(An exclusive story by the Ladies Committee of the Puke, Montana Public Library. . . which is closed on Sundays now.)
Most folks don't know much about Chainsaw Dave; where's he from? what's his story? Most everyone in town thinks he's always been here, even before there was a town. There's trees 60 feet tall here with his name carved in them way up top now, as they've grown so much since then. There's a picture in Shirley's saloon (back of the bar, left of the mirror that Jessup broke with his head, in the fight - was it in '53 ? - with Harlan over that tramp, what was her name? ) showing Chainsaw and somebody looks a lot like Jack Kennedy having a snowball fight in Harvard Yard.
Chainsaw's a mystery, for sure, and we (The Ladies Committee) don't pretend to know it all, but here's what we do know for almost sure.
Back in 1964, Chainsaw Dave was a New York City boy (stop that laughing back there, when it's time for laughing, you'll be told) enrolled in Brooklyn Polytech, studying Aeronautical Engineering. At the time, he was seeing a Miss Christina Radomski who was an artist, but she crashed her car into a wall in Vermont and she died. We wish that part of the story was fiction, but sadly, it isn't.
Dave pretty much disappeared after that.
Wasn't for ten years that Dave showed up in anybody's news, and then it was in the town of Creekshit, West Virginia when the Sheriff claimed, before the circuit judge, that Dave, under the influence of some liquors that Crazy June brewed him, drove his modified Harley through the wall of Gus's barber shop. The actual reason was never made clear, but as Chainsaw pleaded guilty, the reason didn't much matter, and he was sentence to 60 days of church yard cleanup for the offense.
Puke, Montana (the town in this story) has 657 people living in it today, and that's not far from the average over it's last 50 or so years. People just don't stay here. Nobody living here today came from anyplace else, except for Dave, and he came from the biggest city in the world, to live here. You need to reflect on that for a time. He came here. He left other places, the biggest places, and dropped his anchor down right here. Just thinking on that fact makes you feel that at least one person in the outside world thought kindly of this place.
Town legend says that every house here's got a piece of Chainsaw's work . . . a board, a log, a door or window, or a porch, or a garden fence, maybe even the whole house . . . has some mark put on it by the person who chose to come and live here. Out there on his gravestone, it says "Riposa in pace, vecchio" on account that, the legend says anyways, he found peace here.
Back in big cities, we suppose that all people would say about him (if anything at all) is "He dropped out of civilization and died in some shithole named Puke, Montana".
Here in town, we say that everyone's got their different ways of looking at things.
page written by Dave Leo