The Hour I First Believed

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!” she said. She got all red, and went the other way around the table, and banged open the kitchen door the way I’m not supposed to.

Daddy laughed and called into the kitchen. “Watch out, everyone! Rosemary’s got her Irish up.”

“It’s your turn,” I said. But instead of moving his man, he picked up one of mine and jumped a bunch of his own checkers. “You win,” he said. “Go play.” Over at the record player cabinet, he lifted the needle and dropped it down on that song about the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie. He went into the kitchen, whistling.

“Because I don’t want to dance with you, that’s why!” Mother said. Then Daddy said something, and Mother said, “You think I can’t smell it on you, Alden? You think I can’t recognize a lost cause when he’s standing in front of me?” Then there was some noises and a crash. The kitchen door banged open.

“Wanna play Crazy Eights?” I said.

At the parlor window, I watched him walk faster and faster, down the driveway and onto Bride Lake Road, taking swigs from Grandpa’s bottle.

Mother was sitting on a kitchen chair, crying. She had one regular cheek and one all-red one. The broken pieces of our soup bowl were on the table next to her. “Lolly told me this tureen was one of Great-Grandma Quirk’s wedding presents,” she said.

“Oh…. You want a glass of water?”

“His wild Irish rose. That’s a laugh! I was just the first girl he grabbed on the rebound.” Then she looked at me. “Don’t you ever be mean like Daddy.”

“Want some water?” I said again.

She nodded. I got her the water and she took a little sip. She kept touching the broken soup bowl. “My hands were wet from the dishes,” she said. “It slipped. It was an accident.”

“Oh,” I said. “Sorry.”

She took another sip of her water. “How about a hug?” she said.

She put her arms around me. It was one of her stiff hugs, with the little pitty-pats on my back. “How come you never hug me back?” she said.

“I hug you back.”

“No, you don’t.”

MISS HOGAN? AT MY SCHOOL? She used to be our second-grade teacher and now she’s our third-grade teacher, too, on account of she switched grades. And I’m glad, because Miss Hogan’s nice. Plus, she’s pretty. She drives a green Studebaker and likes cats instead of dogs. This one time, Penny Balocki in our class was teasing me and saying that I love Miss Hogan and want to marry her. I don’t, though. I like her, but I don’t love her. And anyways, she’s already getting married.

Miss Hogan’s fiancé, Mr. Foster, used to play football at Fordham University, and now he’s a cameraman at a television studio in New York City. Miss Hogan’s favorite TV show is I’ve Got a Secret because that’s the show where Mr. Foster works at. And you know what? When Mr. Foster visited us that time, Frieda Buntz raised her hand and said, “Can you and Miss Hogan kiss for us?” And she had to go stand in the cloakroom until recess.

One time, during vacation week, Mother let me stay up late and watch I’ve Got a Secret. One man’s secret was that he got struck by lightning and didn’t die. Another man had this long, long beard and his secret was that, at night, he slept with his whiskers inside the covers, not outside. They guessed the whiskers guy, but not the lightning guy. Last year, one of our best milkers got struck by lightning. Dolly, her name was. And you know what the vet said? That Dolly’s heart exploded. Grandpa had to bulldoze her across the road and down into the gravel pit. All week long, vultures kept flying over our south field.

I’ve got a secret. Someone in our grade keeps spitting in the drinking fountain in the main hallway, and Miss Hogan thinks it’s Thomas Birdsey, but it’s not. It’s me. Last week, our whole class wasn’t allowed to get a drink until someone admitted they were the spitter. And everyone got madder and madder at Thomas because he wouldn’t admit it. Even I was mad at him, because I was thirsty and I kind of forgot who the real secret spitter was. Then Thomas made a load in his pants, the way he used to in first grade, and the office made his mother come get him. Our whole classroom stunk, and Miss Hogan had to send for Mr. Zadzilko, and we all went outside and played dodgeball. Dominick Birdsey had to stop playing, though, because he was whipping the ball too hard and hitting people’s faces. And after? When we came back in the building? Miss Hogan let us all get drinks. In the hallway, Mr. Zadzilko always looks at me, and I want to say, What are you looking at, Mr. Big Fat Glasses Face? I don’t, though. I just look away.

You know what? I stole something once. Mother and I were at Lu’s Luncheonette, buying Rolaids for Mother’s ulcer. And while Mother and Lu were talking at the cash register, I just picked a Devil Dog off the rack and put it in my coat pocket. I kind of thought I was going to get caught, except I didn’t. I don’t even like Devil Dogs that much; I like Hostess cupcakes better. I didn’t eat it. I just kept reaching inside my pocket and poking it with my finger. It got squishy, and the cellophane broke. And the next morning, I mailed it in the mailbox in front of our school.

