It has been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon. It was chilly on Tuesday and Wednesday, as a cold front moved through, and the tomato growers stayed up late debating whether to cover plants for frost or not. “Naw,” they decided about ten o’clock, and hit the hay and lay thinking about it: the humiliation of getting froze out, the shame of eating store-bought tomatoes, or, worse, going on tomato relief. “Here, Clarence, have a couple bushels of these—we got plenty. No, really. Bud covered ours that night in June, of course, when it froze—you remember—it was that night, you could tell by the birch leaves it was going to get below freezing…you didn’t know that?”
It rained Wednesday night. Roger Hedlund lay worrying about his unplanted corn and thinking about his daughter Martha’s new black kitten. Roger had laid down the law that a cat stays outdoors, even when it’s cold: That’s what it has fur for, put it outside, it’ll take care of itself. She looked up at him, pleading. He said, “Now. Just do it.” She put the kitten out. On her way upstairs she whispered, “Murderer.” He heard her. When he went up to bed, he heard the kitten crying on the back step. Well, he thought, it’ll go away. It cried pitifully and then it did go away, and after a while he went out to look for it. “Kittykittykittykitty.” He walked naked except for his long T-shirt, barefoot across the cold wet grass, his big dog, Oscar, with him. He pulled the T-shirt down to make himself decent, and thought he heard the kitten under the house. Bent over to look, and Oscar sniffed him. Roger jumped straight into the side of his house, hitting the faucet with his thigh. He groaned and sat down in the grass. “Ohhhhhhh.” And saw the flashlight. “Dad?” she said. “Dad? Is that you?”
“Go back to bed,” he said, “everything is all right.” But his voice sounded funny, like a man who’d run into a faucet. “What’s wrong, Dad? Are you all right?”
No, he wasn’t. Much later he was not so bad, after the pain subsided and he had a shot of bourbon, but he wasn’t all right. He lay awake listening for the kitten. He fell asleep, and in his dreams something chased him to hell and back—it might have been a cat. In the morning the kitten came back. Martha said, “Don’t you think it’d be less trouble if we kept him in the house? Then you wouldn’t have to get up in the middle of the night and go find him, Dad. You see, if you keep something—” “All right,” he said. “—if you keep something indoors, then you know where it is.” “All right,” he said, “we’ll try it and see how it works.”
Thursday night he was glad the kitten was in. It rained buckets, one of those summer thunderstorms when the sky turns black and clouds boil up and the wind blows the grass flat. Trees bend in half and sheets of rain fall like in the Old Testament, and then it’s over.
The wind took hold of the Quaker State oil sign at Krebsbach Chev, the one that hung on the Pure Oil sign, and ripped it from the bracket and whipped it down Main Street like a guillotine. It sliced into the ground in front of the Unknown Norwegian and buried itself halfway in. When it came whistling down the street, Mr. Lundberg had just emerged from the Sidetrack Tap to make sure his windows were rolled up. The wind almost bowled him over, and then he heard a hum like a UFO and ran inside. It was the sign whizzing past so fast he only saw a blur, it could’ve cut someone in two. Such as him, for example. He is a hefty man and half of him would be almost as much as all of just about anyone else you could think of, but that sign would’ve done the job. It had not been a good week for him anyway, and then to get sliced in two on top of it—not a week you’d care to live through again.
Tuesday night a chunk of plaster fell from the bedroom ceiling, crashing on the bureau dresser and waking him and Betty out of a sound sleep. It was a chunk they have noticed for two years—first its outline, shaped like the state of Illinois, then the shadows where it pulled away from the lath. The force of gravity being what it is, it was clear what would come next, and they both looked up and said, “Looks to me like that plaster’s coming off.” So when it finally fell on the bureau, there were recriminations on her part, after they got over the scare. They lay in the dark, little bits of plaster falling, and she said, “If you’da just done it when you said you were going to.” He knew better than to reply. She said, “I kept telling you to.”
