Poppy had narrowly survived his early logging career in the dense bush of the Interior—along with the malaria he contracted there and various snakebites that killed off most of his contemporaries—to reach an age that seemed to surprise no one more than himself. Poppy was one hundred and one years old. He had not spoken more than three sentences at a time in the last three decades of his life. For this reason, much of his personal history remained unknown, even to his children. No one had any idea why he had become so fond of the polka program from Milwaukee. Thanks to the immense quantity of quinine he’d taken over the course of his life, Poppy was also largely deaf.