My name's Culp-Emo Culp. Emo's short for Emerson, of course. My pappy, he was a big fan of old Ralph Waldo, especially what the man had to say about self-reliance, and once I got old enough to read Emerson myself, I took quite a shine to him, too. But people've been calling me Emo ever since I was a kid, so I suspect now I'm pretty much stuck with it. I've got a middle name, too-Vandiver, like the town down the road-but nobody's ever called me by that. And then Culp's just short for Culp.

Anyway, I write a column called "A Nose For News" in the daily paper down here. It's mostly about human-interest stuff-you know, stories about puppies born with extra nipples and whatnot. It's the kind of stuff that ain't exactly leading off the evening news, but it's the stuff people get to talking about round the water cooler the next day nevertheless. I mean, really, it doesn't matter what the President of the United States does on any given night, you find yourself a puppy with an extra nipple, and that's the kind of thing people are gonna talk about. For days. I mean, I've written I don't know how many columns over the years, many of them with something substantive to say about the community-you know, what we could do to spruce up the town square, why the proposed county tax would be bad for the schools, things like that. Thing concerned citizens should care about, really. And maybe if I say something real controversial, like the time I suggested that we should eliminate yellow from our traffic lights, I'll get a letter or two from some of the old ladies in town, usually directing me to go to straight to hell or see a psychiatrist. But when I wrote that story about the puppy with the extra nipple, I was getting letters in the mail about it for weeks. I guess there's just no accounting for what strikes a chord in people. All I know is, I'm giving serious consideration to writing a book about puppies with supernumerary nipples. I'm telling you, that sucker'd be a best seller. At least in Mexico, that is. I'm talking about Mexico, Missouri, of course. That's where I'm from. Mexico, Missouri, born and raised.

Anyway, you may find the story I'm about to tell you hard to believe, on account of how unbelievable it is, but I swear on my mother's maiden name, it's all true, every word of it. Now, I suppose I might've gotten a detail or two wrong, like the color of somebody's sweater or the exact weight of the pig that crushed Delta Noble's "priceless" collection of them Hummel figurines or the license plate number of the hearse that carried the body of old Percy Crocker to his grave, but when it comes to the important facts of the story, the things that you're most likely to find unbelievable, well, that's all the stuff that's true. You're just gonna have to trust me on this. Cause I was there.

The ground was still soft the day they put Percy Crocker into the ground. Well, the day they put most of Percy Crocker into the ground. At that point, they still hadn't found his head yet.

It had been raining for the better part of three weeks, though the rains in the week leading up to the funeral weren't nearly as bad as what we'd had the two weeks prior. Those two weeks just about flooded Mexico off the map-it was, by seventeen inches, the worst flooding Audrain County had ever seen. You remember the Flood of '93, when the Mississippi went haywire and floated people out of their homes from all the way up in Minnesota to all the way down in Louisiana? Now, that was no picnic, but considering what happened to a lot of other towns in Missouri, Mexico didn't make out too badly in that one.

We paid off that debt in full with the Audrain Country Flood of '02.

It started on a Tuesday, if I remember correctly, with a storm that come up out of the southwest. It was a monster, something tropical, they said, a storm that had meandered its way up from the gulf and picked up steam as it made its way toward Missouri. Nobody knows quite why it hit us so hard-the weathermen kept saying something about the warm front from the west running into a cold front from the east, or something like that, which made the storm settle in smack-dab over Mexico for what seemed like days-but whatever it was, within hours, there was flash flooding across the county everywhere you looked.

We thought the worst of it had passed on that first day, even though the rains kept falling. It wasn't a steady rain-it was some drizzle, some downpour, some thunderstorms, an occasional pause during which you could run out to the sidewalk and claim the soaked lump of newsprint that was that day's edition of The Daily Mexican without getting too drenched yourself-but no matter how it came down, it kept coming, for days. By day four, every crick was a stream, every stream was a river, every puddle was a pond, every pond was a lake, and Lakeview Lake, which most Mexicans would agree is really just an overgrown pond with an ego problem, looked damn near as big as Lake Superior.

And then it got worse. Another storm, this one serious enough to have a name-Ines-swirled around in the Gulf of Mexico, building up steam until she decided to bolt north in the direction of our Mexico like we had stolen her son's lunch money. If rowboats hadn't already become the leading source of transportation in Audrain County by then, I'm sure there would have been more flash flooding, but as it was, we'd already been battered by so much rainfall that most people just glanced out the window, shrugged and said, "Mabel, it's rainin' again."

Finally, after loitering around Mexico like a hustler at a swap meet for about twelve hours, Ines got bored and headed off to Illinois to submerge several hundred automobiles there. For the next three days, some smaller storms followed in her wake, each one a bit weaker than the one before it until finally, on the second Friday after the rains had started, we got a day of sunlight. Mexico still looked like a Midwestern Venice, but I decided I'd been cooped up enough over those two weeks that, well, hell or high water, I was gonna get some fishing in, so I went down to Lakeview Lake (which by that point, as you might imagine, bore little resemblance to the lake from which I'd pulled two smallmouth bass the Monday before the rains began) and snuck in a few good hours of angling. I was lucky I'd gone down there when I did-the rains resumed the very next day, and while some fishermen will go on for hours extolling the virtues of donning a poncho and fishing in the rain, it's really never been my thing.

But I digress-I was telling you about Percy's funeral.

