7

THE CHEESE BAN

The next Sunday, Father Wilmer preached on the story from the Gospel of Mark in which Jesus heals the woman who touched the hem of his garment. Jesus says, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace and be healed of your disease.” We are all broken, we are all unclean and unfit, said Father Wilmer. He said it with great conviction. He seemed to be referring to himself.

After Mass, standing in the doorway, shaking hands, Father saw Megan Schoendienst and he put a hand on her shoulder and apologized for spilling wine on her during Communion. He said, “I have to confess that I was looking down the front of your dress and my imagination got away from me. It reminded me of when I was a boy and a girl named Virginia Schafer and I used to dance in her living room. I am a priest but I am still a man with carnal desires, and I hope you can forgive me.” Her mother overheard this and snatched Megan away and told Father Wilmer that she would report him to the bishop, and that afternoon, a black Chrysler parked in front of Our Lady and the bishop himself strode in without knocking and angry shouts were heard and Father was ordered to pack his bags in 15 minutes and come along and Father did not, he packed a bag and slipped out the back door and down the alley to the Krebsbachs and Carl gave him sanctuary in his woodworking shop and after half an hour the Chrysler drove away. Carl took supper out to the shop and Father Wilmer was sitting at the table, sipping a cup of tea. “What happened?” said Carl. Father said that he was plagued with carnal thoughts when the weather got warmer, and he was no longer able to hold them in. He heard the words coming out of his own mouth and was astonished. “Was cheese involved?” Carl asked. Father nodded. “Lutheran cheese,” he said. “A gift from a neighbor.”

Lenny reported to Mayor Alice about her encounter with Hilmar and showed her the cheese. It smelled like somebody’s old underwear. Lenny said it was a long-standing Scandinavian tradition, to serve an appetizer so foul that you ate heartily the rest of the meal to get the taste of the first course out of your mouth. She had read in Norse mythology that Viking warriors were fed rotten cheese to prepare them for battle and some had ecstatic visions from eating it and danced their way to the battlefield, which terrified the Celts and Saxons—“In other words, loss of inhibition due to food-borne infection became a tactic in battle. The Vikings came to America, had no interest in real estate because they were sailors, but they ate cheese and were fearless and danced with the Iroquois and the Narragansett, and the French portagers got it and it protected them from diseased mosquitoes and the West was settled,” said Lenny. “But why would anyone eat it today?”

“You’re young,” said Alice. “You’re accustomed to frozen pizza and microwave dinners. Old people have been complaining about processed food for years. It tastes flat and meaningless to them because it’s produced for kids who are full of allergies. The average 20-year-old has no sense of smell or taste. This is what antihistamines have done. My kids don’t get excited by smells. Fresh coffee, new-mown grass, a bouquet of flowers, they don’t notice. Home cooking means nothing to them. The difference between real chicken and factory. They want McDonald’s, which is food for inmates. But old people miss the pork from pigs slaughtered on farms, same as they miss homegrown tomatoes and wild berries. It’s not going to be easy to shut down Bakken’s cheese. He’s got a widespread secret clientele who have a love affair with his cheese.”

“Do you eat it, Alice?”

Alice stiffened. “Yes, but I’ve been off it for almost a month.” She started to say something, stopped, and then said it. “I walked into the Bon Ton to get my hair recolored and something reminded me of a scene in a movie—an old Western—where Lucille Ball walks into a beauty parlor and gives a speech and I did the whole thing—I said: ‘It’s been two months since the men went away and already you can see the improvement. No more garbage in the streets. No loafers and drunks lounging around. And yet—I miss having men. Miss the helplessness of them.’” And Alice looked around and she sang:

I miss the way he talks

So sweet and low,

He says, “What’d I do with my socks?

I had ’em a minute ago.”

He’s going to take me to the dance

Or to the picture show.

He says, “Does this shirt go with these pants?”

I say, “No.”

He says, “You’re awesome. You’re colossal.