Sometimes, when I try to hand in my paper early, Miss Hogan goes, “It’s not a race, Caelum. Go back to your desk and check your work.” If I check my work and I’m still waiting and waiting, that’s when I have to take the pass and go help Mr. Zadzilko. After Mr. McCully picked Mother to be head teller, now she always has to stay late at the bank because of her extra responsibilities. She won’t let me go on the bus, because Aunt Lolly’s already working at the prison when I get home and Grandpa’s getting ready for milking. But she doesn’t pick me up until way after all the other kids go home. She had to talk to Miss Anderson about letting me stay and wait, and Miss Anderson lets me because Mother’s divorced. Sometimes, I get to stay in our room with Miss Hogan, but sometimes I have to go be Mr. Zadzilko’s helper.

He has me clap erasers, or empty the wastebaskets into the big barrel in the hallway, or wipe down blackboards with the big sponge. One time, after an assembly, I had to go to the auditorium and help him fold all the folding chairs. We stacked them on these flat carts that have wheels. You know where all the folding chairs go? Under the stage. This door I never even noticed before opens, and the chairs roll in on the carts and stay there until the next assembly.

After the United Nations assembly was when Mr. Mpipi got fired. After he did his dance. First, Miss Anderson gave a speech about the UN. Then the fourth graders sang “Around the World in Eighty Days.” Then some lady who went on a trip to China showed us her China slides. Dominick Birdsey started tickling me, and Miss Hogan made us sit between her and Miss Anderson. The China lady talked so long that the projector melted one of her slides, and some of the sixth-graders started clapping.

Mr. Mpipi came on near the end. He walked out on the stage, and instead of his janitor clothes, he was wearing this big red cape and no shoes. He told everyone how the Bushmen hunted jackals, and prayed to their praying mantis god, and he talked their clicking talk. The sixth-graders started being rude. It’s okay if you laugh with someone, but it’s bad if you laugh at them. Mr. Mpipi thought everyone was laughing with him, so he started laughing, too—his squealy laugh—and that made things worse. Miss Anderson had to stand up and give the sixth-graders a dirty look.

Mr. Mpipi said he was going to show us two Bushman dances, the Dance of the Great Hunger and the Dance of Love. But he wasn’t going to stop in between, he said. One dance was just going to turn into the other one. “Because what does all of us hunger for?” he asked. No one in the audience said anything. Mr. Mpipi waited, and then finally he said the answer himself. “We hunger for love!”

He untied his cape and dropped it on the floor, and all’s he was wearing was this kind of diaper thing. I saw Miss Anderson and Miss Hogan look at each other, and Miss Anderson said, “Good God in Heaven.” Mr. Mpipi was shouting and yipping and doing this weird, shaky dance. He had a big potbelly and a big behind, and the sixth-graders were laughing so hard, they were falling off their chairs. Then someone yelled, “Shake it, Sambo!” Mr. Mpipi kept dancing, so I don’t think he even heard it, but Miss Andersen walked over and started flicking the auditorium lights on and off. Then she went up on the stage, handed Mr. Mpipi his cape, and said the assembly was over. “Everyone except the sixth-graders should proceed in an orderly fashion back to their rooms,” she said.

Later, during silent reading, Miss Hogan had me bring a note down to Miss Anderson’s office. Her door was closed, but I could hear Mr. Mpipi in there. He was saying, “But why I’m fired, Mrs. Principal? Please say the why?”

When the teachers are around, Mr. Zadzilko’s all nice to me. He calls me his best helper, and his junior janitor, and stuff. When it’s just him and me, he calls me “Dirty Boy,” and he keeps flicking his finger at me down there. “That’s to remind you that if you ever blab about certain secrets you and me got, I’ll tell everyone that Little Dirty Boy likes to look at his teachers’ twats.” And I think that means their girdles.

I killed something once. One of our chickens—the brown speckled one with the broken beak and the pecked-at head. “Nervous Nellie,” Grandpa always used to call her. He says a fox probably got her, but it didn’t. The other chickens were out front, pecking at the dirt, and she was all by herself behind the barn. I never liked her—never liked to look at that broken beak. At first, I was just tossing pebbles to bother her. Then I tossed a rock. Then I threw a rock, hard as I could, and it bounced off the barn and beaned her on the head. It looked funny at first, the way she just dropped, but then I realized she was dead and I got sad. She had blood coming out her eye. When I picked her up, she felt limp, like the rag doll Great-Grandma Lydia always wants me to hold and kiss. “Hold my baby,” she always says. “Kiss my Lillian.” Mother says Great-Grandma Lydia has cracks in her brain, and that’s what makes her crazy. The cracks are because she’s so old. All day long, she laughs at nothing and wants me to kiss her dolly. When Nervous Nellie died? I said a Hail Mary for her and buried her under some mucky leaves by the brook. Mother says God has a different heaven for animals than the one for people, but there’s no hell for animals, on account of animals don’t commit sins.

