It has been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon. It was awfully quiet Tuesday when the news got out that Father Emil is stepping down as pastor after forty-some years at Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility. He didn’t mean to announce it until further on into Lent, afraid people might slack off with a lame-duck priest, but the DeMolay was going around selling garden seeds on Tuesday to send themselves to summer camp and Father Emil, always a great customer of theirs, said, “Boys, I won’t be planting a garden this spring,” and they went home and told their parents. In Lake Wobegon, if a person doesn’t plan to garden in the spring, they plan to be planted themselves. Margaret Krebsbach called him up and said, “You’re not putting in a garden; what’s wrong?” He said, “I’m retiring on the 31st of March, the day after Easter.”
“Oh,” she said, “you’re just tired. You feel bad, you need a vacation. You can’t leave us.” “You know,” he said, “this last January I baptized the child of a girl who is the child of a couple I married. Three generations is about enough. When I get to where I’m burying people I baptized, I don’t know but what I’ll get confused and mix em up.” He said, “People here need somebody who’s got all his marbles, because, God knows, a lot of them don’t. So it’s time to retire.”
Margaret told her mother-in-law, Myrtle, and then the news spread across town within an hour. Myrtle is one of the mass media. Father Emil retiring—amazing news: a man there so long, like part of the landscape, a work of architecture, a tree, in a town where tradition is important and sometimes all that we have. To think of him being gone—it’s hard to imagine. Even if you’re not Catholic, and here, if you’re not Catholic, you’re absolutely not Catholic. We don’t go in for nondenominationalism and tolerance. In the Bible we don’t find the word “maybe” so much, or read where God says, “On the other hand, uh, there could be other points of view on this.” So we go in for strict truth and let the other guy be tolerant of us. But even if you’re not Catholic, in a town like Lake Wobegon, when the priest clears his throat, the dogs stop barking. When the priest walks down the street, everybody’s quiet.
Clarence Bunsen stopped by to visit him. Clarence had been in the Cities over the weekend, attending a Ford dealers’ banquet where Bunsen Motors got a plaque as one of the oldest Ford agencies in Minnesota. It was a seventeen-pound bronze plaque you could put on your front step and use for a boot scraper. Clarence said, “I don’t know why I went or why I brought it back, I hate to die and leave this junk for my kids to think about. We got a wallful of plaques for being one of the oldest, and as long as we stay around we’ll get more of them. To me they’re no more attractive than a concrete block. I know that when I’m dead my kids are going to want to heave this junk into a hole but they’ll feel guilty, so they’ll keep it in a box somewhere and pass it on to their kids. Damn souvenirs are like mercury in the bloodstream, except they’re hereditary too. You suffer from it and then give it to your kids.”
“Oh I don’t know,” said Father Emil, “it may be ugly to you but tastes change….” He knew it wasn’t true: he only said it in his pastoral capacity. He squinted at the plaque. It was ugly all right. “I hope they’re not going to give me one of these,” he said.
“We’ll give you a trip to Florida.”
“Why not Jamaica?”
“I don’t think old priests are supposed to go farther south than Florida. Unless they’re missionaries, of course.”
“Then maybe the parish would send me to Florida, and you Lutherans could pay the freight from there to Jamaica and I could be a Lutheran missionary.”
“You’d make a good one, Father. You sure have the intelligence for it. With your background, we could probably train you in a couple of years.”
Father Emil smiled a sweet tolerant smile. “Being a Lutheran is my idea of a vacation,” he said. “I can’t imagine anything more relaxing. To take those truths that are too hard for you and change them a little to make it easier on yourself—just like, if you’re tired of falling down, you turn down the force of gravity—I tell you, Luther was a great man all right.”
On the way home Clarence dropped in at the Sidetrack to see if Wally was there. Wally was, of course. Being the proprietor, he had to be. He said, “Clarence, what can we get you?”
“Oh nothing for me, Wally. I just dropped in to see if you were here.”
“Of course I’m here. Where else would I be?”
“Well, I wanted to make sure. But as long as I’m here, I might as well have a beer.”
“You want a Wendy?”
“Of course I want a Wendy. What else would I have?”
“Just wanted to make sure.”
Saint Wendell’s beer, brewed by the Dimmers family at the old Dimmers Brewery in nearby Saint Wendell’s for five generations, since their ancestor evaded the selective-service system of the Prince of Prussia and fled to the New World. He also skipped out on some debts in the process and broke the hearts of three young women who had the impression they would become Mrs. Dimmers as soon as he paid his debts and finished military service. The young rounder came to Minnesota and became rich and distinguished making beer. He thought at first of calling it Dimmers beer but listened to good advice and called it Saint Wendell’s. For as long as anyone remembers, men in the little taverns around Mist County have said, “Gimme a Wendy,” and some bartenders don’t ask, they just give you a Wendy, and if you say, “I didn’t ask for that,” they say, “Where’d you say you were from?”
