It has been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon. Spring has come, grass is green, the trees are leafing out, birds arriving every day by the busload, and now the Norwegian bachelor farmers are washing their sheets. In town the windows are open, so, as you pause in your walk to admire Mrs. Hoglund’s rock garden, you can smell her floor wax and hear the piano lesson she is giving, the tune that goes “da da Da da Da da da,” and up by school, smell the macaroni cheese hotdish for lunch and hear from upstairs the voices of Miss Melrose’s class reciting Chaucer.
Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephyrus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halve cours yronne
And smale fowles maken melodye
That slepen al the nyght with open ye…
The words are six hundred years old and describe spring in this little town quite well; the sweet breath of the wind, the youth of the sun, the sweet rain, the tendre croppes, the smale fowles maken melodye: we have them all.
I made a pilgrimage up there last Sunday to visit my family and my family wasn’t there. I walked in, called; there was no answer.
I drove over to Aunt Flo’s to look for them and got caught in Sunday-morning rush hour. It was Confirmation Sunday at Lake Wobegon Lutheran Church. Thirteen young people had their faith confirmed and were admitted to the circle of believers, thirteen dressed-up boys and girls at the altar rail in front of a crowd of every available relative. Pastor Ingqvist asked them all the deepest questions about the faith (questions that have troubled theologians for years), which these young people answered readily from memory and then partook of their first communion. Later they lounged around on the front steps and asked each other, “Were you scared?” and said, “No, I really wasn’t, not as much as I thought I’d be,” and went home to eat chuck roast, and some of them had their first real cup of coffee. They found it to be a bitter oily drink that makes you dizzy and sick to your stomach, but they were Lutherans now and that’s what Lutherans drink.
The Tolleruds, for example, drank gallons of coffee on Sunday. Church had been two hours long, the regular service plus confirmation, and Lutherans don’t have the opportunity to stand up and kneel down and get exercise that you find elsewhere, so everyone was stiff and dopey, and the Tolleruds, when they sit around and visit, are all so quiet and agreeable they get drowsy, so they drink plenty of coffee. Years ago, when Uncle Gunnar was alive, they didn’t need so much. He had wild white hair and eyebrows the size of mice, he spilled food down himself and didn’t care, he had whiskey on his breath, and if anyone mentioned the Lutheran church he said, “Haw!” He was an old bachelor who got rich from founding a chain of private clubs in the Dakotas and Iowa called the Quality Prestige Clubs. They were only empty rooms over a drugstore with some old leather couches and a set of Collier’s Encyclopedia, and he gave away memberships to men who’d never been invited to join a club before, tall sad men with thin dry hair, of whom there are a lot, and made his money selling them lots of shirts and ties and cufflinks with the QP insignia. Uncle Gunnar got rich and sold the Clubs to an Iowa meatpacker and went to Australia to get into some line of work down there he didn’t consider worth mentioning, and the last anyone saw him was in 1962. Presumably he died, unless perhaps he just got tired of us knowing him.
The Tolleruds gathered for pot roast because Daryl and Marilyn’s daughter Lois was confirmed. She sat at the head of the table, next to her dad, promoted from the children’s table out in the kitchen. She is a tall lanky girl who has grown four inches this year, and it has tired her out. She is quieter than she used to be, a tall shy girl with long brown hair she has learned to tie in an elegant bun, and creamy skin that she keeps beautiful by frequent blushing, which is good for the circulation and makes her lovelier whenever she is admired.
A boy who has sat silently across from her in geometry since September has written her a twenty-seven-page letter in small print telling her how he feels about her (since September he’s looked as if he was just about to talk, and now it all comes out at once: he thinks God has written their names together in the Book of Love). But she wasn’t thinking about him Sunday—she was blushing to see her Confirmation cake with the Scripture verse inscribed in blue frosting: “Be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.” It was a large cake, and Marilyn used the extra-fine nozzle on the frosting gun—there it sat, lit with birthday candles, and Lois didn’t know how to tell them that she wasn’t sure that she believed in God. She was pretty sure that she might’ve lost her faith.
