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.
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 pu
t 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?
An Excerpt from VISITING TOM
By Michael Perry
Available Wherever Books Are Sold August 21, 2012
RULES OF THE ROAD
OPERATING AS I DO UNDER the rubric of nonfiction, and with an eye to the various critical permutations of the term, I believe I owe my readers certain specifics: I strive to keep the facts straight. If I fail in this and a reader graciously notifies me, I post a correction in public. That said, you should know that in the book you are about to read, some names have been changed, and in some cases time has been compressed and oft-told tales synthesized to preserve ink and eye strain. Beyond that, I’m doing my best to give you things as they were, and for reading what I write you have my solemn gratitude.
PROLOGUE
IF YOU’RE GOING TO VISIT Tom Hartwig, you will have to drive past the cannon. Not just past it, but before it. The muzzle surveils you through the open door of his galvanized tin pole shed, poking from between a pair of manure spreaders and a homemade portable welder the size of a chest freezer. You’ll be about fifty yards out when you first glimpse the artillery, and will thus have time to consider whether or not you wish to proceed directly into the field of fire.
The cannon is not a lawn ornament. If you look to your left, well across the field and halfway up the hill to the treeline two hundred yards distant, you will see a 4×8 sheet of white plywood with a red bull’s-eye painted dead center. Upon closer study you will note a pair of perforations in the plywood— one within the first ring of the bull’s-eye, the other just outside it. The cannon is only moderately accurate (as evidenced by the number of significant divots and frayed saplings surrounding the plywood backstop), but if you care to stand up there and test the matter, you may first wish to note that when the cannonballs do hit their mark, they leave a ragged puncture through which an NFL line-man could easily stuff his fist.
Tom never leaves the cannon loaded, but newcomers will nonetheless find it daunting to motor between the target and the menacing hollow eye. “It’s tough,” a salesman once told Tom, “to come up your driveway with that thing parked there.”
“Oh,” said Tom, “I never shoot at anyone coming up the driveway . . .”
The Hartwig residence— a classic twin-porched Wisconsin farmhouse, clad in white clapboards and capped with a silvered standing-seam steel roof— sits central to a cluster of outbuildings arranged at the base of a semicircling ridge. If you open the kitchen door and cast your gaze out beyond the red peg-and-tenon barn (framed with nary a nail, and still standing square well into its second century), you will note how the fall-away slope of the land terminates in an abrupt cut, beyond which lies fertile bottomland and a rambling thread of water we call Cotter Creek.
It was Cotter Creek that drew the original white settlers to this spot, as well as those who came to the country prior— Tom will tell you the local Ojibwe tribes preferred to camp the eastern bank, so as to keep a protective band of water between them and the prevailing west winds in the event of a wildfire. Tom’s immediate predecessors arrived in the 1860s, when his grandfather, a German immigrant employed by a local farmer, followed the creek while searching for a stray batch of cows and took a liking to the area. Looking into the matter, he found out the property was being held for sale by a land agent in New York, and in the mid-1870s he took ownership. After a final trip to Germany to sell his remaining homeland possessions, he returned and began to establish the homestead in earnest.
Tom doesn’t know for certain when the house and barn were built, but he has his ideas. “Weaaahhll,” he told me once, prefacing the sentence with a drawled-out “well” the way he so often does, “when we remodeled the house we found square nails. Square nails went out of use about the turn of the century. So you know it was built before 1900.” He is prone to that sort of statement. Of sharing arcane knowledge as if he is confirming something you surely knew.
Other buildings followed over time— a pumphouse, a milkhouse, a chicken coop, a pig hutch, a machine shed, a granary, and in more contemporary times, two steel pole sheds. Tom arrived in 1929. Born at a hospital in nearby Eau Claire, he spent his first night at the farmhouse swaddled in a crib upstairs. He has lived beneath the same roof for every one of his eighty-two years since.
He’ll smile when he describes his childhood, how he’d snatch up his schoolbooks, go slamming out the screen door, trot past the barn, and drop down the cutback bank to the footbridge spanning Cotter Creek, then on to a second bridge that served as a natural meeting place for the local farm kids making the two-mile trek to the old one-room school. Stealing a few moments from the morning, Tom, his brother, and the neighbor boys would gather up shale rocks and drop them plonk into the water. Some days Tom lingered even longer, searching for stone flakes left streamside by the Ojibwe as they knapped arrowheads and skinning tools. By the time he was in high school, he had a sackful.
