Population 485 (24 page)

“It’s awfully sick,” said Sandy.

“Just have your husband shoot it.”

There is a way of thinking out here—it has its roots in farming—that when an animal is past the point of recovery, you put it out of its misery. I came home from school one day to find that my father’s little flock of sheep had been savaged by two neighborhood dogs. Several ewes were dead. Others were horribly wounded, wool dangling at their necks in bloody fluffs, the meat ripped from their haunches. In a blood frenzy, the dogs tore at the sheep even as they dragged themselves forward. My father went to the house for his deer rifle and then, alone in the pasture, walked among the fallen sheep, shooting them one by one. Unable to amend the suffering, he ended it.

“Well, not everyone can just shoot an animal,” said the vet, returning Sandy’s call. “But there are so many feral animals…you really shouldn’t expose them to your own cats.” She’s all but saying the cat should be euthanized. Still, taking the cat to the vet for euthanasia,
the blue juice
, as we call it ’round here, isn’t free. And so now I have Trygve on the phone.

“I know a place,” I say. “I’ll be over in a little bit.” Hanging up, I already feel a little light in the gut, a little tight around the mouth, the way I always get when I figure I’m about to see something nasty. I’ve seen so much blood and mess up to this point, why would the death of a bedraggled cat bother me?

Because I know exactly what we’re in for.

Trygve and I are driving north. In the trunk we have a cat in a box, a shovel, and a rifle. When I got to Trygve’s house, the cat was so far gone it was tipping over. It opened its mouth to meow, but raised no sound. I took a pair of bright blue latex gloves from my medical kit and slipped them on, what with all the pus, and wrapped the cat in an old towel. I volunteered at the animal shelter for a week every summer when I was a child, and one of my jobs was to retrieve the cats and dogs whose numbers came up on the euthanasia list. A dog might sit still for the needle, but the cats you had to roll in a towel or you’d get slashed. I remember speaking gently and petting each animal until the air eased from its lungs.

We are driving to the hidden patch of land where my brother lives. A dirt track leads off the main road through a stand of jack pines to his cabin. Trygve turns up the track and drives until we reach a swale that opens into the creek bottom below. I carry the box down the swale and set it on last year’s marsh grass, pressed and brown after a winter beneath snow. Trygve follows with the shovel and rifle. There is some sun, but the sky is pale, and the air is cold. Trygve digs a small hole. I take the cat from the box.

The spade cleaves a neat wedge from the peat, and the cat sways on the flat grass. In an empty trailer house at the foot of a Wyoming mountain many years ago, I was thumbing through a discarded
Newsweek
and came across a series of photos in which a man in South America dug a shallow grave, lay in it, and was bayoneted. The trailer tin ticked in the high-noon sun, and I went cold. I was queasy for a week. I get the same sickly flush whenever I see the horrific black-and-white footage of Nazis shooting Jews in trenches. And now, there was that cat, waiting by the hole.

What a warm fuzzy story this would be if we had taken the cat in, plied it with eyedroppers of warm milk and medicine, spent the next few weeks nursing it back to health. I tended my share of shoebox hospitals as a child, standing vigil over limp baby birds, or baby rabbits dragged into the yard by our old calico cat. When one of our sheep refused a lamb, my father would swaddle the lamb in rags and place it on the heat register, and we would take turns coaxing it to suckle milk from an old ketchup bottle capped with a rubber nipple. I once watched my mother resuscitate a newborn calf, blowing air down its throat and pressing on its ribs until it shook its head and opened its eyes. But this cat we have decided to kill.

We are not making the decision lightly. There are people in this world who quite happily stuff healthy cats in a bag with a rock and toss the whole works in a lake. There are people who will swerve across the road in order to pin a cat’s spine to the centerline. Trygve and I, on the other hand, have given consideration to the cat’s condition and decided it would be better off out of its misery. To say the least, this is a judgment call, based on cloudy anthropomorphism. The responsibilities of being human are various. We were not feeling good about it out there on the dead grass. I’ll say this for Trygve. He was quick, and he was true. He put down the shovel, took up the rifle, a walloping
Blap!
, and it was done.

Trygve looked at me. “Well, he didn’t feel that.”