She thought she might’ve lost it on Friday night or sometime Saturday morning, she wasn’t sure. She didn’t mention it at that time because she thought she might get it back.
On Friday night, less than forty-eight hours before confirmation, she was sitting on the couch watching television with Dave, the boy who wrote the letter, while her mom and dad were gone to have supper with her prayer parents. When you’re confirmed, you’re assigned prayer parents, a couple who promise to pray for you for three months prior, and Lois’s turned out to be the Val Tollefsons, people she had never liked. To think that every night over supper Val Tollefson had bowed his big thick head and said, “And, Lord, we ask Thee to strengthen Lois in her faith”—the same man who said once, “You won’t amount to a hill of beans, you don’t have the sense that God gave geese.” She could feel her faith slip a little. She felt guilty, because Dave wasn’t supposed to be there, and she was supposed to be ironing her confirmation dress, but he had walked two miles from his house, so what could she do? She felt sorry for Dave, he always has a bad haircut and a swarm of pimples on his forehead, but she likes him, he’s quiet and nice. They talked to each other at Luther League get-togethers about what it would be like to be someone else, someone famous, for example, like Willie Nelson—you could use your fame to do good—and they went for one walk halfway around the lake, holding hands, and then she got the long letter saying how much she meant to him, twenty-seven pages, which was much more than she wanted to mean to him; it scared her.
She didn’t know that Dave was a born writer, that twenty-seven pages is nothing to him, he did thirty-one on the death of his dog, Buff—she told him it would be better if they didn’t see each other anymore. Friday night he walked over, full of more to say. She had four little brothers and a sister to take care of, so he sat on the old red sofa with a bottle of orange pop and watched as she fed the baby, and she turned on the TV and lost her faith. Men in khaki suits were beating people senseless, shooting them with machine guns, throwing the bodies out of helicopters. Their reception was so poor, the picture so fuzzy, it was more like radio, which made the horrors worse, and she thought, “This could happen here.” It gave her a cold chill to imagine violent strange men busting in, as they had done to Anne Frank. She held the baby, Karen, imagining all of them were hiding from Nazis, and heard twigs crunch outside and knew that this boy could not protect her. She prayed and heard something like an echo, as if the prayer was only in her head. The whole world in the control of dark powers, working senseless evil on our lives, and prayer went no place, prayer just went up the chimney like smoke.
When Marilyn cut the confirmation cake and served it with butter-brickle ice cream, Lois thought, “I should say something.” Like “I don’t believe in God, I don’t think.” Nobody would need coffee then.
After dinner she put on her jeans and a white jacket and walked out across the cornfield toward the road and the ravine to think about her faith on this cloudy day, and, walking west over a little rise, she saw, just beyond the ravine, a white car she’d never seen before, and a strange man in a trenchcoat standing beside it. She walked toward him, thinking of the parable of the Good Samaritan, thinking that perhaps God was calling her to go witness to him and thereby recover her faith. He stood and pitched stones up over the trees, and as she got closer, he turned and smiled, put out his hand, and came toward her. She saw her mistake. Something glittered in his mouth. She stopped. He was a killer come looking for someone, it didn’t matter to him who it was, anyone who came down the road would do. He walked toward her; she turned and fell down and said, “Oh please no, please God no.”
I hadn’t seen her for five years. I said, “Lois, Lois—it’s me.” I helped her up. How are you? It’s good to see you again. We shuffled along the rim of the ravine, looking for the thin path down, and she told me about her confirmation, which I have an interest in because I am her godfather. I wasn’t invited to church, I reckon, because fourteen years ago I wasn’t anyone’s first choice for godfather. I was nominated by Marilyn because Daryl suggested his brother Gunnar and she thought that was ridiculous, and to show Daryl what a poor choice he would be she suggested me, and Daryl said, “Sure, fine, if that’s what you want,” and they were stuck with me.
