Before the naked Mr. Detmer lifted his right foot to put it into the leghole of his briefs and his big toe caught in the elastic band and he lost his balance and toppled over and whacked his shiny head on the bathtub and entered a period of religious apotheosis, he had been an amiable pillar of the community, a friendly eminence at civic occasions, a booster, a Rotarian, but now that he was convinced that the Last Judgment was at hand, nobody invited him to lunch anymore. He was the president emeritus of Mist County Co-op Power & Light, and still occupied the big sunny office on the top floor of the Central Building with a commanding view of the lake. He could look out and see men in boats angling for the wily sunfish, except now he listened to radio evangelists wail about liberals and avoiding the unclean thing. He used to be a benevolent man, handing out gifts. Everybody from the Girl Scouts to the Good Shepherd Home came pussyfooting into Mr. Detmer’s office and made their pitch and he smiled and wrote out a check. No more. One sharp blow to the head ended that.
For years on the Fourth of July, on the steps of the Central Building, it was he who declaimed the Declaration of Independence at high noon, immediately preceding the Living Flag, and every year he got a lot of compliments on it, and then the July Fourth committee asked him to edit it and he said no. If you’re going to read the Declaration of Independence, you have to read the Declaration of Independence. So they shit-canned it. It was death by memo. “To: Mr. Detmer—The arrangements committee has instructed me to inquire as to the possibility of shortening your 4th of July presentation in the interest of economizing on time and making the occasion more fun for everyone, particularly families with small children.” Your presentation! This was a sacred document of our nation!! Presentation? A presentation is a home economist talking about table setting! This is the manifesto that declared us a nation!
He’d been rooked. Royally screwed. “Daddy, just do the short version,” said Mrs. D. No, it was the principle of the thing.
Small children, he felt, could profit from being made to sit quietly and listen to a man read the paper that made America America, but what offended him was getting a memo—not a phone call or a visit—but a memo. So he whipped one back. “To: Committee—I couldn’t agree more. To hell with the Declaration. It happened a long time ago and who cares? Let’s not force people to suffer through it, let’s have a pie-eating contest instead.” And so that’s what they did. A pie-eating contest, an egg toss, and a three-legged race. Unbelievable.
And then the worst blow of all: nobody told him how much they missed hearing him read. Nobody. He waited for complaints to surface and none did. He thought of writing an anonymous letter to the Herald Star (“I was disappointed to hear that our community has turned its back on the Fourth of July, the birthday of freedom in our country,” etc. etc.) and sign it Disgusted, but he was not the devious type. Instead, he quietly disappeared from the Chamber of Commerce, the Boosters Club, Rotary, the church board, the Boy Scouts, and faded into the woodwork, thinking that surely someone would say, “Wally, what’s happened to you? Where’d you go?” And a couple of guys did, but without much real remorse.
Unbeknownst to most, MCCPL had been absorbed in 1998 by the NorCom network and Mr. Detmer’s job had become ceremonial, which suited him fine. Minneapolis was running the show now and he was happy to step aside and let the big boys have the headaches. He sat in his swivel chair at the big oak desk and worked on an epic poem: Sunshine in the Night: A History of the Electrification of Lake Wobegon and Environs.
The glimmering lights of the little town
Shone like a beacon for miles around
To many a farmhouse in the gloom
And folks who sat in shadowy room
And tried to read by kerosene lamp
Like soldiers in some foreign camp
Cast their eyes to Lake Wobegon
And dreamed that the swift advancing dawn
Of modern times would reach them soon
And turn their midnight into noon.
A history of electrification in rhymed verse—men and women enjoying recreation and refreshment as efficient electric-powered machines performed the tasks that so burdened their ancestors—and he was halfway through it, on line 852—“The glory that was radio/Bringing opera and quiz show/With the turn of a dial/And comedians to make you smile”—and that was when he cracked his skull and suddenly electrification seemed insignificant. Man was in ever greater darkness than before. Immorality ran rampant.
LOCAL MAN SUFFERS CONCUSSION
The rescue squad was called to the home of Mr. and Mrs. Walter Detmer on Saturday morning to investigate a fall. Someone in the home had slipped and struck his head on a bathroom appliance. It was determined that he had suffered a mild concussion and he is now resting comfortably at home and is expected to recover fully.
But he didn’t. He wrote the lines: “Dark shadows hover near, unseen. Men cannot fathom what they mean. They are the shadows of the wings of that dark visitor who brings Death to you and also me, despite all electricity. No device, however grand, can halt his step or stay his hand—Not light nor warmth nor radio wave can slow our progress to the grave.” There his epic ended.
The next morning he tuned in Waiting for the Call on which Pastor Lyman found warnings in Jeremiah against the Internet and Mr. Detmer, having worked all his life to bring cheap electricity to Lake Wobegon, felt he had done the devil’s work.
“You did good for us all,” said Mrs. Detmer, ever the optimist, but six months later he was still feeling the imminence of the End. People who said hello to him in the Chatterbox and asked him how he was were given a gospel tract “THIS DAY MAY BE YOUR LAST,” which discouraged friendly conversation. “Hey, good to see you again,” they said as they walked away.
Mr. Detmer knew he had lost traction upstairs. The Lord had shown him the Truth, but the Lord had also taken away some marbles. Crossword puzzles were beyond him. He talked to Debbie on the phone and stared at the 3x5 index card on which Mrs. Detmer had carefully printed:
DEBBIE. YOUR DAUGHTER. IN CALIFORNIA.
SHE LOVES YOU, WALTER.
Walter was 72, Lutheran, Lake Wobegon-born and bred, a graduate of Concordia College in Moorhead. He had never experienced mystical visions in his life and now he was seeing one a minute. Men in black whispering, “Don’t believe them. Don’t you see how it all hangs together?” He didn’t like this. After thinking it through, which took several hours, he decided to remove himself from the picture by taking pills. He had forty of them he had pilfered from Mrs. Detmer’s prescription and they were stashed in a manila envelope on which he wrote “Declaration of Independence.” It was in his desk at the office. He would do it, he thought, on a Monday, when his secretary Phyllis came in at noon. That would give him three hours to get the job done.
He was ready to go but first he needed to write a letter to his family and, in his present condition, that was hard. Dear Wife, he wrote. I am gone. It was time to go so I took the quickest route. These are the Last Days and I had to get out. We had a good life with no more troubles than most people and I am glad for all our good years together. I have left you enough money to get along on and I hope you have a very nice life. But it won’t last long because God is moving on the waters. I will see you very soon. Your loving husband.
Mrs. Detmer told Debbie she doubted very much that he would ever be himself again. “This is as much of him as we are ever going to get,” she said. “Aside from his references to the end of the world and the seven-headed angel and the blood covering the moon, he is pleasant and not much trouble, really. I just hope I can keep him at home for another year or two. Then we’ll move into assisted living, which I dread but what can you do?”