton, sponsored by Hercules Cleaning Crystals. Hold on to your hats, ladies, back in a moment with another juicy morsel after this word from Hercules! Monday night, it was Jack Cassidy and His Air Cadet Squadron, sponsored by Happy Baked Beans. An evil gelatin came squooshing in the windows of the Johnson house and started eating their furniture and then it ate the dog, Rusty, while the family clung to a chandelier. The gelatin was climbing the walls toward them, gurgling and sucking, and they were about to lose their grip on the light fixture, and just then we heard the drone of airplane engines and knew that Jack and the boys were on their way, and the Air Cadet Chorus came back to sing:

Happy Baked Beans are nutritious,
Help you live the natural way.
They are nature’s fruit, have a healthy toot
With baked beans every day.

Eva woke us up in the morning by calling out, “Daylight in the swamps.” She just liked the sound of it. She had a whole raft of phrases. She said, “If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride.” She said, “What we lack in our heads, we must make up for with our feet.” If you couldn’t find the pitcher of cream sitting right smack in front of you, she said, “If it were a snake, it woulda bit you.” Or “None so blind as those that refuse to see.” If you burped at the table, she said, “Bring it up again and we’ll take a vote on it.” She enjoyed jokes of all kinds, knock-knocks or Little Willie riddles, moron jokes. We tossed a softball back and forth and she complimented me on my arm. She also told me how well I read to her out loud from the Psalms and McGuffey’sReader, where we never wearied of Longfellow, the village smithy under the spreading chestnut tree, the smith a swarthy man was he, and listen my children and you shall hear of the midnight ride of Paul Revere, and the forests primeval of Evangeline, and the song of Hiawatha and the lovely Nokomis and the waters of Gitche-Gumee.

“I love to hear you read out loud,” she said. “You have the loveliest voice.”

I basked in her praise, coveted her praise, set my hat by it. Mother was the one who checked my ears for earwax and cautioned me against nose-picking and reminded me to make the bed and do my chores and worried about spoiling me. Eva didn’t worry about spoiling. She told me that I was the brightest little boy she knew and that I would grow up to be a great man like Franklin D. Roosevelt or Jack Benny.

 

 

It was a big day when Daddy finally came home from New York. Mother and the Olders and I drove to the Great Northern depot in Minneapolis and met his train as it came steaming in under the long shed, the dark-green cars, a trainman riding on the steps, and a car passed and through a window I glimpsed a couple smooching, and then Daddy hopped off, rumpled and tired and (I thought) not so happy to see us. He groused about us wasting all that gasoline to come meet him when he could just as easily have taken the bus.

Mother had warned us not to make too much noise, so we rode home in silence, listening to Daddy complain about the Army and its inefficient practices.

The farmyard was full of cars, all the relatives drove out to see him in his uniform and his campaign hat, ribbons on his chest. Grandma cried. We posed for pictures. There was fried chicken and corn on the cob at a long table on the lawn. We stood around the piano, Aunt Eva playing, and sang hymns. And not so long after that, Daddy went away again.

 

 

Mother says it was almost a year later. I remember it as three or four days. My earliest memory is of Daddy not being there, and then he was, and then he wasn’t.

Mother explained to the three of us that Daddy could earn a great deal of money if he went to work for the Air Force in Greenland, in a place called Tooley, but spelled Thule. He would earn better money than he could ever hope to earn in Lake Wobegon, so—because he loved us all so much—he would go away for a while and then come home and we’d be able to buy a nice house in town.

I didn’t care about a house in town, I was perfectly happy where I was.

We kept a map of Greenland in the living room, over the couch where we knelt and prayed every morning after breakfast, and a red pin marked where Daddy was, and while everyone else prayed to God for Daddy’s safe return, I silently prayed that he would not come back and that I would live on the farm forever with Eva and Grandma and Mother.

He was gone for three years, coming home for a week in the summer and a week at Christmas, and those were good years for yours truly.

People said, “You must miss your daddy a lot,” and I nodded yes and made a brave face, but it was all a big lie, I loved things as they were.

