by Wally Lamb
I spotted his cowshit shovel, still hanging from its same nail in the wall, identifiable by its chipped red handle. As a girl, Lolly’d painted it for her father as a birthday surprise, but she’d overturned the paint can in the process and gotten a surprise of her own: a spanking. Most, but not all, of that red paint had worn off the handle now. I lifted the shovel from the wall and tamped its blade against the cement floor. My fingers fit in the valleys Grandpa’s grip had worn into the wood.
Or maybe his father’s grip had made them. Who knew how old that damn 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.”
I opened my mouth to ask her some more, but Lolly shook her head and passed me another picture: her beloved grandmother, seated behind her desk at the prison, her young farm manager standing to her left like a sergeant-at-arms. “Look at the two of them with those matching Cheshire grins,” I said. Lolly took back the photograph, squinted, and grinned herself.
“Little by little, he won her over, you see? She began to trust him. Rely on him. They swapped ideas, solved problems together. Became almost like business partners, I guess. And then, of course, it turned into a different kind of partnership. Lucky for us. Me and you wouldn’t be sitting here if it hadn’t.” Observing that made her chuckle, and those watery blue eyes of hers recovered their sparkle. “To hear Grandma tell it, widow Quirk was fit to be tied. First the state of Connecticut steals her land away from her so they can build a prison. Then the prison matron steals her son out of the cradle. Course, nobody’d stolen anything. The state had paid her for that property fair and square, and Grandma and Grandpa just plain fell in love. I tell you, the gossips in town must have had a ball with that romance! Grandma was already in her forties—a confirmed old maid, or so everyone assumed until they got hitched. Married each other right down there by the lake, with all the prison girls in attendance. Nineteen eighteen it was. Grandma was forty-six and Grandpa was twenty-three. It was sad, though. We’d gotten tangled up in World War I by then, but Grandpa’d dodged that bullet—got a farm deferment from the government. Then he ups and dies of influenza. They’d been married for less than a year. When Grandma buried him, she was pregnant with my father.”
“Alden Quirk the Second,” I said.
“That’s right. Alden Jr., speak of the devil.” She passed me another picture: Grandpa Quirk, a boy in knickers, on the lap of a sober-faced Lydia.
“She looks more like his grandmother than his mother,” I said.
Lolly nodded. “She’d started late, and then had to raise him by her lonesome. And then, like I said, after our mother died, she pretty much raised your father and me. It’s funny, though: I heard her say more than once that making prisoners and little children toe the line was a cakewalk compared to dealing with her mother-in-law. Adelheid Quirk—Addie, they called her. Stubborn German girl. She was a pip, I guess.”
“So Addie was your great-grandmother?” I asked.
“Right. On my father’s side. Went to her grave blaming Grandma for her son’s death. Thousands and thousands lost their lives during that flu epidemic, but she held Lydia P. Quirk personally responsible.”
Walking along Bride Lake Road that morning, I smiled as I recalled that Christmas visit of ours three or four years ago: Aunt Lolly and me warmed by brandy and picture passing, by her desire to tell me the family stories and my desire to listen to them. “You gonna remember all this stuff?” she’d asked me that day. “You want a piece of paper to write it down?”
“Nah,” I said, tapping my finger against the side of my head. “Got it all in here.”
She nodded in approval, then called into the kitchen. “Hey, Hennie Penny. How about another slab of that apple crumb pie of yours?”
“Thought you said you were stuffed,” Hennie called back.
“I was. But all this reminiscing’s brought my appetite back.” Turning to me, she asked if I wanted more pie, too, and I said I did. “Make that two pieces. And two cups of joe if there’s any left.”
From the kitchen, “Want ice cream on that pie?”
“Twist my arm,” Lolly said.
A few minutes later, our wives had entered the dining room, plates of pie à la mode in one hand, coffee mugs in the other. “These two big lugs must’ve never heard of women’s lib,” Hennie had mock-complained. “Next time, we oughta burn our bras on the stove and make them get their own damn pie.”
Mo had nodded in good-natured agreement.
I CAUGHT MYSELF DOING SOMETHING I’d often done as a kid: kicked a stone along the side of the road, trying to give it a ride all the way down to the cornfields. But I kicked it crooked and a little too hard, and it hopped into the poison ivy sprouting up along the roadside.
