Population 485 (32 page)

Brother John and I were so disoriented by the whole deal we took off the next day and went fishing.

Commencing the following Monday, there were changes. Jed’s big old farmhouse got a thorough going-over. No more dirty jeans on the living room floor or tractor parts in the sink. Suddenly there were sunflower curtains on the windows. Potted ivy on the windowsill. A herd of Beanie Babies where the equipment sale fliers used to pile up. A second Adirondack chair in the yard. Flowers planted down by the pond. A garden no five people could hope to maintain. I saw those changes in the first week, and I wondered how it was going.

Several weeks later, a friend and I stopped by the farm, and Jed was leading a doe-eyed Jersey milk cow into the barn. He was holding it by an embroidered purple bridle—another sign that someone new was doing the shopping at Farm & Fleet. The Jersey was the only milk cow on the place. Jed had rustled up an old Surge milker and got the wheezing vacuum pump back in running order so that he and Sarah could have fresh milk. I leaned against the pen rail and watched as Jed hung the milker from the belly strap, then swung the inflations into position, one by one.
Whoosh-shlup
, they sucked themselves into place over each teat. The moment all four inflations were in place, the Jersey raised a dainty rear hoof and kicked them to the manure. Jed silently pressed his head into her flank and repeated the process. She kicked them loose again. Still quiet, Jed was positioning the inflations a third time, when the cow kicked yet again. Sarah had come in the barn and was leaning against the rail beside me. She had been to town, and was wearing tan slacks and white open-toed sandals. When the cow kicked the third time, Sarah clambered over the manure-caked rail and strode across the cow pen as if she were wearing wellies and overalls. When I left, she and Jed were kneeling side by side at the flank of the Jersey, the milker in place, the milk coursing into the bucket.

Late June. I’m on the road to Lincoln, Nebraska. My friend Gene has been offered a position at a hospital in Scott’s Bluff, but first he must take a test on Nebraska physical-therapy law. During the trip, Gene reads me passages from the study guide, and it seems to me Nebraska physical-therapy law boils down to definitions of good touch/bad touch and proscriptions against advertising the way car dealers do. The state requires that the test be taken in person. Gene has only two days off work to make the trip, so I’m helping him drive, out and back, hammer down. In a minivan, but still. We have road music—Dave Alvin, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Emmylou Harris, Peter Tosh, the Clash, Bad Livers, Steve Earle, Koko Taylor—and we entertain ourselves with stories from the old days, back when we first met while working on the same neurological rehab unit. I tell the one about the time I looked down the hall and saw all the sad little stroke ladies, waiting to be trundled off to therapy in their wheelchairs, and I decided to dance for them, a show-tune sort of thing. I had a stainless steel bedpan in my hand, and as I high-kicked down the hall, I doffed the bedpan like a tricorn hat. They laughed and laughed. A little too much, I noticed, then I turned and saw the staff psychiatrist following two paces behind me with his notebook.

We hit it off back then, and we hit it off now. It’s the mystery of compatibility. If he passes the test, he gets the job, and I’ll see him maybe once or twice a year. Somewhere on I-80, still in Iowa, westbound, mile marker 13, a little overpass, a blackbird teeters on a wire, flutters against the crosswind, and just as we pass beneath, he allows himself to be swept aloft and I think, these are the moments that fine-tune the spin of the earth. Later that night, in the Motel 8, while Gene studies, I write a letter to a friend, and I include the observation on the blackbird.

Gene took the test the next day. All that driving, the test took twenty minutes, and he passed. Before the summer is over, he’ll be gone to Nebraska for good. His wife, Paula, will be happy. Her family are all in Nebraska, and it has been years since she has been near them. Gene has mixed emotions about the move, but he is a Nebraska boy himself, and he understands the pull of family and geography. “It will be nice for Paula,” he says, and I love him for the unqualified understanding in his voice. But I will miss him. And I wonder if Frank will leave when he gets married. And I still haven’t quite figured out how to act around my brother Jed when he is man and wife.

I dropped Gene off at home and came in off the road on the morning of June 29, 2001. I drove into New Auburn and made my customary lap around the block, cutting over to Elm Street rather than driving straight up Main, so that I could see if the trucks were out. The fire hall was closed up tight, but Jed’s pickup was parked on the street out front. It didn’t make sense, but perhaps he was in working on equipment, or had been dropped off at home after a fire. It didn’t quite add up. I pulled into the lot and let myself in the hall. It was cool and dark. No one around. I crossed in front of the engines, through the garage to the meeting room. The run logs were in a clipboard on the chief’s desk. I paged back through them to see what I had missed, starting with the day I left for Nebraska. A couple of medical calls, nothing out of the ordinary. Then I flipped up the bottom sheet, the most recent call. The crew log showed that ten members had been out, and they had been logged in for four hours. Unless it was a structure fire, that’s a long time to be out. I looked at the description form. “Accident” had been circled. There is a column down the left side of the form with the heading, “Driver Information.” In the box titled “Driver, Vehicle 1,” someone had written
Sarah Perry
.

I went straight home. There were fifteen messages on my machine. The first three or four were hangups. Then there was my brother John. He was on a cell phone, calling from the ditch along Five Mile Road. His voice was haggard but straight. Sarah was just killed in a car accident here at Turkey Corners. The rest of the message was static.