The rifle was loaded with 240-grain .44-caliber hollow-points. Shooting a cat with armaments like that is roughly equivalent to swatting a mosquito with a spade. I was standing just off his left shoulder, and at the sound of the report, a clutch of white fur flew past my head. A peanut-sized wad of phlegm hit me in the leg and clung to my jeans. There was blood on my shirt. Trygve toed the remains of the cat into the hole. We tipped the peat wedge back in place, tamped it down with the shovel, and drove home. I went straight to the basement. Standing beside the washing machine, I removed all my clothes and started them immediately on the heavy cycle.

Humans possess no monopoly on the powers of preservation and destruction. Our ability to wield these powers with sustained intent, however, is unmatched on this earth. Nature can trump us in an instance or over millennia, but in the day-to-day main, humankind has developed a preponderant ability to fiddle with destiny. More than any other natural force or creature, we decide what will go and what will stay: the rainforest, an old building, a sickly cat…ourselves.

When they tore down the old Farmers Store, I swore I wouldn’t write about it. Last thing the world needs, really, another elegy on a pile of bricks. But then the first wall tumbled, and the vibration transmitted itself through the dirt, resonating in the foundation of my house half a block away. Upstairs, my writing desk trembled and shook the lamps. The electric letters on my computer monitor went jittery, and concentric ripples flared in and out of phase inside my coffee cup. The destruction became difficult to ignore. I made some notes. As I typed, the shudder of falling bricks was perceptible through the keys.

The Farmers Store building went up in 1905. The concept behind the store originated in 1891, when a small group of locals pooled their resources to buy goods in quantity at wholesale prices. Their initial order consisted of a barrel of sugar, a barrel of molasses, a barrel of crackers, some vinegar and seasonings, and a bolt of calico. A year later, the venture had become so popular that the group incorporated, and commenced to building community stores. The New Auburn store was outfitted with plank floors and pressed-tin ceilings. Hand-sawn oak stairs led to the second floor, and the building was fronted with a bank of plate-glass windows. In vintage photographs, the wooden sales counters are glassed in and ponderous, docked against the wall like barges. The men behind them are kitted out in ties and aprons; the women wear their hair in a bob. Behind them, dry goods are packed to the ceiling on shelves running the length of the store and accessible by a rolling library ladder. Out on the main floor, vast wooden tables are stacked with hats and lace-up shoes. Another photograph, taken from the center of Main Street in 1908, shows a cluster of locals standing on the plank sidewalk beneath a pinked canvas banner that reads FARMERS STORE COMPANY. The planks shine with rain, and a man with an umbrella blocks the doorway. A padded wooden rocker and a dining room table with slim Chippendale-style legs are visible in the display windows. A buggy is parked front and center, with a steer hooked in the traces. Along the lower left-hand margin of the photograph, some wag has written
Quadrapedmobile.

The New Auburn Farmers Store ceased operations in 1966, the year my family began farming north of town. I was in the building a handful of times. I remember the creak of the wooden floors, the polished dark rail along the stairway, and warm summer air coming through the open twin doors where the man with the umbrella stood. A series of enterprises sprang up and died in the old building over the years. About the time I was in eighth grade, the store was known as Don’s Discount, and was filled with day-old bakery and crates of castoff merchandise. I riffled through boxes of vinyl records, and bought the only song I recognized, a 45 of Supertramp’s “The Logical Song.”

Sixteen years later, I returned to town and found the plate-glass windows blocked with plywood. The double doors were enclosed by a cobbled-up wooden vestibule that had begun to shed pieces of siding. The day before they knocked the whole works flat, I wandered up and took some pictures. A homemade sign hung from a pipe extended over the entryway. The Farmers Store’s latest incarnation was posted in hand-painted letters:

MAIN STREET

STORE

The script was cramped and thin. Below, in a willy-nilly arrangement of stenciled letters so small as to be indecipherable from Tugg’s Bar across the street, the scope of the final venture was defined:

GROCERIES

DISCOUNT ITEMS

BAITS

CLOTHING

ICE CREAM

PIZZA

BOLTS

KNICK KNACKS

COLD POP

CRAFTS

HARDWARE

WORM’S

MINNOW’S

SNACK’S

BEST B.S. IN TOWN

“I hate to see it go,” I said to one of the old-timers who watched the excavator push the store down.

