Population 485 (28 page)

Later, much later, I think for a very long time about this scene.

I am disgruntled. Long after the fact, I come up with assorted repartee. I indulge in revenge fantasies. In the most straightforward, I grab Lorraine by the ankles and troll her up and down the gutter. In another, I stand tall in the rotor wash and improvise a series of rude limericks, each beginning, “There once was a narwhal named Lorraine…” In another, I compose a list of terms detailing Lorraine’s anatomy, limiting myself to adjectives ending in -
ic
, -
erous
, or
ematous
. In my favorite, I say, well, at least I look good in biking shorts.

I chewed it over for a while.

Then I smiled.

Everything said and done, what you had here, was your Supreme Heroic Moment.

Springtime. A farmer calls. He’s been planting corn near a swamp. His orange tractor has backfired, the sparks have lit last year’s bleached canary grass. By the time I get there, the brush buggy is parked at the edge of the field. The lieutenant I drenched at the cabin fire last winter is handing down backpack cans. I run around the front of the buggy and he hits me right between the eyes with a stream of water.

“Know what that was for?” He’s grinning wide.

Sure do.

P
ENULTIMATE

A
LL
J
ACK
M
OST WANTS
is someone to tell him what’s the deal with his rock. The rock is a legend now. Jack’s constant companion. He’s lugged it in and out of every bar and restaurant from New Auburn to Bloomer and back. At the firefighter banquet we gave him a tube of super glue. Told him to stick the rock on the hood of his car to avoid the trouble of dragging the thing in and out of the trunk all the time.

Jack found the rock on a Saturday. His “day off.” He runs the feed mill all week, grinding corn, mixing mineral, making deliveries, bulling the heavy bags around. On the weekend, Jack and his twin brother Mack generally split and haul loads of firewood, but on this particular weekend, Jack had been hired by some lake ladies to build a fieldstone fence. That Saturday, he was gathering material for the fence, picking rock at his folks’ farm. Depending on how the glacier treated your farm, picking rock is a rite of spring here. When we were growing up, the farmers used to hire gangs of kids—some, like the ten Jabowskis, were a gang unto themselves—to slog along behind hay wagons in the plowed fields, pitching rocks on the wagon bed until it sagged and the wheels pressed deep in the dirt. When it was full, the farmer hauled it to the end of the field or the edge of a swamp and dumped the load. You can still see these cairns all around the county, the smooth brown and pink and tan stones in mounds the size of a Volkswagen.

Jack picked the rock on Saturday, but it wasn’t until Sunday morning, when he was turning it in his hands to determine how it might best fit the wall, that he noticed the paw print. The rock is about the size of a bowling ball, and countersunk on the surface is what appears to be the paw print of a large cat—a central pad surrounded by five toes. The print is an inch deep and crisp. It could be covered maybe by a large pancake. Jack pulled the rock from the wall and told the women he was working for he’d be keeping that one. He got a lot of opinions that first day, mostly from guys drinking beer. He stopped at my house and pounded on the door. I looked the rock over and took a couple of pictures. It was strange, all right. Sure looked like a big old paw print. “Whadd’ya think?” said Jack. “Saber-tooth?” I said. It was the only thing I could think of.

Jack was on a mission then. He’d take time off from the feed mill, or from cutting wood, and he’d set off with his rock, trying to find out what he had. He showed it to everybody local—neighbors, the science teacher, strangers at the Gas-N-Go—but then he started seeking out experts. People with qualifications. First place he tried was the Science Museum over in St. Paul. “They said it was a sedimentary rock,” says Jack. Then he left it with a geologist in River Falls for a week. “He said it wasn’t sedimentary, it was volcanic,” says Jack. A geologist on staff at the university in Eau Claire agreed that it was a volcanic rock, but didn’t clear up the mystery of the print. “He said no cat could have put a print in a rock like that,” says Jack. “He said it would have been too hot, and an animal would not step on a hot rock.” Some experts suggested the print was formed by chance, others said it was carved by man. “But the geologist in River Falls told me no way, because that rock was too hard,” says Jack. He took a day off work and went to the Field Museum in Chicago. Took his daughter with him, and I would like to have been there to see old Jack come stomping through the doors with that rock under his arm.

