It has been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon. The first snow fell Monday and it turned cold. It got so cold Tuesday and Wednesday, you actually saw boys wearing scarves outdoors. The cold snap came on fast. Bud had been meaning to put antifreeze in the pickup—it was his firm intention, and he even mentioned it to Eloise one day—and the next morning the truck was frozen up and Bud was mortified. He couldn’t even eat breakfast. She said, “For heaven’s sake, what’s wrong with you?” He said, “Radiator cracked on the truck, and now I got to spend a day putting in a new one.” He couldn’t even admit the truth to his own wife.
As the municipal maintenance man, Bud has a reputation for competence and foresight, the man Mayor Clint Bunsen calls first for any mechanical problem. He wasn’t about to take his frozen truck to Bunsen Motors and become Clint’s joke of the week, so he borrowed Carl Krebsbach’s pickup and drove to Little Falls for a new radiator. But first he had to call Clint and say he was going. He had to think of an excuse. “I need to go to Little Falls to…” To what? What could he say he was going to Little Falls to get so that Clint wouldn’t say, “Oh we got that right here. What size you need?” Had to think of something too odd for Lake Wobegon to stock but not too odd for Little Falls, a town of seventy-two hundred. A trailer hitch. Or tin snips. A piston for his lawnmower. Or a chamfer bit. He’d heard of that somewhere; “chamfer bit” sounded good. Like something you ought to know, so Clint wouldn’t say, “What’s a chamfer bit?” He’d say, “Oh. Yes. We used to have those but we don’t anymore.” Unless Bud had the name wrong. Maybe it was a chandler bit. And Clint’d correct him: “You mean a chandler bit.” And every time they consulted him on mechanical problems, Clint’d remember and say, “Well, a chamfer bit might do the trick,” and laugh and slap his knee, and everybody would start chortling and wheezing. Chamfer bit! Bud was nervous, and when he got Clint on the phone, he said, “I got to go over to Little Falls to get me some work gloves.” “Okay,” said Clint, “see you later.” Bud said, “They’re not just ordinary gloves. They’re a special kind.” “Okay,” Clint said, “that’s fine.” “Somebody told me about these,” said Bud, “so I thought I’d run over and see if they got them there. Nobody has them here. I checked.” “All right, then,” said Clint, “we’ll catch you later.” As Bud was pulling away, Carl came running out and said, “If you go by an auto-parts store, see if they don’t have a radiator hose, I froze up my car the other night, forgot to put the antifreeze in.” Okay, Bud said, I’ll do that.
Carl knows, there’s not much privacy in a small town. You know so much about other people, and you have to figure they know at least as much about you. What they surmise about you from what they know is, of course, a matter of conjecture.
It was cold. Not historic heroic cold, just plain everyday cold, not even worth complaining about, a fact of life like the flat terrain, though some people complain about that. “It’s flat out there,” they say, “darned flat. It’s a lot of sky to have to keep track of.” The furnace broke down at the Herald-Star, just when Harold’s wisdom tooth was on the fritz and he had it pulled Tuesday. He sprained his ankle at the dentist’s when he hooked his foot around the chair, hanging on while the tooth came out. He almost pulled his foot off. When he hobbled to the Chatterbox for a cup of soup, Carl said, “That tooth had a long root, didn’t it?” He heard the same joke from others. That night the furnace stopped, two water pipes froze, and the toilet burst, causing a short so the lights wouldn’t go on. Harold’s blessings were running in the red. He reached for the bottle of Old Overcoat whiskey in the desk and the bottle was empty. Someone had finished it, perhaps himself. He threw it into the wastebasket, or meant to, but had gotten turned around in the dark and threw it through the door instead. Glass shattered on the sidewalk. Water was frozen on the floor, and he slipped and fell on the glass. Some people thought he must be drunk but he only wished he was.
It was cold, and at the Lutheran parsonage Judy Ingqvist said to her husband, Pastor Dave, “This year we’ve got to try to make the Annual Ministers’ Retreat in Florida this January. We really need to. Three years in a row now we have cheated ourselves out of it, and we could use a break.”
“It’s not in Florida this time,” he said, “it’s in the British West Indies, I think. They sent a brochure on it. Let me go find it.” Off he went, and then from the dining room: “Honey, did somebody fool with this thermostat? It’s sixty-two degrees in here.”
“What’s the thermostat set at?” she said.
“Seventy-five.”
“Aha!” she said. “Try turning it to fifty-five. Slowly. Then up to ninety. Then off. Wait fifteen seconds and put it up to seventy. That worked last year a couple times.”
For months the building committee has discussed the parsonage furnace, an old coal burner converted to oil that some think needs replacing and others say has a lot of use left in it. Finally, on Monday, the committee traipsed through the kitchen down to the cellar on a fact-finding trip and stood meditating in front of the ancient blackened hulk in the corner and its tangle of pipes. “It sure runs quiet,” said Elmer. “I don’t think it’s on,” said Clarence. He glanced at the laundry rack where the minister’s wet shorts hung and his wife’s brassieres and pantyhose.
“It seems to work fine except that it doesn’t give heat,” David said. He squeezed past Elmer and stood a few feet from Val, in front of the laundry rack. “It seems to be discouraged by cold weather. Any sudden drop of temperature and it feels like the furnace figures ‘What’s the use?’ It feels doomed to failure. So it quits.”
He stood, hands in his jacket pockets, as the men studied the prehistoric furnace, and Judy noticed that he was shielding the laundry rack and her wet underwear—what a lovely modest man—his hands in his jacket pockets so as to spread himself wider to protect her private clothing.
