The Hour I First Believed. Wally Lamb
shovel was? Four generations of Quirks had farmed here, if I remembered the history right. Five, if you counted me, which I didn’t. I’d done my share of farmwork growing up—from junior high through grad school and beyond. But I’d never liked farming much—had never been interested in taking over. For the past several years, whenever Lolly mentioned my inheriting the farm, I’d cut her off. “Get out of here, you old coot,” I’d say. “You’ll outlive me.” But she hadn’t. And now, like it or not, this place was mine—the history and the burden of it.
Leaving the barn, I spotted Lolly’s plaid jacket hanging from a hook—the one she was wearing the day she’d waved us off to Colorado. I reached out and grabbed the sleeve. Clutched it in my fist for a few seconds, and then let it go.
Most of the two dozen trees in the orchard looked blighted. Not long before we moved to Colorado, I’d helped Lolly cut down three or four of the dead ones. I saw her now, goggles on, chain saw in hand. “You’re a maniac with that thing, old lady!” I’d yelled, over the buzz and the blade’s bite, and she’d laughed and nodded like it was high praise. The apple house was in sorry shape, too—busted windows, half-collapsed roof. Well, what did it matter? The cider press was gone—sold to Olde Mistick Village years ago. There was nothing left in there that the rain could wreck. Let the bats and mice have it.
I headed back down, crossed Bride Lake Road, and started toward the cornfields on the far side of the prison. Walking along the road, I thought about how fucked up the layout was: a fifty-acre women’s prison parked in the middle of a two-hundred-acre family farm. Lolly had filled me in on the history of the farm a few years back. Christmas day, it was—Maureen’s and my first trip back home after we’d moved west. Mo and Hennie were in the kitchen, cleaning up, and Lolly and I had lingered at the dining room table, drinking brandy and passing around the old family pictures. I’d heard a lot of Lolly’s Quirk family stories before, but that day, for some reason, I was more interested in them than usual. Why was that? Because I’d finally escaped Three Rivers? Because I’d reached my mid-forties? Whatever the reason, part of the pleasure that day was witnessing Lolly’s pleasure in telling them to me.
The sale of land to the state had been a desperation move, Lolly’d said. The original Caelum was MacQuirk, a native of Glasgow, Scotland. He’d married into manufacturing money and come to America to oversee his father-in-law’s latest acquistion, the Three Rivers Bleaching Dyeing & Printing Company. But Caelum MacQuirk had failed at both textile mill management and marriage, Lolly said; he’d operated the company at greater and greater loss and fathered a child out of wedlock. To be rid of him, his father-in-law had bought him off, and with the money MacQuirk had purchased a two-hundred-and-fifty-acre tract of land along the southernmost boundary of Three Rivers. He’d married the child’s mother and taken up farming, but had failed at that, too. “Hung himself,” Lolly said, matter-of-factly. “Left his widow and son land-rich but cash-poor.”
It would have made more sense for the widow Quirk to sell acreage at either the east or west end, but, according to Lolly, the state of Connecticut strong-armed her into selling them the tenderloin of the property, lake and all. Still, it had all worked out, in its own way. The deal they negotiated called for the widow’s son, Alden—a recent graduate of Connecticut’s agricultural college—to be installed as the new prison’s farm manager.
“You remember my Grandma Lydia, don’t you?” Lolly asked me. “Your great-grandmother?”
I nodded. “The tappy old lady with the rag doll.”
“Well, she was a hell of a lot more than that. Back in her prime, Lydia Popper was a force to be reckoned with. Got her salt from her grandmother, she always used to say. She politicked for years until she wore down the state legislature and got ’em to buy the land and build her her ladies’ jail. The cottage-and-farm plan, she called it. Designed it, and ran the place for forty years. And raised a son all by her lonesome while she was doing it.”
“Her son was Grandpa Quirk, right?”
“That’s right. And then when our mother died delivering your dad and me, she had to step up to the plate and help raise us, too. She was in her sixties by then, and now here were these two babies to do for. She was smart, though. Got her prison gals to pitch in and help. Couple of ’em even wet-nursed us, my father told me.”
“Nursed by convicted felons,” I said. “Maybe that’s why Daddy made all those trips to the pokey.”
I’d expected my remark to draw a laugh from her, but it fell flat.
“Now, at first, Lydia balked at the idea of someone so young and untested as this wet-behind-the-ears college boy being put in charge of the farm operation, just because his mother had finagled him the position as part of the land purchase. See, Lydia’d promised those politicians up in Hartford that once it got going, the jail would pay for itself because of the farm production. What those gasbags up there cared most about was the business side of things, see? How it’d impact the state budget. Not whether or not a bunch of troubled girls got fixed. Got on with their lives. So the state gave her five years; if the place wasn’t breaking even by then, they’d shut it down. Grandma knew that the whole ball of wax depended on the farm operation, okay? And she knew, too, that several of those politicians who’d opposed her were itching to see her fail. They didn’t like the idea of a woman running things, see? Figured they’d give her just enough rope to hang herself. Lydia suspected they’d saddled her with this young Quirk fella to ensure her failure. Nothing she could do about it, though; it was part of the deal they’d struck with the widow.
“But Alden surprised Grandma. Turns out, young as he was, he was a damn good steward. Practical, shrewd. Worked like an ox. And he was good with the prison ladies, too. They liked him, so they worked their fannies off for him. Course, he was a good-looking son of a gun. I’m sure that didn’t hurt. See? Here he is.” She passed me a picture of a strapping young guy in overalls behind a team of plow horses. “You resemble him, don’t you think?”
I shrugged.
“Well, if you can’t see it, I sure as hell can. Your father resembled him, too. I got Popper looks, but your dad was all Quirk, same as you.”
The robust farmer in the photograph looked nothing like my scrawny, straggly-haired father, and I told her so.
“Well, you gotta remember, kiddo. You only knew your dad after the booze got him. That goddamned war was what turned him alcoholic. Him and Ulysses, the two of ’em. They were high school buddies. Me, my brother, and Ulysses were all in the same class.”
I said I hadn’t realized that. Or if I’d known it, I’d forgotten it.
“Yup. The two of them, Ulysses and your dad, went down to the recruiting office and enlisted right after we graduated. I had wanted to go to college myself. To study anthropology—maybe go out west and work with the Indians. I used to find arrowheads out in the fields every once in a while—from when the Wequonnocs hunted out here, I guess—and that’s what got me interested. Grandma Lydia was all for me going; she’d gone. Studied sociology. And little by little, me and her were wearing my father down on the subject. But after my brother enlisted, that was that. If Alden wasn’t gonna stick around and help Pop with the farmwork, then I was gonna. Somebody had to. So I stayed put, and Alden went off to see the world and fight the Koreans.”
“I never heard much about his war service,” I said.
“Well, I never did either. After he came back, he wouldn’t talk about it, not even to me. Whenever I’d ask him about it, he’d close up like a clam. Get huffy with me if I pursued it, so after a while I just shut my trap.” I watched her eyes water up as she remembered it. “Something happened to him over there, because he came back different. Damaged, you know? And that was when he started drinking hard.”
“No such thing as psychological counseling back then, I suppose.”
“I don’t know. But Alden wouldn’t have signed up for it if there was. First month or so he was back, he mostly stayed cooped up in his room. And then when he did finally get out of the house, he mostly went off to the bars.”