Let me kiss you.”

And I point to his left nostril

And hand him a tissue.

I get along alone as best I can.

But I miss my man.

Lenny said, “And that’s from eating cheese?”

Alice nodded: “I walked in doing the scene and Charlotte looked at me and said I looked flushed and made me sit down. I felt a glimmering around my eyes and my lips felt numb. It hasn’t happened again. Thank goodness. But it was an exciting moment. I liked what it did to me. So, yes, I’ve been there and know what it’s like. I know what we’re up against.”

They agreed that the issue needed to be addressed by the town council, though two of the council seemed to be on cheese themselves, Louie and Judy. He had announced that the Postal Service was opening and reading his mail and he was getting strange phone calls late at night from people with distinct Asian accents wanting to know his Social Security number. Judy had quit the PTA in protest against its accommodation of Harry Potter books despite their clear satanic underpinnings. She had highlighted devil worship in several of the books and the school showed no interest.

Sometimes the town council met privately in executive session because if it were an open meeting, people couldn’t say what they really think. So Alice and Margie and Senator K. met at Alice’s house without telling Louie and Judy. Senator K. is the swing vote and has no idea what’s going on half the time, and usually he takes his cue from Alice, though sometimes he confuses Judy for Alice, they have similar hairdos, so there’s that to worry about.

The executive committee agreed that bad cheese needed to be banned in order to keep the peace, and to save time, they’d do it without Mr. Bakken present, so Margie arranged for her daughter Carla to take her fourth-graders out to the Bakken farm to look at the old farmhouse he kept in memory of his mother who had dearly loved children, and they arrived Wednesday at 4 p.m. as the full council was gathering. Mr. Bakken’s feelings about children were similar to his feelings about the income tax, but to make Irmgaard happy he allowed the children to touch her antique appliances, the woodstove, the crank phone, the icebox, as, back in town, the council stripped him of his God-given right to sell or give away his Gammelost.

First on the agenda, before they came to cheese, was Clint’s annual plea for the Fourth of July: “I’m just going to say this: the Fourth has slipped into a pitiful state, and it’s a tragedy because this is a great country and an inspiration to the rest of the world and yet the great day has gone into decline, except for the fireworks, and why? Because in a free country you can’t make people celebrate freedom. Half the time you can’t even get them to exercise it. And that’s why it’s important for us to keep this celebration going. Put on a parade and the Living Flag and a corn roast at the very least.” No reaction from the crowd. Alice moved for further study. All the members nodded.

Then, without naming names, she described the incidents of hostility in town, and Lenny spoke about viruses and the danger of eating unpasteurized dairy products. There was a vaccine that might be effective, but one of its side effects is sleepiness and that is something Lake Wobegon can do without. So the council voted to ban unpasteurized cheese pending a report from a laboratory. Louie and Judy voted no, and Alice and Margie Krebsbach voted yes. Senator K. looked at Alice in bewilderment and she nodded and he voted yes.

As a matter of public health, the Lake Wobegon Town Council has voted to institute a ban on the sale of unpasteurized dairy products, particularly cheese, until we receive a laboratory report on the safety of consumption and its detrimental effects on public behavior. Your cooperation is earnestly requested. It is in the public interest to maintain standards of civility in our social intercourse. We hope to have further information in a month or less.

The notice was printed in formidable black type with the town seal (Sumus Quod Sumus) and posted in the Herald Star and at Ralph’s and the Chatterbox and copies were mailed to registered voters, and two days later, the protestors showed up at the town hall and the town clerk, Viola Tor’s son Vic, heard a clamor outside and went to the door and saw a crowd of a dozen or so, shouting, We stand up for liberties, the right to speak and eat our cheese. They wore cheesehead caps and carried signs, “The mayor is not a king in a palace. Up with liberty, down with Alice.” Louie was there and his wife, Doris, and some Schoendiensts and several of Lenny’s cousins and Dorothy’s son Kurt and his wife and Dutch Schultz and Ernie and some of the Sidetrack Tap crowd. Vic listened to their complaints and advised them that a recall election requires a petition signed by 400 registered voters. As to the legality of the council’s ban, he had no authority to comment.

