From the Top

by Michael Perry

  Usually you just chitchat and talk smart, what you call a “smoke & joke.” But sometimes you get real nuggets. It was through pickup truck windows at the intersection of Carlson Corners that I received the happy news of my brother Jed’s engagement.

  Unfortunately not everybody gets it anymore, and I have a perpetually renewing resolution not to hold daily funerals for the past so I’m not going to saw on this for too long, but I knew things had changed a while back when I was still living in my hometown of New Auburn. There were only 485 people in residence and Main Street is wide enough you could run five wide NASCAR-style with room left over for Willie Johnson to ride his lawn mower to the tavern. I was out cutting grass one day and my buddy Snake drove by. He stopped, so I walked out there in the middle of Main Street and leaned into his window. We talked for a pretty good stretch. Every now and then someone would drive through and they’d just swing around us, no big deal. Then this woman pulls right up on Snake’s bumper and she lays on the horn. I looked at her and then slowly rolled my eyes around the space surrounding us as if to say, You know, Ma’am, you just have at ’er. Roll right around us. Then I went back to visiting with Snake. The woman honked again. Snake and I just kept visiting.

  Finally the woman gave the steering wheel a violent twist, stomped the accelerator, and whipped out around us. As she zoomed past, she flew us the bird.

  We gave her the gaze.

  Our point being, Ma’am, this is how we hold neighborly visits around here in lieu of a garden fence. And when you stop to visit through a pickup truck window, you are luxuriating in the tapering moments of a quieter time. And furthermore, honking crabs the soul.

  So Mike and I, we had a nice visit in his driveway. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have any feeder pigs for me this year. As a matter of fact, he’s looking for some himself and he tells me that the cheapest ones he’s found are sixty dollars apiece, which is a bit of a shock after they’ve held steady at forty for so many years now.

  That was bad news. But if you’re gonna get bad farmin’ news, you might as well get it from a neighbor who’s in the same boat. Or in the same pickup truck, as it were. And talking to you through a rolled-down window.

  We drove off and went about our business. I stopped by the feed mill and bought chicken feed. While the feed mill man was tallying up the bill, I leaned against the feed mill counter and we commiserated about the price of pigs. In the absence of a pickup truck window, the feed mill counter is a fine substitute.

  JOHN DEERE FUNERAL

  It’s been a year since Donnie died. He was a neighbor I didn’t know real well or for a real long time, but knew well enough to know his name and know his truck and wave when I saw him plowing his sweet corn patch with his beloved Johnny-Popper.

  A couple years back the township trimmed the trees along our road, and Donnie and his brother Denny (Denny lives right down the hill from me) got the crew to drag the trees to a spot out there behind Denny’s shop. They’d peck away at the pile now and then, but with fall coming on and quite a few sticks to go, they said if I’d come down there and give them a hand I could take some of that firewood. Donnie was already in the fight of his life by then—cancer—but when I showed up with my pickup and trailer there he was, leaning on the back of the buzz saw, ready to go.

  The buzz saw was homemade and painted John Deere green and yellow, because those brothers are John Deere through and through. Always have been. I’m more an International Harvester guy, but when there is wood to be made you join the team, and besides, with that blade spinning right there a guy isn’t going to quibble over colors.

  We worked steadily but carefully; when you grow up where and when I did the very term buzz saw brings to mind old-timers short three fingers, and those were the happy accidents. The wood bolts were stacked fairly neatly, but there was still a quite a little tugging and lugging to be done, as if we were undoing a pile of giant jackstraws. I lugged the long chunks, Denny tossed the sawn chunks, and Donnie worked the saw bed back and forth. We kept an eye on him but he looked good the whole time, and when it was done I had two heaping loads, the truck and trailer springs sagging.

  I didn’t see Donnie a lot after that—waved at him a time or two and inquired as to his condition whenever I talked to Denny—but I knew he was struggling, up and down. When I saw the obituary I couldn’t say I was surprised.

  The funeral was held in a small town nearby, and I wasn’t sure exactly which church was hosting the service, but the town was of a size that all I had to do was peek down two or three streets until I saw where all the cars were, and that was the place. When the church part was over they bore his casket to the cemetery on a hay wagon drawn by one of his antique John Deere tractors. You could hear it coming from clear the other side of the railway tracks, the pop-pop-pop, slow and steady.

  It turned cold the day of the funeral, cold enough that despite the green grass, when I got back home I stoked a fire in the wood-stove. When we were buzz-sawing wood that day, we cut some of those chunks a little long before we got ’er dialed in, and so as I was trying to wedge a section of split maple into the firebox on the diagonal—the only way it would fit—I recognized it as a piece Donnie helped us cut that day, one of the many that kept us warm all winter long, and as the kindling took and the smoke curled up and out into the chill air I figured there are a lot of ways to honor a man.

