1.
If has been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon. Commencement was Wednesday evening at the football field, the eighty-seven members of the Class of ’86 were ushered into the next chapter of their lives to the sweet strains of Elgar. Carla Krebsbach was one of them, and earlier that day, while she looked at the pictures of her classmates, autographed, in her copy of The Shore, she thought, “Wouldn’t it be nice if there were eighty-six people in the Class of ’86? It would be like a good omen,” and then it struck her that she had wished someone dead, just as her eyes fell on Dale Walters’s picture, where he had written, “If you get to heaven before I do, just drill a hole and pull me through— Lots of love and good luck to a great kid, that’s you!”
She thought, “Dale is going to die because of my terrible thought.” With his black hair combed like he never combs it, serious eyes looking straight out, he looked like he might be dead already, hanging in his basement from a rafter, or drunk and crashed into a tree, or his head blown off. Lord have mercy on me, a sinner. She put on her eye shadow and prayed for God to save his life.
That night, at seven o’clock sharp, the eighty-seven moved in processional formation out of the gym door, across the dirt lot, and onto the cinder track around the field where the Leonards won two games last fall. To the sad and elegant cadence of “Pomp and Circumstance,” the Class passed before the bleachers and the sharp tiny flashes of light here and here and here like parents’ heads exploding, and filed into the eight rows of folding chairs between the forty- and fifty-yard lines, and, on a signal from Miss Falconer, they sat down in unison. She had them practice in the lunchroom on Tuesday. She said, “Don’t flop down like that, don’t just collapse like a pile of bricks—let yourself down gracefully—no, not like that!—you look like you’re an invalid.”
She worked with them on the correct method of sitting and they got worse at it, until she threw up her hands in despair. She is a small, utterly elegant woman, so perfectly groomed and neatly dressed that if she dropped dead the undertaker wouldn’t have to fix her up a bit—she’s ready to go right straight in the coffin for reviewal. So elegant, and she clapped her elegant hands and cried, “What’s the matter with you people? This is simple! Don’t flop, don’t poke around or grope or waggle your seats, just—sit. Dale? Dale, are you part of this, or what is your problem?”
Dale had reason to be distracted. He was fairly sure that he’d flunked Dentley’s final in higher algebra and that any moment there’d be a knock on the door, Mr. Halvorson would come in and say, “Dale, could I see you…out here…for a moment,” and his classmates would turn and look and think, “Heroin. Heroin and car theft and sex acts too awful to mention.” He’d follow the principal out to the hall and hear him say, “I have bad news, Dale. You can’t graduate, you’ll have to come back next year.” He waited all day for the knock, he felt like he was floating. Tuesday afternoon they got their copies of The Shore and sat on the grass where they used to sit talking after lunch all those years and signed each outer’s yearbooks. He wrote, “Dear Allen, remember all the good times we had—”
“I will always remember this,” he thought, “this very moment; years from now I’ll always be able to remember exactly how this looked and how I felt. I’ll remember her face”—looking at Carla Krebsbach—and he looked where Carla had written in his book:
When darkest night surrounds you
Look up and see a star
And know that you have one true friend
No matter where you are.
Algebra ordinarily was a good subject for him but on Monday he couldn’t remember anything the first twenty minutes. He kept saying, “Relax,” and relaxed and got panicky in a relaxed sort of way. The last thirty minutes he wrote down anything he could think of that made sense. On the last problem, in the last panicky minutes of the hour, he caught a clear view of Barbara Soderberg’s test—the problem solved in big block lettering—and looked up at the top of Dentley’s head behind his desk, looked at Barbara’s test again, and then looked up at the minute hand just about to jump to the twelve so the bells would ring, and thought, “This doesn’t matter that much, it’s just not that important to me.” And set his pencil down. The bell rang and Dale stood up and walked away. That was Monday.
There are no Walterses in Famous People of the Great Plains, Dale has checked. He imagined how his name’d look in there and wrote it down on an index card that is pasted inside his blue folder where he keeps his school stuff.
WALTERS, DALE. B. Lake Wobegon, Minn. March 4, 1968. BA Harvard, 1990. MA Yale, 1991. Ph.D. University of Paris, 1993. Married, Danielle Monteux, 1992. Three children: Antoine, Mimi, and Doug. Elected to the Institute of Arts, 1994, and L’Institut Nationale Académie de la Honneur et Gloire et Héroisme, 1995. Author of numerous scholarly and artistic works, frequent lecturer here and abroad, recipient of more prizes than you could shake a stick at.
He thought of it again in the minute before the bell. He thought, “Life is so wonderful that it is all we can do simply to experience it, and all the things people think are important—none of it matters if it makes us less able to live.” Did I think of that myself? he wondered.
