20

BACK TO MINNEAPOLIS

I packed my bag, fending off Betty’s questions, and drove downtown and parked behind the Chatterbox and went in the back door to pick up a caramel roll and an apple for the drive back to Minneapolis.

Dorothy said, “They’re small, sweetheart. You want two?” These are rolls the size of softballs with about 10 times the minimum daily adult requirement of caramel, but as long as she had opened the door to a second caramel roll, I considered the option. It’s a long drive to Minneapolis. The sugar would keep me alert. A number of Wobegonians have been killed in traffic accidents on that highway, most of them on the way home, but still. It would be a shame to lie bleeding in the twisted wreckage of my car in the ditch under a semi loaded with lumber and think about the caramel roll I didn’t have. “How about some coffee with that, darling?” she said. As a matter of highway safety, I thought, a coffee would be an excellent idea.

“You don’t want that to go, do you? You might hit a bump and spill on yourself. Stick around. What’s your rush?” she said. Well, that was a whole other question, so I sat down to think about it and she poured me a mug of coffee, black. People who take milk with their coffee are trying to mitigate the purpose of coffee, which is to awaken the conscience. They are tea-drinkers at heart who imagine tea will lead to writing haiku and unfortunately it does.

I write these short lines

With fear in my heart that they

Will make a haiku.

What the world needs is not poetic whispers but the workings of conscience. I came home to work on a pointless project involving sainthood, but I did confront my faithless and hopeless youth and I declined institutionalization and in the process I had seen my friends and family lose their inhibitions, if only briefly, and speak freely and the town survived it all. I sipped my coffee and it stung the roof of my mouth and I was grateful for that.

“So how’s it going for you today?” Dorothy said. It’s not a simple question at nine o’clock in the morning. Usually, I wake up feeling ambitious, but this morning I had wanted to stay in bed and sleep some more but had shamed myself to arise and shower and put on a suit and tie by thinking grievous thoughts of unpublished poets, pitchers whose arms went bad, football stars who got dinged too often, standup comics who didn’t keep up with the times, child geniuses whose genius is useless. E.g., the boy in St. Paul who knew by heart the names of every performer on A Prairie Home Companion and which of the 750 shows they had performed on, which is astonishing for about 10 minutes, but is pointless given the existence of Google and so today, at 28, he works in a soup kitchen ladling out tuna casserole to other unfortunates. The world is full of them. So what right do I have to lie abed?

“I’m okay,” I said. And I seemed to be. I felt good about throwing my novel into the trash. For many years, when I’ve had a hard day and can’t get to sleep at night, I imagine walking out of my apartment house and finding 20 reporters on the sidewalk, camera crews, men and women with notebooks, and they want to know how I feel about having been given the Nobel Prize in Literature, and by the time I thank the Swedish Academy for this honor, I am asleep.

Sometimes for variety’s sake, I’m at the White House and Bill Clinton is pinning the National Arts Medal on me. These fantasies are bread and butter but like all fantasies, they lose their usefulness and go dim, and now, sitting in the Chatterbox, I realized I have washed ashore in the same town where I launched forth years ago. I’ve come full circle and am a nobody again, thank God, the beautiful symmetry of life.

A street-cleaning truck came by and vacuumed the gutters and scrubbed the pavement and the driver waved to me. It was Marlon. As I drank my coffee, I turned and there was Alice. I braced myself for the attack. “I’m glad I get to see you before you leave town, I want to thank you,” she said. Dorothy handed her a menu and she ordered steak and eggs with hash browns and onions. Myrtle and Florian came in, she in her jet-black wig and purple pantsuit, he in coveralls and Powdermilk cap. She was muttering at him about why in God’s name did he forget his hearing aids at home and he looked contented as usual. They’ve been at odds for 50 years and that’s how they maintain their balance. She wanted to sell the farm and move into a senior high-rise in St. Cloud and Florian resisted selling the farm by going to estate sales and purchasing junk machinery, ancient mowers, windrowers, wood chippers, log splitters, headers, feeders, manure spreaders, mulchers, cultivators, sprayers, harvesters, discs and harrows, bunchers, balers, scrapers, augers, loaders, tractors, tillers, plows, scythes, skidders, sawmills, combines, grinders, graders, planters, processors, forwarders, sealers—40 acres of useless machinery where the weeds grow tall around the junk, and the farm is unsaleable and if you ask Florian what he keeps it for, he says, “Waiting for a good offer. Most of this stuff, they don’t make it anymore. Can’t buy it anywhere. If they want it, they have to come to me.”

