They were married for forty-four years. Of course, it didn’t escape notice among the vigilant ladies of the Bon Marche Beauty Salon when Jack and Evelyn went their separate ways or that after he died she planted him between his mother and his grandparents under a solo gravestone, a skinny slab of polished granite with JOHN L. PETERSON 1921–1986 carved in it. All around the Lake Wobegon cemetery, you saw double stones, the husband down below, waiting, his wife’s name beside his, her death date blank, but she had no intention of landing next to him. Nor would she inscribe the stone “Beloved Husband and Father” or “Asleep in Jesus” or “Takk for Alt” (Thanks for Everything). She sat in church for his funeral, listening to him eulogized and hymns sung over him about eternal rest, like layers of whipped cream on a burnt sausage, and put him in the ground and went home and had a cup of coffee.
She and Jack split up in 1981 when he fell in love with a teen porn star named Candy Disch whom he saw in Teacher’s Pet in a private booth at the adult-video shop in the Mall of Minnesota. It was his first visit there. A lifelong urge since adolescence, suddenly realized at age 60. When Candy strolled on screen in her teeny skirt and striped stockings to beg Mr. Baggins to please please give her a passing grade in algebra and he scowled over his wire-rim glasses and she unbuttoned her blouse and let her perky breasts poke free, Jack melted like butter on a hot waffle. She had a playful way about her that he was missing in his life. She was the girl he should have known when he was 17, come around forty-three years late. He wrote away to Candy c/o Violet Video on San Fernando Boulevard, Los Angeles, and Candy sent him a picture postcard of herself and a handwritten note (“Jack, I’m so glad you liked the movie, it really means a lot, please call me”) and he got her on the phone and talked to her for $2.29 a minute. She thrilled him. He knew the meter was running but he had a big crush, which he felt was reciprocated, though she was vague about when they might meet, but he collected photos of the little honey bowling, shooting pool and sunbathing. Jack’s brother Pete and his sister LaVonne couldn’t comprehend this. How could a World War II vet, a member of the Lutheran church, the father of three, be consumed by passion for a frizzy-haired blonde in a red velvet jumpsuit unzipped to the navel who pursed her pouty lips and whispered, “Oh baby, give it to me, give it to me”? They refused to speak to him or look at him again. They forbade their families to speak to him.
Evelyn felt bad at first. She wept and took his hand and laid it on her breast—“Why would you be fascinated by pictures when you could have a real woman?” she cried. He turned away, flushed, embarrassed.
She had no wish to humiliate him. There was not much cruelty in her. As for fascination, who can explain it? Some men take up golf, some chase girls, some drink Hi-Lex. So she helped Jack ease into a new life as a bachelor.
“He’s always felt hemmed in. He married too young. We all did, back then. He hated the Navy and he should’ve had a few years of freedom but he had to come back here and earn a living and raise kids. All he wants is to do things his own way in his own time. So why shouldn’t he live as he pleases? He’s sixty, for heaven’s sake,” said Evelyn.
She had been paying the Visa bill including large payments to Violet Adult Services for Candy’s phone time and finally she told Jack that they had to settle up. She borrowed the money to buy out his share of the house and he bought a fishing shack on Lake Winnesissebigosh, ten miles north, and installed a propane heater, stuffed the cracks with strips of pink foam covered with silver duct tape. He had a fridge full of beer and plenty of videotapes. He hauled a blue velour Barcalounger out there and a water bed. It was all friendly. She didn’t call him names or yell or cry. She simply trundled him out to his fishing shack and kissed him goodbye. She told Florence about an article in Lutheran Digest about menopausal males having hormonal surges that cause phantom romances. A great big husky old farmer from Sioux Falls sold off his hogs and flew to Malibu and stood along the coastal highway with a sign saying, “Angel, I love you,” referring to Angel Marquez, star of Bolero. It was a hormonal surge. They shot him up with estrogen and he quieted right down. She had mentioned this to Jack and he hit the ceiling. So he would have to go. His choice.
