Free Pilgrims by Garrison Keillor Page B

“Okay, give me a few minutes to get some tools together and I’ll be right over.” Fuseburnt out, door stuck, window busted, toilet plugged, plaster falling—they called Carl and he went and half the time he didn’t even charge them for it. So where would he find the time to arrange secret meetings in motels?
    â€œA man wants what he can’t have. He has one woman, he wants more. The heart longs for the impossible and it doesn’t ever stop, even when it’s broken, it keeps on wanting. Does he drive a truck?”
    â€œAn old camper. He keeps tools in the camper part.”
    â€œHe’s slipping it into her on top of the tool chest. He’s mounting some lady whose shelves he just nailed to the wall. Ask him about it. Men are scared. You surprise them with a direct question and they’ll either confess or they’ll lie so badly you can see it leaking out of their ears. Do you talk about sex?”
    My God, no. Never. She would rather walk naked through the streets than sit and have that sort of conversation. It just was what it was, sex, and certainly they’d never ever talked about it, who did? Nobody she knew. Never argued much, never had much in the way of bad feelings. He was a carpenter, the town handyman, a soft-spoken man, faithful, reverent, clean, brave, and she didn’t know how to ask him, “Why don’t you want to mess around with me?”
    Maria pulled out a pack of smokes, offered one to Margie, took one for herself. “I started again,” she said. “After the breast cancer. What the hell. What have I got to lose? I’m not going to worry about dying. Done that already.
    â€œOf course, maybe I’m more realistic about men because I was created by a guy fooling around. I’ve been thinking about my dad so much. I live in a little street in Trastevere below the JaniculumHill and I go for walks in the evening and I feel like he’s there and he’s restless about something. He wants to get his story straightened out. You’re the first person I’ve told all of this. I know you have a kind heart.”
    â€œTo think that August Norlander begat a child in Italy is sort of mind-boggling.”
    â€œSo people in Lake Wobegon know about my papa?”
    â€œThey named the football field for him. His name is on a brass plaque in the front entrance of the high school. It says LOST IN SERVICE , which the VFW thinks is defeatist, so they raised a stink and now they’re raising money for a new one called THE GREATEST GIFT . He’s right there. And we mention him at the Memorial Day service at the cemetery every May. And they read out loud that story about him charging up the hill in the priest’s robes and blowing up the German machine-gun nest, swinging an explosive on a chain.”
    â€œYeah, well—it never happened. Take my word for it.”
    It wasn’t a complete surprise to Margie. She had always questioned the priestly garb story—too G.I. Joe–like, and when she got the call in January and accepted that Our Local Hero had made a baby one fine night in 1944, it opened the door to new information. And then Norbert had sent her a few of Gussie’s letters. She had reread them on the plane over, one written during the battle for the Benedictine Abbey at Monte Cassino in which Gussie described the range of snow-topped mountains around it, the ferocity of the Allied bombing, the night sky lit up with cascades of detonations. He had been marching with his platoon along a dirt road through the ruins of a village, and they stopped for smokes, and lay inside a garden wall and lit up, andone man found a battered Victrola in the house and cranked it up and a little orchestra played “Bye Bye Blackbird” and Gussie got up and danced a jig and that was when the brigadier spotted him and took him into custody as his aide-de-camp. The brigadier was on foot, having been de-Jeeped by a pair of