Old Glory (13 page)

My father, at least, would surely have given his eyeteeth for such a congregation. The Lutherans packed the church to its doors. There was such a press of plaid acrylic jackets, fancy hats, fresh perms, good teeth, scrubbed children, Masonic pins that I thought God himself, if He existed, would have been a little awestruck by the way in which His children had got on so well in the world. Would He, I wondered, feel like me—with a twinge of envious amazement at all the four-wheel-drive R.V.’s, C.B. radios, ranch-style bungalows, video cassette recorders, Japanese cameras, motor cruisers and new Chevy pickups with which the Red Wing Lutherans had surrounded themselves?

This was Rally Sunday, I read in my order of worship. What everyone was actually rallying for, I had no idea; so I listened to the reading of the Lesson, in the hope of finding out.

“Wives,” read Pastor Roberts, giving his flock a sweeping glance which combined chumminess and severity, “be subject to your husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is head of the wife as Christ is the head of the Church: and He is the saviour of the body. Therefore as the church is subject to Christ, so let the wives be to their husbands in everything.”

I felt a rustle of assent susurrate through the congregation. In Red Wing, generally, we reckoned that St. Paul was a far surer authority on things than the newfangled prophetesses of the Women’s Movement.

We sang Hymn No. 383.

As we sang, I sensed that this despair was something that we had read about in the newspapers rather than actually experienced in Red Wing. The tune was jolly, and our voices sounded more triumphant than sad as we bellowed out that the world was coming apart at the seams. There was a hint of smugness, even, as we sang about the kind of dreadful things that happened in places like, say, Chicago or Southeast Asia. At the end of the hymn, Pastor Roberts told us what was happening in Red Wing during the coming week: a pizza party for teen-agers, the Junior High swim, the Sarah Group, the Coffee Hour, the Sewing Group, the Cherub Choir … nothing that smacked of despair.

I got lost during the sermon. I had started to think of wakes and wing dams again. I heard Pastor Roberts say that the Bible was “God’s greatest free meal.” Insurance salesmen, he explained, bought expense-account lunches for prospective clients, and the Bible was a bit like this kind of lunch, only immeasurably bigger and more nourishing. Then, when I listened next, he was saying that the Bible was “a road map.” My attention drifted completely. I thought about trying to read my lunch, and what the Rand McNally Road Atlas would taste like if one were ever condemned to eat it. Then I heard the word “oysters” and brightened considerably.

“Are you an oyster or an eagle?” demanded Pastor Roberts. “An oyster-Christian or an eagle-Christian? Now, you’ve got to make your choice. Will you be an oyster, or will you be an eagle?”

An oyster, I thought; I’d sooner be an oyster every time. But that was not the right answer.

We sang again. Hymn 501.

I thought of my boat, bucking on the combers of Boulanger Slough.

I had had just one short glimpse of death’s cold wave. The next time I saw it, I would most certainly flee. On Rally Sunday, I was badly out of kilter with the First Lutheran Church. On the way out, I shook Pastor Roberts’ hand with an apologetic mumble to hide my foreign
accent, and marched off alone down the green to Front Street, where I found an empty bar and drank a Bloody Mary with an overdose of hot Tabasco.

Mississalma
had left her moorings. There was nobody to say goodbye to. I crossed the lagoon and got out into the main river. Here the current ran from west to east, and although I could feel a stiff breeze on my cheek, there were no whitecaps on the water and the going was smooth. On both banks, the forest leaned over the river, and the sun, filtered through an opaque bank of low cloud, was just strong enough to throw the shores into shadow and make winking spoons of the little waves in the buoyed channel.

Five miles below Red Wing, the woods abruptly took their leave of the water and the river opened into Lake Pepin, the longest and widest pool in the whole course of the Mississippi. Now the waves were rolling in from a far gray nowhere—a longer, slower swell than I’d met in Boulanger Slough. I climbed them at half speed, slid over their tops and tried to feel out their rhythm as if they were a new dance step: the Mississippi Whoops-a-Daisy or the Pepin Lurch. I tried to soothe my alarm with Mr. Rawlings tonic jingle, but it didn’t work. There were twenty-three more miles of this to go, with the river three to four miles from bank to bank, and the channel keeping mainly to a central line down this small, swollen sea.

