It has been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon. It was Homecoming on Friday, the Leonards vs. Bowlus Friday night at Bowlus—an away game, on account of Leonard Field has developed a sinkhole about ten feet in diameter that suddenly sank two feet between the ten- and twenty-yard lines, not that the team used that part of the field very often. Coach Magendanz and Mr. Halvorson decided to fill it with clay, and found that filling it made it sink deeper, and removing the fill made it deeper yet. So they are keeping the hole under observation and Homecoming had to be moved to another location.
The parade was in town, though, and the Homecoming dance last night, reigned over by Queen Carla and King Jim, royalty elected by the senior class under the supervision of Mrs. Hoffarth, who eliminates inappropriate candidates. The drawback of secret ballots is the tendency on the part of a few to vote for the wrong person when nobody is looking, and once a girl other than the Queen got more votes for Queen, but those were not informed votes. The voters didn’t know what Mrs. Hoffarth knew, or else they didn’t have the best interests of Lake Wobegon High School at heart. The girl in question had been to the gravel pit, parked in a car with a boy and drinking beer, and Mrs. Hoffarth maintains that when you’ve been to the gravel pit, you shouldn’t expect to wear a tiara and ride a convertible down Main Street. A Queen should be above gravel-pit business. “If you climb down off the pedestal, don’t expect to climb back up,” she says. “A pedestal is not an elevator.”
For years, ever since I was in school, because Mrs. Hoffarth’s brother Gerald is a colonel of the National Guard, the Homecoming Queen has ridden on a Sherman tank borrowed from the Fighting 308th armory in Freeport. She rides in the forward hatch, below the cannon, and a squad of Guardsmen march in front of her. It made a deep impression on me to see a beautiful classmate in a pink gown smiling and waving from a tank and may have warped my feelings about women, particularly beautiful ones. I talk to them and hear bolts slam in the carbines and combat boots scrape on the pavement. Fear of death isn’t the best basis for a friendship. It’s an okay basis, but not the best. But that is personal stuff I never told anyone, so keep it under your hat—I don’t want to be asked about it by every amateur psychiatrist in town. It’s a little odd thing in my makeup that comes from coming where I’m from, no stranger than thinking about death every time you put on clean underwear, one of those quirks a person can live with.
What’s hard to live with is not the trash floating in your head but the ordinary facts of life: mortality, knowing that you’ll die, and frailty, knowing that when we’ve got it figured out we don’t, and indignity, knowing that if we manage to put up a good front we still have the backstage view. I suppose that’s why I don’t go home for Homecoming. They know stories about me that I can’t explain away and call me by a nickname that I left home in order to lose. Wild horses couldn’t drag it out of me now. But I’ll tell you: it was Foxfart.
The Queen of Homecoming, Carla Krebsbach, has no odd nicknames to escape, no humiliating secrets, and she made a terrific Queen. She looked like a million dollars, wearing a white spangled dress you could get married in if you wanted, but with a dress like that, why get married and ruin your good looks? The soft contacts made her eyes glisten. She had her hair cut so her posture is improved. When Mrs. Hoffarth walked slowly across the stage holding up the tiara and the other four girls in line squeezed their eyes shut, Carla looked straight ahead, as if she knew for a fact whose head was going to be crowned. Hers. When it was, she didn’t cry or hop up and down, she looked as if she was ready. The tiara dropped on her and it fit like Cinderella’s glass slipper. She blinked and smiled a smile you could feel in the back row of the auditorium.
Unfortunately, her dad, Carl, couldn’t be there to see it. He was at his folks’ house, Myrtle and Florian’s, south of town, looking into the matter of their septic tank, which had reached an emergency status the night before. Florian noticed a problem last week when he raised the extension ladder and climbed up to install storm windows. He climbed up seven rungs and was only two feet off the ground. The lawn was soft as a trampoline, and the ladder sank down into it. “Well, it’ll freeze soon, and then I can get around to it,” he thought, but it didn’t freeze soon enough. Thursday morning the ground around the ladder had sunk three feet. “Well,” he thought, “these things happen.” He could put in roses there. A sunken garden. Be quite attractive. Friday morning the toilet overflowed, an event that he dared not overlook. So he called Carl.
