It has been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon. Cool weather and, down at the football field, twenty boys are working out under the cool eye of Coach Magendanz. After fifteen laps and three rounds of pushups, it doesn’t feel so cool, and they lie on their backs, imagining it’s a beach, and a woman says, “Did you really play football?” and you say, “Oh, yeah. Sure.” Coach says, “You wanna sleep, go home.” She says, “Honey, who is that big ugly loud man?” Coach says, “All right, up, ten laps, come on, ladies!” And you jump up; the woman is gone, so is the beach blanket and the frozen Daiquiris. It’s just hot sun and a cinder track and a big man yelling at you.
Cool nights, getting down around fifty, and it has all the farmers murmuring over their coffee cups at the Chatterbox. Farmers are worriers, and even though it’s been the best year anyone can remember—record crops of oats and wheat, rain has been perfect, a half-inch a week—still, Rollie says, “I don’t know, she’s been so cool at night now. It makes you wonder if maybe it isn’t going to be an early frost this year. It sure isn’t doing the soybeans any good. Sure, the oats and wheat were real good, but the price went down, you know. And we could use a little more rain, to fill out the ears of corn.” Things are real good but they could be better, because, you know, you never know. Right? “Ja, that’s right, I know what you’re talking about.”
That’s what they were talking about, but other people were talking about an item that appeared in the Herald-Star on Thursday. It read: “THANK YOU. I would like to thank my family and friends for their prayers, visits, flowers, gifts, food, when I was recovering in the hospital. I will never forget your love and generosity. Mange takk. Florence Tollefson.”
Virginia Ingqvist read it and called up Arlene Bunsen. “Has Florence been in the hospital recently?” Arlene didn’t think so. Neither did Irene when Arlene called her, or Marlys Diener or Marilyn Tollerud. Virginia called her nephew Pastor Ingqvist. He ought to know, and he said he didn’t think so either, but then, Val Tollefson has been upset with him, so maybe if Florence went to the hospital, Val got another minister for her, who wouldn’t sneak in liberal doctrine at bedside when she was too weak to resist. Virginia called Arlene back. She felt terrible to think maybe Florence had been in the hospital and nobody knew and she had felt so abandoned she put the ad in the paper to shame them. Arlene said, “I don’t think Florence would do that.” But it did seem to both of them that, about a month ago, they hadn’t seen her for a while. Florence is so quiet, though, it was hard to know. Virginia ran into her Friday at Ralph’s Grocery and said, “Florence, I’ve been thinking about you. How are you feeling these days?”
It seemed like an odd question to Florence, one that a number of people had asked her since Thursday. She looked down in the freezer chest among the hams and wondered if something was the matter with her. Did she look that bad? She’s a little heavier, but then she always gets a little heavier during the summer months, especially if she’s put on some weight over the winter.
It was Arlene who finally came right out and asked. Florence said, gosh, no, she wasn’t in the hospital. If she had been, she’d have made sure people knew about it. It’s the Christian way: if you need help, you tell people, so they won’t feel bad for not giving it. That thank-you item was ten years old, from Florence’s old appendectomy. Harold Starr put it in the paper because it was on his desk. He’s got stacks of stuff on his desk, some of it going back to childhood, and once in a while you open the paper and a piece of old news jumps out at you: here’s the honor roll from high school a quarter-century ago and I’m still not on it, years later, and no smarter. And here’s an obituary: your poor old grandma has died, again; once should’ve satisfied her, but no, she wanted to reperish.
So Florence was fine. Arlene still wondered: wasn’t she gone for a few days about the middle of July, she and Val? Seems like we didn’t see them—well, I suppose they were around somewhere.
In fact, Val and Florence had planned to go to Mount Canaan, Washington, in June, to pick up a trunk of books and papers and things that had belonged to Val’s father, David Tollefson, who died last April. Val had not attended the funeral. He hadn’t told anyone that his father died. Most people thought his dad died long ago. Val meant to go west in June, thinking there might be some important Tollefson family history in the trunk, and then he got cold feet and told them to ship the trunk to Minnesota. It arrived around the middle of July. That was when Florence and Val disappeared for a few days. They were in the house reading his dad’s papers.
