Sunday morning Clarence Bunsen
stepped into the shower and turned on the water-which was cold, but
he's Norwegian, he knows you have to take what you get -- and stood
until it got warm, and was
reaching for the soap when he thought for sure he was having a heart
attack. He'd read a Reader's
Digest story about a man's heart attack ("My Most Unforgettable
Experience") and this felt like the one
in the story--chest pain like a steel band tightening. Clarence grabbed
the nozzle as the rest of the story
flashed before his eyes; the ride in the ambulance, the dash to the
emergency room, unconciousness as
the heart team worked over him, the long slow recovery and the
discovery of a new set of values. But as
he imagined what was about to happen, the heart attack petered out on
him. The story said it felt like an
elephant stepping on you. This felt more like a big dog, and then
somebody whistled and the dog left. So
it wasn't a heart attack, there was no story, and Clarence felt better.
(The storyteller is disappointed, of course. A full-blown heart
attack would be a reasonable test of his
ability, perhaps leading to death itself, a narration of the last
moments, the ascent of the soul through
the clouds, an exclusive report.)
It wasn't a heart attack, but for fifteen seconds it could have
been one, and in the depths of his heart
he thought it was -- so in a way it was. When you believe you're dying,
ten or fifteen minutes is like a
lifetime, and when the false attack was over, he nonetheless felt he
sort of had a new set of values. For
one thing, he wasn't sure he should waste time taking a shower, life
being so short, having come so
close to death in the sense that when death comes it might come exactly
like this. It was Sunday
morning, but he wasn't sure he wanted to go to church and sit through a
sermon, life being so short. If
you knew you had twenty minutes left to live, why, then, church would
be the place you'd head first;
you'd turn yourself in, no more fooling around, no kidding, pour the
sacred oil on me, Jack, say the
words, and pluck your magic twanger -- I don't have all day.
He thought instead of going to church he'd like to go for a walk
(good for your heart) and worship
God in the singing of the birds, the sunshine, green grass, and
flowers, which, this being Minnesota, we
don't have yet. He thought: Life is short, so you should do something
different. He dried his old body
off and put on underwaer -- maybe, life being short, you ought to get
new underwear, but whatcan an
old man wear except boxer shorts? Can't go around in those bikini
things you see in stores. What if a
robber with a gun forced you to strip down to your underwear ("Hey
you--old guy!--hear me? I said,
strip"), and there you be, an old geezer in tiny purplish briefs,
robber'd take one look ("Hey, man, you
are ridiculous") bam, you're dead. Dead because you did something
different becauselife is short. He
stood at the dresser, shopping for socks (black, brown, gray,
gray-black, Argyle). Arlene called up the
stairs, "It's almost nine-thirty!"
He wanted to yell back that he was feeling delicate from what he
thought at the time was a heart
attack, but it was hard to yell something so vague, so he yelled, "Be
there in a minute," and in not so
many minutes he appeared in the kitchen in full Sunday regalia: brown
suit, black shoes, white shirt,
and one flash of color, the tiny red flecks on his dark tie. He
appeared through the door in a cloud of
bay rum, poured himself a cup of coffee, drank some, then kissed his
wife (in that order -- he is
Norwegain), and looked in the frying pan on the stove and saw food that
whenever you read about
cardiovascular disease you read about that stuff.
He put a pan of water on to boil, for oatmeal. Arlene watched,
spatula in hand. "What's the matter?
Breakfast is ready. I got your eggs." Hard to explain: a
semi-heart-attack. A heart that wasn't attacked
but heard footsteps in the weeds. Maybe it was only a twig, maybe the
whole aorta about to fall off.
"I don't feel like bacon and eggs this morning."
"Well, I guess I'll have to throw them out, then."
"Yeah..."
"Are you feeling all right? Are you sick?"
He's Norwegian; he said, "No. I'm just fine." A Norwegian's dying
words: "I'm just fine." On the field
of battle, torn to a red pulp except for your mouth: "I'm just fine."
Wreckage of a car, smashed to
smithereens, a bloody hand reaches out the window and writes in the
dust: "O.K."