He wrote it on the front page of The Shore under a photograph of the school: I AM ALIVE. I AM A LIVING FEELING PERSON AND WHAT I USED TO THINK WAS SO IMPORTANT, IT ISN’T. TESTS AND GRADUATION DON’T MATTER BECAUSE NOW I KNOW WHAT I NEED TO KNOW, THAT THE IMPORTANT THING IS LIFE ITSELF.
How glorious to fail—and, in this moment of humiliation, discover the meaning of life.
It was the greatest day and a half of his life, and then it ended sadly. Dentley called him in and said, “Dale, your final wasn’t so good but I’ve been looking at it and I’m going to give you a C minus on it and a C for the year—I think that basically you understand the material, you just didn’t know exactly how to use it.”
“But I didn’t solve the problems,” Dale said.
“Yeah, but I could see where you were headed on most of them, and anyway I’m going to give you some extra credit for class participation.”
He looked up, a sad man with thin dry hair, smiling, and Dale said, “That’s not right. I flunked your test. I don’t want to sneak out of it. I failed.”
“Dale, you had a bad day. I’m not going to nail you for that.”
He didn’t feel right about it but he let Dentley write down a C, then he felt worse. It was like he had refused to cheat, only to allow someone else to cheat for him. He talked to Mr. Halvorson, who thought Dale was complaining that the grade was low. He kept saying, “Dale, there’s no shame in getting a C—it’s a passing grade.”
When he sat with the others Wednesday night, he felt good again. The night so clear, the smell of grass and damp, the music and voices drifting across the field, so many faces—how could a lover of life not be elated with so much to see as this? Carla won the Sons of Knute Shining Star scholarship and they all jumped up and clapped. She was valedictorian too. “When we look back on this night years from now we will see it as a great moment when our lives turned and our future course was determined,” she said. At the end, the band played and they stood up together in a whoosh of gowns and walked out, heads high. Someone called, “Dale! Dale!” and the camera flashed. He went with Allen to Martha Hedlund’s, whose parents weren’t home, and drank beer and smoked a cigarette. Carla said, “Hi, Dale,” and he put his arm around her. They talked about what they would do in life. “I’m going in the Navy,” he said, which sounded good to him. A great night, drinking a can of beer, one arm around a girl, talking. And then she said, “I’m awfully glad you’re alive.”
“It’s enough to be alive,” he said, “a person doesn’t need anything more.”
“The Navy!” said Allen. “I thought we were going to go to Saint Cloud State together. How can you go in the Navy?”
“Just do it. That’s how.”
Drinking a beer, one arm around a girl, talking about life—on the verge of leaving all this behind, on the very edge, the last moment before the door shuts, the last trembling moment—when she said that strange wonderful thing, “I’m awfully glad you’re alive.”
So was he, so glad he was awfully sorry to say goodnight.
2.
Beautiful summer weather the week after graduation, a good week for fishing, when farmers got a lull in their field work and could go out and sit and rock in a boat and work on their sunburn. Rollie Hochstetter pulled in a stringerful of sunnies, fishing in Sunfish Bay, about twenty yards off the end of Kruegers’ dock, not far from the weeds, with his brother-in-law Don Bauer in Don’s aluminum boat (6 1/2-horsepower motor), with 2 1/2-to-3 1/4-inch worms, about two feet off the bottom using a 3/4-inch red plastic bobber. Nearby sat Clint Bunsen in his boat, contemplating the sun on the cool water, the rod and reel in his hand. His serenity was disturbed by the activity at Rollie’s stringer, so he called over, “You going to keep those puny things? I’m going for the big ones. I’m not sure those are legal-size, are they?”
Rollie said, “You know, to tell you the truth, I don’t go for those big ones, they’re too damn bony. These medium-size are the good eaters, you know that.”
Clint contemplated the wisdom of Rollie: if you can’t have something, find a reason why you wouldn’t want it. He imagined Rollie as a monk in a boat, praying, “Lord, do not send me any of those big ones as they are too bony, Lord, as Thou surely must know. Grant Thy servant a little fish, one of the good eaters.”
Clint knew why Rollie was out on the lake, though; it was because his heart was breaking. His grandson Dale Walters decided to join the Navy, and who could say whether he’d come back or not?
“Why so soon?” his mother said. “How do I know you’ve even thought about it? Four years! Dale! What’s the big rush? You haven’t signed anything yet, have you? Honey. You didn’t. Oh, Dale. How could you do this? Honey, you don’t even know how to swim. You’d be out in the ocean someplace.”
“Ma, they carry life preservers.”
“How do you know that?”
“It’s the law. They have to.”
