Population 485 (33 page)

Authors: Michael Perry

BOOK: Population 485

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Except for the funeral director, John and I were the last to leave the cemetery. The funeral director is getting up there in years some, and I think we caught him a little off guard, and maybe he thought it disrespectful, but when we pulled even with the casket John hit the air horn good and solid one more time. Then he ginned up the diesel and we turned toward home.

Seven nights after Sarah’s death, the entire department met in the fire hall. A team of five volunteers—EMTs and firefighters, led by a minister—took us through a critical incident stress debriefing. The experts will tell you CISD is an integrated system of interventions designed to mitigate the adverse psychological reactions that accompany an event with the potential to overwhelm the coping skills of an individual or a group. What you basically do is get together and talk the whole thing over, with outside supervision and support. It has been six years since our last CISD. We had that one after Tracy Rimes was killed on Jabowski’s Corner. I’m not one for group therapy. But I saw some powerful good done in the session we held for Tracy, and now I’m four-square behind the idea. We sat in a circle, and the minister got us started, and that’s all I will say. CISD is only effective if everyone speaks freely, without fear of chatter. The first thing the group leader does after closing the door is bind everyone in the room to complete confidentiality.

The doors were closed for two hours. When we came out, someone had a pot of coffee ready, and we leaned around on the trucks, smoking and dunking cookies, and we made the sort of small talk you make when you’re finding your way back to the trail. I thought back to the night these folks all met Sarah. The mood in the Sundial Supper Club was festive, the mood here in the trucks is grave. But the nut of the thing is the same. At some point over the last twenty-five years, each of us walked in, took a seat at the back of the room, and offered to drive these yellow trucks to trouble. And because of that, we now stand in the midst of a small cluster of people privy to a history written in places the outsider does not see.

For my brother, there are dark days ahead. The house, suffused with her memory, the most perverse sort of tease. Her horses, her pet goat, her empty saddle in the hog shed. This buddy of mine called, and I think he put it well. “The tough times start,” he said, “the day the last casserole dish is returned.”

Out there running Jed’s baler, looking ahead to line up the windrow and back to check the ties, I feel centered on the earth, the way I always feel when I’m doing something fundamental in a familiar place, the same way I feel when I grab a hose and try to put out a neighbor’s fire, or hold an old lady’s hand while Bob or Jack gets the oxygen set up. Captive of my heart and feet, I’m a wandering fool, but I’ve got the sense to keep returning. On this land, in this place, with these people, I am where I belong.

I have a new girlfriend. She lives on a farm and sleeps in the back of her pickup. She has been tending Sarah’s garden. We are lying on our backs in the truck bed, looking up at the sky. A goose-bump wind sends clouds scudding over the face of the moon. I watch the whiteness wax and wane, and I am thinking, little brother, how long will you have to sleep beneath the cold moon before you can feel the sun again?

A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to:

First and foremost, my parents—anything decent is because of them, anything else is simply not their fault.

…the people in and around “Nobbern” who make it my favorite place in the world. Members of the NAAFD, past and present. The Chetek ambulance and fire crews, Bloomer ambulance and fire crews, and the “Silver Star” crews—it’s a privilege to be out there with you. Frank, clear back to Galloway. The Bruce for early seeds, late rumbles. Magnuson, for garage rants and intercession. Jayne, cool and true. McDowell family. Mrs. Rehrauer. John Hildebrand. A, B, and C. Racy’s, for much coffee. Kris and Frank, for food and football. Shimon Lindemann (Whitelaw Johnie and his Mystery Date). Bill and Wilda. Adrienne Miller, Darcy Frey, Ilena Silverman, Susan Orlean, Karen Croft, for a hand along the way. Everyone who came to the readings over the years. And in the big city, Lisa Bankoff, Alison Callahan, Patrick (he of Obscure Powers) Price, and Liz Farrell.

…
Esquire, Salon, Hope Magazine, Orion, Troika, Word, Brevity, No Depression, Discovery Online, and The World & I,
for publishing essays from which some of the material for this book was drawn.

