The Hour I First Believed

by Wally Lamb

  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 Bushme
n 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!” 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.

  “Wa
nna 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.