*
“I got tired of being supervised by my wife,” he explained to his friends at the Sidetrack Tap. “Somebody always telling you to take your feet off the coffee table. It’s a lousy way to live. Our ancestors in Norway knew they had a bad deal. The land was worthless for farming and the old man treated them like slaves and the pastor was yelling and shaking his fist every Sunday, and they put two and two together and got on the boat and came to America. And when they got to Minnesota, they saw they had exchanged one bad deal for another, and they didn’t agonize over it, they headed for California to look for gold, but the gold was gone, so they sold shovels to people who were looking for gold, and I got about twenty relatives out there who are multimillionaires and if I wanted to I could call ’em up and ask ’em for money and they’d give it to me and you know something, I ain’t going to do it, because that ain’t my way. I don’t need their help or yours or anybody’s and I don’t need you or anybody telling me what to do either.”
So he sat in his shack, in a welter of junk and wrappers, his TV set shining on him, commercials in which powerful pickup trucks ran up steep mountain slopes and skinny models slunk through clouds of fog and golden beer foamed over life’s big frosty glass. He lay like a pig in a pen, and dozed and awoke and peed in the sink and lay down and watched a little more. He drank all the whiskey he wanted whenever he wanted and didn’t care who knew it. He called it his antifreeze. He snored to his heart’s content, got up in the middle of the night to fry up a steak and have a slug of whiskey, slept until noon, it was all good.
Barbara told him once that a quart of whiskey a day was too much and he said, “Lot of small-minded people in this town, just envious of anyone who knows how to have a good time. Don’t be one of them. And I’m beyond a quart anyway. Quart and a half.” He sighed a long sigh. His skin was gray, mottled, as if he were rotting from the inside out and about to burst. His breath would’ve knocked a buzzard off a garbage truck. “Your mother never begrudged me a good time, I’ll say that for her.” And then he started to weep. “Do you think she’ll ever take me back?” he said.
No, that was never an option. Mother was living her own life, traveling off to California, Florida, St. Louis….
Dear Barbara,
It cost me $215 round trip to St. Louis and Mamie was happy to lay eyes on me so the week was well worth it and thanks for mowing my lawn. It looks great!!! I’ve been thinking about our talk. I know that things are strained between you and Daddy after the way he tore into you about Lloyd—no excuse for that at all—and believe me I am on your side, but you really must avoid acrimony as much as possible. Daddy never really grew up and we could talk about WHY NOT until the cows come home but it’s simply a fact that must be lived with. He is and always will be 14 years old and it behooves the rest of us to accept that and not agitate ourselves over it.
Trust me when I say he means NO HARM to anyone. The man has no malevolence in him at all, he simply feels very urgent about his own needs and desires and doesn’t stop to think about how this might affect others. His interests are few in number and rather simple and don’t bear going into in great detail except that he has developed a vast fantasy life to compensate for the straitened circumstances of his own. I found this rather OVERWHELMING when I discovered it accidentally and now I have given up those feelings of hurt and dismay (pointless, really) and simply accept that he is who he is. And meanwhile I choose to EMBRACE the meat and marrow of life, and open my eyes to the wonders around me. I have a certain wanderlust that must be satisfied and that is why I love going to St. Louis and Reno and Miami and other places I’ve been off to lately.
Life is so dear, dear heart. Live it with gallantry.
Daddy and I came to a parting of the ways. I handed down an ultimatum and he couldn’t meet it and so we parted. I simply put him out to where he could be happy and I went about my business and that is that. And once I was shut of the worry and guilt and dismay I seemed to get back some of the old curiosity and verve I remembered from girlhood and I found kindred souls to have fun with and enjoy life and meet it with anticipation and wonder. That is what we cannot cannot cannot ever give up is that ESPRIT. That is what I admire in Bennett even though he is so lost in life, he keeps that venturing spirit. People are too easily squashed by their burdens and become dull and obedient and censorious of the esprit in others—O I could name names but I will not—and it behooves the spirited to keep dancing.
KEEP DANCING, dear.
Love love love from your mother
Barbara visited Daddy every month or so. He liked being denned up at the lake. He went shambling through the woods, collecting blueberries and chokecherries, wild plums, even sarsaparilla berries, dandelion greens, nuts, wild mushrooms, ransacking the nearby dump for usables. He told Barbara that he found roasted chipmunks quite delectable. He grew a beard. He became prophetic. He was libertarian by nature and he predicted the imminent crash of the government and an era of anarchy during which people would flock to the woods and have to learn to survive, as he had. He was quite proud of living alone, though Mother still did his laundry and ironed his shirts nicely and they spent Thanksgivings and Christmases together and when he landed in jail for drunk driving, she bailed him out. He was a mess but he was family nonetheless. She took hot meals out to him, tried to interest him in AA, and offered up his name in prayer on Sunday mornings. Once for her birthday he bought her a mink coat from a man named Shorty who was running a Fire Sale off a flatbed truck at an exit on the Interstate. A silver mink with scorch marks on the back and it reeked of smoke. And it was July. Mother returned the coat and said, “You’re going to need this out at the cabin.”