“Well, it served its purpose,” he said.

Hugh Ruud was born on May 1, 1922, in the second story of a house overlooking Main Street, across from the Farmers Store. The house still stands—I can turn in my desk chair and see the upstairs windows. Little Hugh hit the air bawling, and squalled all night long. His father took him in his arms and paced the floor. “Snookie,” he murmured, “what am I gonna do with you?” Eighty years on, and Hugh Ruud won’t even turn his head at “Hugh.” He is Snook around town, he is Snook in the phone book, and if I turn my desk chair again, I can see a yellow sign hanging over the door of a little brick building kitty-corner from where the Farmers Store stood, and the black letters say, SNOOK’S STORE—HOMEMADE SAUSAGE & BACON.

“That sign come all the way from California,” says Snook. I have gone to his house to visit. To try to sort out some local history. We are at his kitchen table, having coffee. His wife, Betty Lou, has cinnamon rolls in the oven. Snook sold the store in 1988, but that name was too good to let go, and so the new owners kept the sign up. “We paid five hundred dollars for that thing,” says Snook. “But it was a nice sign. Lit up nice.”

Snook’s health has been a little hit-and-miss lately. For a while last summer, his heart got so bad his daughter was certain they were going to lose him. He got pretty down, and there was a stretch in July when he really didn’t care if he lived or died. But today he’s all grins and stories. I’m just basking in his rambling. He cusses delightfully, and the village he describes is magical. When he talks, the blacktop and aluminum siding and satellite dishes evaporate, the streets fill with storybook folk, and the old buildings resurrect. I just let him go.

“Up there by the railroad tracks, they had a hobo jungle up in there. Right where all them damn cars are.” He’s describing Slinger Joe’s, a junkyard at the north end of the village. “Them guys would come in on the train, and they’d go around the gardens and pick a few carrots and some cabbage and cook it. There were two big pickle vats in there, up higher than this ceiling. They had a salt brine in there, just to keep them from spoiling. They used a real coarse salt. We used to jump up there, go up, and get one of them pickles. Geez, they was sourer than hell!”

Betty Lou breaks in, points at Snook. “The Tom Sawyer of New Auburn!”

“You live in the old Gravunder house?” Snook asks me. I nod. “There used to be a free show right behind your house. And a popcorn stand. During the Depression, they had free shows every Saturday night. Christ, everybody in the country came. Hell, they’d park a hundred cars in there.”

Snook takes me through all the buildings that are gone—the brick factory, the creamery, the band shell, the potato warehouses, the railroad depot, the old charcoal kilns, the old wooden schoolhouse and fire hall, the old brick schoolhouse, the old jail, the old bank, the old post office, the old three-corner gas station at the corner of Main and Old Highway 53. And now the Farmers Store.

“When I was a kid, you know, we used to go up at Christmastime down to the Farmers Store,” says Snook. “Those big bay windows, they’d have that lined with toys. Geez, I remember after supper in the wintertime around Christmastime I’d go down there and look through that glass, look at all them toys and you’d know goddamn well you wasn’t going to get any because things were so damn tough. But I liked that old Farmers Store. I hated to see that building tore down.”

Talk turns back to Snook’s store. Snook says it was built around the time of the Depression. Back in those days, it was a Red & White store. According to Snook, there were Red & White stores in nearly every town in those days. Chain stores before chain stores were evil. The original owner spent most of his time across the street at Blaisdell’s Tavern—in business today as Tugg’s Bar. “He’d sit at the end of the bar by the window,” says Snook. “If somebody went in the store, he’d come over.” In the mid-1930s, Harry Jacobson bought the store and ran it for the next forty years. I can remember walking in the door sometime around 1970, standing beside my mother and staring up at Harry in his white apron. He kept a giant candy jar on the long wooden counter, and sold cookies out of a barrel. You gave him your grocery list, and he gathered it from the shelves. Even in 1970, it was like walking into a western. Snook bought the store in 1974. He had served in World War II, worked on the railroad, and had training as a butcher. He turned the butchering experience to his advantage.