In that aerial-view photo back at the farmhouse, you could see that the prison property was wedge-shaped, as if Connecticut had come along and cut itself a big slab of Quirk family pie. Narrowest near the road, the prison compound fanned out from there, encompassing Bride Lake and, surrounding its shore in a semicircle, the six two-story brick dormitories that housed the inmates. “Cottages,” they’d called them. Per Great-Grandma Lydia’s orders, they were left unlocked, Lolly had told me, and because “the girls” could walk off the compound, few of them had. Behind the cottages had been the barns, coops, pastures, and fields that had made the prison self-sufficient and had provided surplus dairy and vegetables to the almshouse and the orphanage. The rear of the property was woods and, beyond that, an abrupt drop-off. A stone thrown from the cliff’s edge would land in the town of New London.
A woman had thrown herself from that ledge once—a prisoner for whom Bride Lake had been a revolving door. I was in college at the time, and Mother had sent me a clipping about the suicide because the victim was someone I’d known as a boy. Zinnia, her name was. She’d worked for us during cider season. We’d been friends of a sort, Zinnia and me; she’d had a son my age and was always hugging me. Borrowing me, I realized now—borrowing my eight-year-old body. But at the time of Zinnia’s death, I was nineteen or twenty, consumed by college work and college life, and grateful for both the reprieve from Three Rivers and the anonymity of Boston. I was momentarily sad to read my mother’s news, I remember, and then the next moment I was over it…. I hadn’t thought about Zinnia in years. Decades. But on that April day that Lolly died, I felt, again, Zinnia’s fat, sun-warmed arms around me, and felt, along with her unequivocal embrace, the biting shame of my betrayal of her—my having let her take the rap for food I’d stolen.
Just past the curve in the road, the new high-tech complex came into view: a boxlike eyesore of a building, surrounded by chain link and crowned with spools of razor wire. “Makes me want to puke every time I come around the corner and see that goddamn thing, parked up there where the cow pasture used to be,” Lolly had grumbled during one Sunday evening phone call. “It’s like they’re sticking their middle finger up at everything Grandma stood for.”
“They” was the regime of Governor Roland T. Johnston, a law-and-order conservative from Waterford whom I’d had the pleasure of voting against before we moved out West. Johnston had come to power on the basis of his campaign promises to abolish the state income tax and put an end to the coddling of Connecticut’s convicted felons. “Let every Willie and Wilma Horton in this state take note,” I’d heard him say on TV the night he won. “The Carnival Cruise is over. The ship’s been docked.” Shortly after his inauguration, the custody staffs of the state’s seven prisons were paramilitarized, Police Academy trained, and armed with Mace and billy clubs. For the first time in Bride Lake’s history, male guards now roamed the compound, maintaining order largely by intimidation. Ground was broken on the state-of-the-art facility that would house the new, hard-core female inmate population, which, the governor maintained, had been the unfortunate byproduct of women’s liberation.
“That’s bullshit!” Lolly had declared. “There are some bad apples in the barrel over there—always have been. But it’s not right, the way h
e’s painting them all with the same brush. Most of the gals come in so beaten down by life that they’re more dangerous to themselves than anyone else.”
By the time the new “supermax” was open for business, Maureen and I were living out in Littleton, removed from state politics, but the age of Internet propaganda was upon us. “I had my friend Hilda write it down so you could take a look,” Lolly phoned to tell me. “She’s Miss Computer these days—Internet this, e-mail that. You got a pencil? It says double-ya, double-ya, double-ya, period, p-o, period, s-t-a-t-e, period, c-t, period, g-o-v. Whatever the hell that mumbo jumbo means. Hilda said to spell it out and you’d know.”
By logging onto the Department of Correction’s Web site, I was able to take a “virtual tour” of the new facility. During her forty-year tenure as superintendent of Bride Lake, Lydia Quirk had made fresh air and sunshine part of the equation by which female felons could heal themselves. But as the virtual tour proudly showed, the eight-by-ten-foot cells of the new high-tech prison had three-inch-wide window slits that didn’t open or let in light. Air recirculated now, and the electronically controlled cell doors were popped once an hour so that inmates could take a five-minute rec break on the tier. “Recreation? That’s a joke,” Lolly had said. “These days, recreation means standing in line at the hot water pot with your Styrofoam cup and your ramen noodles. All that junk food and sitting around on their asses: they get as fat as pigs now. Half of them are on insulin, or Prozac, or blood pressure pills. Why bother to rehabilitate ’em when you can just drug ’em and fatten ’em up. Grandma would roll over in her grave.”