He said, “Well, if you change your mind, you know where to find me.”
Of course people gossiped about their separation but Mother rose above it. She was a duchess. She was circumspect and unburdened herself to nobody but her childhood friend Gladys and sometimes her daughter and she did her weeping in private. In public she offered a resolute smile and plenty of small talk. She avoided scrutiny by attaching herself firmly to Lake Wobegon Lutheran church. She took over the Altar Guild after the sainted Mrs. Dalbo succumbed to arthritis, arranged the flowers every Sunday, arranged lunches for funerals and senior suppers, stood ready to step in and manage anything that needed managing. She was responsible for bringing in Ernie and Irma Lundeen and their Performing Gospel Birds, a troupe of parakeets and doves and canaries, a macaw, an owl, and a crow, who enacted scenes from Scripture in their bird-sized costumes and picked out hymns on xylophones and wound up the show with the Blessing of the Birds—the congregation, heads bowed, heard the beating of wings as the Gospel Birds dropped mustard seeds on each person, seeds grown in the Holy Land. Some people thought the show was trashy and beneath them, but after the Birds left, people talked about it for weeks. A remarkable evening. She took on the wedding of a lapsed Catholic about to ship out to Vietnam and in a hurry to marry his girlfriend, an unbeliever, and Evelyn got them hitched and served champagne on the church lawn and tossed rice at them and paid for the motel. She chaperoned Luther Leaguers on convention trips, camped with her Girl Scouts, taught Sunday school, sponsored a Vietnamese family of four, baked for bake sales, edited the Ladies Circle cookbook, sewed for the Christmas pageant, and did the Reformation Sunday scholarship fundraising dinner fifteen years in a row. And then she buried Jack.
*
Jack died of a heart attack on a bitter January afternoon in front of the Sidetrack Tap. He was a little drunk and arguing with Mr. Hoppe about the authenticity of the Kensington Runestone. Hoppe insisted the stone was inscribed by Viking explorers in the fourteenth century and left in a meadow in western Minnesota, and Jack said the stone was a well-known fake, carved by a farmer with time on his hands. Anybody with an IQ of a potted plant would know that. They’d had this argument for thirty-seven years and the venom had not dissipated, but only distilled. The argument was the vehicle for Jack’s anger about old age, bad luck, communism, marriage, Lutherans, the fluoridation of water. It put him in a fury, plus which he’d been thrown out of the bar that morning for yelling at someone he thought was Norbert and who was not. Wally gave him the heave-ho and a few minutes later Barbara saw him fumbling with his keys, trying to open the trunk of a car that wasn’t his, and she offered to buy him lunch. Jack was gaunt, unshaven, his hair matted, his face loose, skin sagging, his teeth punky, his glasses missing a lens. He’d been in the leg trap a long time. They traipsed into the Chatterbox Café and sat at the counter and she ordered chicken soup and a grilled cheese sandwich for each of them. “I’ll drive you home,” she said.
“I got no home,” he said. “Got no family. Used to but not anymore. Family is pretty overrated in my book. I am on my way to a place that I don’t even know that I’ll recognize it when I get there. Maybe the stars. Or the woods. Maybe just North Dakota. I am the Hard Luck Kid. Old and beat down and used up. That’s me. Ever show you my scar?” He started to lift his shirt and she made him stop. “But I never held out the tin cup, kid. Say what you will, I never held out the tin cup. But hey, who cares? Nobody. Nobody gives a rip if you live or die. You die and they shove you down in the ground and go about their business and it’s like you never existed. That’s the long and the short of it. Between a man and a dog, there isn’t a dime’s worth of difference and you can quote me on that. People think they’re so high and mighty. Ha. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. That’s in the Bible, you can look it up. Everybody in this town looks down on Jack Peterson, well, let ‘em. My own wife looked down on me for forty years so I’m well used to it. Her and her books and her good manners and her la-di-da lady friends. I fought for this country. I wore the uniform. I was in California but I saw men go off to the Pacific and come back in bags. It could’ve been me. It wasn’t but it could’ve been. So don’t look down on me. Goddamn Norbert stole my auger and now he’s trying to avoid me. What kind of a deal is that? Goddamn V. A. won’t fix my teeth. Went to church to ask for twenty bucks to tide me over and they’re like, ‘Oh Jack, we’d love to but we gotta check with Pastor Ingqvist and he’s out on a call, could you come back at four o’clock?’ The hell. I’m not stupid. They got the money right there in an envelope in the drawer. I’ve seen it. They don’t gotta get permission.