Val’s parents were David and Mary Tollefson, married in 1927, and Valdemar was the oldest boy, born in 1928. His father was a carpenter, and in 1946, when Val was eighteen, his father went to work on a house down the road from them that belonged to the Hedders. David added on a bedroom and a living room with a stone fireplace. It took him two months, even with Mr. Hedder’s help, and about Labor Day, when he finished the job, he came by the Hedders’ house late one night in his Ford coupe and picked up Mrs. Hedder and they went off together and never came back.
They left seven children behind, two of hers and five of his, and drove west, all night, and were married the next morning in South Dakota, which made them guilty of bigamy, but perhaps they thought adultery was worse. They continued west and wound up in Mount Canaan, and he got work there as a carpenter, and ten years later he tried to get back in touch with his family in Lake Wobegon.
Nobody in town had so much as mentioned his name for ten years. The space he occupied was a blank. He was a popular man; men thought he was a real good worker, women thought he was polite and handsome, and children loved him, even little kids who didn’t know him—they’d run right up and he scooped them in—but when he left five children and a wife in the middle of the night, there was no doubt which side Lake Wobegon was on, and he was put out of mind and his name disappeared. Ella Anderson was his younger sister. He wrote to her and she wrote back. One Sunday, Ella, talking to Mary after church, mentioned that David was well, and Mary shot her a look of pure bitterness and walked away and wouldn’t speak to her again for more than a year.
Val was eighteen and he never forgot. Nobody’s father ever left, not in that town; a father was as permanent as the color of your eyes. Val took everything his father had ever given him, every gift, books, bicycle, even a new deer rifle, and he threw them away. He took the rifle down to the lake and swung it around by the barrel, and it flew out over the water, and he heard the splash and crumpled to the ground and lay there and cried.
The trunk that came in July was the first thing of his father’s he had seen in forty years. He hauled it down to the basement and it sat by the fruit jars for a week before he opened it. When he looked through the first layer, Val realized that of course there wouldn’t be any Tollefson family history in it—his father had taken none with him. David’s history in the family stopped when he turned the key in that Ford coupe. There were old brown Sunday-school magazines on top, books on Scripture, hymnals, a certificate thanking David for years of faithful service to the Zion Lutheran Church of Mount Canaan, and a Bible. In the front of the Bible was his father’s name and the name of his second wife, the former Mrs. Hedder. Val had never known the name of the woman his dad ran off with. Her name was Agnes.
Agnes. Val sat down on the trunk, feeling a little weak to have her name after all these years. Agnes. It felt unfaithful to his mother to know that name. He was surprised how curious he was to know who that woman was. He knew the story about his dad working on the house. He imagined them glancing at each other as the walls started to go up. Perhaps she helped him. His dad hammering, planing, sawing lumber—fresh lumber smells—and her coming out to ask how everything was going. Perhaps she made him a good lunch every day and they talked, and what did they talk about? What sort of man would do this: as you work on a man’s house and build him a new bedroom, to be planning to run away with his wife?
In an old Folger’s coffee can, Val found letters, dozens of them, addressed: “Dear Mrs. Hedder,” then “Dear Agnes,” and some “My darling Agnes,” all written in pencil, in a handwriting he recognized right away, even forty years later. Val thought, “I don’t want to read these,” but he did. The letters had been folded into small squares. Maybe he had hidden them for her to find.
“Dear Agnes,” he read, “Something has taken hold of my heart, a wonderful feeling, and I cannot turn away from it or I would die inside and be no use to anyone. This feeling leads me to you, my dear lady, and though I know that what you say is wise and true, still I know what is in my heart and I want you to come away with me.”
Val cringed. Always the story had been that the Hedder woman lured his father away. But it wasn’t true.