Jed was feeding heifers when his pager went off. When the dispatcher gave the location he recognized it as an intersection less than three miles from his farm, and he knew Sarah had to make that intersection on her way home. He grabbed his gear and jumped in his truck, a little extra nervous, as we all are when a call comes from an area frequented by family. Just down the road, at the home farm, Mom pulled out in front of him in her big old Lincoln. They arrived at the scene together. Jed didn’t recognize Sarah’s car at first. It was that badly damaged.

Mom thought I would want to know how it went, and so the morning after, she took me through the scene. The car had been shoved from the roadway into the ditch, but was still right-side up. Sarah looked as if she had simply reclined her seat. Her hands were at her sides. Jed saw the damage, the passenger side crushed clear into Sarah’s right side, and immediately he thought of her in a coma. She wasn’t breathing, but her heart was beating. Mom suctioned blood from her throat with a tube, and Jed gave her several breaths. Then the fire and rescue trucks began arriving, and Jed remembers seeing the familiar yellow paint and then a feeling of gratefulness, gratefulness that the people spilling from the vehicles were his friends, and that Sarah would not be in the hands of strangers. Max had arrived in his pickup, and he pulled Jed away now, took him down the ditch, and, not knowing what else to do, held him.

It unfolded the same as it always does then, the ambulance arriving, driven by more friends, and the fire crew fanning out to reroute traffic, mark out the helicopter landing zone, help Mom and the EMTs with medical care. John was on an excavation job fifteen miles away, but when he heard the call and location, and then radio traffic mentioning a first responder’s wife, he dumped his trailer and headed to the scene. Almost unnoticed, one of the first responders and EMTs were treating the driver of the other vehicle, preparing her to be transported to the hospital for evaluation. Chief Ernie had ordered the chopper the moment he sized up the situation, and shortly it was settling into a nearby cornfield with its familiar thunderous buzz. The flight nurses came on the run, and Mom says it was something to see, the way they worked, inserting chest tubes to relieve the pressure on Sarah’s lungs, running through their resuscitation algorithms, placing tubes and setting IV lines. They handed the IV bags to two firefighters and told them to squeeze, as if they could force life back in her veins.

At the end, they made the call right there in the green grass. Jed has told me he is thankful for this, for it left him with no questions. He wasn’t called to some emergency room cubicle, or to some morgue, didn’t have to stand and wait for someone to pull back a sheet. Instead, on his knees, touching familiar ground, he bent to his young wife, gave her his very breath, and knowing it wasn’t enough, gave her into the care of friends, stepped back, and turned to face the desolate traverse.

Jed had hay down, and so the day after Sarah was killed, I baled it. We embraced and wept deeply that morning, and then we got to work. We don’t ask why, my brothers and I. These things happen every day. This time, it happened to us. Still, when I bring the tractor back from the hayfield, I see my brother, his tough little body sagged with grief, and I am overwhelmed with the journey he faces. Returning to the field with a forklift, I gather up the fresh bales, stacking them against a future guaranteed to no one.

At the wake, it was her hands that made me cry. I would look at them and think of them touching my brother. I thought too of the poet Frank Stanford, or more specifically, eight beautiful, desolate lines of his “Blue Yodel of the Lost Child”:

A letter to the condemned,

You came too late

Like the snow

Who calls you his wife now,

And your breasts will never be

Heavy with milk,

And your voice like an owl

On every fence post.

At the funeral, we brothers stood and spoke in turn. John went first, told about Sarah’s goofy little laugh, told how he used to roar past her yard in his dump truck and hit the air horn, and he would see her blond ponytail bobbing as she waved. I went next, and said something about how I reckoned we aren’t given this measure of grief without first being given an equal measure of love. I said I had done the math, and between the three of us, Jed’s wedding had brought an end to 102 combined years of bachelorhood. That got a little laugh. Then I told the story of Jed and Sarah milking the cow.

And then Jed stood, and we were amazed at his strength, him facing the wall-to-wall church, speaking slow but strong about how every time Sarah went to the sale barn she came home with an orphan goat or a calf or three chickens, and how they were going to have to have a husband/wife discussion about the financial implications of perpetual animal rescue, and then he said neither he nor Sarah had much time for organized religion, but they got married because they loved each other and wanted to do the right thing before God, and I was at once stricken and proud.

Hud Simpson and Nick Tuggle washed and buffed the fire trucks in the morning, and the department turned out in uniform shirts—the first time they’d been off the hanger since the awards ceremony in February. Chief Ernie led the procession to the cemetery, while several members of the department shut down traffic and then brought up the rear in the other trucks. John and I made the procession in his dump truck, put it right in there a couple of vehicles behind the hearse, his dog Leroy between us on the homemade booster seat. It’s an eight-mile drive to the cemetery, over the skid marks in the intersection where Sarah was killed, past her childhood home, past the house she and Jed shared for seven weeks. It is the price and comfort of living in a small place.

We sang a hymn in the sun, then left her to be put in the ground, just a few feet from the graves of my brother Eric and sister Rya. At the end Jed stood by the casket with Mom, and then with Sarah’s mother, and I kept thinking of all the slide carousels in my parents’ house, filled with pictures of us as children, and how much a mother agrees to stand when she delivers life into this world.