The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin'

by Lamb, Wally

  They’d worked together at the mill, Ray said. After Henry’s father died, Connie’s father had more or less kept up with the family. Had sent the mother a little money from time to time because the kids were still young. It was unusual for her father to do that, Connie had said. “Her old man was pretty tight with his dough, I guess. But he helped Henry’s family out here and there. For some reason. He really ruled the roost, you know—your grandfather. Over at the house. What he said went.

  “He worked at the store where they traded, you see? Henry. So she got to know him that way. Saw him every week when she did the shopping. That was how it started—because her father had known his father and because she saw him all the time at the store. They were just friends at first, for a long time. For years, I guess. He used to sneak over to the house and visit her. Her father worked nights, you see? Then, I don’t know, I guess one thing just led to another. They were human, same as everyone else. And like I said, she was kind of naive—didn’t know too much even by the time I come along. Kind of in the dark, still, even after she’d had two babies. . . . Her father would have killed her, you see? If he knew she’d fallen in with a colored guy? If he had lived, he probably would have put her out of the house. Sent her over there to live with his folks.”

  “You guys save any room for dessert today?” Kristin asked. Man, I jumped. “Oops, sorry. Did I scare you?”

  “No,” I said. “No thanks. We’re right in the middle of something.”

  “Oh. Sorry. I can take this whenever you’re ready. Or if you want, you can—”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I’ll take care of it. Thank you.”

  We finished our coffee. Sat there, for a few minutes, in silence. Then Ray reached across the table and patted my hand. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “It’s like I always say. Mongrels make damn good dogs.”

  “Henry what?” I said.

  “Hmm?”

  “Henry what?”

  “Drinkwater.”

  I drove out to the Indian graveyard first. Walked right up to him. Henry Joseph Drinkwater 1919–1950. In service to his country . . . I stood there, unable to feel much of anything. He was just a carved rock. A name and two dates. Up the path, over the rise, I could hear the Sachem River, the never-ending spill of the Falls.

  At a pay phone, I looked up the address of the Wequonnoc Tribal Council office. Drove up to a dilapidated two-story house with trash in the yard. Following the sign, I climbed the fire escape stairs to the second-floor office. The door was locked; the inside empty. relocated to wequonnoc boulevard, wequonnoc reservation (route 22), the hand-lettered sign said.

  I drove down to the reservation—past the bulldozers and cement mixers, the land that had been cleared and stumped. The coming casino. The tribe’s new headquarters sat at the end of a rutted road, the beginning of the woods—an impressive three-story building made of cedar and glass. Brand new, it was. Drilling and hammering echoed inside.

  I entered. Asked an electrician if he knew where I could find Ralph Drinkwater.

  “Ralphie? Yeah, sure. Second floor, all the way down. I think he’s still here. That suite that looks right out onto the back.”

  He was hand-sanding a Sheetrock seam, lovingly, it looked like to me. I stood there, undetected, and studied him. He’d sand a little, blow on it, pass his fingers across it, sand a little more. RALPH DRINKWATER, TRIBAL PIPE-KEEPER, the plaque on the door said.

  The office was handsome. Huge. Cathedral ceiling with exposed beams, floor-to-ceiling stone fireplace that faced an entire wall of glass. Jesus, what a life he’d had. His sister gets murdered, his mother goes off the deep end. And then that scummy business out at Dell Weeks’s house—posing for dirty pictures just so’s he’d have a place to stay. But he had declared who he was all the way through: Well, I’m Wequonnoc Indian. So I guess not all of us got annihilated. . . . You guys ought to read Soul on Ice! Really! That book tells it like it is! . . . He’d been crapped on his whole life—had scrubbed toilets down at the psycho-prison for a living . . . and had still managed to be a good man. To rise up out of the ashes. And now, he’d arrived at this big, beautiful room. This big, brand-new building. He’d come, at long, long last, into his own.

  “This going to be your office?” I said.

  He pivoted, spooked a little by my voice. Stared at me for three or four seconds more than was comfortable. The dust he’d raised from sanding gave him a frosted look.

  “What can I do for you?” he said.

  I told him I wasn’t sure—that I had just needed to find him, talk to him if he had a minute. “I found something out this afternoon,” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  “That my father’s name was Drinkwater.”