Then, this summer, he said yes, he’d have the junk hauled away so they could move to the condo. This threw Myrtle for a loop but she’d been begging him for years and didn’t know how to unbeg. He met a trucker in the Sidetrack Tap who said he’d come haul the junk away but then he took off for Montana and sold the truck so Florian is still waiting. Meanwhile he’s bought a few more machines. Young men grew old fast working those machines and died young bringing in the crops and tending the land, and did it bring them pleasure or enlightenment? In his opinion, no. So he devoted himself to a life of contemplation. And so shall I.

I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was Clint. “Saw your suitcase in your car. You leaving us?” he said.

Dorothy brought me the two caramel rolls and I sliced them into small pieces so I could offer them to the others, knowing they’d decline, and I’d get to eat all of it, but instead they said, “Thanks” and ate two apiece. Dorothy came over and sat down with a cup of coffee.

Clint said, “I’d like two slices of toast and a coffee with milk.”

She said, “Get it yourself. I’m on break.” So he went and put bread in the toaster and poured a cup of coffee. “Where do you keep the milk?” he said.

“Look around,” she said. “If you can’t find it, the cat has some in a dish on the floor.” She looked at me. “What did you write about me? Did you have a tall angular man with wavy reddish hair walk in and ask for breakfast in a foreign accent and fall in love with my eggs and sausage and take me away in his private jet to his mansion in Monterey?”

“No,” I said, “I’m afraid it lacks plausibility.”

“I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that,” she said.

Alice and Clint and Dorothy and I sat around the table, and 10 feet away, Myrtle told Florian that she had seen a perfect apartment in St. Cloud, two bedrooms, a laundry, and a balcony looking out at the Mississippi River. The previous tenants had died in a murder-suicide so it was available furnished, linens, towels, dishware, everything, and cable paid for through the end of the year.

Pastor Liz walked in and saw us and pulled up a chair. “Mind if a theologian joins you?” she said.

“Okay by me,” said Alice, “but let’s start out in a spirit of forgiveness.”

“Fine,” said Liz and we all said it together: Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us and lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil. Liz said that Senator K. was feeling very ill this morning, and Mary called and told her he doesn’t want pastoral care, he is afraid of healing, he wants to take his leave. She turned to me: “Someday you’ll be the oldest living survivor, and people will be avoiding you on the street for fear you’ll tell them one of your stories that they’ve already heard a hundred times.”

I said, “No, I’m done. I’ve told enough stories. I was meant to be a bus driver or a short-order cook but I wandered into the storytelling field in order to make myself appear intelligent and instead of fulfilling a useful function I became a mere decoration. Name me one great writer who was happy. Name one. Other than Solomon. For a writer, the secret of happiness is to read Don Quixote and recognize that Cervantes is 10 times the writer you’ll ever be and don’t bother wasting time in the attempt. Do something useful with your life, like run a day-care center. From now on, when I get up from this table, I intend to stay strictly within the bounds of truth. Though I will say, in my own defense, that I have done some good with fiction.”

“Are you about to tell the story about giving Bert’s eulogy?” said Alice. “I’ve heard it, I don’t need to hear it again.”

“No, this is a different eulogy, one for my classmate Rich. He went to California to visit an uncle and he rented a car and was driving to Santa Barbara and enjoying the scenery when he came over a hill where moments before the tailgate of a semitruck had sprung open and the road was all yellow with bananas and he slammed on his brakes, the worst thing to do when driving on bananas, and he skidded 200 feet and into a eucalyptus tree, and died with the smell of cough drops in his nose. His wife knew, and so did her sisters and Rich’s brother, that there was no uncle involved and he’d gone to spend a weekend with a former student, Emily, whom he was (as it turned out) fatally attracted to. I gave a eulogy, and it was my job to create an uncle and spare the family the shame. I created a great uncle, a veteran of D-Day, a patriot and poet and potato farmer who quoted Emerson, an Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer of uncles, brave, sensitive, down to earth, and dying of tuberculosis contracted in a Nazi prison camp. And I took out the bananas and substituted three small children crossing the road and Rich swerved to avoid them. Even Rich’s wife who knew the truth about the bastard was moved to tears. He was a jerk but, thanks to me, he was forgiven.”

