Population 485 (25 page)

“Six head a week we ran through there, just over-the-counter beef quarters. Maybe down to around four in the wintertime. And we always made at least four to five hundred pounds of sausage a week. Bratwurst, bologna, garlic stick, head cheese, roast beef, all that stuff. We worked hard. That’s where I made my money. I couldn’t make no money on groceries, because we couldn’t compete with nobody. But the meat business, hell, we could skin the hell out of them on the meat. But I took a lower price on my meat than most, you know. That’s what I used more for a drawing card. On Friday nights, all these lake people would come up to my store and buy their meats. They were good customers.”

“The first ten years were great,” says Betty Lou. “We made a little bit of money, and we were busy. And then the supermarkets came in at Chetek and Bloomer…”

“They were cutting prices to beat hell,” says Snook. “Made it tough. Our distributors started going out of business…. Christ, you’d get bananas on Monday, and you wouldn’t get another delivery the rest of the week.” Still, they stayed at it.

“We worked seven to six, every day except Sunday,” says Snook. “Sundays we’d try to get out before noon, but we never got out before one. It got too much for me after I had my heart trouble. I’d lift the quarters of beef out on the meat block and would purt’ near black out.” So Snook and Betty Lou sold out. “Betty Lou worked awful hard in that store,” says Snook. “She was glad to get rid of it. But I loved that store. I
still
love that store.” He takes a pull at his coffee. Puts the cup down. Smooths the tablecloth. “But I just couldn’t do it anymore.”

We stop for a while. Work on the cinnamon rolls. Then Snook gets going again. Tells how they built their house in segments, as money allowed, and how shortly after declaring they couldn’t yet afford an indoor toilet, he spent $500 on a motor for a speedboat someone gave him in a trade. Betty Lou went out and stenciled JOHN across the bow of the boat. “It was a
john
boat!” he says, slapping his leg. When he finally walks me to the door, his eyes are twinkling.

Like a million other nostalgia-addled fools, I want to bottle time. It’s part of the reason I love to shoot the breeze with the old-timers. It’s why I stare longingly at old pictures and flip through the records of the former livery stable. It’s why I called the man who owned the Farmers Store the night before the excavator was due and asked if I could have the Sherwin-Williams paint sign attached to the side of the store overlooking Spruce Street. My buddy Frank and I spent half the day getting the bloody thing detached. The weather was ten degrees and windy, and the sign was so far up we had to park a half-ton truck beneath it and prop a thirty-foot extension ladder in the bed. From the ground, the sign looked like a little tin deal, maybe a foot square. Up close, it was two feet by three feet and made out of enameled steel. Must have weighed forty pounds. It was bolted to the bricks, and I almost gave up, especially when I chiseled the first bracket loose and the sign swung out and nearly knocked me into the freezing wind. I could see Frank down there, shrugged deep into his sheepskin coat and bracing the ladder, as if that would help. I was ready to give up when the second bracket gave way and dumped the whole works in my arms. Once I got my heart rate back to where it didn’t vibrate the ladder, I inched my way down to the truck. I have the sign downstairs now. I like to look at it, feel it radiate the years. But I’m glad I talked to Snook. Glad he recited that litany of places that no longer exist in this place. There was a lot there to remind me about the constancy of change. How much it means to carry those things with us. And how to know when it is time to let go. As it is with buildings, it is with ourselves.

There is a big swamp just north of town. We call it the Keesey, after a long-gone settler who farmed the flats before the government stuck a little box dam around one end of the Beaver Creek culvert and backed the water up over the hay fields. In spring, the trail to Keesey’s abandoned homestead reemerges as a narrow trace of canary grass running due west into the wetlands, a palimpsest revealing that the swamp is not entirely primordial. And yet on certain autumn evenings, if you tromp far enough out there, if you plant your butt in the muck and get your head below the cattail tops and wait, you will shortly hear the clotted bugling of sandhill cranes, and when they circle and descend in their lanky echelons, you will feel you are living in the time of pterodactyls. I seek the swamp because, unlike me, it is a patient servant of time. The swamp is all percolation and decay. It is the perfect place to make yourself small in the face of the earth.

