The Hour I First Believed. Wally Lamb
get annulled. Last year, when I made my First Communion, Monsignor gave me a Saint Christopher medal because Mother’s always so helpful. All us kids got scapulars and little prayer books, but only I got a Saint Christopher medal. After Sunday dinner, Mother irons the priests’ clean clothes and drives them back. And if she finishes in time, then we can go to the movies. My favorite movie is Old Yeller, except for the part where Travis had to shoot Old Yeller because he got hydrophoby. Mother’s favorite movie is The Song of Bernadette. She says Jesus sends messages to the boys he picks to become priests, and that I should always look and listen for signs.
“What kind of signs?” I said.
“It could be anything. A voice, a vision in the sky.”
One time I saw a cloud that looked like a man with a big Jimmy Durante nose. When I sing “Inka Dinka Do” with my Jimmy Durante voice, the grown-ups always laugh. And at the end, I go, “Good night, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are!” and they clap and tell me to do it again. Mother never laughs, though. She says that Jimmy Durante cloud was not a sign from Jesus. I told Mother the Bushmen think God is a praying mantis, and she said that was just plain silly.
Mother and I are Catholic, and Grandpa Quirk and Aunt Lolly are Protestant. One Sunday, when Mother was outside warming up our car for church, I heard Grandpa ask Aunt Lolly, “Have the cat lickers left yet?” On the way over to St. Anthony’s, I asked Mother what cat lickers were. Her hands squeezed the steering wheel, and she took a puff of her cigarette and put it back in the ashtray. “Catholics,” she said. “You and me. If Grampy Sullivan heard Grandpa Quirk call us ‘cat lickers,’ he’d be pretty gosh darn mad.”
Aunt Lolly and Grandpa Quirk don’t have to go to church unless they want to, and they don’t have to eat Mrs. Paul’s stupid fish sticks on Friday. Mother gets mad if I hold my nose when I eat my fish sticks. “Like a little fish with your ketchup?” Grandpa always says. When Mother’s not looking, he sneaks me bites of meat.
My Grampy and Grammy Sullivan live in Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts, and so don’t all my freckle-faced Sullivan cousins. When we go visit, Grampy Sullivan won’t speak to Mother. It’s because first, she didn’t marry a cat licker, and then, she got a divorce. Whenever Mother walks into a room, Grampy Sullivan walks out. Mother says he’s probably going to start speaking to her after she gets annulled. Poor Mother has to wait and wait and wait, like I had to wait until after Valentine’s Day before I got my Christmas present from Daddy.
When I was little? I used to think Grandpa Quirk was Mother’s father, but he’s not. Grandpa Quirk is Daddy and Aunt Lolly’s father. Aunt Lolly and Daddy are twins, except they don’t look alike, the way the Birdsey twins in my grade do. Aunt Lolly’s taller than Daddy, even though she’s the girl. Plus, she’s a little bit chubby and Daddy’s skinny. He has black hair, and a bushy beard, and two missing front teeth that aren’t going to grow back because they weren’t his baby teeth. Daddy and Aunt Lolly’s mother died in the middle of having Daddy, so Grandpa had to raise them by himself. And Great-Grandma Lydia was kind of like their grandmother and their mother. She wasn’t crazy then. Aunt Lolly said Great-Grandma used to be very, very smart. Daddy said, “My sister came out first, so she grabbed all the smarts and left me all the stupids.” He said he was the runt in a litter of two.
A lot of the kids in my class can’t tell the Birdsey twins apart, except I can. Thomas has a little dot near his eyebrow and Dominick doesn’t. Sometimes Thomas is a crybaby. They came over my house once. Dominick and I played Whirlybirds, on account of that’s both of our favorite show. I was Chuck, and Dominick was P.T., and we jumped down from the loft onto the bales of hay, like we had to jump out of our helicopter just before it crashed. Thomas was too chicken to play Whirlybirds. He only wanted to play with the barn kittens and throw a stick for Queenie.
