Coop_ A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting - Michael Perry [107]
Like the legendary bullet unheard, the worst bad news rarely gives warning, but rather drops on your head without so much as a shadow to announce it. Think of a feed bag filled with lead shot and allowed to achieve terminal velocity before the dead thump, the impact so echoless and mundane that for one dumb moment we fail to recognize the devastation for what it is.
When the cell phone rang the first time, I did not hear it because I was wandering around the home improvement store and had left the phone in the cluttered front seat of my car. When it rang the second time, I had just departed the lot and was merging to the frontage road. I fished it out, flipped it open, and put it to my ear. Anneliese, her voice dreadfully calm: “You need to go to the hospital. Jake had an accident. He’s coming on the chopper.”
Over twenty years now I have responded to emergencies in the instant, and for the first time ever I went dead blank. I remember the car moving silently down the road while I tried to put the name in context ( Jake…Jake?), tried to get a fix on the message, tried to know what to do, and then the familiar cold focus cleared my brain. I flipped the turn signal and turned right opposite of the way I had been headed.
My brother Jed knew he wanted to be a farmer from the time he was in diapers. He was still in them when he climbed aboard the Ferguson tractor and managed to punch the starter and get it lurching forward, although thankfully the key was off so he didn’t go far. When he was a preschooler I built him a haymow on the doghouse and rigged a pulley system so he could pull up the miniature hay bales that Dad made for him by hand-tripping the baler knotter. When he got older, my folks had a tough time getting Jed to maintain decent grades in school—not because he lacked the aptitude, but because he simply didn’t see the need for any lessons not available on the farm. In high school they homeschooled him for a while, mainly to prevent him languishing in a classroom. Mom taught him to make bread, how to cook and can, and how to patch his own jeans. Dad assigned him farmbased math problems and lined him up with a work-study job at the feed mill in Chetek. He pushed railcars, unloaded feed, and learned some agribusiness.
He returned to school for his senior year because he wanted to graduate with his friends, and then as soon as the cap and gown were stowed, he began muscling out a living. By turns a farmer, a logger, an over-the-road trucker, and a laborer for any occasion, he supports his family doing whatever it takes as long as it’s honest and borderline legal. For a while he did custom choring—milking cows and overseeing the operation for farmers who wanted to take a week off, or needed temporary help. He was good at it. A couple of farmers came back to find milk production had actually gone up in their absence. Word got out, and he got hired a lot. In the meantime, he was carving out his own living—running a joint milking operation with a friend for a while, doing custom fieldwork, and always the logging and truck driving. He saved up and bought the neighboring farm and took to raising crops and young stock. He got some pigs. And after years of bachelorhood, he found a blond country girl named Sarah and married her. They had been married seven weeks when Sarah was killed in a car accident. Jed answered the call as a member of the fire department and was the first on scene. He did as he was trained, but it wasn’t enough.
The darkness was unimaginable. But he emerged, and married Leanne. She came to the marriage with