It has been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon. It was cold this week, so cold it brought tears to the eyes of a Norwegian bachelor farmer. Mr. Odegaard’s Ford pickup wouldn’t start when he came out of the Sidetrack Tap after lunch, so he decided he’d walk home, feeling pretty warm from the lunch, and a half-mile later he decided to hitchhike. He put out his thumb as Mr. Bauser came along in his old green post-office Chevy, and he drove right on by. Mr. Odegaard jumped out on the road. “Tell-witcha!” he yelled. “Goddamn you anyway, I’m never gonna write another damn letter in my life! I’m never gonna even go in your damn post office! I hope you die in hell!”
Mr. Bauser has a lot on his mind. He turns fifty-five in two weeks and is thinking he ought to do something with his life and not just go along in the post office, sorting letters. He’s thinking an idea he’s had for several years since he bought a Lawn Quest rider mower, and that is: get together some guys to set a cross-country record for rider mowers and get in the Guinness Book. He’s not sure there is a cross-country rider-mower record to break, in which case they could take it easy and whatever they did would be a record. Maybe a month or two, Los Angeles to New York. Or start from New York. The news media are there, and maybe you’d rather have them present for the start of the event rather than the finish. Mr. Bauser didn’t even see Mr. Odegaard.
Mr. Odegaard walked on. If he wasn’t so angry, he might’ve laid down and died, it was so cold. Anger kept him going. He wanted to get home and write to the Herald-Star about so-called Christians—“Some of these people you see parading out of church on Sunday, you ought to see them when you are stranded on a highway on a cold day, they pass you by like you was a mailbox.” He was mostly done with the first paragraph and thinking about the second.
It was bitterly cold. A group of young evangelists were working door-to-door in town, who came all the way from Bob Louvin Bible College in Blunt, Georgia. They sat in a big blue motor home with “Bob Louvin Bible College” painted on all sides and tried to get warm before they made a run at a house to preach the Gospel.
They knocked hard on the doors with their bare hands and said, “Morning, ma’am, I’m from Bob Louvin Bible College, wonder if I could step in for a minute and share something from Romans?” She said, “What?” They said, “Could I come in, please?” They looked like warm clothing wasn’t doing them any good at all. They were too far north, outside of Bob Louvin’s cable-TV coverage area, and part of their testimony, once they got in the door, was to play a videocassette of Bob Louvin, and nobody around here had VCRs, so the evangelical team didn’t stick around long, about two hours, their motor running, and headed west into the wind. They whipped on past Mr. Odegaard standing on the county road, his thumb out, and he watched them speed away, his finger out, and there were tears in his eyes. (“They are no more Christians than pigs are, or a goddamn fish. Just cause you’re underwater doesn’t make you a Baptist.”) Long after they disappeared, he still yelled things their way, which only time can tell if it comes true or not.
While the motor home was still parked by the Knutes’ temple, consumed by a cloud of exhaust, a shiny old black Cadillac with a silver-angel hood ornament slid up to the curb in front of the rectory next door to Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility school at the end of morning recess, when the herd was just lining up at the front door before they went up the chute. When they spotted the car, most of the livestock broke loose and galloped over to have a look. Sister Arvonne said, “Hey! Inside!” A tall horse-faced man in a black coat and hat slid out the back door and stood up. He said, “Good morning, Sister,” and went straight into the rectory. There was a faint smell of cologne and his heels clicked on the sidewalk, then he disappeared. The driver sat in the car with the motor running for half an hour, halfway through algebra. Kids working problems at the blackboard stared down at it. “Keep your mind on your business,” said Sister Arvonne, “and I’ll let you know if anything happens worth looking at.”
What she knew was that, after forty-four years, Father Emil had asked to be relieved of his duties at Our Lady, but she didn’t know who the gentleman in black was. Our Lady is a mission church of the Order of Saint Benedict, founded in 1858 to minister to the Indians and then to the German immigrants who were following a map drawn by a Father Schlafmeister, who placed Minnesota several hundred miles farther west than it actually was. When the settlers arrived, they had the feeling they weren’t quite there yet, that the mundane fact of longitude had stopped them short of their dream of Minnesota, that it was out where Montana is, and they lost touch with their home base in Pennsylvania. Our Lady has always been under the jurisdiction of the Abbey of Saint Frederic, outside of Scranton, but when Father Emil submitted his resignation, it panicked the Abbot, who had been in office for only eleven years and didn’t know he had a mission church loose in Minnesota, rolling around the deck. Father tended not to ask his superiors for much guidance and the file on Our Lady was thin. The Abbot worried that it was one of those crackpot Catholic Second Coming churches with ammo boxes in the basement and the Knights of Columbus in masks, so he got on the horn to Minnesota, to the Bishop of Brainerd, and said, “If you want it, you can have it.” That was the tall man in the black coat, Bishop Dennis O’Bleness of Brainerd. He sat in Father’s parlor and balanced a cup of Sanka on his knee and listened to Emil’s rocker creak and tried to see the old man’s face.
Father likes to put his chair so the morning sun comes over his shoulder. The sun lit up the Bishop while Father sat there like the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. The younger man tried to slide his chair southward into the shadows. “Light bother you? I can pull the shade. Just takes a minute, with these knees the way they are—”
“No, that’s fine. So. You feel you can’t continue—”
“Don’t feel. Know. I knew I’d know it when the time came, and now it’s come.”
“How old would you be now?”
“Seventy-two.”
“And what sort of timetable are we looking at here?”
“I would like the privilege of celebrating Easter Mass. I would like to leave on Monday, March 31.”
“And what are your plans at that point, Father?”
“My plan is that you will take care of me for the rest of my life.”
“Well, I would hope that the Abbey would make some arrangements for you….”
“Whatever. I’ll just pack my bag and sit on it and wait for somebody to come.”
He still hadn’t got a good look at Father. First the hallway was dark and now the sun was in his eyes. He wasn’t sure this was on the up and up. Lake Wobegon: had he ever driven through here before? It was on the border between Brainerd Diocese and Saint Cloud and, frankly, he couldn’t recall discussing with Bishop Reitz whose parish it should be. It was no prize, obviously. A strange town, one that would take a special sort of priest, a man who perhaps couldn’t fit in at another parish, a square peg, who would find his voice, his vocation.…Well, he’d been giving Father Wilfred some careful thought recently. Poor old Wilfred. Maybe he could find peace in Lake Wobegon. Maybe the Lord had created this vacancy especially to give Father Wilfred a place in the world.
A strange town, the Bishop thought. On the sidewalk outside, a man came up and spoke to him urgently about rider mowers. The old priest with the light over his shoulder: could he have been a ghost? And now this old man ahead on the road—a hitchhiker, but he was standing in the middle of the road, waving his arms—Brother Curt had to veer to the left, almost off the road, to avoid him. They sped away and the Bishop looked back as the man threw something at them, hitting the rear window. The Bishop ducked. (“Catholics are the worst, the bottom of the barrel. A few days ago…”) The glass didn’t break, the object wasn’t hard. In fact, it stuck to the window. A few miles farther, Curt stopped and scraped it off, but it wouldn’t come off, it spread around.
He thought that Father Wilfred might be just the ticket.