He lay, smelling the perfume on the bureau that got busted by the chunk. A dozen different perfumes, sickening, and when he opened the window, the wind blew all the perfumes directly at him. She said, “But oh no, you wouldn’t listen to me, would you. Oh no. You wouldn’t listen to me for one minute.”
He lay and listened to her, remembering me awful nights out when she wore the perfume he bought her, such as the Sons of Knute Syttende Mai Ball, which he spent in a suit at least three sizes too small for him. He was too proud to have it let out, although it meant he couldn’t dance, couldn’t sit, had to stand, and when he dropped his wallet he had to kick it into a closet and close the door and ease himself down so he could pick it up, but when he eased back up, his pants split anyway, and then he could only stand in certain areas.
She said, “Well, maybe you’ll listen to me the next time. I’m not wrong about everything, you know.”
The perfumes were gifts from him, bought at K Mart in Saint Cloud for anniversaries and birthdays, in a panic at the last minute, him sneaking over to Notions while she was in Women’s Wear and asking the clerk to give him something nice. He should have known, looking at the clerk, that her taste wasn’t right on the mark. She looked like someone he played football with, except she piled her hair up high on her head and sprayed it to stay, so when she gave him a bottle of Nuits de Oui, he might’ve guessed it wasn’t what Betty would wear. Smelling the perfumes made him think what a dope he was, and he couldn’t even fix a ceiling before it fell either.
He lay in the dark thinking it over. Her last words were “And you can clean it up too.” At six-thirty he got up and made toast and coffee and brought it up to her in bed. To confuse her. Then he got the vacuum out. He picked up the big pieces and the broken bottles, vacuumed the plaster bits and dust on the floor and under the radiator and on the bureau, as she sat and drank her coffee, speechless. He swooshed around with the vacuum, a new Japanese-made model more powerful than what he was used to, and it sucked up some money off the bureau, including a few quarters that banged around in its bowels, and it almost swallowed a picture of Donny Lundberg. As he rescued Donny from the vacuum’s maw, it ate a tiny plastic bottle of superglue that clattered around inside it and then made a popping sound. He felt something wet on his bare foot. He wiped it off with his hand. Then it dawned on him that it was superglue. He said, “Oh for dumb,” and clapped his hand to his forehead.
He was in that pose when Betty drove him to the hospital: The Thinker, hand to his forehead. He remained in serious thought until the nurse found the correct solvent and sat with a Q-tip and slowly pried his hand loose from his forehead and the bedspread from his foot. He had gotten so mad about putting his hand to his forehead, he kicked the bed with his sticky foot, and the spread came along attached to his ankle.
The hand-forehead separation, the bedspreadectomy, were carried out with professional gravity befitting an open-heart operation. Betty drove him home without a word about anything except the rainy weather and things other than getting stuck to yourself, but still he had to go to work at the Co-op elevator with an angry red mark on his forehead and another on the heel of his palm. They said, “What happened to you?”
He said, “I hit myself in the head with my fist.”
“Boy, you hit pretty hard.”
“Yeah, I guess I don’t know my own strength.”
It was a week when a person would rather not be sliced in half, because you’d want your family to remember you as a better man than what you were most recently.
The rain was good news for lawns and gardens; some of them turned so green, you look at them and see green for the rest of the day—your kids look green, your food, even your thumb.
Some kids turned green Friday night after the Junior-Senior Prom. The theme was “Caribbean Escapade,” and the gym was decorated to look like a beach house under palm trees and an illuminated tropical moon. And a Plexiglas lagoon on a night in June. With a macaroon by the old spittoon. Couples of seventeen-year-olds in evening dress, dancing close, and the visions of elegance led to delusions of invincibility when the bottle was passed in the parking lot. Some kids learned that although vodka-and-apple-juice is tasteless going down, it’s quite memorable on the return trip. That night, in and around town, a few sailors had to weather heavy seas. If any preachers had been awake at 3:00 A.M., they could’ve converted them to temperance, Methodism, Masonry, yoga, or Japanese yen; the fields were ripe for harvest.