“Who’s going to enforce it? This is the government, they make the law, they don’t have to obey it, they don’t hafta take care of you one bit—they could throw you over the side and who’d know it?”
Bobbie was scared and upset. Dale is her youngest boy, then it’s Deb, and then they’re all gone. She stood against the stove, crying into a dish towel. (This was a week ago Friday.) Everyone was there, an emergency family meeting, Rollie and Louise and Jack and Bobbie and Dale’s uncle Carl. Bobbie said, “Talk to him, Jack.” “I can’t tell him anything, I gave up telling him anything a long time ago,” said Jack. Bobbie said, “Talk to him, Dad,” and Rollie just looked away. He was hurt because Dale hadn’t asked his advice.
Bobbie was making lasagna. “What am I doing this for?” she said through her tears. It was eight o’clock in the evening and everyone had eaten supper and she was making four big pans of lasagna, to freeze, she said, but with Dale leaving and taking his appetite with him, why such big pans?
“This is the craziest thing you ever did and you did some crazy ones,” she said. She laughed. “Remember when you went after the groundhogs?” He certainly did. It was only a year ago. Something was harvesting their garden as the plants came up out of the ground, and one day Jack noticed six groundhogs hiking through the yard en route to the lunch program and thought, “Six is too many. One or two, yes (if they’re married), but six is pushing charity too far,” so he told Dale, “Dale, get out there and wipe out those groundhogs.”
Dale got his .22 out of his closet and was coming downstairs when he caught sight of himself in the mirror. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, and standing there, nice tan, fairly good pectoral development, rifle, he looked like a hero. He found a red bandanna and tied it around his forehead. Looked better.
Outside, leaning against the tree behind the corncrib, waiting for groundhogs in the scorching heat, he could imagine how good he looked, and he moved out through the weeds, imagining other men—Bravo Company—following him (though he couldn’t hear them, that’s how good they were). He nailed the first groundhog by the milkhouse. It flopped twice and he heard others scurry into the weeds at the end of the garden. One of them made a run for it. He fired and missed, and chased it, and then saw one at eight o’clock and turned and crouched and fired, but it was a big rock, not a groundhog, and the bullet hit it and then he heard a chunk and there was a hole in the side of their green Chevy.
She laughed at the thought of it, her boy at supper that night saying, “Dad, I was going after groundhogs today and I put a shell in the Chevy.” The reason Dale waited until supper to confess was that his mom was weeding begonias on the other side of the car. He stood on the rock and looked at the hole and saw that if the car hadn’t been parked there he would’ve killed her. He put the rifle back in his room.
She laughed. “Oh honey, I’m sorry, but it was so comical, the look on your face—” He might have killed her that afternoon and been in all the newspapers as a wacko teenager.
She said, “But what are you going to do with the nice car Grandpa gave you?”
“Well,” he said, “it’ll be just as nice in four years, except it won’t have so much mileage on it.”
Rollie didn’t say much that night, because he felt too bad. He had looked after Dale since he was six—Rollie saw how those older brothers ganged up on the little boy and he knew what a hard man Jack could be, so he went out of his way for Dale and tried to show him things. He taught him how to drive a tractor when he was seven, and how to handle pigs, and took him fishing, and was close to him, as close as Rollie knew how to be, close enough that Dale came over to talk to his grandpa every single damn day, so he was hurt that the boy would now turn away and be secretive and, this Friday night, not even look at him. Rollie sat and studied his coffee. “You know,” he said, “there never was a war we fought that we had a good reason for. None of them made sense. Not a goddamned one.”
Jack cleared his throat. Everyone was quiet. Nobody spoke.
About eleven, Bobbie said she was going to bed. They walked out in the yard and stood around the cars for a while, talking. To Dale it was like a dream. Under the yard light and the stars in the sky, his family talking in the evening breeze, the big barn half full of hay bales like a cargo ship docked at the house, looming above them in the night.
Saturday he and his dad went out and cut more hay, and Sunday more relatives came over. He tried to call Carla but she was at her grandparents’ fiftieth anniversary in Cold Spring, and in the evening she was gone, her mother said, to Saint Cloud with friends to see a movie. What friends? What was his name? Dale didn’t dare ask, but he did drive past her house about eleven o’clock. The lights were on, but he didn’t dare go in. He was afraid that if he said, “I came to say goodbye, I’m going into the Navy, who knows if I’ll ever come back,” she’d say, “Oh, that’s interesting. Well, good luck.”
Monday he cleaned out his room. He threw out all his school stuff, most of his letters, and his 4-H project on pork (Nature’s Perfect Food), and selected the pictures he’d take along, including Carla’s graduation picture, an enlargement. Most other people she gave a billfold-size but to him she gave an enlargement, one more way he knew she had feelings for him.