  AMBULANCE KARMA

  I left the farm the other night and drove into town to the local technical college to begin my biannual first responder refresher. Every two years we have to revisit and retest on all the ways there are to keep people ticking when they’ve stopped tocking. The refresher is twenty-eight hours of classroom time and usually takes place over a month or so, and I always run into trouble stringing one together because I’m on the road a bunch, not that that makes me special, because there are truckers and soldiers in the department who face the very same scheduling issues. I realize I just said being a soldier causes “scheduling issues” and will think on that some more later. Jeepers.

  Anyways, as we say around here when we aren’t saying Any-hoo, the local emergency services instructors have kindly helped me work out a schedule that fits in between all the road days, and I’m spending a lot of time looking at PowerPoints about how to administer epinephrine and oral glucose and practicing splinting pretend broken arms and treating fake shock and binding up imaginary hemorrhages, and—because this is the modern age—rehearsing what to do in the event someone drops a weapon of mass destruction in the back yard.

  You might think all this difficult-to-schedule death and destruction playacting would be a breathless downer, but actually, once I get in the classroom I really enjoy it. I’m closing in on my own quarter-century of being a volunteer EMT, first responder, and firefighter, and it’s been a consistent part of my life longer than anything else in my life besides breathing. It’s a privilege to serve alongside my neighbors wherever I may be. I love that we converge on scene with all of our different backgrounds and beliefs and abilities and suddenly start speaking in the same language: the language of rescue. The language of help.

  I also cherish how the fire and rescue world exists in its own little space outside the things I do to make a living. All the writing and performing and running hither and yon, and yet when I step in that classroom and see the legless, armless BigHead mannequin lying there on the table with his hair that looks like bad chocolate frosting and his teeth that click if you put too much pressure on them while inserting an airway, well, then I know that it’s time to practice inserting airways, in particular a CombiTube, and I know that if I meet another emergency medical provider somewhere even far from home and we don’t know a thing about each other, if I say, “Inflate the blue tube first,” he or she will smile and say, “And don’t forget to auscultate for bilateral lung sounds and gastric insufflation,” and we’ll know exactly what we’re talking about just as reliably as two poets talking villanelles or musicians talking minor fifths.

&n
bsp; It just seems healthy to pursue some interest outside your main interests. In my case, being a volunteer rescue member has always been my way of reminding myself that I am mortal and ought to act that way. That trouble can come to any of us, in sixty-’leven different ways and at any time. Again, it sounds like a downer, but it doesn’t feel like a downer. It feels solid to know that. Like the big surprise is pre-sprung, so it won’t hit quite so hard when it comes. Or at least I’ll recognize it for what it is and say, “Oh, it’s the big surprise. Okay, then.”

  There’s karma involved, too. Not the kind of karma where I believe if I make enough emergency calls I’ll build up some cosmic bank account of get-out-of-jail-free cards, but rather the karma that when the day comes when I need help—or, even more importantly and specific to my heart and situation, my family needs help, and it’s one of those many days when I’m far from home—well, then, when help arrives it’ll have a friendly face.

  If you don’t know what a CombiTube is, it doesn’t matter. It’s enough to know that it’s a tube we use to help air go in and out when air isn’t going in and out. That’s all we really want, isn’t it? To keep the air going in and out? And to know that if we’re having trouble making the air go in and out—literally, sure, but even more frequently figuratively—someone will come around to lend a hand.

  TOM AND ARLENE IN LOVE

  I was over visiting my neighbors Tom and Arlene a while back and we were talking about how life tends to roll around in circles … although not perfect circles. Maybe it’d be more accurate to say life is elliptical. With an ellipse you get a little more wiggle room, and goodness knows the secret to happiness is a little more wiggle room.

  I love to visit Tom and Arlene. Tom is eighty-two and spry; Arlene is a few years younger but her health is not the best. Often when we talk she is using oxygen, and you can hear the hiss of the tank in the background. Tom and Arlene have been married fifty-nine years now. Arlene says her goal has always been to make it to their sixtieth anniversary. Even with the strain of recent hospital stays showing on her face, you can see the resolve in her eyes.

  Sixty years of marriage. It’s nowhere near a world record, but it deserves a tip of the seed corn cap, that’s for sure. I tried pinning Tom down once on love and how to find it and how to make it last, but for all his knowledge—Tom is one of the smartest fellows I’ve ever known—he turns into a silly seventh grader when you try to get serious with him on matters of life and love.

  “Why do you figure you and Arlene were able to make it last so long, Tom?” I ask him.

  “Weahhll, I always say love is a disease everyone gets,” he says. Then after waiting for a beat, he said, “Some people catch it quite often!”

  Then he leaned forward in his chair and giggled at his own joke like a kid who just said something mildly naughty to his teacher, and it occurred to me that that attitude right there maybe had a lot to do with why he was still riding his bicycle a half a mile out to the mailbox and back every day at the age of eighty-two. The other day he told me, “I always tell people, I get up in the morning with nothin’ to do, and by nighttime I’m only half done.”