“I was born in this town, grew up here, all my buddies were from here. Married your mother, 1942, went off to war. Treat you like a hero and then you come back, forget it. You work hard, raise your kids, do your best, and you get old and they throw you away like they never knew you. I could write a book about this town that’d burn the eyes right out of your skull. I know these people. There’s not a one of them better than me, not one. The Lutherans are the worst and the Catholics run ‘em a close second. Myself, I am a card-carrying atheist. Proud of it. Could I borrow fifty bucks until next week? I get my check next week. I gotta go to the V.A. and have them look at my head.”
So she forked over the money, paid for lunch, patted his shoulder, and as he headed off to his death, he stopped in the doorway and faced the diners in the booths along the wall, and yelled, “For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God, assholes!”
He walked back to the Sidetrack Tap and there was Mr. Hoppe who smelled of Lilac Vegetal cologne spritzed on liberally. “You smell like you’re hoping to get lucky, Hoppe,” said Jack, “but let me tell you: as long as it’s light out, no woman is going to come within ten feet of you. And after dark, one of them might shoot you if she had a gun.” Mr. Hoppe had had a major drinking bout the day before, which he had lost, so he was feeling unsteady, but he drew himself up to full height and said, “Jack, I wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire.” When he wasn’t dead drunk, Mr. Hoppe could be rather aristocratic. “You,” he said, “are a piece of trash.” They stood there insulting each other for a few minutes and then got onto the topic of Viking history. Hoppe said it was a crime that the Viking explorers were never given credit while that stumblebum Columbus had a holiday of his own. Jack said, “Well, America is named for Eric the Red. Isn’t that enough for you?” Hoppe said it wasn’t. And he brought up the runestone. They were standing at the curb in front of the bar, and Jack was hanging onto the town’s lone parking meter (erected in 1956 as an experiment, soldered shut in 1972), and he yelled at Hoppe, “It’s no wonder you never made anything of yourself. You got shit for brains.” And he turned, clutched at his chest, and fell to the ground, dead, his old grizzled mug flat on the ice and snow. “To hell with you,” said Hoppe and then thought better of it. He shook Jack’s shoulders. “Get up, you old booger,” he said. And then he smelled death. It was Bruno, the old mutt, making his rounds of garbage cans. The dog sniffed at Jack’s feet, then his crotch, and his face, and then licked Jack’s lips. That was too much for Hoppe. He fled into the bar and had Wally call the constables Gary and LeRoy. And then the sheriff came, and the coroner, and a motley crowd of townsfolk, many of whom had seen Jack only minutes before and were struck by the irony: there he had been and now he was no more. It was a wonderful commotion, one that the deceased would have enjoyed. They took photographs of him lying there, and then packed him up and took him away. Somebody went to tell Evelyn but she was in St. Louis. At last, the only mourner left was the dog who sniffed around at Jack’s death site and scratched at the ice, and then lay down on it and took a nap. A week after that, Wally put the Sidetrack up for sale. He told Evelyn, “I never planned to spend my life in a tavern putting mothballs in the urinal and pouring shots of bourbon and listening to a bunch of drunks talk about the good times. I got into this as a favor to my brother-in-law. I was going to run it for him until he got better, but he died. And here I am.”
*
They were married all those years and all Evelyn would say about him was that he was who he was and never pretended to be anything else and in the end he lived how he wanted to live and it’s pointless to try to change people. He liked being alone. He liked working on cars. He was employed by Rudeen’s Chevy-Buick in Little Falls until the drinking got to him. He preferred a job in a town where he didn’t live, which cut down on conversation. He’d slipped into marriage, and it didn’t suit him, fell in love with an imaginary friend, took up the bachelor life, drank freely, went fishing, got to talk to his loving daughter at the end. And he died in an instant. It all worked out.