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Nonfiction- 2nd Place

Growing up, the stories I knew best were those we told within the family. Many had to do with our trips to Sturgeon Lake. In July and sometimes in August my family would drive to Sturgeon, as we always said, 100 miles north of St. Paul, just off Highway 61. Along the way my father would tell my sisters and me that if we kept still we might see a moose or a wolf by the side of the road, and we half believed him. He did not keep still, nor did he really want stillness from us. He recalled other trips, anticipated good weather, remarked on the intrusive presence of motorists from Iowa who hauled large wobbly trailers on our crowded highways, assured my mother he was holding the speedometer needle right at 55, and performed lively readings of jingles from Burma Shave signs planted here and there along the road:

Within this vale

Of toil and sin

Your head grows bald

But not your chin.

~ Burma Shave

Besides the jingles we saw, he knew others from other Burma Shave signs around the state, and as he recited them my sisters and I would join in. Sometimes we could get the last line right by thinking how to complete the rhyme.

Just past Willow River we’d head east into the little town of Sturgeon Lake and stop to buy gas and milk and eggs. Then it was four miles over a flint-hard dirt road to the lake and Wold’s Resort. When we reached the dirt road I knew what I’d soon hear. “Now we’re so close I could spit there from here,” my father would say. “At least he said ‘spit,’ this time,” my mother would add.

Halfway around the south shore of the lake we’d turn in at a sign that said “Wolds” and park in the shade on pine duff lining the driveway. Usually we’d find the Wolds, Mort and Eng, in their kitchen or garden. In the exchange of greetings that followed, they would abide my father’s handshaking and respond politely to my mother’s remarks about the grounds – Yes, the roses by the tool shed look good this year, so far – until Mort supposed that, well, we’d probably like to get settled after our long drive, and he should show us around to our place. Mort was more outgoing than Eng. “It’s a new pump there,” he might mention as we walked past the pump house on our way to the cabin. Or, stepping inside, “New oilcloth for the kitchen table.” Looking into a dish cabinet, then thinking twice, my mother would say that the shelves wouldn’t need much cleaning.

But before we cleaned anything or unpacked the car, we would head back outside and down to the lake to look at the beach and the dock and the boats. My sisters would kick off their sandals and wade into the water, splashing at dragonflies and each other. Looking to the northeast, reckoning from a fallen-down barn and a white boathouse on opposite shores, my father would locate the weed bed where the big crappies lived. “Tomorrow morning,” he would say, grinning, “they’ll jump right into the boat. We’ll have to fight them off.”

In the week that followed – two weeks, during the bad polio summers – all of us would fish, my sisters and I would swim, my mother would sunbathe in her underwear, and I would poke around in clearings and outbuildings left over from the time when the resort had been a farm. I knew where there was a pedal-driven grindstone with a metal seat recycled from an old hay rake, and I sat in it and ground away at the blade of my pocket knife until my father said I’d turned it into a shiv, whatever that was. I knew where there was a gray half-timber icehouse, still in use, and on hot afternoons I would climb into it and sit in its loading port – a good spot to suck chunks of ice and practice spitting bits of sawdust into the scrubby field below, alive with horseflies and grasshoppers. “What did Mort and Eng grow in this field,” I once asked my father, “back when they were farmers?” “Rocks,” he said. Sometimes I fished from Mort’s dock, stretched out on my belly, dangling a line over the side. Looking straight down, I could watch bluegills smaller than my hand swim from beneath the dock to inspect the bit of angleworm I’d stuck on a hook and lowered for their consideration. They would come forward slowly and circle the worm, feinting, until one of them – A bluegill brave! A Kiowa bluegill, counting coup! – nudged it with his nose and darted back. The others would follow in a flash, their shadows streaking across ripply washboard patterns in the bright sand bottom of the lake.

When berries were in season we went after them. The best ones, it was understood, were never near at hand. Finding them meant driving deep into the woods on a logging road, then hiking in deeper still when the road petered out. On one of these expeditions we nearly lost Anna Hanson, an old family friend and our surprise guest at Wold’s. Absorbed in following a trail of blueberries, and eating a few for each one she dropped into the Crisco pail she carried, Mrs. Hanson drifted away from the group and disappeared. We found her hours later, just before dark, sitting on a stump in a black-spruce bog. My father called to her as we approached so that we wouldn’t startle her. Even so, she didn’t move until we came very near. When she did turn to face us – dark eyes unblinking, deep creases running down from the corners of her mouth – I could see that mosquitoes had chewed her neck and arms. “I might have died here, Lawrence,” she said at last, emphasizing a note of gravity in her delivery. My father grinned and picked up her Crisco pail, now empty, and helped her to her feet. “But not from starvation, Anna,” he replied.

It had not been a postcard sentiment about the north woods that prompted Mrs. Hanson to join us at Sturgeon in the first place, and the berry-picking misadventure fell in line with her experience of other rusticities – a midnight encounter with skunks in an outhouse would soon follow – that did nothing to make her feel reverent in the presence of nature. She would remark, after having perturbed the skunks, that some people in this country maybe had gone fånig, spending good money to sleep in places as cramped and primitive as the ones their own parents had worked all their lives to put behind them.

