It was chilly on Tuesday and
Wednesday, as a cold front moved through, and the tomato growers stayed
up late debating
whether to cover the plants for frost or not. "Naw," they decided about
ten o'clock, and hit the hay and lay thinking about
it: the humiliation of getting froze out, the shame of eating
store-bought tomatoes, or, worse, going on tomato relief. "Here,
Clarence, have a couple of bushels of these - we got plenty. No,
really. Bud covered ours that night in June, of course,
when itfroze - you remember - it was that night, you could tell by the
birch leaves it was going to get below freezing...you
didn't know that?"
It rained Wednesday night. Roger Heglund lay worrying about his
unplanted corn and thinking about his daughter
Martha's new black kitten. Roger had laid down the law that a cat stays
outdoors, even when it's cold: That's what it has
fur for, put it outside, it'll take care of itself. She looked at him,
pleading. He said, "Now. Just do it." She put the kitten
out. On her way upstairs she whispered, "Murderer." He heard her. When
he went up to bed, he heard the kitten crying on
the back step. Well, he thought, it'll go away. It cried pitifully and
then it did go away, and after a while he went out to
look for it. "Kittykittykittykitty." He walked naked except for his
long T-shirt, barefoot across the cold wet grass, his big
dog, Oscar, with him. He pulled the T-shirt down to make himself
decent, and thought he heard the kitten under the house.
Bent over to look, and Oscar sniffed him. Roger jumpedstraight into the
side of his house, hitting the faucet with his thigh.
He groaned and sat down in the grass. "Ohhhhhh." And saw the
flashlight. "Dad?" she said. "Dad, is that you?"
"Go back to bed," he said, "everything is alright." But his voice
sounded funny, like a man who'd run into a faucet.
"What's wrong, Dad? Are you all right?"
No, he wasn't.Much later he was not so bad, after the pain
subsided and he had a shot of bourbon, but he wasn't all right. He lay
awake listening for the kitten. He fell asleep, and in his dreams
something chased him to hell and back - it might
have been a cat. In the morning the kitten came back. Martha said,
"Don't you think it'd be less trouble if we kept him in
the house? Then you wouldn't have to get up in the middle of the night
and go find him, Dad. You see, if you keep
something -" "All right," he said. "-if you keep something indoors,
then you know where it is." "All right," he said, "we'll
try it and see how it works."
Thursday night he was glad the kitten was in. It rained buckets,
one of those summer thunderstorms when the sky turns
black and clouds boil up and the wind blows the grass flat. Trees bend
in half and sheets of rain fall like in the Old
Testament, and then it's over.
The wind took hold of the Quaker State oil sign at Krebsbach Chev,
the one that hung on the Pure Oil sign, and ripped it
from the bracket and whipped it down Main Street like a guillotine. It
sliced into the ground in front of the Unknown
Norwegian and buried itself halfway in. When it came whistling down the
street, Mr. Lundberg had just emerged from the
Sidetrack Tap to make sure his windows were rolled up. The wind almost
bowled him over, and then he heard a hum like a
UFO and ran inside. It was the sign whizzing past so fast he only saw a
blur, it could've cut someone in two. Such as him,
for example. He is a hefty man and half of him would be almost as much
as all of just about anyone else you could think
of, but that sign would've done the job. It had not been a good week
for him anyway, and then to get sliced in two on top of
it - not a week you'd care to live through again.
Tuesday night a chunk of plaster fell from the bedroom ceiling,
crashing on the bureau dresser and waking him and Betty
out of a sound sleep. It was a chunk they have noticed for two years -
first its outline, shaped like the state of Illinois, then
the shadows where it pulled away from the lath. The force of gravity
being what it is, it was clear what would come next,
and they both looked up and said,"Looks to me like the plaster's coming
off." So when it finally fell on the bureau, there
were recriminations on her part, after they got over the scare. They
lay in the dark, little bits of plaster falling, and she
said, "If you'da just done it when you said you were going to." He knew
better than to reply. She said, "I kept telling you
to."
He lay, smelling the perfume on the bureau that got busted by the
chunk. A dozen different perfumes, sickening, and when
he opened the window, the wind blew all the perfumes directly at him.
She said "But oh no, you wouldn't listen to me,
would you. Oh no. You wouldn't listen to me for one minute."
He lay and listened to her, remembering the awful nights out when
she wore the perfume he bought her, such as the Sons
of Knute Syttende Mai Ball, which he spent in a suit at least three
sizes too small for him. He was too proud to have it let
out, although it meant he couldn't dance, couldn't sit, had to stand,
and when he dropped his wallet he had to kick it into a
closet and close the door and ease himself down so he could pick it up,
but when he eased back up, his pants split anyway,
and then he could only stand in certain areas.
She said, "Well, maybe you'll listen to me the next time. I'm not
wrong about everything, you know."
The perfumes were gifts from him, bought at K Mart in Saint Cloud
for anniversaries and birthdays, in a panic at the last
minute, him sneaking over to Notions while she was in Women's Wear and
asking the clerk to give him something nice. He
should have known, looking at the clerk, that her taste wasn't right on
the mark. She looked like someone he played football
with, except she piled her hair up high on her head and sprayed it to
stay, so when she gave him a bottle of Nuits de Oui,
he might've guessed it wasn't what Betty would wear. Smelling the
perfumes made him think what a dope he was, and he
couldn't even fix a ceiling before it fell either.
He lay in the dark thinking it over. Her last words were "and you
can clean it up too." At six-thirty he got up and made
toast and coffee and brought it up to her in bed. To confuse her. Then
he got the vacuum out. He picked up the big pieces
and the broken bottles, vacuumed the plaster bits and dust on the floor
and under the radiator and on the bureau, as she
sat and drank her coffee, speechless. He swooshed around with the
vacuum, a new Japanese-made model more powerful
than what he was used to, and it sucked up some money off the bureau,
including a few quarters that banged around in its
bowels, and it almost swallowed a picture of Donny Lundberg. As he
rescued Donny from the vacuum's maw, it ate a tiny
bottle of superglue that clattered around inside it and then made a
popping sound. He felt something wet on his bare foot.
He wiped it off with his hand. Then it dawned on him that it was
superglue. He said, "Oh for dumb," and clapped his hand
to his forehead.
He was in that pose whe Betty drove him to the hospital: The
Thinker, hand to his forehead. He remained in serious
thought until the nurse found the correct solvent and sat with a Q-tip
and slowly pried his hand loose from his forehead
and the bedspread from his foot. He had gotten so mad about putting his
hand to his forehead, he kicked the bed with his
sticky foot, and the spread came along attached to his ankle.
The hand-forehead seperation, the bedspreadectomy, were carried
out with professional gravity befitting an open-heart
operation. Betty drove him home without a word about anything except
the rainy weather and things other than getting
stuck to yourself, but he still had to go to work at the Co-op elevator
with an angry red mark on his forehead and another
on the heel of his palm. They said, "What happened to you?"
He said, "I hit myself in the head with my fist."
"Boy, you hit pretty hard."
"Yeah, I guess I don't know my own strength."
It was a week when a person would rather not be sliced in half,
because you'd want your family to remember you as a
better man than what you were most recently.
This is the news from Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, where the women are
strong, the men are good looking and all the
children are above average.