Mother was a town girl, slender and pretty, she had worked as a secretary for Brown & Bigelow, taking shorthand and typing, and liked to dress well and do up her hair, and the farm was a long exile for her. She never ventured into the woods or the hayfield. She took a job at the bank and bought a Model A Ford and kissed me goodbye every morning and went off for the day. She boarded the Olders with Aunt Flo and Uncle Al in town, so they could attend school there and not the one-room country school. Several times Mother left me with my beloved Eva and took the train to New York and met Daddy there. I did not mind this at all.

“You’re a brave boy not to cry when your mother goes away,” said Grandma, but the truth was, I didn’t mind.

I loved the little white house with the big kitchen and tiny parlor, the old black spinet, Grandma’s bedroom downstairs, the creaky L-shaped wood stairs and the two bedrooms above, the woodstove and the red water-pump on the kitchen counter by the sink, the pantry with floor-to-ceiling shelves of jars of canned corn and beets and pickles. The paradise of red-oak woods and pasture where Mr. Walberg’s mournful Holsteins lay in the shade and chewed and thought cow thoughts and ignored the corncobs I tossed to them. Empty sheds to play in, the machine shed smelling of motor oil and full of coffee cans of bolts and nuts and screws and a long-deceased Ford tractor that was my Spitfire, my B-27. The big spooky old barn where you could climb up the side of the mow and leap down onto the loose hay, or stand on the highest promontory of bales and orate into the sweet grassy air.

My cousins came around to visit and eat Grandma’s ginger-bread cake, and we’d all play Starlight, Moonlight, and Eva tore around and flushed us out of our hiding places in the shadows and galloped after us through the tall weeds toward the yard-light pole that was the goal. She and I were It together and put our foreheads against the pole, counting loudly to fifty, and then she trotted off into the dark to flush the others out and I stood waiting to catch them, and the last one caught was always my cousin Kate, who was fast as the wind and sneaky. She had short dark hair and a mischievous look about her. She knew songs like “The horses stood around with their feet upon the ground, / O who will wind my wristwatch when I’m gone? / We feed the baby garlic so we can find him in the dark, / and a boy’s best friend is his mother.” She knew “Two little children lying in bed, / one of them sick and the other near dead. / Send for the doctor, the doctor said, / ‘Feed those children on shortnin’ bread.’ ” She would pee outside in the bushes, without a blush. She climbed trees. She told secrets. When it got past bedtime and Uncle Sugar and Aunt Ruth stood in the light calling “Katie! Katie!” she took her sweet time coming in. She was my favorite cousin as long ago as I can remember.

 

 

Eva could hypnotize chickens by cradling them in her arm and stroking their foreheads, ten or twelve strokes between the little yellow eyes and down the beak, and the chicken, dazed, stood motionless for several minutes before awakening from the trance and falling over in a feathery heap. She never killed a chicken without first putting it into a hypnotic state. She took us swimming in the river and there performed her trick of standing on her head, her two big white legs sticking straight up out of the water. She was the only grown-up to behave this way; the others sat in the kitchen and drank coffee and spoke of serious matters, such as the soul. She could recite the 23rd Psalm at top speed backwards or rattle off the eighty-seven counties of Minnesota, “Aitkin, Anoka, Becker, Beltrami, Benton, Big Stone, Blue Earth, Brown, Carlton, Carver, Cass, Chippewa”—a blur of sound and I loved hearing it. She could play several pieces on the piano by heart, one was by Chopin and the others were not. The Chopin one was sweet and sad and made me think of a drawing of Confederate officers bidding farewell to their wives on a veranda before riding north to die in the swamps of northern Virginia.

At night she would hum me the Chopin tune as we lay in bed, or “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross” or “Abide With Me, Fast Falls the Eventide,” and I snuggled up against her broad back and fell asleep in her auntly smell and then the room was bright with sunlight and I dressed and trotted out back to pee and washed my face and sat down to breakfast. And if it was summer, we would stroll out to the garden down a dirt lane beyond the machine shed and hoe corn and weed the onions and beets and tighten up the twine that the beans twined along, and then she said, “How about a nice ripe tomato?” And we each picked one, hot in the sun, and wiped off the sand, and ate it, the juice running down our chins.