Just the evening before, I’d heard stories of steamboats’ going down with all hands lost in storms on Lake Pepin, of drowned fishermen and capsized cruisers. I waited for a wide enough trough, swung the boat’s head around, and ran her back upstream into the shelter of the forest. If I anchored up at the neck of the lake, perhaps the wind would drop an hour or so before sunset, and at least I could make Lake City before it got too black to see the buoys.

I found a shady inlet of stumps and logs, a real raven’s nest, and slung out my anchor. The woods here were too thick and tangled to walk in, so I settled down to read John Cheever. I found it difficult not to fall asleep. Lapped in water, with the leaves tinkling overhead, I did my best to follow the talk of Cheever’s Connecticut suburbanites. It was oddly tough going. Cheever’s world was at once too familiar and too far away. I had lived, briefly, in his landscape when I taught at a college in Massachusetts. Then it had seemed a very foreign place. With the pages of the book blowing over in the wind here in the Wisconsin forest, the East Coast of the United States and the English home counties had blurred into one. London was a city just a little east of Boston.

I heard other voices coming from somewhere on the Minnesota shore.
Children shrilling. A gust of high laughter on the wind. They mixed with the voices in the book and muddled things up: I lost the Wapshots and listened to the leaves instead.

I was woken by the boom of a bullhorn.

“To-whit, to-whoo! To-whit, to-whoo! To-whit, to-whoo!” I thought it said; a giant electronic owl calling across the river.

The
Mississalma
was revolving slowly on the current, a hundred yards out. I cupped my hands to my ears. Next time, the words came in signaled periods.

“I. Said. Dis. Cresh. Un. Is. The. Bedder. Part. Of. Val. Or.”

I put both my thumbs up.

The houseboat moved to the near edge of the channel. “There’s a bit of a lick running out there on Pepin!”

“I know!” I shouted. “I tried it and came back!”

“If this wind doesn’t die, we’ll see you—stay on board here overnight!”

“Thank you!”

“Hope to see you! If we don’t, have a good trip, now!”

The
Mississalma
went on upriver. As she disappeared around a loop in the forest, I rather hoped that the wind wouldn’t die. When one is traveling, twenty-four hours is long enough to make one think of people as old and valued friends.

I crossed the channel to find where the voices came from. A Stars and Stripes was ripping at its flagpole in a clearing on the far shore. Lawns came down to the river’s edge, and I could see figures hunched around trestle tables on the grass. Behind them, a little way up the bluff, there was a wide-windowed timber ranch house. The jokes were coming loudly now, a steady
yak-yak-yak-yahoo
breaking across the water. The small private dock was already filled with boats; I sneaked mine in between two fat white cruisers and set off to gate-crash the affair.

“Hi, there. You a K.C.?”

“What’s a K.C.?”

“Knights of Columbus.”

“Sorry, no. It just sounded like a good party from where I was sitting across the river. Can anyone join?”

“Hey, Bill, come over here a moment, willya? That’s the Chief Navigator, Fourth Grade. He’s the head guy round here.”

The Chief Navigator said I was welcome to join the Knights of Columbus picnic. I was too late for Mass, he said; that had been at two-thirty. Now there was just beer and beans and barbecued chicken. He gave me a can of Michelob, told me where to find the barbecue and said I should go talk to Father McKinney.

The Knights were burly farmers from across the river at Ellsworth, Wisconsin. From a distance they looked like clones. They wore mail-order suits from J. C. Penney and Sears, all in the same chemical oat-meals and blues. Each face, though, had weathered differently. The hot summers and vicious winters had turned some to jagged outcrops of rock; others were plump and roseate; still more had the grained and knotted surface of old pine. I found Father McKinney, conspicuous in his cassock, at the end of a long table of families.

“This morning I was a Protestant,” I said, “up at the First Lutheran in Red Wing. This afternoon I seem to have joined the Catholic Church.”

“You know what they say about instant converts?” Father McKinney had a knobbly, bog-Irish face which didn’t quite fit his gleaming American dentistry.