The rain was more than farmers needed and came at the wrong time, keeping them out of the fields, and now planting is late. Farmers are in enough trouble as it is, and even if they could run the weather as they please, they still might not make it. Roger got so nervous he couldn’t sit down for two minutes. He’d start to say something, jump up in the middle, look out the window, and forget what he said. Cindy said, “You’re driving us crazy, let’s get out of here. You can’t do anything until it dries up, so let’s go away and do something this weekend.” He said, “You must be crazy.” “No,” she said, “not yet.”
Leave before we get the corn in? “We’ll go to Grand Rapids and stay with my sister,” she said. What about Cathy and Martha? “They’re old enough,” she said, “it’s only for a couple days.” “Yeah,” the girls said, “you need a break, Dad. You ought to go.”
It was the eagerness in their eyes that Roger kept thinking about as he and Cindy drove north toward Grand Rapids Thursday evening, and how pleasant his girls were, how helpful as they saw their parents out to the car. “Here, Dad, let me carry that. In you go. Okay, you two have a good time and don’t worry about us.” Driving north, he could hear Cathy’s voice saying, “Don’t worry about us, don’t worry about us,” and just north of Aitkin he turned around and headed south. “Are you crazy?” Cindy said. “Yes,” he said—“as the father of two teenage daughters, I’d be crazy not to be crazy.”
When they turned onto the county road a half-mile east of their place, they noticed more cars than you normally see, all heading west. They came over the hill. Up ahead their house was blazing with lights. All the traffic was turning in at their driveway. They could hear the music quite clearly from the road as they cruised past. “You don’t want to go in?” she said. Roger said, “I don’t know. Maybe it’s something we don’t want to know about.” “Then let’s turn around and forget we ever saw this, whatever it is. God help us, I hope it isn’t what I think,” she said.
At the crossroad, he parked on the shoulder and they got out and looked at the farm. Across the muddy field, with so much standing water the house looked like a cruise ship with a big party on board. More cars drove up the gangplank.
“Probably it’s not what we think,” she said. “If we’re going to trust them, then we have to trust them and not go around spying on them to see if they do what we want or not.”
“I’m curious. I’m going over and see what’s going on. Want to come?”
“Of course I do,” she said.
It was hard going. They took off their shoes and socks and waded through mud up to their ankles, straight across the field in the dark, toward the carnival in their farmyard. Headlights, loud music: he didn’t know there were this many teenage kids in the county. They got to the edge of the windbreak. It didn’t seem like their place with the music blasting. Voices screeching, drums pounding. “My gosh, they’re going to kill the chickens,” she said. She looked in the coop, and the chickens did look dazed. Some of the hens seemed to be turned upside down in their nests. Where was Oscar the faithful watchdog? Oscar, who goes crazy when the mailman turns around in the yard.
Roger peeked around the corner of the coop. Kids milled around, went in the house, came out. More cars pulled up, kids got out. Two kegs of beer by the back door. Kids moved around, restless, hanging around, watching other kids hanging around, watching to see if there was more fun somewhere else, boys circling, girls waiting—a lot like a party he sort of remembered from twenty-five or so years ago.
Oscar lay by the back steps, an empty beer cup by his head, his head on his paws. Some kids lit cigarettes, took long drags, big clouds of smoke. Lighting up—Roger remembered that. Kids passing their cigarettes around. That’s generous, he thought. And there was his own little girl, Martha—reaching for a cigarette. No! No! he thought. Don’t. She put it in her mouth, his sweet little daughter. Oh darling child, don’t. A boy lit it and out of her sweet lips came smoke. Roger had taken two steps out from behind the coop. He wanted to run to her and yet he really didn’t.