People often call Carl in this sort of situation. It’s what comes from being handy. Sometimes he envies the incompetent. He inspected the sinkhole, went back to town and borrowed the backhoe from Bud, and came back and started digging.
Even he was surprised by what he found. It appeared at first to be—and as he went deeper it actually turned out to be—a 1937 Chevy coupe that someone had buried there to use as a septic tank. Whether they couldn’t afford a concrete one or just had a low opinion of that car, there it was in its subterranean glory, the roof caved in, the passenger compartment pretty well loaded to capacity.
You’ll notice how gracefully I tell this story, slipping elegantly around the unnecessary or too-vivid details, touching only the high points, but I must tell you that Carl moved the backhoe around upwind and went at it from there. It had to come out—that was the only spot for a new tank unless he wanted to cut down two oak trees or put a new tank uphill of the house, which isn’t the textbook way—so he hauled out this monstrosity, getting more and more curious to know who had put it there. Florian has owned the place since Carl’s grandpa died. Florian had gone to town with Myrtle to watch Homecoming. Carl loaded the Chevy onto a hay wagon and didn’t bother to tie it down: if it fell off, it fell off. He hitched up to the tractor and started his lonely drive to the dump, on the other side of town. By then he was not in a good humor. “Honor thy father and thy mother,” yes, but did it include this? Hauling away thirty years of family history? The Chevy septic tank had lost most of its load but with the wind at his back it was suffocating.
That may have been why he didn’t ask himself why so many cars were parked along McKinley Street. He didn’t see a soul around and figured the coast was clear—he wasn’t getting much oxygen to his brain, only the fumes of his heritage. He chugged past the high school and the Lutheran church and had to make a right turn to get the wind off his back, because now his eyes were full of tears. He hung an emergency right onto Main Street, and suddenly he was a feature attraction.
The entire population was lined up three deep on either side of Main between McKinley and Taft, and straight ahead and coming his way was the marching band and the tank behind it. The other tank.
He imagined he could make it to Taft and turn left and avoid the parade, but the old Farmall didn’t have much acceleration with that load of Chev, and he and the National Guard put on the brakes and met nose to nose directly in front of the Chatterbox Cafe. The band had melted away to the side. About half the crowd began to move off toward a more distant vantage point, and the other half followed them. A strong aroma of Chev got in the ventilator of the Cafe, and the patrons silently put down their forks and emerged from the rear. Queen Carla sat on the front of the tank, her eyes almost level with her father’s where he sat, in front of the old family heirloom. “How could you do this to me?” Her lips formed the words.
She was a Queen. When Queen Victoria once noticed pieces of toilet paper floating in the Thames and asked what they were, one of her counselors, the privy counselor perhaps, said, “Madam, those are printed notices saying that swimming is forbidden.” Rank has its privileges, and one of them is ignorance.
The tank couldn’t turn around there, the sergeant told Carl, so he had to turn the tractor and wagon. Backward and forward, backward and forward, back and up and back, and now people were cheering and clapping. First gear, reverse, first, reverse, first, reverse. Damn. Damn. Damn. Damn. “If this falls off,” he thought, “I’m going to leave it and leave town.” The band began to play again, “Anchors Aweigh.” When the Farmall got turned around, the band fell in behind it and the three units paraded north to the statue of the Unknown Norwegian, where the second and third units turned left. The Unknown watched the Krebsbach float chug off to the dump.
In a way, it was the most memorable Homecoming ever. Graduates who heard about it later wished they had been there, because of course it won’t be repeated. It was a onetime event. Which was how Carl looked at it hours later, when he’d taken a bath and was sitting in the Sidetrack enjoying a cold Wendy’s. He said, “Well, if it had to happen, I’m glad it happened where everyone could see it.” That’s how I feel. Who needs dignity when you can be in show business?