The Hour I First Believed. Wally Lamb
know how Bride Lake got called Bride Lake? Because a long, long time ago—when George Washington or Abraham Lincoln was president—this man and lady were getting married by the lake, and some other lady shot the bride in the head. Because they both loved the same man. The groom. Aunt Lolly says every once in a while, one of the prison ladies says she seen the ghost, walking out by the lake in her bride dress. “Nothing kills a nice quiet shift like one of those ghost sightings,” Aunt Lolly told Mother. “Of course, most of the girls were brought up on superstitions. Burn your hair when it falls out, or your enemy will get ahold of it and make trouble. Don’t look head-on at a gravestone, or someone you love will die. Don’t let your feet get swept with a broom, or you’ll end up in jail.”
“I guess they all got their feet swept,” Mother said.
I asked Hennie if she ever saw the ghost, and she said no. Chicago said no, too. Zinnia said she might have seen her one night, down near the root cellar, but she might have been dreaming.
This is how you make cider. First, Chicago cranks the crank and the press comes down and crushes the apples. Then the juice comes out and trickles down the trough and goes through the strainer. Then it runs into the big funnel, and out through the tube and into the glass jugs. Chicago scrapes the smushed apples into the slop barrel with a hoe, and dumps the new ones onto the pressing table, and they go bumpity, bump, bump, and they don’t know they’re about to get crushed to death.
Zinnia’s job is bottling and capping the cider when it comes out of the tube. She has to switch the jugs fast, so that not much spills on the ground. Grandpa won’t let me fill the cider jugs, because the only time I did it, I forgot to switch the tube and cider spilled all over the ground. Aunt Lolly says I’m lucky Grandpa won’t let me fill the jugs. “The sugar from the spillage attracts bees,” she said. “You want to get stung all day long, like poor Zinnia?”
Zinnia always wants to hug me and pat me because she has a boy my same age named Melvin. I said maybe some day Melvin could come play at our farm, and I could bring him to the maze and show him the shortcuts. Zinnia started crying. That’s when I seen that she has freckles. All my Massachusetts cousins have freckles, but I never knew colored people got them.
I have chores, you know. Feed the chickens, bottle-feed the calves. My allowance is fifty cents. Plus, I earn more for extra jobs, like weeding and picking up the drops at the orchard. Grandpa gives me a nickel for every bushel basket I fill. And you know what? Brown apples and wormy apples are good for making cider, because it means the apples are nice and sweet. There’s no worm guts in the cider, though, because of the strainer. When the slop barrel’s full? Chicago has to roll it down the path and dump it underneath the barn, on top of the manure pile. There’s this hole in the barn floor, and when you shovel out the manure, you throw it down the hole. And after, Grandpa uses it for fertilizer. He says apple slop sweetens the milk.
Zinnia and Chicago get to use our downstairs bathroom when they have to go, because we can trust them. They eat their lunch on our back porch—two sandwiches each, plus Coca-Colas and cake or pie for dessert. They told me our lunches are better than prison lunches because Hennie doesn’t skimp on the meat or the cheese. Zinnia always gives Chicago one of her sandwiches, so Chicago eats three. Chicago eats pie with her fingers, and then she sucks them clean instead of using her napkin.
You know what Zinnia’s got? A tattoo that says, “Jesus
a
v
e
s.” It starts on the palm of her hand and goes up her arm. She told me she made it with a safety pin and fountain pen ink, and it hurt but it was worth it. Sometimes, when she stares and stares at her tattoo, she can feel Jesus wrap his arms around her and calm her down. Mother says I better never try giving myself any tattoo, because my blood could get poisoned.
Zinnia hugs me different than Mother does. Mother hugs me stiff, and pats my back with these fast little pitty-pats, and I just stand there and wait for her to finish. But when Zinnia squeezes me, I squeeze back. Once, when she was hugging me, she started rocking back and forth and thinking I was Melvin. “How you eatin’, Melvin? How your asthma? Your mama’s main sufferation in life is missing you, baby boy.” She was holding me so tight and so long that Chicago had to stop cranking and help me. “Come on now, Zinni,” she said. “This boy ain’t your boy. Let him go.”