I will go to the swamp in my camo cap and waders, toting my shotgun and four cheapo plastic decoys, hoping maybe to bring home a duck for supper, but I also take a little notepad and something to read. The local duck population benefits from my literary pretensions. At the whistle of wings, I frequently look up from my book to see a mallard pair flaring out of range. There are times, in the early fall, when much of the swamp is still green, that the sun will warm the air to the point where spiders and tiny winged insects reemerge. The spiders climb to the reed tips, spin out a little silk, and sail away, while the insects flutter over the water, apparently aimlessly, but who am I to say. By morning the water is skimmed with ice, and I wonder where the bugs wound up.

It’s a powerful thing, to sit low in the swamp as the sun goes down. You can feel the heat leach out and the cold press in, and it feels irrevocable. Last year’s reeds are broken, brown, and half-rotted, this year’s reeds will be there soon. A methane bubble pops the still water now and then, the message being, this is what it all boils down to. I get bleak and overwhelmed. In the west, the sky goes pale red and brassy. I feel the spreading color more than I see it. In 1970, the Berlin Philharmonic made a recording of Wagner’s
Götterdämmerung
. At about 3:05 into Siegfried’s Funeral March, a solitary trumpet peal rises over the strings and fades. I find it to be unbearably plangent. That note captures exactly what it is to watch the sun set from the Keesey. Sometimes nature is a comfort. Sometimes it presses down on you like cold steel.

I set out wandering one morning, with my shotgun and my waders. The reeds were furred with frost, and I was well bundled up. The day before, several ducks had overflown me, only to drop from sight into some invisible pothole halfway across the marsh. I was on a mission to locate and hunt the pothole.

From a distance, the swamp appears as a grassy plain, but when you get out on it, you realize it is actually a floating mat of plants and muck. With each step, I sent out bulky ripples. It seemed as if I might break through. I probably should have turned back, but I have stomped all over the swamp, and never came across a spot deeper than waist level. By the time I spied the pothole, I was pretty warm from all the awkward tramping. The water was scattered with lily stems and bits of tuber—a sign of heavy feeding by ducks and geese. Looking for a spot to hide with my shotgun, I stepped to the edge and the earth opened up and swallowed me. In the split second it took for me to realize I was dropping, I threw out my arms. I was holding my shotgun in both hands—one hand on the stock and one on the barrel—and I believe this saved me, as the gun caught in the reeds and distributed my weight across the floating marsh edge. I hung there, the icy water an inch from the top of my chest waders, my feet not touching bottom, and I remember thinking, with great clarity and focus, Your next move is very important.

If I lost my grip on the shotgun, or slipped from the edge, the water would pour into my waders and be absorbed by all my heavy clothes, and I’d go down like a sack of sand. There was a chill just south of my pancreas that had nothing to do with the temperature of the water. I remember thinking they’d never find me. I would become Chippewa County’s own Kennewick Man. A bog mummy in camouflage waders.

I held my position for a while. Like Jonah, his elbows braced against the jaws of the whale. I tend to yammer sometimes about accepting death as peace, and hanging there that morning, I did achieve a sort of Zen clarity, but it had nothing to do with acquiescence. Unprepared to make the Mission to Big Peaceful, I instead commenced the most delicate, cautious pull-up, ever so slowly drawing my chest to my elbows, firmly suppressing the urge to flail at the fragile marsh-fringe like a spasmodic monkey. Inch by slow inch I slid my body up and over, until I was back atop the floating mattress. I took a very deep breath then, and grinned out there all alone. In time, I thought. In time. But not today.

The time came when the people who bought Snook’s Store couldn’t make a go of it anymore. I used to try to buy something in there every couple of weeks, a can of mushrooms, some orange juice, the homemade frankfurters. But it was negligible commerce in the face of all I toted home from the supermarkets and Wal-Mart. For the first time since the Depression, the store closed. They reopened it recently, as the Sunshine Café. I’ve been over there for biscuits and gravy, and there are cars parked there pretty regular in the mornings and around meal time. I hope it works out. The local school principal bought Snook’s yellow sign. He plans to hang it on the wall in the student commons area, surround it with old pictures and local artifacts. Give the kids a chance to expand their vision of a place they see and yet don’t see every day. If you can find a way to strike a balance between ignoring the past and clinging to it, maybe just
recognize
the past, then I guess you’ve got something.