  I watched the surprise flicker in his eyes. Watched them narrow with well-earned distrust. He nodded, leaned against the wall for a couple seconds. Then he turned his back to me and faced his wall of glass. Faced the woods. A crow flying past was the only thing that moved.

  “This afternoon?” he said. He turned around again. Looked at me. “What do you mean—you just found out this afternoon?”

  I started to shake; I couldn’t help it. I walked a few steps over to the raised hearth of his big fireplace and sat. Told him about my conversation with Ray.

  He had known all along we were cousins, he said; he’d thought I’d known all along, too. That I’d wanted it kept a deep, dark secret.

  “Well, I didn’t,” I said. “I’ve been in the dark until two o’clock this afternoon. I’m just . . . I’m trying to figure it all out. And I need help, man. . . . I need some help.”

  He nodded. Came over and sat down on the hearth next to me. The two of us looked straight ahead, out at the tangle of trees.

  My father and his father were brothers, Ralph said. His aunt Minnie had told him one time, way back before she moved to California. Before his sister died. “Do you ever see two little boys at your school named Thomas and Dominick?” Minnie had asked him. “They’re twins, same as you and Penny. They’re your cousins.”

  There were four children who’d lived, Ralph said: Henry, Minnie, Lillian, and Asa, in that order. Asa was his father. “Ace,” everybody’d called him—the youngest and wildest of the bunch. Their parents were mixed: their mother, Dulce, was Creole and Portuguese; her maiden name was Ramos. Their father, Nabby Drinkwater, was Wequonnoc, African, and Sioux.

  Every one of the kids but Minnie had died young, he said; Lillian of encephalitis, Henry in the Korean War, and Ace from driving drunk. He’d never married their mother; Ralph and Penny Ann were three years old when he flipped his car over and killed himself. Minnie was seventy-two or -three now—a widow, retired from a job with a packing company out in San Ysidro. He’d gone out to see her once—had hitchhiked most of the way. They wrote back and forth. Minnie was considering moving back to Three Rivers, once the casino got under way. Did I remember his cousin Lonnie Peck, who’d died in Nam? Lonnie was Minnie’s son. She had four other kids—two boys, two girls—all well, all with families. Minnie’s son Max was a gaffer at Columbia Pictures. Ralph had seen his name at the end of a couple of movies—right there in the credits at the end. Maxwell Peck, his cousin. “Yours, too, I guess,” he said.

  Ralph had hated my brother and me when the four of us all went to River Street School, he said—Thomas and me, him and his sister. He’d hated the way everyone always lumped us together—two sets of twins, one black, the other white and therefore better. And then? After Penny Ann got murdered? That day I read that speech about her at the tree ceremony? He’d wanted to kill me that day, he said—pick up a rock and bash my skull in with it. “I thought you knew,” he said. “I thought you wanted to deny your own father. Your Wequonnoc and African blood.” The first time he’d run across the word hypocrite, he said, he’d thought immediately of Thomas and me: the Birdsey twins, who lived a lie.

  And later on? That morning when the two of us showed up on Dell Weeks’s work crew? Man, he’d wanted to bust
my head in that day, too. Mine and my brother’s. Six different public works crews and they’d stuck us with his. He was as good as we were—as smart, if not smarter. But there we were, his big shot “white” hypocrite relatives, home from college and rubbing his face in how much further you could get in life if you lied about who you were. If you kept it a deep, dark secret.

  It had been our mother’s secret, I told Ralph. Not Thomas’s and mine.

  “Your brother knew,” Ralph said. “How come he knew and you didn’t?”

  “He didn’t know,” I said. “She kept it from us both.”

  But Ralph said he and Thomas had talked about it once—during that summer on the work crew. That Thomas had brought it up: how they were cousins. “I remember that conversation,” he said. “He said your mother told him.”

  “He couldn’t have known,” I said. “She wouldn’t have told him and not me.” And as I said it, it came flying back at me—hit me right between the eyes: that day I’d finally sprung him out of Hatch. That trip we’d taken out to the Falls. Thomas had stopped in front of Penny Ann Drinkwater’s grave. Remember her? he’d said. We’re cousins. And I’d dismissed it as more of his crazy talk. . . .

  He’d known.

  She’d given Thomas his father but had withheld him from me. . . .

  Ralph and I talked for a few minutes more, me trying to take it all in. Trying not to sink into the unfairness of it: Ma’s same old fucking favoritism.