Cindy was right behind him, her hand on his back. “This is ridiculous. I can’t believe they’d do this. Are we going to allow this?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t? No? Well. I don’t know either,” she said. “I was hoping you’d know. You’re always so—so—”
“Strict?”
“Yes.”
“You know something?” he said. “I’m getting tired of being a dad.” He didn’t want to march in and be the cop, have everybody get quiet and him make a speech while sullen kids slink away cursing him under their breath. He wanted to take his lovely wife by her cool hand—Come away, come away, my love, my sweet slim darling, mother of my children, come away.…She said, “Look! They’re tramping on my petunias.”
“Come,” he said.
“You’re going to just walk away and leave them?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure this is right?”
“No.”
He took her hand and they stepped carefully over old lumber in their bare feet and past the wreck of the old corn planter under the box-elder trees and Grandpa Steen’s Model A, sunk down to the hubcaps.
“You know, that party at the gravel pit was like this,” she said.
“What party?”
“Roger, honey, you know very well.”
There were fast footsteps behind them, and a snarl and a bark. It was Oscar coming straight at them—“Oscar! Good boy!” Oscar stopped, growling. “Oscar! Oscar—easy boy, good boy.” Roger took a step toward him; the dog barked. He backed up and barked and barked. He followed them across the field, barking,
How strange! To spy on your own house and be chased away by your own dog and then—to find that your own car is parked too far down in the ditch, and when you put your foot on the gas to come away my love, come away my dear one, your rear end slips to the side and you’re stuck. What then?
They made it to Grand Rapids at 4:00 A.M. and tumbled into bed. Before he went to sleep, he saw it all over again: his long hike back to the house, up the driveway; the silence when he came around the corner; someone shut off the tape, there was a lot of shuffling and muttered hellos, and he said, “Can somebody give us a push?” And when Martha said, “What were you doing parked on the road?” and he said, “None of your business,” she said, “Oh Daddy, you didn’t,” and he said, “Well, I’m just human, you know,” and she said, “You’re so sweet. I had no idea,” and smiled at him. “Huh?” he said. He said, “I meant that—you mean you thought that—you really thought that your mother and I—?” And then, after the Tollerud boy pulled them out with his old pickup, Roger had a bad feeling in his rear end: no billfold. He must’ve dropped it when they ran through the mud with Oscar on their tails. Maybe it was in the field, but he didn’t think he’d look for it right then. He said to Cindy, “You got some money?” She said she thought that he had money. So he said to Martha, “Would you happen to have some money you could let me have until Monday?” “Hey!” she said. “My dad needs some money.” They passed a hat and collected sixty dollars. “I’ll pay you back!” he said to them all. “No problem, don’t worry about it,” they said. And the quiet ride to Grand Rapids in the middle of the night. He thought Cindy was asleep and then she said, “Sure, you remember that party, that’s where we met. You were with your cousin, and he spilled beer on my pedal pushers, and you wiped it off with your hankie. I had beer running down my leg and you tried to clean it up.”
Later she said: “What do you think your grandpa would have thought if he’d come home and found a hundred kids hanging around his house?” He said, “He woulda been darned surprised to be alive in 1986, I’ll say that.”
Her sister left a note on the door: “We went to bed. The rollaway is made in the basement, help yourself to anything in the fridge. Will wake you up at 7. XXX Gloria.”
Settling down on the rollaway, he thought again: I’m getting tired of being a dad. Love my girls, but I’ve been a parent long enough, I did what I could. I can’t go on being in charge much longer. These kids, this world, are going to continue long after I’m gone, and I should get used to that and even enjoy it. I can’t run them. I can only love them and this good life.
Thank you, God, for this good life and forgive us if we do not love it enough. Thank you for the rain. And for the chance to wake up in three hours and go fishing: I thank you for that now, because I won’t feel so thankful then.
Good night, my sweet wife, sweet dreams. He kissed the back of her neck and lay, full of love, and fell asleep.