Queenie’s our dog. She’s brown and white, and has these little eyebrows that make her look sad even when she’s happy. We got her from Jerry, the artificial insemination man. When Jerry comes to our farm, he brings this stuff called spunk that’s from the best sires in the state. I asked Grandpa what spunk is and he said, “Male stuff.” Jerry puts it in the cows’ hineys with this big needle-looking thing. And later, the cows have calves that grow up to be good milkers. If they’re girls. Grandpa writes a chalk mark on the barn wall every time a calf is born—X if it’s a male, an O if it’s a female. He says he’d be rich if he could only figure out how to milk a bull.
When I was a baby? It wasn’t Grandpa and Aunt Lolly that did the milking. It was Grandpa and Daddy. Then Grandpa and Daddy had a big fight, and we had to move, and Daddy worked at this place that made helicopters. I don’t remember any of that. All’s I remember is Mother and me living at the farm without Daddy. I’m the only kid in my class whose parents got a divorce.
When I was in first grade, and Daddy was being good? Grandpa let him sleep on a cot in the milk house. He got to have Sunday dinner with us, too. Mother didn’t want him to eat with us, but it wasn’t her decision. It was Grandpa’s decision. When Grandpa’s foot got infected was when Daddy started being good. Grandpa couldn’t milk, so Daddy came back and him and Lolly milked. Daddy was the one who taught me how to hang a spoon off my nose so it just stays there, and how to sing “Inka Dinka Do.” At school, I did the spoon trick for our talent show, and everyone wanted me to teach them how to do it. At recess, kids kept chasing me and going, “Please, Caelum. Please.”
Daddy got the idea for the corn maze when he was staying in the milkhouse. At first, Grandpa said no—it wouldn’t work. All people wanted was to drive out, buy their apples and pumpkins, and show their kids the cider press. And anyway, Grandpa said, what he needed come fall was silage, and what he didn’t need was everyone in Three Rivers and their uncle tramping through his cornfields. Then he changed his mind and told Daddy he could try it. So Daddy drew that map, and when the corn was about a foot high, he put me on his lap and we tractored down the paths and dead-ends and loop-de-loops. And I was the one who held the map.
That first year, it was Daddy and me who stuffed the Quirk family. And it was Daddy, not Aunt Lolly, who drew on the faces. “Free cocoa?” Grandpa said. “I thought we were trying to make money, not lose it.” But he changed his mind about that, too, and you know how much money the maze made us? Six hundred dollars! So Daddy got to eat Sunday dinner with us, whether Mother liked it or not.
One time, after Sunday dinner, Daddy made Mother cry. Lolly and Grandpa took Great-Grandma for a car ride, so it was just the three of us. Mother told Daddy to leave, but I wanted him to stay and play with me, so she said he could. Daddy was being nice at first. He tried to help Mother by bringing the dishes out to the kitchen, but she said she didn’t need any help. “If you two are going to play,” she said, “then play.”
Daddy read me the funny papers. Then we played tic-tac-toe. He wasn’t paying attention, though. He kept tapping his foot and looking over at the record player cabinet. “Want to hear a record?” he said. I said yes, either Bozo the Clown Under the Sea or Hopalong Cassidy and the Square Dance Holdup. But Daddy said he felt like listening to music. “Where’s your checker set at?” he said. “Go get it and we’ll play some checkers.”
At first, I thought the checkerboard was up in my room. Then I remembered it was in the pantry drawer. When I got to the bottom of the stairs, Daddy was standing at the record player cabinet. Except the door on the other side was open—the side where Grandpa’s liquor’s at. Daddy took a big swig out of one of Grandpa’s bottles, and then another swig, and then he noticed me. He put the bottle back and cleared his throat. “They used to keep the records on this side,” he said. “Guess I got mixed up. Got a little thirsty, too, but that’s between me and you, buddy. Okay?” And I said okay.
Grandpa’s good at checkers, but Daddy stunk. Plus, he was playing that Dean Martin music so loud, I couldn’t concentrate. When Mother came back to the dining room to get the tablecloth, he said, “Rosemary Kathleen Sullivan, my wild Irish rose.”
Mother didn’t say anything. She bunched up the tablecloth kind of mad and tried to walk past Daddy, but he pushed his chair out so she couldn’t get by. Then he touched her hiney.
“Don’t!”