“How the Crab Apple Grew”

by Garrison Keillor (1942-)

It has been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, my home town. It was warm and sunny on Sunday,
and on Monday the flowering crab in the Diener's backyard burst into blossom. Suddenly, in the
morning, when everyone turned their backs for a minute, the tree threw off its bathrobe and stood
trembling, purple, naked, revealing all its innermost flowers. When you saw it standing where
weeks before had been a bare stick stuck in the dirt, you had to stop, it made your head spin.

Becky Diener sat upstairs in her bedroom and looked at the tree. She was stuck on an assignment
from Miss Melrose for English, a 750-word personal essay, "Describe your backyard as if you
were seeing it for the first time." After an hour she had thirty-nine words, which she figured
would mean she'd finish at 1:45 p.m. Tuesday, four hours late, and therefore would get an F even
if the essay was great, which it certainly wasn't.

How can you describe your backyard as if you'd never seen it? If you'd never seen it, you'd have
grown up someplace else, and wouldn't be yourself, you'd be someone else entirely, and how are
you supposed to know what that person would think?

She imagined seeing the backyard in 1996, returning home from Hollywood. "Welcome Becky!"
said the big white banner across McKinley Street as the pink convertible drove slowly along,
everyone clapping and cheering as she cruised by. Becky Belafonte the movie star, and got off at
her old house. "Here," she said to the reporters, "is where I sat as a child and dreamed my
dreams, under this beautiful flowering crab. I dreamed I was a Chinese princess." Then a reporter
asked, "Which of your teachers was the most important to you, encouraging you and inspiring
you?" And just then she saw an old woman's face in the crowd. Miss Melrose pleading,
whispering, "Say me, oh please, say me," and Becky looked straight at her as she said, "Oh, there
were so many. I couldn't pick out one, they were all about the same, you know. But perhaps
Miss-Miss-oh, I can't remember her name-she taught English, I think-Miss Milross? She was one
of them. But there were so many."

She looked at her essay. "In my backyard is a tree that has always been extremely important to
me since I was six years old when my dad came home one evening with this bag in the trunk and
he said, 'Come here and help me plant this'-"
She crumpled the sheet of paper and started again.

"One evening when I was six years old, my father arrived home as he customarily did around
5:30 or 6:00 p.m. except this evening he had a wonderful surprise for me, he said, as he led me
toward the car.

My father is not the sort of person who does surprising things very often so naturally I was
excited that evening when he said he had something for me in the car, having just come home
from work where he had been. I was six years old at the time."
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She took out a fresh sheet "Six years old was a very special age for me and one thing that made it
special was when my dad and I planted a tree together in our backyard. Now it is grown and
every spring it gives off large purple blossoms..."

The tree was planted by her dad, Harold, in 1976, ten years after he married her mother, Marlys.
They grew up on Taft Street, across from each other, a block from the ballfield. They liked each
other tremendously and then they were in love, as much as you can be when you're so young.
Thirteen and fourteen years old and sixteen and seventeen: they looked at each other a lot. She
came and sat in his backyard to talk with his mother and help her shell peas but really to look at
Harold as he mowed the lawn, and then he disappeared into the house and she sat waiting for
him, and of course he was in the kitchen looking out at her. It's how we all began, when our
parents looked at each other, as we say, "when you were just a gleam in your father's eye," or
your mother's, depending on who saw who first.

Marlys was longlegged, lanky, had short black hair and sharp eyes that didn't miss anything. She
came over to visit the Dieners every chance she got. Her father was a lost cause, like the
Confederacy, like the search for the Northwest Passage. He'd been prayed for and suffered for
and fought for and spoken for, by people who loved him dearly, and when all was said and done
he just reached for the gin bottle and said, "I don't know what you're talking about," and he
didn't. He was a sore embarrassment to Marlys, a clown, a joke, and she watched Harold for
evidence that he wasn't similar. One night she dropped in at the Dieners' and came upon a party
where Harlold, now nineteen, and his friends were drinking beer by the pail. Harold flopped
down on his back and put his legs in the air and a pal put a lit match up to Harold's rear end and
blue flame came out like a blowtorch, and Marlys went home disgusted and didn't speak to him
for two years.

Harold went crazy. She graduated from high school and started attending dances with a
geography teacher named Stu Jasperson, who was tall and dark-haired, a subscriber to Time
Magazine, educated at Saint Cloud Normal School, and who flew a red Piper Cub airplane. Lake
Wobegon had no airstrip except for Tollerud's pasture, so Stu kept his plane in Saint Cloud.
When he was en route to and from the plane was almost the only time Harold got to see Marlys
and try to talk sense into her. But she was crazy about Stu the aviator, not Harold the hardware
clerk, and in an hour Stu came buzzing overhead doing loops and dives and dipping his wings.
Harold prayed for him to crash. Marlys thought Stu was the sun and the moon; all Harold could
do was sit and watch her, in the backyard, staring up, her hand shielding her eyes, saying, "Oh,
isn't he marvelous?" as Stu performed aerial feats and then shut off the throttle and glided
overhead singing "Vaya con Dios"1 to her. "Yes, he is marvelous," said Harold, thinking, "DIE,
DIE, DIE."