The story of Rich led to Liz’s story of the Lutheran pastors on a pontoon boat and Clint’s story of a tomato-sucking dog and Dorothy told about Bruno the fishing dog and Clint told about his dad’s encounter with the black Lab who came up out of the hole in the ice and caused Oscar to lose his English, and by then it was noon, and Mary had come to report that Senator K. was feeling a good deal better. Dorothy said, “If you’re going to the Cities, you better get going. Unless you’d like lunch.” She brought out a pan of macaroni and cheese hot from the oven. “Pasteurized, don’t worry,” she said. “You turn your head and the cheese goes past your eyes.” A joke from third grade. It smelled good. We noted the generous amount of peas in it, a Dorothy innovation.

“Byron loved peas in everything. He loved peas in spaghetti,” Mary said. “That’s how he died. I was making spaghetti for lunch and he went down the basement to get a package of frozen peas, and on his way back up he sat down on the steps. Next-to-last step from the top. I was on the phone with my sister and I asked him if he was okay and he said, ‘I’m fine’ and when I opened the door to the stairs, he was gone. His eyes were open and he was dead. I called the rescue squad and they came and worked on him but he had no pulse. I sat down beside him and put my arm around him and told him I loved him and always would love him. And I took the frozen peas from his hand and put them in the refrigerator.” Clarence walked in the cafe, and he could tell from how quiet we were that Mary was talking about a death, so he waited for her to finish. She said Byron had seen a doctor a month before and everything was fine. “So I called up the kids, John in Boston and Ronnie in Texas and Judy and Diana in Tucson, and Bill, and Mr. Lundberg and his son came and took the body away and I took a nap and cleaned up, and by six or so, the kids were all there and we were hugging and Diana was pretty torn up but we were okay. They wanted to hear how it happened so I told them and I asked if they wanted some spaghetti for supper—I’d made it already, and I brought it to the table and we said grace and they served themselves and then Diana looked at it and she said, ‘Are these the peas Daddy brought up from the basement when he died?’ I said yes. She said, ‘You are serving us the Death Peas?’ She couldn’t get over it. We were eating the peas Daddy held in his hand as he died. I don’t think she’s forgiven me to this day. John pointed out that Byron had touched everything in this house including the chair she was sitting in, and she said, ‘Yes, but we’re not eating it.’ Oh my. What a day. That was five years ago. Death peas.”

As she told about Byron’s death, we could hear the marching band in the distance and then it came booming by, a drum major in a grenadier hat and white jacket and pants, clarinets in the front row, trumpets and trombones, a line of drummers in the rear. Today was the Fourth of July. In all the drama of the cheese and the lost Mustang and the discarded novel, I’d forgotten all about it.

It was truly inspiring. The military bearing of adolescents in uniform, their posture, the high-stepping march, the serious faces, the sheer focus. Dickie the drum major thrusting his scepter high over his head to the rattle of the snare drums—the boom of the bass drum and the oomph of the tubas—the dinging of the xylophone, the sheer pride of it all—it was everything the old Knutes parading on the 17th of May were not—they were the dying past and this was the eager future—but where did our children learn this? We are a modest rural community of ordinary people, we are not a Prussian elite officer corps seeking world domination, so what is the high-stepping to drum cadence all about? It is about youthful idealism, and good God do we need it. It’s not about domination but about pride, a necessary fuel whether you are picking potatoes or repairing transmissions or writing a novel.

The band slammed their right feet down and came to a stop, the drums still keeping time, and Dickie turned, back arched, and aimed himself a quarter-turn and counted to four and headed up McKinley Street, and the band wheeled smartly behind him and all of us in the cafe were stunned with admiration. “End of the world”? No way. The world has just begun to begin.