The Hour I First Believed

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 bass, Big Wilma, but he never did. I wish I could fish there. I can’t even go near the fence. If Big Wilma’s still in there, I bet she’s a monster.

You 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

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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 up the Quirk family, too, and the free hot cocoa. Mother makes it on the stove in two big pots, and then she pours it into the big jugs she got when she used to work at American Thermos. She quit there, though, because her boss was always yelling at everybody and he gave her an ulcer. Now Mother works at the bank, and she likes it better, except she has to wash her hands all the time because money’s dirty and you never know where it’s been. I licked a dollar once. Mother made me put Listerine in my mouth and not spit it out for a long time, and it hurt.

Sometimes my scary dreams are about Daddy, and sometimes they’re about Mr. Zadzilko. Our school used to have a different janitor, Mr. Mpipi, but he got fired. And I was mad because Mr. Mpipi was nice. The teachers think Mr. Zadzilko’s nice, too, because he brings them snapdragons and these stupid Polish doughnuts that his mother makes called poonch-keys. Mr. Zadzilko’s not nice, though. When the teachers go to the toilet, he peeks at them through this secret hole.

Before Mr. Mpipi got fired, he came to our class once, and he told us about these people called the Bushmen that are his relatives or his ancestors or something. He showed us where they live on the world map—in Africa, near the bottom. You know what Bushmen hunt and eat? Jackals. And desert rats. And when they see a praying mantis, they think it’s God!

Mr. Mpipi had our class all sit on the floor, even Miss Hogan. Us kids sat cross-legged, but Miss Hogan knelt on her knees and her skirt made a big circle around her. Mr. Mpipi told us a story about how Mantis made the moon by throwing fire into the night sky, and how he married a snake. And you know how Mantis travels around? Between the toes of an antelope, because that’s his favorite animal. Mr. Mpipi talked Bushman talk, with these little clicky noises before the words. Everyone laughed, even Miss Hogan, and Mr. Mpipi laughed his high, squealy laugh, too. Mr. Mpipi is colored, I think, except he doesn’t have chocolate skin. It’s more like the color of those dried apricots Grandpa gets at Christmas.

After his visit, our class wrote Mr. Mpipi a thank-you letter on big easel paper, and we all signed it. And it made him so happy that he gave us a present: a praying mantis egg case. It was supposed to hatch in April, but it didn’t. Then, after the assembly, Mr. Mpipi got fired. Miss Hogan was going to throw out the egg case, but I asked her if I could have it. She said yes, and I brought it home and put it on my windowsill.

I caught Mr. Zadzilko peeking. That’s how I know about the hole. It’s in the big second-floor closet, where the buckets and mops and the Spic And Span are. Miss Hogan wrote me a pass and sent me down to help him because I was the first one done with my Social Studies questions, and I had ants in my pants and kept bothering my neighbors. I opened the closet door and Mr. Zadzilko was peeking through the hole. He jumped when he saw me, and fixed his pants and his belt, and he was laughing like heh heh heh. “Look at this,” he said. “Mop handle musta poked a hole in the wall. Gotta patch it when I get a free minute.” He gave me a sponge and told me to wet it in the boys’ room and then go downstairs and wipe the cafeteria tables.

And after, when the recess bell rang, I went back upstairs to return my sponge. Mr. Zadzilko wasn’t there, so I turned a bucket upside down and climbed up and looked through the hole. And there was the principal, Miss Anderson, sitting on the toilet, smoking a cigarette. You could see her girdle.

I knew it was naughty to look, so I closed my eyes and got down off the bucket. And when I turned toward the door, Mr. Zadzilko was standing there.

“My, my, my,” he said. “Aren’t you the dirty boy.”

He yanked the pull chain, and the closet light went on. Then he pulled the door closed behind him. He came over and sat down on the bucket, so that he was breathing right in my face. The hole was a secret between me and him, he said. If I said anything, he’d tell the teachers he caught me looking. “You were just curious,” he said. “I understand that, but the teachers won’t. They’ll probably have you arrested. And everyone will know you’re Dirty Boy.”

