The Hour I First Believed. Wally Lamb
with the lowest recidivism rate in the country, and they came up with Bride Lake.”
“The women’s prison? When was this?”
“Long time ago. ’Seventy-eight, ’seventy-nine. The producers came up, dug around, and discovered Lolly. She was a guard there at the time, but she was also the granddaughter of the woman who’d established the place. See, before my great-grandmother came along, they used to just lock up the women with the men. The assumption was that they were throw-aways anyway.”
“Oh, my God, that’s horrible,” Valerie said.
“But my great-grandmother had this idea that a separate facility run by women—plus fresh air, sunshine, farmwork, schoolwork—would rehabilitate. Community service, too. Giving back was part of her formula. And it worked, too, I guess. Sociologists, criminologists, shrinks: they came from all over to study her methods. Sigmund Freud visited once. That was in the 60 Minutes story, I remember. There’s this great picture of Freud and my great-grandmother strolling the grounds arm in arm.
“But anyway, they loved Lolly—the producers, the crew, Morley Safer. She’d never paid much attention to television, so she wasn’t intimidated by it. And that made her, whaddaya call it? Telegenic. And on top of that, Lolly’s a great storyteller. She told Safer about the day Sophie Tucker came to visit an old vaudeville friend who was in for larceny and stayed on to do a show. And about the summer when the inmates served as surrogate mothers for a bunch of monkeys that were being fed experimental doses of lithium up the road at the state hospital. And the time when ‘the gals’ made hootch from the dried fruit platters the Baptist church ladies had given them for Christmas, and they were drunk on their asses when the state inspector dropped by for a visit.”
Valerie laughed. Touched Lolly’s hand.
“But like I said, Morley Safer got a kick out of Lolly. Sent his crew back to New York and stayed for supper. My aunt’s companion fried some chicken and made peach cobbler, and Lolly told more stories. And somehow that night, he and Lolly discovered they shared a birthday, November the eighth. They’ve sent each other a birthday card ever since.”
“Wow,” Valerie said. “Well, now that I know I’m taking care of a TV star, I’ll have to give her the VIP treatment.”
I smiled, teared up a little. “I just want her to be okay,” I said.
Valerie pulled a tissue from the little box on Lolly’s tray table and handed it to me. “Sure you do.”
I left the hospital sometime between eight and nine. There was a Taco Bell on West Main Street now; that was new. I pulled up to the drive-thru, got a couple of burritos. Ate as I drove. The endless day flew back at me in fragments: the post-prom, the monk and his praying mantis, the chaos theorist’s jawing. God as mutability, I thought. God as flux….
THE ROAD HOME WAS TRAFFICKY with cars heading to and from Wequonnoc Moon. I drove past its purple and green glow. Took the left onto Ice House Road, and then the right onto Bride Lake. Nearing the farm, I approached the prison compound. Braked. “Grandma’s prison,” Lolly always called it.
I put on my blinker. Slowed down, swung left, and headed up the dirt driveway to the farmhouse. My headlights caught a raccoon on the front porch, feasting out of the cat food dish. I cut the engine and got out of the car. “Get!” I shouted. Unintimidated, it sat up on its haunches and looked at me as if to say, And who might you be? It took its sweet time waddling down the stairs and into the darkness.
The storm windows were still in; the door latch was busted. I could take care of that stuff while I was here. The old tin coffeepot was where it always was. I reached in, and touched the front door key. In the foyer, I fumbled, my hand batting at the darkness until I felt the old-fashioned pull chain. I yanked it, squinted…. Things looked the same, pretty much—a little shabbier, maybe, a little more cluttery. Things smelled the same, too: musty carpet, cooking grease, a slight whiff of cat piss. I put down my travel bag and walked over to the large framed photograph that hung on the wall at the foot of the stairs. “Bride Lake Farm, Aerial View, August 1948.”
God, this house, I thought. This abandoned Bride Lake life.