…the volunteers everywhere, and to the professionals who do it every day, setting the bar for us amateurs.

…the memory of Robert Jones and Waylon Jennings.

If I missed you, drop by. But do announce yerself….

About the Author

Michael Perry
lives in rural Wisconsin and online at www.sneezingcow.com.

Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

Praise
for
Population: 485

“Swells with unadorned heroism. He’s the real thing.”

—USA Today

“In the best tradition of books that pay quiet homage to community service, place, and the men and women who live there. A perfectly pitched celebration of small-town life.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“This is a quietly devastating book—intimate and disarming and lovely.”

—Adrienne Miller,
Esquire

“I have been waiting for thirty years for a fresh and talented voice to rise out of the volunteer fire service in America, and finally it has arrived in Michael Perry’s
Population: 485
. Perry is a firefighter/EMT and he makes you feel you are responding right along with him to fires, auto wrecks, even suicides, and his hard work is told with the thoughtfulness and gracefulness of a first responder who cares about people, his town, our country, and the world we live in. But this is more than a book about a small-town fire department. It is a literary venture told on the cusp of service to his community—all written with a soft human touch by an intuitive writer with a distinctive and refined American style. Firefighters and EMTs will be talking about this book for a long time to come. And so will all readers who have a love for American literature. This is a small-town story in the big tradition of Sherwood Anderson and James Agee.”

—Dennis Smith, author of
Report from Ground Zero

“My heart goes out to anybody who knows—and writes as well as Michael Perry does—about rural small-town life. His book is often funny, sometimes heartbreaking, but always full of life, characters, and the tangled web of small-town history, daily drama, and strain of occasional weirdness that make country living such a challenge and an adventure. New Auburn, Wisconsin, sounds a lot like Pleasant Valley, New York, except colder in the winter, so I felt immediately at home reading
Population: 485
. If there’s one thing I admire more than a man who can go home again, and does, and happily, it’s a volunteer firefighter. Mr. Perry’s account of firefighting is scary, inspiring, and renews my gratitude toward our own, to whom I owe much. He has written a joy of a book, as gnarly, stubborn, courageous, and full of eccentricity in all its forms as country life itself.”

—Michael Korda

“Minnesota has Garrison Keillor…neighboring Wisconsin has Michael Perry. If you read one nonfiction title this autumn, make it this one. It’s that good.”

—
Sunday Oklahoman

“Population: 485
is bound to be one of the best nonfiction books of the year…. Filled with moments of tenderness, humor, and just plain goofiness as it takes us into the lives and homes of the inhabitants of one small town…. Makes for riveting reading.”

—
Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel

“Part portrait of a place, part rescue manual, part rumination of life and death,
Population: 485
is a beautiful meditation on the things that matter.”

—
Seattle Times

“Finely crafted, hard-to-come-by honesty.”

—
Hope
magazine

“With self-effacing humor, stellar wit, and phenomenal writing, Perry gives an intelligent, articulate voice to small-towners…. Powerful, engaging, and often hilarious.”

—
The Phantom Tollbooth

“Somewhere between Garrison Keillor’s idyllic, sweet
Lake Wobegon
and the narrow-mindedness of Sinclair Lewis’s
Main Street
lies the reality of small-town life. This is where Michael Perry lives.”

—
St. Paul Pioneer Press

“May simply be the best book about small-town life ever written.”

—
Wisconsin State Journal

“Humorous, poignant.”

—
Chicago Tribune

“A remarkable new book, sometimes comic—sometimes sad.”

—
Los Angeles Times

Also by Michael Perry

Truck: A Love Story

Off Main Street

Big Rigs, Elvis & the Grand Dragon Wayne

Why They Killed Big Boy…and Other Stories

Never Stand Behind a Sneezing Cow
(CD)

I Got It from the Cows
(CD)

Credits

POPULATION
: 485. Copyright © 2002 by Michael Perry. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Mobipocket Reader July 2007 ISBN 978-0-06-146752-3

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