Kurt was the most reasonable spokesperson, arguing that freedom of diet is basic to adulthood. The state and federal governments have the power to outlaw dangerous foods; a municipality does not. People’s fondness for raw cheese is a matter of taste, like a fondness for lutefisk or fried eel or steak tartare. As for the “aberrant behavior” cited by the council, these are incidents of speech protected by the First Amendment. Louie had more to say about the collectivist mentality behind the ban, but Kurt was quite level-headed. He himself did not eat raw cheese, he said, but he needed to defend others’ right to do so. “First they come for the cheese, then they ban the burgers.”

Vic was polite but he’s lived here all his life so far, and when he looked at them, he remembered that Kurt was the worst third baseman in history, a sieve, and his wife and Judy had once dressed up as shepherdesses for a school talent show and sung Mairzy doats and dozy doats and little lamzy divey, a kiddley divey too, wouldn’t you while tap-dancing. Not the sort of people you look to for advice on public health issues. As for Charlotte, when she was 14, she wanted to switch from piano to trombone so she could be in band. Her mother said, “Honey, I hate to say it, but girls don’t play trombone.” And that sealed the deal and Charlotte, disagreeable by nature, became a dreadful blatty trombonist, clueless, tone-deaf, but a proud marcher. This is the problem with not leaving home: people remember all the bad stuff about you and it undercuts your moral authority.

The cheeseheads headed for district court in St. Cloud and challenged the town council’s ban on unpasteurized cheese. They persuaded Louie and Judy and other lunatics to stay home, and Kurt presented their case as a matter of civil liberties and Alice asked for a delay so that Lenny could be present to testify. She was home sick with the flu. “She been eating the cheese?” said Judge Larson. He thought it was hilarious and so did his clerk. He talked about his own fondness for Norwegian cheese, and he discovered that he and Kurt had something in common, grandfathers who brewed their own beer in big wooden buckets, so the hearing slipped into reminiscence and beer appreciation and beer-drinking contests, and then the judge approved Kurt’s request for a 90-day restraining order against enforcement of the ban, and that was that. The case was continued to a date in July.

From St. Cloud, the protesters drove in a six-car caravan to Hilmar’s farm, where he stood in his yard and welcomed them and they purchased 40 pounds of raw cheese in affirmation of their rights as American patriots, and they held an eat-in at the farm, with cheese on homemade bread, and they sang:

The cheese stands alone,

The cheese stands alone.

We’re free to eat the cheese

Any cheese we please,

The cheese stands alone.

They threatened Margie with a boycott of Krebsbach Chev and threatened Alice with impeachment and confronted Clarence and Clint and said, “Whose side are you on?” Louie said, “If you don’t think we have the intelligence to know what to put in our own mouths, then I don’t need to shop here anymore.” They distributed signs to shopkeepers: WE SUPPORT FREEDOM OF CHEESE, and some shops posted them in the window and others didn’t. Dorothy did. Then she crossed out “We” and wrote in “I.” The Chatterbox is the center of public life in town, and maybe someday there will be sectarian cafes for people of various persuasions, but meanwhile everyone needs to feel welcome. And after all, she is Hilmar’s cousin.

The problem with protest movements in small towns is that people know each other much too well, and Louie was not the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree. He didn’t have the brains that God gave geese. People remember his adventure with the weather balloon and the helium tank. His brother had bet him he couldn’t get off the ground and he took the bet and attached the helium hose to the balloon and it got bigger and bigger and up he went. This happened on Midsummer’s Day, which used to be a big thing in Lake Wobegon. People gathered to drink and celebrate and they used to say:

Midsummer’s Day, Midsummer’s Day,

Say whatever you want to say.

A day of dancing and drinking and laughter

And all forgotten the morning after.