He called the Navy the next day and went to Saint Cloud and took all the tests and made up his mind that if they wanted him he was going.
“You seem almost happy about it or something,” Allen said. “It’s like you don’t even care or anything.”
The reason he felt happy was the Navy physical. As the doctor sat and asked him questions, Dale was making up his mind to ask him one, and finally, after he lowered his underpants and coughed and was checked for a hernia, Dale said, “I, uh, was always wondering why, uh, my pennis, you know, it hangs crooked. I always wondered what was wrong with it.” The doctor looked. He said, “First of all, it’s pronounced ‘penis,’ and secondly, it’s perfectly normal.”
Perfectly normal. What a gift. He took it home with him. Perfectly normal. He had worried about this since he was sixteen. He wanted to call Carla and tell her somehow, or at least be with her and feel perfectly normal. He was glad he had never discussed it with her and mispronounced “penis.” Somehow the subject had never come up.
And suddenly it was Wednesday noon and Dale was leaving at one. His mother sat and wept over breakfast and then she got busy. Jack drove the Pontiac in to fill it up with gas, a sort of going-away present, a full tank. Dale sat in the living room. Debbie sat there, reading Parents magazine. Everyone came in for a little lunch, the Walterses and Rollie and Louise and Carl. They squeezed in around the kitchen table, where his mother had laid out a big spread. She didn’t use the dining room, because it wasn’t Sunday and they weren’t company. And she felt too bad. She felt so bad she had spent all morning fixing lunch. There were platters of meat, hot and cold, and tuna salad and potato salad and hamburger hotdish and tuna hotdish and breads and pickles—even Fran could see it was too much—and then she reached into the oven for the big one, a baking pan. She held it out to him—“For you, Dale”—and she took the tinfoil off. It was pigs in blankets, wieners baked into a biscuit crust. He had liked them when he was eight but she still thought it was his favorite dish. She watched him take two. She studied his face for signs of pleasure. “Mmmmmmm, those are very very good. Thank you,” he said.
And then it was one. “Well,” he said. He stood up. “I can’t stand it,” she cried, and she ran into the bathroom. He hugged his grandpa and grandma, he shook hands with Uncle Carl, he looked at his dad and shook hands with him. He said, “Ma? Come on, Ma.” And then he set down his duffel bag. “Did you give me back the car keys?” he said to his dad. Jack said, “I gave em to you, of course I did, you musta put em in the kitchen.”
But they weren’t anywhere in the kitchen. Everyone helped look except his mom, who was crying in the bathroom about her boy leaving. Except he wasn’t leaving. “Look in your pants,” Jack said. “Dad, I didn’t put em in my pants. You had em.”
“I gave em to you, Dale. I come home and got outta the car and come in and give em to ya. Look upstairs, look in the living room. Where were ya sitting? Try and think.”
Grandma was crying now, and Debbie had an arm around her and was sniffling. Oh Dale, we may never see him again. Dale thought: I may never get out of here. His dad standing by the fridge saying: “This is stupid. This is the craziest thing I ever heard of.” Carl: “Just calm down, Jack.” Jack: “What are you talking about? I’m calm.” Rollie: “Take it easy.” Jack: “Why don’t you take it easy, Dad?”
“Ma, come on out of there. Open the door.”
“I can’t. I feel too bad.”
“Ma, are my car keys in there?”
“No.”
“Ma, are you sure?”
“No.”
“Ma, please. I got to go. Help me find them.”
“But I don’t want you to go.”
“Ma, did you take my keys?”
“No.”
“Ma!”
His grandma crying. “I just know I’ll never see you again.”
Debbie crying. “I’ll be here, Grandma.”
“Oh I know, honey, but it’s not the same.”
Debbie went up to her room to cry.
Jack said, “Maybe you gave em to someone. Maybe you left em out on the lawn somewhere. Maybe you left em in the car.” When he said that, a thoughtful look came over his face. “You know,” he said, “I wonder if they wouldn’t be up over the visor.”
And of course they were.
And so he left.
He drove past Carla’s on the odd chance she’d be outside, and she was mowing the lawn and he got out to say goodbye and she hugged him. “I’ll sure miss you a lot,” she said, “so I hope you’ll write me once in a while.”
And away he went. It’s a wonderful thing to push on alone toward the horizon and have it be your own horizon and not someone else’s. It’s a good feeling, lonely and magnificent and frightening and peaceful, especially when you leave someone behind who will miss you and to whom you can write.
And so the blue Pontiac rose over the rise and zoomed around the curve by the grain elevator and up the long grade to the hill and disappeared into the future.