  I had a point to make about those circles, but I got off track and am running out of time. One of my favorite things about visiting Tom and Arlene is how time slides into irrelevance. Well, not complete irrelevance, because they have a cuckoo clock on the wall and it doesn’t really go tick-tock-tick-tock, it goes squeak-tock-squeak-tock and then of course every once in a while the little door slams open and that bird shoots out to give a crazed toot or two, but rather than making you feel like you should be getting back to business in the real world, the clockworks yank the bird back out of sight and the message seems to be: Never mind, I can come back again later, go ahead and visit, life is a circle. Or an ellipse. Or a zigzag. Take your pick, and take your time.

  IN THE WAKE OF THE WAKE

  Arlene did live to see her sixtieth wedding anniversary. She was fully present, and she celebrated in joy. A few months later she died at home, as she had also wished. To her last breath, Tom was at her side.

  I went over to see my neighbor Tom the other evening. He recently lost his wife of some sixty years. I don’t know how you quantify such a thing. I don’t know how you remark on the echoes of such a departure without coming up short or obvious. I don’t know that you even try.

  I brought Tom a leftover pork chop that my wife had cooked. She and I are coming up on nine years married. I was thirty-nine when we took our vows, so barring my somehow making it to the century mark I’ll likely not see sixty years of wedded union even if she’ll have me that long. Tom thanked me for the pork chop and put it in the fridge with the other food accumulated since the funeral. It’s only been a matter of weeks since Arlene died, so folks still drop in with a little something now and then, but Tom says it’s tapering some, and I’m reminded of the friend who once told me, “The tough times start when the last casserole dish is returned.” We were speaking in the wake of the funeral for my brother’s first wife. He lost her just seven weeks into their marriage.

  With the pork chop in reserve, Tom and I sat on wooden chairs in the kitchen. The room smelled faintly of bacon, and I could see the pan over there on the stove. Tom said he had taken advantage of two warm days to get some of the garden in, although he thought it was probably too early, as it was turning cold again, but he just felt like he had to get out there and put something in the dirt. Bought his seed up at Stockman Farm Supply, he said, and he’s going to try growing some of those dipper gourds this year. That and some new radish he’s never seen in all his eighty-plus years. He’s had a black bear coming around again, and he wonders if it’s the one he ran out of the yard last fall. There he was, an octogenarian clad in nothing but a pair of cutoffs, swinging a stick and hollering at that bear to get out of the birdseed while Arlene rolled her eyes in the kitchen. He hasn’t actually seen the bear this spring, but one of his bird feeders was sprung and one of his beehives was busted.

  Last year Tom lent me a book about gunpowder, and along with the pork chop I had finally brought the book back. As it sat on the kitchen table between us we marveled at the miracle of saltpeter and sulfur and charcoal combined and then meandered off on a joint stem-winder examining humans and history and the unwavering dedication mankind has maintained in refining the means of killing one another. The discussion wound up with that moment where you both just sit there and shake your head, a morose sort of unity that is unity nonetheless.

  We shot the breeze a good forty-five minutes before I asked Tom how his spirits were. That was when he told me about the bacon he made that morning. He said it was the first batch he’d fried up since Arlene died, and the minute it hit the pan the scent and sizzle hit him pretty hard, as he always fried one slice for him and one for her.

  Later I thought about my brother losing his wife after seven weeks and Tom after sixty years and how these griefs might compare. It’s an unanswerable question, I suppose, and not mine to speculate. The immediately bereaved are the only ones qualified to have that conversation. I have said that both men “lost” their wives, when in fact from what I have seen in their eyes it is they the living who are left lost.

  As for the rest of us, we feel our way, trying to help, not really knowing how but hoping that maybe by sitting in the kitchen chair and conversing about nothing much and sharing in the sense of absence without necessarily saying so, we might somehow shine some dim light on the path forward.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to

  Terry, Tom, Becky, and the entire Lake Superior Big Top Chautauqua bunch, from the Blue Canvas Orchestra and singers to stage and sound crew and all board members and volunteers

  Jaime Hansen, who brings the studio right on out to the farm

  Alissa Freeberg, for remarkable and conscientious assistance

  Blakeley Beatty, for booking it

  Karen Rose, for those other books

  Kate, Kathy, Kristin, Elizabeth, and T
ed at the Wisconsin Historical Society Press

  John and Beth at the Wisconsin State Journal

  Al Ross, microphone sensei

  Lisa and Dan at ICM

  And my family, the ones I think of every time I say, “Back home on the farm …”

  About the Author

  Michael Perry is the author of numerous books, including Population: 485, Truck: A Love Story, and the New York Times best-seller Visiting Tom. His live humor recordings include Never Stand Behind a Sneezing Cow and The Clodhopper Monologues. He lives in rural Wisconsin with his wife and daughters and is privileged to serve as a first responder with the local fire department. He can be found online at www.sneezingcow.com.