It was warm out, and on the way to church they smelled mud, a
sweet smell of rot and decay, and a
whiff of exhaust as the Tolleruds cruised by with their carload of
kids. Clarence used to walk to Sunday
school with his four little kids. Now, having almost had a heart
attack, he misses their sweaty little
hands for one heartbreaking instant and misses how, before going in to
worship the Lord, he ran a
quick bladder check and a nose check to see where blowing was needed.
The kids always cured him of
the sort of morbid mood he felt this morning -- he never had these long
grim thoughts about death when
the kids were little, but then he was younger, of course.
Church was half full and restless. Pastor Ingqvist's Lenten
sermons have gotten longer. Val Tollefson
has been after him to liven up his preaching. Sunday morning before
church, Val tunes in "Power for
Tomorrow" on TV from the Turquoise Temple in Anaheim, and there is a
gleam in Reverand La Coste's
eye that Val wishes pastor Ingqvist would emulate and also use more
dramaticinflection, rising, falling
inflection, cry out sometimes, use long pauses to give solemnity to the
sermon.
Clarence checked out of Pastor Ingqvist's sermon early. It was
about the parable of the laborers in
the vineyard, the ones who came late getting the same wage as those who
came early and stayed all
day, a parable that suggests you need not listen carefully to the whole
sermon from the beginning but
can come in for maybe the last sentence or two and get the whole point.
Besides, the pastor's long
pauses were hypnotic. Clarence's mind drifted away to other things,
until suddenly he was startled by
his own heavy breathing: he opened his eyes; the sermon wasn't over, it
was only a long pause. The
pastor's inflection suggested he was coming toward the end and the
offering was next. Clarence eased
his wallet out and saw he had no cash. He got out a pen and hid the
checkbook in his Bible (next to
Psalm 101) and quietly scratched out a check for thirty dollars, more
than usual, because he had almost
had a heart attack and also because his offering was personalized. He
wrote surreptitiously, trying to
keep his eyes up and ahead -- knowing you're not supposed to write
checks in church, it isn't a grocery
store.
He glanced to his right, and Mrs. Val Tollefson was glaring at
him. She thought he was writing in the
Bible. (In the old Norwegian synod you didn't write in a Bible, not
even little comments in the margin
like "Good verse" or "You can say that again," because every word in
the Bible is true and you
shouldn't have to add any that might not be true, not even in pencil,
because it undermines theauthority
of the Scripture.) Meanwhile, the sermon ended and Pastor Ingqvist
launched into a prayer. Clarence
tried to tear the check quietly out of the checkbook. There's no worse
sound in the sanctuary that a
check ripping. This check wouldn't come quietly, the first half-inch
rip sounded like plywood being torn
from a wall, so he waited for the pastor to launch into a strong
sentence of fervent prayer to cover up
the check removal, but Pastor Ingqvist was pausing at odd points, so
Clarence couldn't tell when it was
safe or when suddenly he would be ripping in the middle of pure holy
silence. Clarence folded the check
back and forth until it almost fell off. Mrs. Tollefson was about to
get up and snatch the Scripture out of
his hands. At prayers' end, as they said the Lord's Prayer, he eased
the check out ("And lead us not into
temptation, but deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the
power, and the glory, for ever.
Amen"), and when Elmer passed the basket, Clarence laid down the check
folded neatly in half in the
basket and bowed his head and suddenly realized he had written it for
three hundred dollars.
He had written with his eyes averted and he knew he had written
three-zero-zero on the short line and
three-zero-zero on the long line. Could a man sneak downstairs after
church and find the deacons
counting the collection and say, "Fellows, there's been a mistake. I
gave more than I really wanted to"?
He now felt fully alive for the first time all day. He felt
terrifically awake. He had given all he had in the
checking account and a little more. What would they do until the end of
the month to keep body and soul
together? Maybe they would have to eat beans and oatmeal. What's a man
gonna do? A man's gotta
live.
That's the news from Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, where all the women
are strong, all the men are
good-looking and all the children are above average.
