Population 485 by Michael Perry

Author:Michael Perry [Perry, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2002-04-09T21:00:00+00:00

When Barry Lynn was a boy, he racked tobacco in North Carolina. The fieldwork made him hardy, and gave him a man’s hands, but he was never like the other boys, and childhood was not easy for a boy with no appetite for mud or baseball. He speaks fondly of an aunt, who even then, even in Carolina before the First World War, understood the boy was different. She’d sneak him bits of lace and ribbon: “pretties,” he called them. Like a scattering of bright feathers left by a flown bird, the pretties implied other worlds.

Barry is eighty-nine years old now. For the last two decades, he and his younger partner, Michael Doran, have been teaching and performing modern dance in a weathered schoolhouse up a dead-end road just off Highway 27, south of Ladysmith, Wisconsin. The area runs heavy to fishing, hunting, and logging, and the surrounding townships are salted with poverty and backwoods scrabblers. The studio sits at the edge of an abandoned farmstead, a lily amid a stand of pulp. It is an anomaly only if you think art belongs somewhere else.

The first time I met Barry, he was eating salad at the Old Country Buffet. With his velour top and sandals, his longish snowy locks, his shoulder bag, and his eyeliner, he was an octogenarian sprite among a herd of all-you-can-eat size XXXL roughnecks sausaged into size XL NASCAR T-shirts. Michael was wearing a blousy, tie-dyed purple pirate shirt with matching long-tailed bandana and tasseled neck pendant. The NASCAR crowd didn’t pay much attention. Disinterest is a form of tolerance.

I go see Barry and Michael dance sometimes. It isn’t far. Over the river and through the woods, basically. My knowledge of dance doesn’t extend much beyond what I can find in my copy of Microsoft Bookshelf ’95 and a New Yorker profile of Merce Cunningham, but sometimes, when Barry is moving to the rhythm of his breath or Michael arcs a finger just so, I want to run down to the local tavern league softball field and say, drop your gloves, your bats, your beer, and come and see this astounding, delicate thing! There are times in that studio when I feel the husk fall right off my soul.

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