Clearing Up a Few Things

By Garrison Keillor

I have been rambling around Berlin and Paris and London with two brothers and a sister for two weeks, and it has actually been fun, for the simple reason that we had our fights long ago and don't need to have them again, and there was so much to talk about that we couldn't have with nonsiblings present, stuff from childhood when our hearts were open, and now we carry it everywhere we go. We were in London, having supper at the pub on the Thames where the gallows once stood where the highwayman Jack Sheppard swung back in the time of George I, and the river reminded us of the Mississippi, and pretty soon my brother was telling how he found a .32cal. pistol in a cornfield behind the house when he was 15 and carried it around on his person for a few days because, he said, "I just liked the feel of it." He had no idea whether the gun was loaded or not.

I have known my brother for almost 60 years and he never told me this before. I guess the gallows was what reminded him of it. Now if our spouses or children had been there, they would have been bored silly long before the conversation got around to the pistol, and they'd have started talking about the reform of the House of Lords or something, but the truth is I am terribly interested in what happened in my childhood, there being fewer and fewer people left who remember it, and with siblings, your minds meld and you piece together the story of the big Keillor family meeting at our house in 1947--no need for footnotes or apology, you just sit down in Les Deux Magots cafe and hash it out, as French people of great elegance and purposefulness stride past, one of whom reminds you of your dad, a gray fedora on his head, smiling at the Revere movie camera as yellow streetcars rumble down Bloomington Avenue in 1953, and we children perk up and smile--someone off-camera has told us to smile, and like good children we do.

Or you walk up Unter den Linden to the Brandenburg Gate, and the great arch reminds you of Mother and Dad and how they eloped to Stillwater, Okla., and got married. (What year was that?) You walk into Parliament to meet your friend Matthew who grew up in a good leftist family and was made a peer by the Labour government, and you love to address him as Milord because it makes him wince, which reminds you of your history teacher Mr. Faust, and before long you are remembering Mr. Hochstetter and Miss Story and Miss Melby, who are clearer to you in London, being English teachers.

A person would like to get his life story together in coherent form, and life is not quite long enough to accomplish that, but a fact-finding trip with siblings is a big help. Those missing pieces in the puzzle that have been troubling you for years--Why did Dad carry a fire extinguisher when he went to the Boyds' to pick up Wanda for Sunday school? And your sister says, cool as can be, "Because Beryl Boyd was hopped up on vaporizers and liable to hallucinate and think that the house was burning down, and somehow a blast of liquid CO2 seemed to calm her down." And there you have it. A little more of the story.

Over the years, my relatives have been cautious about sharing details of family history with me, knowing the business I'm in, knowing that writers are vacuum cleaners who suck up other people's lives and weave them into stories like a sparrow builds a nest from scraps. People meet writers and are bowled over when the writer is friendly to them and invites them to his house for a glass of wine or to shoot up heroin or whatever they do, and they talk their heads off, and a year later it comes out in a book, and there follow years of bitter and fruitless litigation, and that is why you should always keep a writer at arm's length. And that's all true.

But traveling to Europe relaxed my siblings, and they told me a lot of stuff I never knew before, and now I am pretty well set to talk about Lake Wobegon for at least two or three more years. And then I'll take them on a slow boat to China and find out more. What did my brother do with that .32-cal. pistol? What if it had been thrown into the cornfield by a heinous criminal? Or by Mr. Boyd, who had intended to blow Beryl's brains out and hid the weapon in the corn, and then went looking for it, and it wasn't there, and thus we were narrowly spared the tragedy? I would like to get this figured out.