The place was radioactive with memories.
Chapter Four
MOTHER SAYS I’M NOT TO cross Bride Lake Road without permission, or dawdle near the ladies’ prison fence, or walk past it to our south field where the corn maze is. But I’ve done all three this morning because I’m mad at Mother and really, really mad at Grandpa Quirk. He said I’m too young to run the cash register, and I’m not. In our arithmetic workbook, I zoom through the money pages and I’m always the first one done. “Well, I’m sorry, Davy Crockett, but this is our livelihood,” Grandpa said. “No means no.”
Mother said yes, we can go to the movies tomorrow if she finishes the priests’ ironing, but no, we cannot see I Was a Teenage Frankenstein. “You’re too young for those kind of pictures, Caelum. They could give you scary dreams.”
I already have scary dreams, but Mother doesn’t know. They’re a secret.
October is busy at our farm: hay rides, pumpkins, the maze, the cider press. So many people come to Bride Lake Farm that we have to get extra helpers from the ladies’ prison—not just Hennie, who takes care of Great-Grandma Quirk, but other ladies, too. Aunt Lolly picks them because she works at the prison. Most people need eight hours’ sleep, but Aunt Lolly only needs five. Every day, she works at the farm, then takes her bath, puts on her uniform, and walks across the road to the prison. She doesn’t get home until after my bedtime. There’s good and bad prisoners, Aunt Lolly says, and she knows the difference.
Chicago and Zinnia run the cider press. Chicago has big muscles. “Good luck if you met her in a dark alley,” Grandpa said. Zinnia’s fat, and she breathes real loud, and has orange hair. “Bleach,” Aunt Lolly told Mother. “They snitch it from the laundry. Half the girls on the colored tier are strutting around like Rhonda Fleming.” Mother said they’ll be sorry when their hair starts falling out. Grandpa thinks all the colored people come from Hershey, Pennsylvania, and that’s why some are dark chocolate, some are milk chocolate, and once in a while, one comes out white chocolate. They don’t come from Pennsylvania, though. Colored people come from Africa. Mother says Grandpa Quirk’s not as funny as he thinks he is.
In our parlor? We have this picture of our farm that some guy took from when he was up in his airplane. On account of, this other time, he had to emergency-land in our hay field. Grandpa had it blowed up and put in a frame. On the bottom, it says, “Bride Lake Farm, Aerial View, August 1948.” In the picture, you can see the way Bride Lake Road cuts right across our farm. Our house and our barn and the apple orchard are on one side, and the pasture and the cornfields are on the other. The prison farm and Bride Lake are on our side, too—right in the middle. Grandpa says a long, long time ago, Bride Lake used to be part of our land. But then Grandpa Quirk’s father died and his mother had to sell some of the farm to Connecticut. So that’s when the prison got built. In the airplane picture, the cows look like ladybugs and the prison ladies look like fleas. There’s different Alden Quirks, you know: Daddy is Alden Quirk the Third, Grandpa’s Alden Quirk the Second, and Grandpa’s father was just plain Alden. If my name was Alden instead of Caelum, I’d be Alden Quirk the Fourth. “Well, someone had to come along and break the curse,” Daddy said. Then he told me not to tell Grandpa that he said it—that it was a secret between just me and him.
When Grandpa told me Bride Lake used to be ours instead of the prison’s, I was mad. Aunt Lolly says there’s perch in there, and bass, and crappies. Aunt Lolly takes the prison ladies fishing sometimes. “City girls,” she said. “Tough as nails. But then they’ll see some itty-bitty snapping turtle, or get a fish on their line, God forbid, and they turn to jelly. I’ve had to wade in after more dropped poles than I care to remember.” Grandpa says, when he was a little kid, he used to get to fish at Bride Lake all the time because Great-Grandpa was the farm manager for the prison, and Great-Grandma was like the principal or something. Grandpa says he always used to try and catch this one largemouth