There is this photograph down at the fire hall, taken February 25,1984. The old high school, built in 1906, is in flames. Raging. Smoke so big Betty Lou Ruud saw it clear out from Curavo’s hill when she drove into town to help Snook at the store that morning. The fire department is there, all nineteen members. They’re lined up in two rows, backs to the flame, posed and grinning as if they’re at a family picnic. The old school was grand in its day. Two stories tall and capped with a louvered bell tower. In a picture taken the morning it opened, the three original teachers are posed out front in long pleated skirts and broad-brimmed hats decked with flowers.

The fire department uses old buildings like this for practice. We call it “having a burn.” You start the fire, put it out, start it, put it out, and then eventually you let it go. Usually it’s an old farmhouse, or a barn out in the country. Shortly after I joined the department, we burned the feed mill where my father used to grind feed. I remember sweeping the corncobs out of the bed of his blue pickup, watching them dance and shatter in the maw of the gravity-fed grinder. It was a little strange to crawl around in the smoke on the floor where I used to stand waist-high beside Dad while he paid the feed bill. Someone took pictures of the feed mill burn, and I looked through them while I was working on this chapter. It’s not dramatic, but it is lightly ironic: You join the fire department under the pretext of putting out fires, and you wind up burning your own history.

Life is a preservation project. Our instinct for preservation plays out in everything from the depth of our breaths to an affection for bricks. Even as we flail and cling, trying to bottle time, to save it, we live only through its expenditure. Memory is a means of possession, but eventually, the greatest grace is found in letting go.

At a small farmhouse deep in the country, a small woman meets us at the door. “My husband shot himself,” she says. I put my hand on her shoulder, look straight into her eyes, and ask a terrible question. “Are you sure he is dead?” I am groping for the tone of voice that will allow me to ask this cosmically insulting question and yet convey concern and regret and sympathy and respect, and I am feeling mightily inadequate. I am only asking because it will not do if the coroner arrives to a heartbeat, with us standing around. “I think so,” she says. “He is in the granary.”

He left the first note on the barn door. It was brief and instructive.
I am in the granary
, it said.
Don’t come in. Call the sheriff’s department. They will know what to do
. Below, he had written the fire number, and the name of the road that ran by the farm, and he said another letter, a longer one—she would find it by his body—would explain everything else. She didn’t see the letter on the barn door, and she walked into the granary and saw him there, slumped against the wall, the gun still in his hand.

I steel myself and open the granary door, only to see a narrow passageway back to another doorway. My heart is kicking pretty hard as I walk down the passage. You have this dread, and it gets worse with time, because like with Trygve and the cat, I have a pretty good idea what I’m going to see. You are setting your senses up for assault. When I get closer, I see the man’s feet, just sticking out the door. I take another breath, and put my head around the door.

He is seated, his legs extended. His upper body is leaned against the corner of the granary, his shoulders resting in the vee of the walls, his head tipped forward, his mouth open, his chin on his chest. His arms are crossed across his abdomen. The pistol, an old flat black .38, is still cradled in his left hand. The gun is upside down, his thumb is still in the trigger guard. His mouth is a dark blossom of blood, and the front of his flannel shirt is stained with the bleeding. A small, neat exit wound showed on his scalp, and I remember this absurd sense of relief, because most exit wounds are an expulsive mess. I reached out to palpate the top of his foot, to feel for a pedal pulse. As I pressed my fingertips against his instep, a drop of blood fell from his mouth to his chest, and I felt a familiar, deep drumming in his foot. Oh, no, I remember thinking. This man has so obviously and carefully chosen to die, the idea of having to “work” him horrifies me. I readjust the position of my fingers, lean in more closely, and just as quickly, realize the pulse I felt was my own. My fear has betrayed me, pounding clear out to my fingertips.

Jack hands me a stethoscope. I straddle the man, put the silver bell of the stethoscope over a dry spot on the flannel, and listen long and hard. The man’s face is close to mine now. His skin is waxen. It looks moldable. I am satisfied there is no heartbeat.