He reached behind him and took a greasy paper bag off the shelf. He opened it and held it out to me. “Here,” he said. “Help yourself.” I reached in and pulled out one of those doughnut things his mother made.

“They’re called poonch-keys,” he said. “Take a bite. They’re delicious.”

I didn’t want to, but I did.

“What are you, a little mouse nibbling on a crumb? Take a big bite.”

So I did. The stuff inside looked like bloody nose.

“What kind did you get? Raspberry or prune?” I showed him where I’d bitten. “Oh, raspberry,” he said. “That’s my favorite, too. What are you shaking for, Dirty Boy?”

I tried to stop shaking, but I couldn’t. He kept looking at me.

“You know what poonch-key means? In Polish?”

I shook my head.

“It means ‘little package.’ Because the doughnut makes a little package around the stuff that’s inside, see?”

“Oh,” I said. “Can I go now? It’s recess.”

“Like us men carry the stuff that’s inside us. In our sacs. Get it?”

I didn’t know what he was talking about, but I nodded.

“You don’t look like you get it, Dirty Boy. If you get it, show me where your poonch-key is?”

“What?”

“Your ‘little package.’ Where is it? Point to it.”

I could hear kids playing outside, but they sounded farther away than just the playground. I was trying not to cry.

Mr. Zadzilko made an O with his thumb and his pointing finger. “Here’s the woman’s hole, see?” he said. “Otherwise known as her snatch, or her pussy, or her bearded clam.” He leaned closer and dropped his hand down. “And this, my dirty boy, is where your ‘little package’ is.” He flicked his finger, hard, in the place where Mother says I shouldn’t touch, and it hurt.

“It’s recess,” I said. “I’m supposed to go.”

“Go, then,” he said. “But just remember what happens to dirty boys with big mouths.”

The hallway was empty. There was laughing coming out of the teacher’s room. I went downstairs to the boys’ room. I hadn’t swallowed that bite he made me take; I’d hid it against my cheek. I spit it into the toilet and threw the rest of my poonch-key in after it. I kept flushing, and it kept swirling around and looking like it was going to go down, but then it would bob back up again. Then I thought, what if he’s got a lookout hole in the boys’ room, too? What if he’s watching me flush his mother’s stupid doughnut down the toilet? By the time I got out to the playground, I had a stomachache, and then the recess bell rang two seconds later, and we had to go in.

That night, I was lying in bed, thinking about Mr. Zadzilko, and Mother came in my room in the dark. “Caelum?” she said. “Are you asleep or awake?”

I didn’t answer for a long time. Then I said, “Awake.”

“I heard you crying. What were you crying about?”

I almost told her, but then I didn’t. “I was thinking about Jesus dying on the cross,” I said. “And it made me sad.” I knew she’d like that answer.

Mother goes to mass every morning before work. That’s why she can’t get me ready for school. Aunt Lolly gets me ready, once she finishes morning milking. Except, if there’s a problem, she calls me from the barn phone and I have to get myself ready, and not dawdle or I’ll miss the bus. One time? Some of our cows got loose and started running up Bride Lake Road. Aunt Lolly had to go get them, because they could have got hit by a car, and she forgot to call me. And I started watching Captain Kangaroo, which I’m not supposed to watch TV in the morning. And then the bus came and I was still in my pajamas. Mother had to leave work, drive back to the farm, and then drive me to school. She was crying and yelling, because now Mr. McCully probably wouldn’t pick her to be head teller, thanks to me. At the stop signs and red lights, she kept reaching over and whacking me. And by the time we got to school, we were both crying. I had to roll the window down and air out my eyes before I went in, because the school doesn’t need to know about our private family business.

On Saturdays, Mother vacuum-cleans the priests’ house for free and takes home their dirty clothes in pillowcases because Monsignor Guglielmo’s helping her 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.