Whence Uncle Emil?

     'Long about a decade ago I gave birth to and killed off my Uncle Emil in less than two hours. Poor Uncle Emil. When I rose on that fateful morning he didn't exist. At least not in what is commonly referred to as the real world. Where did he come from? Who knows? Where do any ideas come from? How zen is that? How many rhetorical questions can I ask in a row?
     Being it was the Fourth of July week my wife Lois and I were up north at our cabin. The cabin is that and nothing more. Less than a thousand square feet, no running water save the pitcher pump out front, possibly the finest outhouse in the northwoods and not on a recreational lake. A cabin. On Independence Day we found ourselves in Pequot Lakes for their annual parade and bed races. Alongside the site for the races was a haystack for kids to rummage through in search of treasure and ... ta-dah! … around the corner a flatbed stage with microphone for a liar's contest. I'd heard of such contests, been mildly intrigued by the idea but never considered myself to be remotely in the league with general store sittin', snus juice spittin', old timers who'd spent years grooming both their yarnin' skills and gathering the appropriate wardrobe. But I was intrigued by the possibility of what was up there on the trailer bed. Drawn to it. Keep in mind that I'm also a German/Swede hybrid and border on being pathologically afraid of making a fool of myself in public.
     With a 'hmmm' in my mind I bought a smoked turkey leg across the street and with Lois, wandered the town. During the stroll Uncle Emil drifted into my brain, made himself comfortable and somehow bound myself to him, if you get my drift. A half hour later the three of us sauntered back to the flatbed where we listened a wide range of stories of varying degrees of humor. The whole time my mind was elsewhere, traipsing through an ever-expanding world on the left side of normal. All the while rocking to and fro on the soles of my feet, silently sweating, doing battle with my fears. "Yes I will. No I won't." While I fretted, Emil's story continued to evolve. A tweak here, an embellishment there. "Yes I will. No I won't." Finally from the stage came the last call for contestants. I whipped out my dollar entry fee, yelled, "Yo mama! I be comin'!" and rushed the flat bed. More likely I shuffled forward and mumbled something closer to, "Please forgive me." What follows is pretty close to what came out of my mouth in the alloted three minutes:
    
     My Uncle Emil Schonemann lived in Parkers Prairie, Minnesota. He took great pride in two things; his prowess as a pike fisherman and his glass eye. The glass one was a perfect match in size and color to his good left eye and he could fool most of the people most of the time. The family story had his right eye being lost when a four-inch lag screw grazed it during an explosion at the fertilizer factory outside of St. Bruno. What was left of the eye was removed by the Schonnemann family doctor. Presenting the screw to Emil the doctor quipped, "Looks like the explosion finally did exactly what you've been saying the factory's been doing to you for the last sixteen years." Ever since Emil said he always voted Democrat 'cause he couldn't see anything to the right (pause for laughter. Hear only shuffling of feet and breeze on hay stack. Trudge on.).
     Emil was a died in the wool pike fisherman and had the scars on his hands to prove it. From an early age he worked the little lakes around St. Bruno and the bigger ones closer to Alexandria. Got to know them. But Emil wanted more and bigger. To my uncle that meant Canada. In particular northern Manitoba. He started heading up that way in the late '50s to fish the lakes of the Cranberry chain. Once in a while he portage in and fish the remote lakes. His favorite was Wedge Lake. And it was there he lost his beloved glass eye while hoisting a forty inch pike into the boat. Never found another he liked as much.
     Emil passed away in July, 1983 in the little cemetery outside his home town.
     Because of Emil's stories my son Allan and I began to head up north to the Cranberry Chain in the late '90s. Yeah, we were pike fishermen just like my uncle. While there we'd kill and eat a couple of walleyes on each trip. It was on one of those occasions while camping on a tiny Wedge Lake island that we found a green glass eye in our dinner's belly. When I saw it there was no doubt in my mind where it'd come from and where it was going. Yup, that eye was going home.
     So it was on a clear Hunter's Moon night that Allan and I quietly entered the old cemetery outside of St. Bruno by Jack the Horse Lake. We neatly cut the sod, set it aside, laid a tarp for the dirt then dug down to Emil.  The coffin had held up well. With grappling hooks and a come-along hooked to the Jeep, we resurrected my uncle. He was mostly gone but the medium-heavy, fiberglass rod he'd brought with him 'just in case,' looked as good as the day he'd been planted. Allan and I paused for a moment out of respect, then went though Emil's pockets looking for any spare change I might have missed two decades earlier. I gave Allan the honor of reinserting the eye but it fell through the socket and rolled to the foot of Emil's coffin.
     Now remained the matter of putting the grave back the way it'd been.  Scoping the hole for the reburial, we saw a second box below. This one a simple, slap-dash affair held together with cord and a few bent nails. Thinking more spare change I dropped in the hole and whacked the box open with my shovel. A quick search turned up a wallet which I passed up to Allan. A moment later Al whispered down he'd found a driver's license bearing the name of James R. Hoffa. Holy crap! First I thought, "We're gonna be famous." A moment later the thought changed to, "We're gonna be dead." We spent the remainder of that night carefully covering up what we'd done, even wiped our fingerprints off the grass.
     So if you're ever wondering where Jimmy Hoffa ended up, don't ask Al or me. We don't know nothin'.