He spent hours that day and the next in the basement, by the washtubs, sorting through the layers, laying stuff out on the long table where Florence sorts clothes. It was frightening, like opening a grave sealed shut for years. He reached in and picked up a maple box he knew his father had made, plain wood but so well fitted, and inside, in twelve compartments, were twelve fishing lures his father had tied, more beautiful than jewelry. Pictures of his father and the woman…Agnes. Val couldn’t look at them more than two seconds, they were so ordinary, like any other married couple standing by a car, sitting on steps. And a poem David had written her—his father had never written him a poem, but here was a poem. Val read it and felt weak. He had to go sit upstairs and turn on the radio. It was like a cave-in down deep in the earth under your house, an event so far in the past he never thought about it, now moving, and his own life shifted and sagged, and he felt afraid.
He went for a walk, and Florence descended the stairs and looked over the mess. It was clear that when David Tollefson arrived in Mount Canaan, Washington, with Agnes in 1946, he got down to business and set about to become a good citizen, and clearly the people in Mount Canaan thought he was and they loved and admired him and said so. But what Florence looked at over and over were the love letters. She held them in her hand—written in pencil on cheap tablet, faded in places to where you couldn’t read them:
“My darling Agnes,” she read, “This is harder than anything I ever did, but I know it is for our happiness and that is worth more to me than their opinion. When I am with you, I feel quick and happy, and when you aren’t near it is sad and empty, I walk out of the house and up the road so I can say your name out loud.”
And she found the poem.
A love so true sings out to me
I know that if I turned away
I’d hear the song until my dying day,
Hear the words—forget the melody.
It’s a song you sang while you were working, dear,
Patching shirts, and I was outdoors
Bracing the kitchen wall with two-by-fours
And heard the song and stopped, it was so clear.
It said we should open our hearts and be free.
Love has power over doubt and fear.
I put down the hammer, leaving the wall to be
Built by someone else, and so—here
I am waiting for you, knowing I belong
To one who knows it too, the old sweet song.
Val came back and they sat together on the basement steps. He said, “I decided to burn it. Everything. I’ve looked at it, that’s all that matters. Nobody else has to see it.”
“Well, if that’s what you’ve decided. It’s yours.”
“That’s what I want to do. He had his life and I don’t need to judge him, God will judge him, but I don’t need to keep his memory alive either. When he left here, he gave up his right to that sort of thing.”
“You’re going to burn the poem too? It was a nice poem.”
“Everything.”
“All right,” she said, and she helped him load it all back into the trunk and carry it up to the car. They drove up to the dump, to the back corner behind the birch trees. He tipped the trunk over and put a match to the pile and it went up like straw. Everything was gone in a minute. Except the trunk—he saved that. And the lures—he could use those. The rest he burned. Except for the poem—Florence had snuck that out and put it in her purse. She couldn’t see destroying it—“A love so true sings out to me”—seemed to tremble when she looked at it. She felt better knowing Val had saved something too, though she knew he’d be furious if he saw the poem in her purse, and that made her feel guilty. All these years she’s had so few secrets, and no guilty ones. It made her think maybe this was the beginning of the end of her marriage too. It was like a precious stone you find alongside the road; it’s somebody else’s, you can’t keep it for yourself. So she took it in to Viola at the historical society the next morning. “Viola,” she said, “here’s a poem somebody around here wrote; it looks old, but it’s nobody I know, but maybe it’s worth saving.” Viola put it in an envelope and wrote “Poem, Unknown” in black marker. Later she took it down the basement. Back in the corner, behind a commode, under boxes of license plates and trophies and high-school year-books, was an oak file cabinet (itself historic, thought to be the first file cabinet in L.W.), a cabinet now full of letters, in English and German and Norwegian, about weather and crops and worries about money and children, everyday business, and she stuck it in. The poem he wrote with a trembling heart lies between the pages of an old account book of the Co-op Elevator Association, from 1902, showing that the oat and wheat crops were good that year also, thanks to good rainfall, but that, of course, they could have used a little more.