So as I was saying, the ground was soft that day, on account of all the rain. Actually, soft hardly does it justice-soupy is more like it-and truly, that gravesite was a sight to behold, surrounded as it was with practically one in every two Mexicans sloshing through the mud to gather around Percy's grave. You see, Percy was a popular, well-liked man about town-he'd been a football hero at Mexico State University in the late Sixties and early Seventies, and then a few years later he founded OriFlame, which was, at the time of his death, the largest employer in Mexico outside of the college. Percy had also made it his personal mission to sleep with any woman would could fill the C cup of a brassiere, so I suspect that several of the teary-eyed ladies in the crowd were crying for more sentimental reasons than they let on.

Anyway, the ones who had it worst that day were the pallbearers. They'd had a closed-casket deal in the church on account of Percy's body not having a head, but even without a head, Percy was a heavy man. Aw, hell, let's not mince words-the man was fat. Some of that girth came naturally-after all, he was six-foot-four, and he'd been an offensive lineman back in his football days, so he definitely qualified as big-boned-but some of that fat was just an occupational hazard. You see, OriFlame made gas grills. Percy, as the founder and CEO of OriFlame, considered himself the public face of the company, which meant that if there was a barbecue across town or across the country and he thought he could wrangle a photo op out of it, he was there, shirtsleeves rolled up to his elbows, stuffing whatever came off that OriFlame grill into his smiling face. And you can drink all the light beer you want, but when potato salad, cheeseburgers and bratwurst make up the other three food groups in your diet, and your lone exercise is the aforementioned skirt-chasing, you're bound to have a long-distance relationship with your toes. That's just the way the human metabolism works.

Had it worked otherwise, that rainy Saturday might have been much more pleasant for the pallbearers. Because the headless Percy, drained though he was of most of his body fluids in the embalming process, still weighed in excess of 350 pounds, and even though three of those pallbearers were his former offensive linemates, not a one of them had seen the inside of a weight room since graduating from MSU, and with the footing on the marshy ground being as tenuous as it was, well, it's no wonder they dropped the casket twice.

Now, personally, I understood-just watching those men struggle under the weight of that casket made me reconsider all my friendships with those who struggle with their weight-but some others in the crowd, mostly on account of the rain, but also because several of them had had their shoes sucked off into the muck, just wanted to get the whole thing over with.

Which made the eulogy that Sherman Strafford delivered that much more unbearable.

Sherman Strafford was one of Percy's college linemates, right guard to Percy's right tackle, and he also happened to be the Secretary of Agriculture of the United States of America. Everybody from Mexico was very proud of Sherman, and bragged about him as if he had actually set foot in town for something other than a campaign stop or a funeral at any point since he'd set out for Washington, D.C., twenty-two years earlier. But seeing as there were no cameras around, it was raining and many of us were accumulating sizable deposits of mud in the cuffs of our trousers, the general consensus was that there was no need for Sherman to deliver a stump speech at Elmwood Cemetery on the occasion of Percy's death. Besides, the Secretary of Agriculture isn't even something you can vote on.

Nevertheless, Sherman felt it was his place to pontificate. So he did.

"Friends, family, fellow Mexicans," he said. "We all loved Percy Crocker. I, for one, loved him like a brother. He stood forwell, I don't think it's saying too much to say that he stood for most of the things that are good and right with the world-family, honor, integrity, faith, dignityaaaahcharity, loyaltyanduhhhhhfamily. Yes, family, and a belief in the American Dream. Yes, a belief and a faith in the American Dream, a dream that came to him in his youth and never left him until the day he died. Yes, Percy believed in that dream, with all his heart, and with all his mind, and because of his faith, and because of his belief, and because of his passion for excellence, that's how he built OriFlame into the gas-grilling empire that it is today. I think you all know that without Percy Crocker, there would be no OriFlame empire. And it is an empire because of his dedication, and his beliefhishis faith. He had a vision, friends, a vision of a better life for his family, and a better gas grill that could be enjoyed safely by all Americans. And what he contributed to this town, this town of Mexico, Missouri, right here in the heart of Audrain County, what he contributed to the people, to the institutions of Mexico, Missouri, why, I doubt it could even be measured. Much the same way you have all struggled to measure the rain that has fallen these last few weeks, we will struggle for years to measure the impact that Percy had on the lives of those whose lives he touched. Indeed, it will be impossible to measure that impact, really, for the impact that he left impacted on the people who knew him will be felt for years to come. Perhaps you'll see a gas grill next week and think fondly of Percy. Perhaps next year you'll be out at a Conquistadors football game, and you'll see some young freshman line up on that offensive line wearing the number that ol' Percy Crocker used to wear, and you'll remember the times he used to flat-out flatten the defensive linemen that got in his way. Or maybe you'll drive past the OriFlame plant, and you'll remember the Thanksgiving turkeys that Percy used to give to the less-fortunate of Mexico-or maybe it'll be the Christmas turkeys. Or maybe you'll come back years from now and stand at Percy's grave, and you'll listen to the whisper of the wind, and the rustle of the leaves, and you'll remember the way he touched you, or the special thing he said to you that one time that made you believe in yourself more than you ever had before. That's how it'll be for me, I believe. I always looked up to Percy, and not just because he was taller than me. He was like the big brother I never had, and I'd even go so far as to say that there were times when he was a hero to me. Yes, I believe I'll always carry Percy with me, in a place close to my heart, a place that no one could ever"

It went on like that for another fifteen minutes.

The truly sad thing about Sherman's speech is that if Percy's son Durham had been the eulogizer, though he might not have been quite as effusive in the area of Percy's merits, he most certainly would have been a lot more concise, and we all could have gotten home a lot dryer.

Only problem was, on the day of Percy's funeral, Durham Crocker was locked up in the Audrain County jail.