“Why did she come up here, then?” I asked my mother that night.

The trip had cost Mrs. Hanson some effort, I knew. Earlier she had said to my mother, “Maybe one day I’ll visit you up there, Malva. You and those Norwegians – what do you call them? One of them plays the guitar, I think you said.”

“They are Mort and Eng,” my mother said. “Mort and Eng Wold. Eng is the older brother. And yes, he has sometimes played his guitar for the children. You would be welcome to visit us, of course.”

On that basis – she knew no small talk – Mrs. Hanson headed north not long after we did, riding a Greyhound Bus to the Sturgeon Lake Post Office and setting off from there on foot, unannounced, to find us. We came upon her only by chance, having set off ourselves on a grocery run to town. As we drove west she appeared at a rise in the road about two miles from the lake – a dark bulky figure gripping a valise in each hand, moving slowly toward us in the still heat of late summer.

“That’s Anna,” my mother said, well before observation could have clinched the point. “Goddamn,” my father said, slowing down. “You look tired, Lawrence,” Mrs. Hanson said when he pulled up alongside her.

“Mrs. Hanson is here,” my mother explained, “because she has finally got Peter out of her house and she is interested now in Mort and Eng. Mort especially, I think. Eng really is getting on in years.”

Mrs. Hanson had referred to her husband always as “that no-good Peter” or “that no-good drunken painter.” She had telephoned my mother not long before the Sturgeon visit to say that Peter was killing her and Lawrence should come do something about it, so I was not surprised to hear that she and Peter had parted ways. But an interest in Mort? What could this mean? On Sundays, after church, Mrs. Hanson liked to ride around the East Side of St. Paul by streetcar, dropping in on friends to talk, maybe to stay for dinner, if that would be no trouble. Mort attended no church, he sought out no occasions to talk, he never had seen a streetcar in his life, and his domestic practices were irregular. Once I watched from behind a fence while he stepped from his kitchen into his chicken yard and killed a hen with one shot from his lever-action Winchester. He watched for a moment, frowning, while the headless bird lurched in the dirt, then came around the fence and joined me. “I don’t like wringing their necks,” he said, answering a question I hadn’t quite asked. “She’ll settle down straightaway now.”

“Why is Mrs. Hanson interested in Mort?” I asked.

“Oh,” my mother said, and moved to raise the window by my bed. Moths clung to the rusty screen outside. An outboard motor hummed across the lake.

“Why is she, Mom?”

“Well,” she said, and turned to the bedside table and dimmed the lamp. I could still see moths on the screen, but only when a wing moved in the night air. Then my mother moved to the foot of my bed, reached to smooth a blanket, and looked back toward the lamp. I did not think I had asked a hard question.

“This place, Lawrence,” she began, and right away I recognized the vowels and intonation of my mother’s Anna Hanson voice. It meant that the reply would be a story, recounting, as my mother’s stories sometimes did, a monologue that enabled her to explain something while distancing herself a bit from the explanation.

“This place, Lawrence – these little stugas and that big house of theirs, here on a nice lake – it must be worth…What do you think, Lawrence? No, don’t be funny now. You know these things. Forty thousand? Maybe more. Maybe fifty thousand. I want to know, Lawrence. I’m asking you. How much?”

Only in a story, I thought, would my father’s voice go unheard.

My mother continued: “They don’t have no women, do they Lawrence? Nobody to cook, clean this place up a little? Two rich old men like that – they’d want a woman here for them, wouldn’t they, Lawrence?”

Two rich old men? A woman needed, and perhaps one available? I had never thought of Mort and Eng or Anna Hanson in anything like these terms. One of my uncles was rich, but he wore three-piece suits. I couldn’t imagine him even shopping for his dinner, never mind gunning it down in a chicken yard. And at home I had heard Mrs. Hanson speak disparagingly of him in gossip with my mother, much in the way she spoke of no-good drunken Peter. So why…?

My eyes felt tired. I could make out one moth stuck to the screen. He was wearing a three-piece suit and humming something in a low monotone. Or had old Eng appeared at the window with his guitar, singing the ballad of Per Spelmann? My mother had more to tell, but I fell asleep.

Judge’s Comments:

“A standard retelling of vintage vacation memories might be pleasant enough (who doesn’t like a good Burma Shave jingle, or a spit joke, or a look back at how things were before we were all hammering back and forth on the four-lane) but ultimately what drew me into this piece were those elements that strayed from the standard into the surreal (a bachelor-hunting woman walking a dusty road with two valises; bluegills floating magically over sand; a man killing chickens with a Winchester) while still remaining tethered (however tenuously) to reality, even as reality dissolves into a dream.”

Richard Western has worked as a teacher and editor in Minnesota and Wisconsin. Retired now, he lives in northeastern Wisconsin.