Louie was hanging on to the balloon but he couldn’t get the helium hose off it, and he went up pretty fast and he pulled out a knife and tried to poke the balloon but couldn’t quite reach high enough. He was about a hundred feet up in the air and was sailing in a westerly direction over the trees and still rising. Some people looked up and imagined what they’d say if asked to give the eulogy and not much came to mind. His pants started to slip off him and he reached down to pull them up and poked himself with the knife and dropped it, and he looked like a goner and then a gunshot rang out and he began a slow descent. It was his mother. She had never shot a rifle before but he was her son and she felt a duty and put a hole in the balloon at almost 300 feet. He landed on a barn roof and let go of the balloon and it, with helium tank attached, flew up into the air. They raised a ladder and he climbed down, and she walked over and said, “Louie, you are dumb enough to be twins.” He was speechless, terrified. He’d gotten a fortune cookie the night before that said, “You are about to experience a major life change.” And he thought the life change might be death. But no, the life change was his marriage to Doris six months later. She was a good cook, and two years later he weighed 300 pounds and helium balloons held no more fear for him.

He was a joker. He saw an ad for a talking toilet seat and installed it in his bathroom and when Doris went into the bathroom, Louie put his ear to the keyhole, and when she sat herself down on the toilet, a man’s voice yelled, “Hey, get offa there, I’m working down here.” And the next thing Louie knew, Doris came galloping through the door and rammed the doorknob into his ear and he had a headache and blurred vision for two weeks afterward. But he’d spent a hundred bucks on the toilet seat, so he installed it in the women’s toilet in the town hall, and Alice changed the message to Louie saying, “Hi. How’s it going up there?” which she got from a voice mail he left, it was her joke.

The council took up the cheese issue once more. Louie and Judy weren’t speaking to Alice and Margie, and Senator K. Thorvaldson spoke to everyone but not always with relevance, and when Alice stood up and proposed hiring a municipal therapist to ease people over the ill feelings the epidemic had caused, the cheese caucus walked out in a huff, so the motion passed unanimously.

Clearly, there were hard feelings in town that needed to be dealt with. Daryl didn’t go in the Chatterbox anymore after the run-in with Darlene; he’d been a regular. The Lutheran church lost several lifelong members after the Pastor Liz incident. And then the town was shocked to the core when Father Wilmer was defrocked. The bishop ordered him to contemplate his sins at an abbey in Iowa, but instead Father went civilian, rented a room over the drugstore, took a mail-order course in barbering, and was saving up to buy Bob’s Barbershop and go into business. He was excommunicated by the Benedictine order, but he’d been a good priest and of course he still had many friends in town, Lutherans too. In fact, he went to Pastor Liz for counseling.

“You should go talk to a therapist—Alice is bringing one to town,” she told him.

“Nonsense. What would she know about us?” He told Liz that he suffered from phobias, the fear of crowds, the fear of being alone. And theophobia, the fear of God. Scared in the pulpit, scared at night in the rectory, and afraid God is going to punish him for being a lousy priest. He was torn by insecurities and it was too late to quit, he’d been priestifying for years. “I was rebelling against authority but now I was the authority. It was a mistake that got out of hand. My mother wanted a priest in the family and I did it for her, and now I’m glad she’s dead so she won’t know what a disgrace I am.” And he broke down and wept, and Pastor Liz put her arms around him. And it occurred to him, clinging to her, what the deal was. It was a simple physical reaction. Nobody had hugged him in years. Years. He couldn’t remember the last time. Something about the collar and the black outfit says: Please, No Hugging. By God, he was done with celibacy. It had worked for a while, but now he was done. He was a 57-year-old virgin and he knew nothing about dating or women or how to talk about these things, but this was the next chapter for him, he knew that. Pastor Liz could sense it too. She gently released him and said she could not help him on the next part of his faith journey, but she knew of a website, Padres Seeking Partners.