The baby was named for her mother’s Sunday-school teacher, who was my aunt Lois, my youngest aunt, so young she was like an older sister. She was single when I was a boy and so had plenty of time for her favorite nephew. She told me I was. She said, Don’t tell the others but you are the one I love more than anyone else, or words to that effect. We were riding the bus to Minneapolis, she and I, to visit Great-aunt Posie. Lois seemed young to me because she loved to pretend. We imagined the bus was our private bus and we could go anywhere we wanted. We were somebody.
My favorite game was Strangers, pretending we didn’t know each other. I’d get up and walk to the back of the bus and turn around and come back to the seat and say, “Do you mind if I sit here?” And she said, “No, I don’t mind,” and I’d sit. And she’d say: “A very pleasant day, isn’t it?”
We didn’t speak this way in our family, but she and I were strangers, and so we could talk as we pleased.
“Are you going all the way to Minneapolis, then?”
“As a matter of fact, ma’am, I’m going to New York City. I’m in a very successful hit play on Broadway, and I came back out here to Minnesota because my sweet old aunt died, and I’m going back to Broadway now on the evening plane. Then next week I go to Paris, France, where I currently reside on the Champs-Elysées. My name is Tom Flambeau, perhaps you’ve read about me.”
“No, I never heard of you in my life, but I’m very sorry to hear about your aunt. She must have been a wonderful person.”
“Oh, she was pretty old. She was all right, I guess.”
“Are you very close to your family, then?”
“No, not really. I’m adopted, you see. My real parents were Broadway actors—they sent me out to the farm thinking I’d get more to eat, but I don’t think that people out here understand people like me.”
She looked away from me. She looked out the window a long time. I’d hurt her feelings. Minutes passed. But I didn’t know her. Then I said, “Talk to me. Please.”
She said, “Sir, if you bother me anymore I’ll have the driver throw you off this bus.”
“Say that you know me. Please.”
And when I couldn’t bear it one more second, she touched me and I was myself again.
And the next time we rode the bus, I said, “Let’s pretend we don’t know each other.”
She said, “No, you get too scared.”
“I won’t this time.” I got up and came back and said, “It’s a very pleasant day, isn’t it? Are you going to Minneapolis?”
Eventually we do. We pretend to be someone else and need them to say they know us, but one day we become that person and they simply don’t know us. From that there is no bus back that I know of.
Lois Tollerud asked me, “Why did you stop here?” I told her I had parked by the ravine, looking for a spot where our Boy Scout troop used to camp and where Einar Tingvold the scoutmaster got so mad at us once, he threw two dozen eggs one by one into the woods. Each egg made him madder and he threw it farther. When he ran out of eggs he reached for something else. It was his binoculars. He didn’t want to throw them away but he was so furious he couldn’t stop—he threw the binoculars and reached for them in the same motion. Heaved them and tried to grab the strap as it went by. We scouts looked for it for a whole afternoon, thirty years ago. Whenever I go by the ravine, I look for a reflection of glass, thinking that, if I found those binoculars by some wonderful luck and took them back to him, he might forgive me.
“That’s not true, is it?” she said. “No, it’s not.”
I stopped there because, frankly, I’d had a lot of coffee, but I couldn’t tell her that. We walked for almost a mile along that ravine, to the lake and back, and then I felt like I’d like to visit her family after all.
We walked in. I got a fairly warm hello, and was offered coffee. “In a minute,” I said. “Excuse me, I’ll be right back.” I had a cup and a slice of cake that said “Con but for,” a little triangle out of her verse.
Be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed. Our lovely world has the power to make us brave. A person wants to be someone else and gets scared and needs to be known, but we ride so far on that bus, we become the stranger. Nevertheless these things stay the same: the sweet breath, the rain, the tendre croppes, and the smale fowles maken melodye—God watches each one and knows when it falls, and so much more does He watch us all.