He graduated in 1947. Blessed with a natural understanding of animals and preternaturally adept at mechanics, he elected to stay at home and farm with his father. Still, even a good young man gets restless, and evenings when the chores were done, he would head for town on his brand-new 1948 Harley-Davidson. To ensure the ladies noticed him, Tom wove decorative green and red lights through the front wheel spokes, and then— rigging a pair of generator brushes so they contacted a copper band soldered to the brake drum— he wired a switch that drew power from the low-beam headlight. When he hit that switch he says the bike lit up like a rolling Christmas tree.
The lights were wasted on Arlene Knutson, as she wasn’t the kind of girl to be on the street at night. In fact, it was full daylight on a hot Sunday morning the first time Tom caught her eye— or ear. Arlene was sitting in a church pew beside her mother. The church doors were open to circulate the air, and Tom Hartwig raced that Harley through at full throttle— on the sidewalk. All that noise, and during worship. It didn’t set well, Arlene says, and when Tom asked her out after ser vices, her mother forbade it. Furthermore, Arlene said she wasn’t riding on any motorcycle.
Sensing he was at a disadvantage on two wheels, Tom tried four. Got himself a white ’49 Chevy convertible and a red shirt. Arlene was at work in a second-story office building when she saw him coming this time— rolling downtown with the top down, that scarlet shirt playing off the white car— and when she tells the story now her eyes glint as if she’s seeing him coming up the street for the first time. There followed a successful courtship, and right around the time Dwight D. Eisenhower was moving in to the White House, the young couple married and set up housekeeping in the same upstairs bedroom where baby Tom first slept in his crib.
In 1958, Tom’s father stepped aside, moving with his wife to a small cottage the family built just thirty yards uphill from the original farmhouse. Tom and Arlene moved downstairs and assumed daily operation of the farm. Tom was just shy of thirty years old, and it was good, he’ll tell you, to greet the morning in this place, to step out on that screen porch and see treetops poking through the bottomland mists, the only hint of a world outside their own two-track driveway curving out of sight around the corncrib. In the stillness he walked the bird-songed dawn down the footpath to the barn, where the cows were waiting.
The first official letter arrived right around the time Tom and Arlene took charge of the farm. President Eisenhower had signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act, designed to
create the interstate highway system that would transform a nation. Somewhere in Washington someone drew a line, and that line passed directly between the Hartwigs’ house and Cotter Creek. There were delays and skirmishes, but in 1965 the United States government— that is to say, we— sent bulldozers smack through the middle of Tom’s farm.
The first earth was shifted that winter, when a construction crew bulldozed a crooked ravine straight, then used a crane to install a 360-foot concrete culvert intended to redirect the water headed for Cotter Creek. The foreman asked if it would be okay if the cement trucks used Tom’s driveway, and Tom agreed. All winter long the trucks tore the driveway apart, but the foreman promised that they’d grade everything up shipshape when the job was done.
In spring, the rumbling commenced in earnest, led by twin-engine Caterpillar bulldozers and giant earth scrapers called Tournapulls. Fitted with engines fore and aft, the Tour-napulls were equipped with a bladed jaw that dropped open to scrape up a layer of earth that then accumulated in the low-slung belly of the machine to be carried off and dumped elsewhere. When the going got tough, the twin-engine Caterpillar dozers would pull in behind the twin-engine Tournapulls and give them a push. You had four huge diesel engines roaring in monstrous harmony then, and Tom says that up in the house the dishes rattled in the cupboards and down in the barn the cows stood wide-eyed and trembling.
The interstate opened on November 9, 1967. A series of seven ribbon-cutting ceremonies was scheduled, one at each interchange from Eau Claire to Black River Falls. According to an archived copy of that day’s Eau Claire Leader, the first was held sixteen miles northwest of Tom’s farm and began under blue skies at 9:30 a.m. sharp when a local high school band marched forth before a crowd of some four hundred bystanders to play “On Wisconsin” beneath a banner proclaiming A Salute to Highway Progress. A local pastor then offered a prayer in which he asked that motorists be thankful for the new highway but also “use sound judgment when driving it,” from which we can infer the pastor may have lapsed from prayer mode into sermon mode. After the introduction of dignitaries, the lieutenant governor gave a short speech and, exactly twenty-two minutes after the ceremony began, produced a pair of small black-handled scissors and cut the ribbon. Moments later the official party (consisting, according to the Leader, of fifty cars “from Volkswagens to Cadillacs”) curled around and down the on-ramp, followed by a “cavalcade” of average motoring citizens. The first accident was reported at 10:15 a.m., exactly twenty-three minutes after the ribbon fell. Somewhere you had to figure the pastor was holding his head in his hands.
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