He said, “Do you think that by any chance Lenny—or is that crazy?”

She said it was crazy.

He had been replaced at Our Lady by Father Powers who’d been attached to the Cathedral in St. Paul, an excellent golfer whose mission was to play golf with Catholic tycoons who were thought to be considering large-scale beneficence. Father Powers’s unique gift was his ability to match his partner’s game stroke for stroke, to shoot 71 or 134 as needed so that he could walk alongside Mr. Moneypants and chat about churchy matters but in a chummy way, no preachiness. He admired businessmen for their directness (How much did you pay for this?), and many a rectory roof had been repaired or retirement home added onto with dough he had finessed between the 10th and the 14th holes at St. Anthony’s, the archdiocese course where the sand traps had thorns and some water hazards gave off steam. Father Powers was a faithful opponent of the reforms of Vatican II, which had cheapened the Church, protestantized it. He loved Latin and often slipped into it while saying Mass, turning his back to the congregation, as in the old days. He could be very frank about the failings of the hierarchy: the archbishop couldn’t preach his way out of a plastic bag, Pope Francis didn’t have enough brains to make a decent headache. Powers didn’t give Protestants the time of day: “ecumenical” wasn’t in his vocabulary; now and then, if invited, he’d golf with Lutheran or Methodist pastors and crush them without mercy, in silence, except for offering advice on correct stance as they teed up the ball. He had bursitis in his left shoulder and had to correct his stance for it, and to gauge the correction he wore a lead sinker hung down like a plumb bob from the bill of his cap. He’d tee up his ball, toss a pinch of grass to test the wind, get his feet dug in, adjust the plumb bob, waggle the club a couple dozen times, and take a quick off-balance swing, and hit a perfect drive that rose and rose and dropped and rolled onto the green 250 yards away, and say, “Well, not bad for an old man with a bum shoulder.” But playing with a Catholic hacker with a pile of dough, he could hit a sand trap accurately and then join him in tall grass and hit multiple putts while walking with the donor and discussing Protestants and how they believe in golf with no holes, a driving range theology, just hit so it feels good.

He had little sympathy for Father Wilmer, but the Catholic laity did. How could you banish a good man who’d said one ugly thing and replace him with a priest who had no gift for small talk, who considered himself better than others, a cardinal sin in a small town? A large contingent of them opted to drive to St. Joseph for Sunday Mass or St. Rosa. The next week the Our Lady bulletin referred to “swindling membership” when surely it meant “dwindling.” If not, Father Powers said, at least the swindlers had moved to another church, one friendlier to larceny. Or, in the case of Lutherans, larsony. He did not mind dwindlement. The Church is not for everyone, just as Chesterton is not or James Joyce. Golf is not for everyone. Some people are better suited to wearing a big helmet and lunging forward against other large men. The number of great Lutheran shortstops you can count on one hand with a few fingers to spare.