That spring, Marlys was in charge of the Sweethearts Banquet at the Lutheran church. Irene
Holm had put on a fancy winter Sweethearts Banquet with roast lamb, and Marlys wanted to top
her and serve roast beef with morel mushrooms, a first for a church supper in Lake Wobegon.
One Irene had referred to Marlys's dad as a lush.
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1"Go with God" (Spanish), title of a popular song.

Two men felt the call to go and search for morels: Harold put on his Red Wing boots and
knapsack and headed out one evening with a flashlight. He was in the woods all night. Morels
are found near the base of the trunk of a dead elm that's been dead three years, which you can see
by the way moonlight doesn't shine on it, and he thought he knew where some were, but around
midnight he spotted a bunch of flashlights behind him, a posse of morelists bobbing along on his
trail, so he veered off and hiked five miles in the wrong direction to confuse them, and by then
the sun was coming up so he went home to sleep. He work at 2:00 p.m., hearing Stu flying
overhead, and in an instant he knew. Dead elms! Of course! Stu could spot them from the air,
send his ground crew to collect them for Marlys, and the Sweethearts Banquet would be their
engagement dinner.

Stu might have done just that, but he wanted to put on a show and land the Cub in Lake
Wobegon. He circled around and around, and came in low to the west of town, disappearing
behind the trees. "He's going to crash!" cried Marlys, and they all jumped in their cars and tore
out, expecting to find the young hero lying bloody and torn in the dewy grass, with a dying poem
on his lips. But there he was standing tall beside the craft, having landed successfully in a field of
spring wheat. They all mobbed around him and he told how he was going up to find the morels
and bring them back for Marlys.

There were about forty people there. They seemed to enjoy it, so he drew out his speech, talking
about the lure of aviation and his boyhood and various things so serious that he didn't notice
Harold behind him by the plane or notice the people who noticed what Harold was doing and
laughed. Stu was too inspired to pay attention to the laughter. He talked about how he once
wanted to fly to see the world but once you get up in the air you can see that Lake Wobegon is
the most beautiful place of all, a lot of warm horse manure like that, and then he gave them a big
manly smile and donned his flying cap and scarf and favored them with a second and third smile
and a wave and he turned and there was Harold to help him into the cockpit.

"Well, thanks," said Stu, "mighty kind, mighty kind." Harold jumped to the propeller and threw
it once and twice, and the third time the engine fired and Stu adjusted the throttle, checked the
gauges, flapped the flaps, fit his goggles, and never noticed the ground was wet and his wheels
were sunk in. He'd parked in a wet spot, and then during his address someone had gone around
and made it wetter, so when Stu pulled back on the throttle the Cub just sat, and he gave it more
juice and she creaked a little, and he gave it more and the plane stood on its head with its tail in
the air and dug in.

It pitched forward like the Titanic, and the propeller in the mud sounded like he'd eaten too many
green apples. The door opened and Stu climbed out, trying to look dignified and studious as he
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tilted eastward and spun, and Harold said, "Stu, we didn't say we wanted those mushrooms
sliced."

Harold went out that afternoon and collected five hundred morel mushrooms around one dead
elm tree. Marlys made her mark at the Sweethearts dinner, amazing Irene Holm who had thought
Marlys was common. Harold also brought out of the woods a bouquet of flowering crab apple
and asked her to marry him, and eventually she decided to.

The tree in the backyard came about a few years afterward. They'd been married awhile, had two
kids, and some of the gloss had worn off their life, and one afternoon, Harold, trying to impress
his kids and make his wife laugh, jumped off the garage roof, pretending he could fly, and landed
wrong, twisting his ankle. He lay in pain, his eyes full of tears, and his kids said, "Oh poor
Daddy," and Marlys said, "You're not funny. You're ridiculous."

He got up on his bum ankle and went in the woods and got her a pint of morels and a branch
from the flowering crab apple. He cut a root from another crab apple and planted the root in the
ground. "Look, kids," he said. He sharpened the branch with his hatchet and split the root open
and stuck the branch in and wrapped a cloth around it and said, "Now, there, that will be a tree."
They said, "Daddy, will that really be a tree?" He said, "Yes." Marlys said, "Don't be ridiculous."

He watered it and tended it and, more than that, he came out late at night and bent down and
said, "GROW, GROW, GROW." The graft held, it grew, and one year it was interesting and the
next it was impressive and then wonderful and finally it was magnificent. It's the most
magnificent thing in the Dieners' backyard. Becky finished writing 750 words late that night and
lay down to sleep. A backyard is a novel about us, and when we sit there on a summer day, we
hear the dialogue and see the characters.

1987
http://newterra.chemeketa.edu/faculty/cwc/Eng255/Resources/keillor.htm