“That they’re the worst?”

“That’s right. The very worst. Real rascals. You don’t look
too
bad a fellow to me, though. There might be hope.”

I had to confess that I’d never heard of the Knights of Columbus until ten minutes before. Who were they?

“You’re talking to the wrong man here. I’m only a first-grader, a novice.” But he explained that the Knights had been founded when Catholics were barred from the Masonic orders. Unable for similar reasons to become Elks, Moose or Odd Fellows, the Catholics had dubbed themselves knights. They did charitable works, looked after widows and orphans, had pension funds and sickness benefits, and put on the best picnics and pig roasts for miles around.

“Do they have secret handshakes?”

“If they do, they haven’t told me. Maybe you only learn them when you get out of first grade.”

A passing farmer pulled a chair up to our table and started talking to Father McKinney about the insides of his cows. The priest displayed what I thought was an unseemly amount of knowledge of the subject. He appeared to have qualified as some kind of cattle gynecologist, and was batting away about uterine growths and lactation.

He told me later that he himself had grown up on a small farm nearby. “My daddy had around two-fifty acres. That was a kind of average little holding. We were hayseeds then. Dumb no-accounts. That was the way people thought. Today it’s all changed. Most of these guys here, they’ve got anything from two hundred to five or six hundred acres. With the way the price of land’s gone, a lot of them are rich men now. Some of them … gosh, they’re millionaires. Nobody thinks they’re hayseeds now; they’re getting scared. They’re worried
about the farm vote.… The small farmer, nowadays, he’s a real important guy. You watch the way the politicians go round these little towns in Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota when it gets to be election time. All this inflation; well, it’s blown up the small farmer pretty darned big. He’s a giant now, compared to what he used to be.”

Things were running Father McKinney’s way, and he had the reasonable contentment of a prophet who was living to see his forecasts come to pass. “People now, they want to go back to the old ways. I see it all the time in the Church. A little while back, everything had to be
modern
. They wanted the Mass set to jazz. They wanted services in jive talk. If it was new, it had to be good. Now we’re going back to the old liturgy, the old ritual. Folks are coming to realize that maybe Gran’pappy knew a thing or two, and if it was good enough for him it must be good enough for them too. Last year, now, we had some of them Moonies come to Ellsworth. They didn’t get too much of a welcome. Some folks in town weren’t quite as charitable as maybe they should’ve been.”

“How long did it take to run them out?”

“Oh—I’m a bit of a conservative,” said Father McKinney. “It might have been a matter of minutes. It sure didn’t take no longer than an hour.”

Dusk wasn’t far off. The shadows of the trestle tables stretched almost down to the river. The last of the chicken bones had been picked clean, and the children were beginning to grizzle. The flag still tossed and shuddered on its pole: I wouldn’t be able to make Lake Pepin this evening.

Alma woke me in the middle of the night. “How do you want your eggs?” I couldn’t make out where I was.
Eggs?
Framed in the fluorescent brightness of the cabin doorway, Alma looked like Struwwelpeter. Beyond her, Dick passed by: bespectacled, necktied, in a pale gray business suit.

“It’s a quarter after five.”

It felt like it. If I was to cross Lake Pepin, though, it would have to be within an hour or so of dawn. Last evening, even at her mooring in the lagoon, the
Mississalma
had groaned and stirred on the water in the wind. Now she was silent, except for the breakfast noises from the galley—the sputter of fat in a pan, the dog whistle of a kettle coming to the boil.

We sat out in the glass conservatory on the bow.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s a dreadful thing to do to anyone, to get a household up at this hour.”

“When we stay out here on the boat I’m always up about now. Best time of the day,” Dick said. He looked out happily at the dead lagoon. It was like a sheet of gray ice. Trickles of smoke rose from its surface. The sky was bleary. It began as a swath of charcoal overhead, then lightened to the color of pale mud somewhere far away over Wisconsin. It was a primeval morning, the sort of day on which it was easy to imagine one’s ancestors crawling out of the slime of things. I wished I had asked Alma to turn my eggs over: their yolks had a horrid brilliance, as if they’d been made and painted in Hong Kong.