WLT by Garrison Keillor

encourage listeners to go to the dentist. Myself, I would prefer she died of an infected hemorrhoid, like James J. Hill, but perhaps Dad would be sensitive to that.”
    For a few weeks, Dad and Jo and Frank sat in the big sunny kitchen and talked, and Little Becky stayed away —off at school, presumably—and Jo, as she fixed soup and sandwiches, would relate some pithy comment the child had made during breakfast. “She’s a smart little tyke,” noted Frank. “Can’t put much past that one, you can’t. Wonder if her father will ever come back, that no-good—” and Dad cut him off. “There’s a lot of human nature in everybody, Frank,” he said. “And that man is more to be pitied than envied. It’s like my father used to say: the angry man drinks his own poison.” Well, Frank couldn’t disagree with that. Soon it was time for the noontime hymn. And then, gathered around the lunch table in the little white cottage under the big oak tree at the end of the lane, their humble home, a place like no other, Dad said a little prayer and tossed in a word of thanks for sending Becky their way. “Amen,” said Frank. “I shouldn’t say it, but I wish that man would never return,” said Jo.
    But Ray did not soften. He wanted the child out. Children, he explained to Patsy, are inherently unreliable people, and when you make a child into the star of a show, you are building on quicksand. Children have mercurial moods, are immature, easily spoiled by attention, and they quickly grow up and become unattractive. “Child performers are monsters, every last one,” he said. “You’re going to turn this kid into another Skipper.” David (“Skipper”) Drake was a six-year-old tapdancer from St. Paul who was discovered by Marguerite Montez and taken to Hollywood and became a cocaine addict and threw his mother off the Santa Monica pier.
    So the next week, Little Becky got terribly sick, and Dad was in something of a panic, what with Jo and Frank away on a car trip to Michigan and no money on hand for a specialist—and finally she was knocking at death’s door, 105° fever, babbling about angels and bright heavenly emanations—“Uncle Dad, Uncle Dad, they have such beautiful faces.” Marjery talked through a bath towel to get the faint voice of the dying child, and Dad said, all choked up, “Lord, I never doubted You until now, but —how can You let this child suffer? Lord, take her home or work a miracle, but please, Lord, do it soon.” The switchboard was jammed with sobbing fans—more than $20,000 was raised in one week for the children’s wing of Abbott Hospital. Becky’s fever continued. She babbled about nimbuses and auras and wholeness and purity. A few days later, Ray relented and gave Marjery a six-month contract, and the next day Dr. Jim burst in the door with a brand-new serum flown in from the city. Buster barked for joy and Jo and Frank came back with a tidy sum inherited from a Michigan uncle they never knew they had, and Becky said, “Uncle Dad, why are you crying?” “Oh, don’t mind me,” he muttered. “I’m just a foolish old man, that’s all. And sometimes I wish I were smarter. It seems like life is half over before we know what it is. But you close your eyes and get some sleep now.”
    BECKY: Why is Dr. Jim here?
    JIM: Just came to make sure my girl is all right.
    DAD: You rest now, honey.
    BECKY: Uncle Dad?
    DAD: Yes?
    BECKY: Heaven is the beautifulest place I ever saw. It was all bright and starry and full of music, like a carnival except the rides were free, and Jesus was there, and jillions of angels, and there was no sadness there, no crying, or nothing, just happiness, but still, I’m glad they sent me back to be with you, Uncle Dad.
    DAD: I’m glad, too, little Beeper. You rest now, honey. I’ll just sit here beside