Free Population 485 by Michael Perry

name the chunks, the township adjacent to Priddy’s settlement is christened Auburn Township in honor of Auburn, New York. Up the trail nine miles, a man named C. M. Tarr is so taken with the name, he starts a little village and names it Auburn also. Eventually, this Auburn will be subsumed into Cartwright Mills, only to resurface during the liquor license controversy of 1902. On August 3, 1904, the handwritten entry in the Village Minutes reads, “That the village of Auburn henceforth be called New Auburn.” The Oliver Goldsmith loop was complete.

    We wind up the Tricky Jackson call with the usual smoke-and-joke session. We talk about what went well and what didn’t go so well, and how we might handle the next incident in which a carful of five people hits the laundromat—an exercise that speaks to both the importance and futility of emergency planning—but mostly we just shoot the breeze, an underrated joy. We stand among the trucks. Instead of the traditional red, they are painted bright yellow. And on the door of each truck, in reflective gold leaf, it says New Auburn Area Fire Department. It tickles me sometimes, when we’re standing around the fire hall talking about coon hunting and stock cars, to look at those truck doors and think of Goldsmith, bent over his desk, composing in pentameter, crafting verse, a fragment of which would survive to be pasted on our fire trucks. It is a tangible thread to the past. Establishing a connection between the peeing plywood boy and the Mannekin-Pis is an exercise in corollaries, aimed at deflating pretension. Linking our fire trucks to eighteenth-century literature is an exercise in map reading. We find a trail leading back over the landscape of time, and we find ourselves bearing forward the remnants of a distant aesthetic not immediately evident in our detritus, but ours to claim, nonetheless. Whatever else he did, Goldsmith put a name on the place I have always called home, no matter where I stood at the time I invoked the name.

S ILVER S TAR

    P UKE IS THE GREAT CONSTANT. Sick people puke, dying people puke, excited people puke, people puke while they’re having heart attacks, they puke when their lacerated brains swell, they puke because they get carsick lying on the cot looking up at the dome lights.
    I got the puke christening early. I was in training, still doing ride-alongs as the third wheel on a two-man crew. The page came during a swampy stretch of weather—humidity and temperature readings had been crowding the high nineties for a week. I pulled open the apartment door, and the stench rolled out like warm fog. The living room was packed with family. As I trotted past the kitchen table, I saw piles of trash and dishes and a capacious tureen heaped with onion skins and potato peelings. The patient, Helen, was in the bathroom. The bathroom went about five feet by eight feet, and Helen went about five feet by 350 pounds. She was on the toilet, wedged between the sink and the tub. It was upward of 90 degrees in there, and she was wrapped in a voluminous flannel nightgown. From the smell of things, there were bits of Helen that had seen neither air nor water for a long, long time. I stood in the tub. Donnie and Todd, the two veterans training me, shoved the cot in and stood watching from the door. The cot took up all the remaining floor space. I guessed I was on my own. Helen’s daughter poked her head between Donnie and Todd. “She’s been sick for a couple days. She had a seizure today. She can’t stand up.”
    I tried to help Helen stand, but she just hollered. I looked to Donnie and Todd. They were giving me the rookie smirk. Behind them, I could see the faces of the family, arranged in an arc, peering at me expectantly. I began to sweat. In the end, a fireman wedged himself in the tub with me, and between the two of us, we convinced Helen to wriggle while we tugged and pushed, and after violating every safe lifting technique ever proposed, wrestled her to