If Daddy steps one foot onto our farm, Grandpa’s getting him arrested for trespassing. Mother says I can’t tell anyone at school because that’s private information. Private information is like a secret, and trespassing’s when you step on someone’s private property and wreck things—like when those bad teenagers wrecked the Quirk family. At school, during morning exercises, we always say something about bad people who trespass against us. It’s in either the Pledge of Allegiance or the Lord’s Prayer. I always get those two mixed up. You know what? Miss Hogan’s picked me to lead morning exercises twice this year, and some kids haven’t even done it once.

“Tell him he can go to hell!” Grandpa said, that time the phone rang at supper, and Aunt Lolly answered it. It was Daddy.

“He just wants to apologize to you, Pop,” Aunt Lolly said. “Why don’t you let him apologize?” The phone in her hand was shaking, and Grandpa let out a big breath and got up from the table.

“Apologize for what?” I asked Mother, but she shushed me.

“Here, give me that thing,” Grandpa said.

Mother leaned toward me and whispered. “For what he did when you two went downtown to buy your present.”

“What is it, Alden?” Grandpa said. I could hear Daddy’s little voice coming out of the telephone, except not what he was saying. “Yep,” Grandpa kept saying. “Yep…Yep.” Then he said, “You know how I end each day, Alden? I go upstairs. Kiss my poor, dear mother goodnight—make sure she’s quiet and comfortable. Then I take my bath. Then, before I climb into bed, I get down on my two bad knees and pray to God that my beloved Catherine, who gave her life to bring you into this world, is resting peacefully in heaven. And do you want to know what else I pray for, Alden? I pray that your son doesn’t grow up to be a no-good bum like his father.”

Then I could hear what Daddy was saying. “But just listen to me. Okay, Pop? Can you please just listen to me?”

Grandpa said something about a broken record and hung up in the middle of Daddy’s talking. He looked over at Aunt Lolly. “There,” he said. “You satisfied?” Aunt Lolly didn’t say anything, but she was almost-crying-looking.

And later? When Lolly and me were feeding the chickens? I said, “Do you love Daddy, even though he’s bad?”

“He’s not bad,” she said. “He’s just got his troubles, that’s all. And of course I love him. He’s my brother. You love him, too. Don’t you?”

“I love him but I hate him,” I said.

She shook her head. “Those two cancel each other out. You’ve got to choose one or the other.”

I shrugged. Thought about it. “Love him, I guess.”

Lolly smiled. Then she reached over, grabbed my nose, and gave it a little tug.

WHAT DADDY DID WHEN WE went downtown was: first, he got drunk, and then he broke the cigarette machine, and then he made that gas station lady dance with him. It was my fault, in a way, because I couldn’t pee in the alley.

Grandpa had let Daddy borrow the truck, but Daddy and me were only supposed to go to Tepper’s, pick me out my present, and then come right back.

On the way into town, it started snowing—little snowflakes, not the big fat ones. We were both pretty quiet for a while. Being alone with Daddy felt different than being with him when Grandpa and Aunt Lolly were there. Daddy said, “You know what I’m thinking of buying you? One of those genuine Davy Crockett coonskin caps. How would you like one of those?”

“Good,” I said. I didn’t really want another one, but I didn’t want to say I didn’t. I was a little scared, but not that much.

“You want to play Antarctica?” he said.

I didn’t answer him because I didn’t know what he was talking about. “Well?” he said. “Do you or don’t you?”

I shrugged. “How do you play?”

He rolled down his window, then reached past me and rolled down mine. Cold air blasted in at us, and snow. “I don’t suppose your mother ever allowed you the pleasure of spitting out the car window,” Dad said. “But here in Antarctica, you can go right ahead and spit.” So I did. Then we rolled our windows back up and played the radio loud. Antarctica was kind of fun, but not really. There was a parking place right in front of Tepper’s.