“The lady there gave us free passes all day,” he says. “She came to the conclusion that, yes, it was a mammal print, but, no, it wasn’t, because the rock was too old. No one carbon-dated it or took a sample of it, but they said it was about two million years old.”

Jack followed another line of inquiry. “I said I’d like to see a saber-toothed tiger if they had one, so I could match it up. And the lady there said, ‘Well, a saber-toothed tiger has a bigger foot than that.’ And I said it could be a kitten. Sometime in its life it had to have a smaller foot than a full-grown cat. She said that made sense, but that was as far as she would go with that.”

Jack and his daughter had a good day at the museum. But nothing definitive came of the rock with the paw print. He says he’s going to keep searching. He got someone to make a wax casting of the stone, so a friend could make a plaster mold of the print for a rockhound in Arizona. He tried a creation scientist. “He used to be a science teacher for fifteen years,” says Jack. “Now he just preaches and he says the Bible says the world and everything in it is only six thousand years old and everything was made at the same time.”

Jack does get some ideas in his head sometimes. And I imagine somewhere in his conversations with the experts he finds a way to let them know how much firewood he cut last week. So they probably get a little chuckle from his visits. But you’ll forgive him if he begins to think his theories are as reliable as any expert’s. “Nobody has agreed with each other,” he says. He thinks for a minute. “I just took it all in, and I’m just kind of curious about who is right and who is wrong.”

Not long after I moved here, I noticed my backyard was sinking. Indentations, scattered throughout the grass. I stuck a rake handle in one and it dropped in four feet. I got to entertaining notions about what might be down there. Most of the notions were of your boy-who-just-read-
Treasure Island
variety. I figured maybe something important or valuable had been buried back here, or that I’d unearth the New Auburn equivalent of the terra-cotta army from the ancient Chinese Qin Dynasty. I know when they dug the basement in the lot next door, they found a lot of old beer bottles. So one day a friend and I grabbed a shovel, a sifter, and a notebook and went archaeological. In every hole, what we found mainly were huge rotted roots infested by platoons of red ants. Later on, Durlin Baker, the old-timer who lives out back of my place, across the alley, told me, Yep, there used to be giant elm trees in my backyard, but they cut them all down when the Dutch elm disease came through. Sure enough, when the lady down at the Gas-N-Go lent me some old newspaper clippings, I found a photo of the original schoolhouse taken in the 1930s from such an angle that my house—freshly built—was visible in the background, and the yard was sprouting with elm saplings. We dug up two of the holes and kept a list of what we found in the sifter:

• bits of charcoal
  
• piece of green glass
  
• porcelain chips with orange pattern
  
• nail, rusted, attached to piece of board
  
• plastic bead, red
  
• oval chunk of cement, or lime
  
• candy wrapper (Jolly Rancher)
  

Not much, but something. Signs of previous inhabitants. “Sure,” said Durlin Baker, later. “They used to burn their trash out back there.”

If we’re going to settle in a place, we like to dig around a little, get a sense of what came before. The digging reveals things, and even if they were discarded without thought, as was the candy wrapper, they nonetheless represent a fraction of history. That candy wrapper is the husk of a split second. When they dug the footings for St. Jude’s Catholic Church down the street, they kept turning up bricks from the old brick factory that used to stand on the ground. When my brother dug out a culvert north of town, his backhoe raked away the blacktop and revealed the cheek-by-jowl logs of the original corduroy road still socked tight in the dirt below. When I had to wait to be waved around a monstrous asphalt grinding machine last summer, I noticed that it was removing the asphalt in layers, and that it had cut the patch beside me on such a plane that the long-buried centerline was visible. I felt a goofy little reminiscent tug when I looked at the yellow paint, thinking that the last time I saw it exposed to the sun I was probably sixteen and riding my bike home from football practice. Silly, I suppose, but it spoke to the ties between the archaeology of a place and the archaeology of the heart.