“I don’t know,” said Val, “my cousin in Canby has one almost exactly like it, he says it’s the best he ever had. I just wonder if it isn’t a problem up here in the hot-air vents….” And he slipped around back of the laundry rack, peering up into the joists, the minister keeping an eye on him. “But I suppose we could replace it if it comes to that. We could take it out of Foreign Missions—we got nine hundred dollars in the disaster relief fund that we earmarked for Laotian refugee camps and I’d hate not to send it to them, with things down there being what they are, but—I suppose.”
He circled the laundry rack, and Dave turned and tried to slide the underwear together, and one pale-pink lacy brassiere fell to the floor. The men all glanced down at it. It was pink because it’d been washed in a batch of red things, but Judy didn’t explain that to them. Dave picked it up and dropped it in the laundry tub, a big pink fish. Tears came to her eyes: taking money away from refugees to buy a new furnace and the minister’s wife wearing fancy pink lingerie, they’d never get to go to Florida in January, not now.
In the post office, due to the lack of a fifty-nine-cent part for the gas jet in the stove, it was too cold to sort mail. Mr. Bauser dumped the morning sackful on the table and put up a sign, DUE TO NO HEAT, MAIL IS OUT OF ORDER—HELP YOURSELF, and people wandered in all morning and rummaged around for their own.
“I ordered that part six weeks ago from way over in South Dakota, they coulda sent it by congressional committee, it woulda got here by now,” Mr. Bauser said, but we didn’t mind. It was interesting looking at the mail. To know that Irene Bunsen subscribes to Northern Spy magazine with its big black headlines, FLESH-EATING FLAMINGO FOUND IN FLORIDA, NEST SURROUNDED BY EMPTY BABY SHOES. 450-LB. WOMAN MARRIES 78-LB. MAN. GRANDPA, 89, TAKES NITRO PILL AND EXPLODES AT DINING ROOM TABLE AS WHOLE FAMILY LOOKS ON IN HORROR. Irene has been leading the discussion of Ephesians in Women’s Circle. WISCONSIN MAN PREGNANT WITH FIRST CHILD. You don’t find that in Ephesians, do you.
Mr. Berge had a big creamy envelope from an attorney firm in Houston, their name in black raised letters. What could that be? A legacy from an old rich aunt who died thinking of him as a sweet boy, that grizzled old souse, and here was a check for twenty-five thousand dollars? He was in Texas once, wasn’t he, in the Army during the war—didn’t he go through basic training there? You don’t suppose he committed a crime? Maybe he did and was in prison when we thought he was in the Army, and now time has passed and public outrage has cooled. He is applying for a pardon from that heinous crime, hiring a smooth Houston lawyer to expunge the horrible words from his record. Do you think? Naw. He couldn’t afford a lawyer with stationery like this. Of course, sometimes a court will appoint you one. What do you suppose he did back then?
“I don’t know about this stove,” Mr. Bauser said. “Do you know, I bought this brand-new two years ago from a guy from Rapid City; he was driving a late-model van and he had blue aviator glasses and a sheepskin jacket and cowboy boots, and he give me a five-year warranty on it, parts and labor, and now when I write him a letter there’s no answer; I don’t know, I don’t know.…You care for some coffee?” He reached over to his electric hot plate and touched the teakettle—“I got hot water right here”—and the rest of us who were looking at Mr. Berge’s envelope glanced at the teakettle. Steam curled up from its tin spout.
What sort of crime might he have done in Texas? Now a slick lawyer in a three-piece blue pinstripe suit will get him pardoned by a rich liberal judge who lives in a mansion and lets murderers and rapists go free. If Mr. Berge bludgeoned someone to death on a three-day weekend pass on a Texas back road in 1942, don’t we have a moral obligation to our community and our children to steam this envelope and find out? Of course it would be wrong, but if by opening the envelope we could save a life, then shouldn’t we? If we think something might be wrong, if there’s a suspicion and someone seems to have a tendency?
“I tell you, I start to miss that old woodstove we useta have. That was good heat, wood heat—a real warm heat, not drafty heat.” And he pulled up his parka and rummaged in the postage drawer for instant coffee. We looked at the teakettle boiling on the hot plate. It seems like it’s sat there since I can remember, but I don’t recall Mr. Bauser drinking coffee or tea. And yet for years and years he’s had water boiling on the back shelf next to where he sorts the mail.
I walked over and helped myself to a clean Styrofoam cup, put a little Sanka in it, and poured hot water in. I tried to catch Mr. Bauser’s eye. I wanted to look him in the eye and silently ask him if he ever read my mail, and by the look in his eye, as I thought it, I’d know if he’s guilty or not, the old son of a bitch. I wrote about 187 love letters a year ago, and if I thought the old snoop had steamed the flaps open, reading my words to that lovely woman—words I wrote to her, thinking only of her, far away, the beautiful her—should I have been thinking of him, old man with hair in his nose and little red eyes darting across the page, reading my mind, stealing my life…
Each person knows how much privacy you need, and you can’t accept less, not even in a small town. If you drop by Bud’s garage and say, “You putting in a new radiator? What’s wrong?” and he says, “A rock came up and knocked a hole in the bottom,” you should accept that. When people watch us too closely, it turns us into an actor and kills us, because, frankly, most of us aren’t good at acting. I forgave Mr. Berge for the murder he committed. Maybe it was someone who read his mail and he stabbed them with a letter opener.