The cash register lady said they didn’t sell coonskin caps anymore, so Daddy said, “Let me speak to the owner.” “No, sir,” Mr. Tepper said. “Davy Crockett kind of came and went. How about a hula hoop?” I didn’t really want one of those, either, but I picked out their last black one. “This thing’s only two ninety-nine,” Dad said. “Go ahead. Pick out something else.” He didn’t have enough money for ice skates, though, or this Cheyenne Bode rifle I kind of liked. So I got the hula hoop, some Dubble Bubble, and a Silly Putty egg. By the time we left Tepper’s, the snow had started sticking. “Well, Merry Christmas in February,” Daddy said. “Better late than never, right? You thirsty?”

The Cheery-O tavern had these two bartenders, Lucille and Fatty. Lucille asked Daddy what he wanted to wet his whistle, and Daddy said, “How ’bout a root beer for my buddy here, and I’ll have a root beer without the root. And maybe you can get that good-for-nothing husband of yours to cook us up a couple of his fried egg sandwiches.”

“Coming right up, Ace,” Fatty said. Everyone at the Cheery-O was calling Daddy “Ace.”

I ate my sandwich neat, but Daddy got yolk in his beard. He kept making me sing “Inka Dinka Do” for everybody. Then he started playing cards and drinking these drinks called Wild Turkeys. Fatty kept filling up my root beer mug without me even saying anything. I had to show some man with watery eyes how, when you press Silly Putty onto the funny papers and peel it off again, it makes a copy. “The Japs must make this gunk,” he said. “Because when you copy it, the words come out Japanese.”

“No, they don’t,” I said. “They’re just backward.” And the man laughed and called over to Daddy. “Hey, Ace! There’s no flies on this one.”

“No, but there’s flies all over you, you piece a shit!” Daddy called back. I thought the man was going to get mad, but he just laughed. Everyone laughed.

At first, the Cheery-O was kind of fun, but then it got boring. Daddy kept playing cards, and then Lucille yelled at me because I was hula-hooping on my arm, and I started doing it faster and faster, and it flew off and almost hit the bottles behind the bar. “One more hand, Buddy,” Daddy kept telling me. “This is my last hand.” For a long time, I just stood at the front window and watched the cars go by, slipping and sliding in the snow.

“Okay, let’s make like a tree and leave,” Daddy finally said. We were almost out the door when he grabbed my shoulder. “Hey, how would you like to be my lookout?” he said. He got down on his hands and knees and stuck his hand up inside the cigarette machine. My job was to tell him if either Fatty or Lucille was looking. Then Daddy said some bad words, and when he got up off the floor, his hand was bleeding. When he kicked the front of the machine, the glass smashed. “They’re looking!” I said. We ran.

The problem was, all those root beers made me have to go. Daddy took me to the alley between Loew’s Poli and Mother’s bank. “Go piss down there,” he said. “Go on. Hurry up.” His blood was dripping on the snow.

“I can’t,” I said.

“Sure you can. No one’s gonna see you. This is what guys do when they get caught short. It’s what I do.”

I started crying. “I want to, Daddy, but I can’t.”

He looked mixed up, not mad. “All right, all right. Come on, then.”

Whenever Mother and I went in the Mama Mia Bakery, the Italian lady was nice. But she was mean to Daddy. “Drunk as a skunk, and with a little boy, no less! You ought to hang your head in shame!”

“He just needs to use your toilet,” Daddy said.

“Get the hell out before I call the cops!”

Daddy said the Esso station would let us use their restroom, if his friend Shrimp was on and the boss wasn’t around. Shrimp and Daddy were friends, from when Daddy used to work there, before he got fired.

“Harvey comes back from the bank and sees you here, he’ll probably shitcan me,” Shrimp said. The other mechanic stopped working and came over.

“Jesus Christ Almighty, Shrimp,” Dad said. “You’re gonna let the kid have an accident?” Shrimp gave Daddy the key, and Daddy unlocked the door. “I’ll wait right out here,” he said. “Make it snappy.”

I was all shaking at first, and I got some on the seat and the floor. I kept peeing and peeing and peeing. The flusher didn’t work. There were dirty words on the wall and someone had drawn a picture of a man’s pee-pee. The sink had a spider in it. I put on the faucets full blast and watched it get caught in the tidal wave. It was dirty in there, but it was warm from this steamy radiator. I wanted to leave, and I didn’t want to. I didn’t like it when Daddy got drunk.

He wasn’t waiting right outside. He was in where Shrimp and the other guy were fixing the cars. He was talking louder than everyone else. “What do you mean you don’t want to dance with me, darlin’?” he said to some lady in a mink stole. “Sure you do!” He kept trying to waltz, and the woman kept trying not to, and when Shrimp tried to stop it, Daddy shoved him away. Then that Harvey guy got back from the bank.