We dig for threads and echoes, all correlating past to present. If we study the history of a place in order to establish a contemporary context, we are free to make what we will of any resonance, however tangential. A heavy ledger in the back room of the New Auburn village hall contains the handwritten minutes of the first recorded meetings of the village board, including the promulgation on May 28, 1902, of “Ordinance No. 9: An ordinance to prohibit the leaving of animals and teams unfastened in the public streets and for the prevention of cruelty to animals in the Village.” Nearly a century later, the photocopied minutes tacked to the post office bulletin board note that during the meeting of March 9, 2000, discussion included “the incident of the shooting of the pig that got loose from Olson’s Market.”

So we dig. Metaphorically, and sometimes with a shovel. An assignment had taken me on the road for about a week one summer when I returned to find my neighbors scouring their backyard with a metal detector. In between the auto carcasses and defunct lawn mowers, the spotty grass looked as if it had been attacked by a roving pack of gophers. The old man would sweep the detector over the earth, and when it went
whoop
, he’d signal his two young boys to dig. I was on my way out through the backyard to the post office when I saw them, and I thought it was a little strange, but then I got to thinking about it, and knowing how grim their evident financial situation was, I figured, What the heck, good for them if they find anything. That afternoon I had to go on the road again. When I came back five days later, my entire yard—front and back—was dotted with holes. More than forty of them. I was gobsmacked. Never mind issues of trespass and vandalism, I kept thinking, if they
did
find gold doubloons, those were
my
gold doubloons! They’re a pretty rough bunch, though, so I just pretended I didn’t notice. Indeed, they had gone to the effort of replacing about half their divots. And based on how things continued to look over there—cop cars and junk cars accumulating apace—I doubted they had unearthed the treasure of the Sierra Madre in my dandelions.

We spend this life looking for a center, a place where we can suspend without a wobble. The specific coordinates are elusive, scalable only by the heart. I moved into an old house in this little town on a January night seven years ago. That first night, I switched the lights off and sat for a long time on the wooden floor. A neon beer sign bolted to the roof of the bar up the street filled the empty cube of the living room with soft orange light. I took it for a sort of consecration, and was pleased to note that my heart felt steady.

It was never my intention to live here. By and large, I favor the hermit life, and my plan was to find an isolated place out by the home farm, but nothing panned out. I was on my way back home after another fruitless search when I passed through New Auburn and saw the For Sale sign in front of this house. On a whim, I made an offer and wound up on Main Street. To the extent that such a thing is possible in a town of 485 people, I thought I might feel pressed. But people around here pretty much give you your space.

Which is not to say they don’t pay attention. Once a neighbor lady called to tell me a kid was fooling around behind my garage. He ran off before I got around the corner, but there were fresh scorch marks on the siding, so I figure she saved my garage. When I have to go on the road, the women over at the phone company keep an eye on my house. Four years ago, when I was on assignment in Tennessee, my storm door blew open in a wind storm and the latch broke. Bob the telephone lineman came over and wired the door shut. I still think about that whenever I wave at him in his truck. And then I cringe, because I still haven’t fixed the door.

There is a fellow in town who does yard work. We often exchanged hellos in the post office, but he had never been to my house. One spring he asked if he could rake my yard, and I said sure. “I’ll knock on the door when I’m done,” he said. I told him I would be upstairs writing, so he should knock vigorously.

“Yeah,” he said. “you’ve usually got your music on pretty loud.”

I was cleaning carp out behind the house one afternoon when the rawboned neighbor guy walked over. He had been fiddling on a junk car. “Nice ones,” he said, looking down at the fish. And they were, a bodacious passel of
Ictiobus bubalus,
as my carp-shooting buddy Mills and I like to call them when we’re all dressed up in camo on our secret log, sweating in the sun and smelling of fish slime and
Off!
. A little Latin to offset the caveman behavior and stink. Mills got me into bow fishing, and now it’s a problem. I sneak off to shoot carp the way some guys sneak off to shoot pool. Mills smokes them up with apple and hickory in his old concrete smoker, but first I have to clean them. The neighbor stood there silent while I sawed off heads and peeled out guts. Every now and then he took a drag on his Marlboro and a pull on his Pabst. Finally, he spoke.