“I don’t believe I said.”
“Good. I don’t want to know.”
Wendy’s is the beer a man drinks because it is the best. It’s made from the deep wellwater from the town of Saint Wendell’s, there’s no water like it. People from all over the world have said so: it’s good water. Saint Wendell’s has a municipal faucet, and people drive up with a trunk full of plastic bottles and get a month’s supply. A Frenchman came and got two gallons and took it home. This is true. French customs wasn’t going to let him take it through, but then they tasted it and said “Ahhhhh,” and those men were French, and the French make great water themselves. Wendy’s is made from it, using an old German recipe, by people who have worked for Dimmers Brewery so long they don’t remember if they were hired or if they took a vow. The old brick brewery was supposed to resemble a Bavarian castle, but when it was built, in 1879, bricklayers had beer rights: there was two-fisted day-long drinking on the job. When the layers got on high scaffolding, it made them dizzy. So the building starts out to be a castle and rises royally for two stories and then it quits and becomes a sort of barn. The bricks for the towers were used to make a brick road because the layers felt more comfortable on their hands and knees. The brick road is a hundred feet wide for about seventy-five feet and then it’s seventy-five feet wide for one hundred feet and then it becomes a path.
You think of this as you sit in an old dim bar and drink a Wendy, and you think of how the beer wagons kept rolling in Saint Wendell’s through Prohibition. They trained the horses to make the deliveries, and these smart Percherons memorized complicated beer routes—stop here, skip two houses, stop there—and when they stopped, a guy ran out of the house and grabbed his beer. The horses didn’t make change but they did everything else, but of course if a horse got on the sauce himself, he might get mixed up, but usually they did the job and if the sheriff came, all he found was a wagon and a horse with red eyes and bad breath.
A man thinks of the Dimmerses’ history when he drinks a Wendy, especially the first Dimmers, who ran away from responsibility, shirked his duty to his country, reneged on his debts, seduced women and lied to them—but, hey, who’s perfect? Those are the very sins a man goes into a tavern to contemplate committing.
You think of history while sitting in a bar unchanged in your lifetime, and you feel peaceable: the long mirror, the neon beer signs, the old oak back bar with glass doors and columns and dark figures (angels or trolls) at the top, brooding, and below them the Minnesota Twins scoreboard (that’s what they’re brooding about) and the old Swancrest radio, the fancy cut glasses in the cabinet for drinks nobody knows how to make, drinks with swizzle sticks—they don’t use those here. Wally’s nephew tended bar once and put ice and sweet vermouth in Mr. Berge’s whiskey and said, “Here, try this.” Mr. Berge didn’t see the swizzle stick, though it had a big fleur-de-lis on the end. When Mr. Berge removed the fleur-de-lis from his left nostril, he bled a little, but he was peaceable. He only said, “Sonny, don’t do that again unless you tell me, and then don’t do it anyway. Gosh, it hurts.”
In Minneapolis, you go to any hotel or shopping mall and find an English pub or a Western saloon or small-town tavern with a name like BILLY BOB’S, but the antiques come from the antique factory and the concept was developed by a design team—the city is full of new places made to look old, but those aren’t the same as a joint where people have sat for fifty years, and all of them people you know. It’s the difference between a lie and the truth. It’s not true that Wendy’s is the best beer in the world, actually it’s not that good. And it gives me terrible gas. The fact that we can sit and say it’s the best and defend it against superior brews is one more reason why it is the best, and maybe the gas helps us do that.
Father Emil appeared in the Sidetrack once, when Wally and Evelyn celebrated their twentieth anniversary. He walked in, wished them well, had a sip of brandy, and said goodbye. That was twenty-seven years ago. Wally kept the glass and wrote Father Emil on it and put it on the shelf. One day he was washing glasses and left it sitting two minutes on the counter and somebody saw Father Emil and put in two bits, so there it sat, a collection glass, for years and years. If you told a priest joke you had to put a quarter in the glass, and for Norskie jokes, moron jokes, jokes about drunks, any bad joke, the jury at the bar assessed a fine, and so, over the years, comedy helped support the church.
“So, Clarence,” Wally says. “We should go in on a gift for him—maybe some kind of a…What’s the word I’m trying to think of?”
“A plaque.”
“Yes, a plaque. We could glue the Father Emil glass onto it, and think of a humorous inscription. You’re humorous. You should do it.”
“Naw, we oughta send him on a trip to someplace like Jamaica. Or just send him to Jamaica itself.”
“How much would that run us, do you think?”
“I don’t know. Couple thousand, maybe.”
“Gosh, you’d have to tell some pretty rank ones to get a couple thousand. You care for another?”
“No, I’m going to have to get on out of here, it’s getting late.”