For Easter Mass, Our Lady congregants were surprised to see Mr. Westby, a Lutheran, who’d sold his dairy farm and moved to Florida four years before with his wife, Alma, and now here he was among Catholics. What gives? Alma was a true Lutheran, heavyset and enigmatic. Her motto was, “Never pass up the chance to keep your mouth shut.” But she came alive once on a vacation in Florida, she chattered and laughed and sang and danced, so after the Mister developed back problems, he sold the farm and bought a Spanish cottage on Longboat Key with a walled swimming pool, and Alma looked at him, tears in her eyes, and said, “This is what I always wanted in life and never knew it.” They bought two Pekingese, Bella and Stella, who became their grandchildren. Their daughter, Deb, was a singer called Alyssa Permission with the band Doubtful Pajamas, a girl with shaved head and two big wings tattooed across her clavicle, and their son, Don, was a waiter who’d been living with a friend named Dave for 11 years, both of them in New York. The Westbys loved their Florida life and hardly ever left their walled swimming pool. They were in seventh heaven. They sent a Christmas card north with a picture of Bella and Stella wearing water wings in the pool. The dogs barked on the Westbys’ voice-mail message. The dogs sat at the table with them and ate the same food. And then one day, while Alma left them for a moment in the walled yard, the dogs died. Evidently, they ate a poisonous plant, a vine that had grown into the yard through a crack in the wall. The Westbys were devastated. They could not bear to stay another day. They put the house up for rent and came back to Minnesota, back to winter, back to grief. His brother Les had died, and they moved in with his widow, Jane, who had been depressed before and now was submerged in misery, sitting in a darkened bedroom listening to Frankie Valli, her late husband’s favorite singer. Mr. Westby asked Pastor Liz, “How could God allow this to happen, when we were finally so happy? I hated dairy farming. I was a convict in a prison run by Holsteins. Florida was paradise. Our dogs were our family. I thought God was a loving dog.” Pastor Liz clearly heard him say “loving dog” and decided not to mention it. She said, “I’m sorry you and Alma have been so upset. I can understand how you feel.” But he didn’t want to be understood, he wanted to understand God’s cruelty. So they went to Our Lady for Easter.

Alma despised Frankie Valli, and she thought they should try Florida again and get two new dogs and learn to love them. Mr. Westby said he could do that but wanted to spend time in New York first, reconciling with Deb and Don. Alma said, “Let them reconcile with us, they were the ones who spit in our face, why should we make the effort?” They went to Our Lady for Easter, and Mr. Westby read the bulletin and there was a verse that burned in his brain. And he stood up and though it went against his shy retiring nature, he spoke it aloud as the organ was playing the prelude. “Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” The organ played louder and he shouted it. And people looked at each other, and they all thought, Cheese. Gary the town constable sat down by him and asked, “Are you all right?” “I belong to the Lord,” said Mr. Westby. “Are you done shouting?” said Gary. “Yes,” he said. Father Powers shook hands with him after Mass. Mr. Westby repeated the verse, “Love one another.” “Good idea, you’ve come to the right place,” said Father Powers. The Westbys were in agreement that if they heard Frankie Valli sing “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You” one more time, they’d commit violent acts, so they headed for New York and got a room in a hotel near Grand Central Station. They met their children separately for lunch at the Oyster Bar. Deb had quit singing and become Judeo-Christian and worked in a church school and asked to borrow $5,000 to have her tattoos removed. Don and Dave were working at the same Spanish restaurant and were very busy with their men’s choral group and a theater company called Epic Inclinations. Each lunch lasted an hour and a half, and that was more than long enough. Mr. Westby ordered oysters and then said to the waiter, “I’m sorry but these oysters are raw.” There was not much conversation, but the restaurant was packed with people so there was plenty to look at. Back at the hotel, he and Alma sat in their room, listening to a woman in the next room sobbing at a TV movie with a dog in it, and they agreed that their children were like strangers at a bus stop, there was nothing to reconcile about, and he said, “Let’s go back to Florida and love each other,” and so they did. Someone told me they bought two more little dogs and are quite content. I don’t know, but I wouldn’t be surprised. In any case, they are Lutheran no longer and probably not Catholic either. Their dogma is about the great commandment to love and also about dogs.

All unhappy marriages are alike; each happy marriage is happy in its own way and a mystery to outsiders. The phone rings and Alma answers it and she chatters to the outsider in a reasonable way, and then she hangs up, and Mr. Westby asks, “Who was it?” and she says, “Al,” and he says, “Oh, how’s he?” “Fine.” And then they resume their own language, whose vocabulary is much smaller, and some of which is made up of silences. The beauty of it is that you don’t have to say how you feel, the other person knows. Now and then there are bad feelings when the marriage is tested and they push at the walls and the walls hold. Sometimes they don’t answer the phone. The call goes to voice mail, and they hear a man offer them tremendous savings on something they don’t need like life insurance or a time-share in Florida, and as time goes by, there is more and more they don’t need, just each other who share the language of love.