If you had poisoned blood, it might be good, because then bad people wouldn’t come near you. “Get back!” you could say. “You want to be poisoned?”
Nobody even knows I’m down here at the corn maze, or that I took more stuff from the kitchen. It’s not stealing, because Hennie would let me have it anyway. I took a chunk of the ham we had last night, and some icebox cookies, and some potatoes from the bin. This time I remembered to wrap the potatoes in aluminum foil like he wants. If he’s not there, he said, I’m supposed to just leave it. Hide it in the baby buggy, under the baby.
The maze doesn’t open until ten o’clock, and it’s only eight o’clock, so the rope’s hanging across the entrance, between the two sawhorses, and the “Keep Out” sign is up. One time? Teenagers snuck into the maze at night, and took the Quirk family’s heads off and smashed them. Grandpa and me found them on Saturday morning, when we were putting out the free hot cocoa. “Goddamn juvenile delinquents,” Grandpa said. He had to shovel the broken pumpkins into the back of the truck and hurry and pick out five new ones. And Aunt Lolly had to draw on all the new faces quick, before the customers came.
“Juvenile delinquents” means teenagers. One of them put a lady’s bra on Mrs. Quirk, over her dress, and she looked weird with a bra on and no head. The pumpkins’ insides looked like smashed brains.
When you figure out the maze and get to the middle, where the Quirk family is, that’s when you get your free cocoa. It’s on a table in two big thermos jugs, and there’s cups and a ladle, and the sign says, “One cup per customer, PLEASE!” because some people are pigs. The Quirk Family is Mr. and Mrs. Quirk, their son and daughter, and their little baby in the baby buggy that used to be my baby buggy. We stuff them with newspapers and corn husks, and they wear our old clothes. This year, the boy’s wearing my last year’s dungarees, and my rippy shirt that I chewed a hole in the front of when I tried out for Little League, and my Davy Crockett coonskin cap. I didn’t want my coonskin cap anymore after Grandpa told me the fur tail looked like it had the mange. I yanked it off and threw it in my toy chest. But Aunt Lolly sewed it back on for the Quirk boy. “First time I’ve had to thread a needle since Home Economics,” she told Hennie and me. “Damn, I hated that class. My brother got to go to woodworking and make a knickknack shelf, and I had to do all that prissy sewing.”
“Here, give me that, you ninny,” Hennie said, but Aunt Lolly said no, no, now she was on a mission. She had to take lots of tries to get the thread through the needle. Each time, she stuck her tongue out and made cross-eyes, and me and Hennie laughed. Hennie and Aunt Lolly can be friends at our house, but not at the prison. If Hennie called Aunt Lolly a ninny over there, she’d get in trouble and have to go to this place called “the cooler.” Which, I think, is like a freezer or something.
Sometimes, if Great-Grandma takes a long nap, Hennie makes me gingerbread. She’s been working at our house for so long, she doesn’t even need anyone to walk her over from the jail anymore. She just waves to the guard at the gate, and he waves back. I saw Hennie and Aunt Lolly kissing once, out on the sun porch. They didn’t see me seeing them. On the lips.
You know what? The people that go into our maze are stupid. First, they run down all the dead ends and go, Huh? Then they go back on the same paths where they already went and don’t even realize it. Some people get so mixed up, they end up back at the entrance. I’m not supposed to show anybody the shortcuts. “Folks want to be lost for a little while, Caelum,” Grandpa Quirk said. “That’s the fun of it. And anyway, nobody likes a know-it-all.”
In the desk, out in the barn office, there’s this map that Daddy drew. It shows what the maze looks like if you’re a helicopter flying over it, or the geese. Daddy invented the maze, back when he was being good. He’s the one who thought