  “So . . . how do you become a Wequonnoc?” I said. “What do you do?”

  Ralph misunderstood the question. He started talking about Department of the Interior requirements and notarized genealogy reports, about the way the tribe planned to disburse income once the gaming revenue started coming in. “They used to tell me in school that the Wequonnocs had all been wiped out,” he said. “But now that everyone’s picked up the scent of money, you’d be surprised how many cousins I got.”

  “I don’t give a shit about the money,” I said. “I’m telling you, I didn’t know. I found out two hours ago. I’m just trying to figure out who the fuck I am.”

  He looked over at me. Studied my face for the truth. We just sat there, looking at each other. Then he got up and walked over to a big, plastic-shrouded desk parked in the middle of the massive room. He lifted the plastic, opened a drawer, and took something out of it. “Here,” he said, tossing something at me. “Catch!”

  I plucked it from the air and looked at it: a simple, smooth gray rock.

  “Found it on the reservation the other day,” Ralph said. “Way the hell out, sitting all by itself at the edge of a stream. What shape is it?”

  I looked at it again. Closed my fingers around it. “It’s oval,” I said.

  He nodded. “When a Wequonnoc baby’s born, the women take the cord and form it into a circle. Cinch it, so that it has no beginning or end. Then they burn it in thanks to the Great Creator.”

  I looked at him. Waited.

  “Wequonnocs pray to roundness,” he said. “Wholeness. The cycles of the moon, the seasons. We thank the Great Creator for the new life and for the life it sprang from. The past and the future, cinched together. The roundness of things.”

  I palmed the rock. Squeezed it, released it, squeezed, released. “The roundness of things,” I said.

  “You want to know how to be Wequonnoc?” he said. “There. That’s your first lesson.”

  I looked out Dr. Patel’s office window. Watched the wind toss the trees, ripple the surface of the rushing river. It had been pouring most of the morning, gusting more and more like it meant it. The forecasters had been warning that, by the time Hurricane Bob arrived at midday, it could reach speeds of ninety or a hundred miles an hour. But when I’d called and asked the doc if she wanted to cancel our 10:00 A.M. appointment because of the weather, she’d said no, not unless I wanted to.

  “You were saying?” she asked me now.

  “No, I was just telling you, I’m having a hard time with it. I mean, I’m trying real hard not to fall back into my same old thing—the anger, the jealousy. It’s pretty pathetic to be jealous of a dead brother, right? Pissed at your mother when she’s been in the ground for almost five years? But I don’t know. It’s hard. . . . I mean, I was the one who kept asking her. I was the one who needed to know who he was. She knew how much I needed to know. . . . Did she hate me or something? Was that why she wouldn’t tell me?”

  Dr. Patel shook her head. We could only second-guess as to her reasoning, of course, but had it occurred to me that my mother might have withheld the information out of some sense of maternal protectiveness? Out of love, perhaps, not hate?

  “How do you figure that?”

  She reminded me that Ma had lived her entire life accommodating the needs of angry men. “First her father, then her husband, and then one of her sons.”

  “Me, you mean?”

  She nodded. “Thomas had a very different nature. Yes? He seemed to have developed a temperament much like your mother’s. I have long suspected, Dominick, that what you perceived as your mother’s greater love for your brother may have been merely a greater sense of compatibility. Maybe she told Thomas about his and your conception because she knew he would not react in anger. Maybe she felt she didn’t need to protect him from his own rage the way she needed to protect you from yours.”

  “Protect me?” I said. “I don’t get it.”

  “Well, let’s say that you had gone to her at age thirteen, or sixteen, or seventeen, and demanded to know who your father was. And suppose she had—”

  “I did go to her,” I said. “It was like she was deaf or something.”

  “Let me finish,” she said. “Suppose you had asked her for the information and she had given it to you. Said to you, her angry young son, ‘Dominick, your father was half Native and half African American.’ How do you think you would have reacted?”

  I said I had no idea.

  “Well, think about it. Might you have been confused?”

  I told her I was pretty damn confused now. That I was halfway through my life and had just found out who I was.

  “Your confusion is understandable,” she said. “But at age forty-one, you have resources to draw on, a greater understanding of the world, a whole catalog of human desires and shortcomings that would not have been at your disposal back then. If you had found out the truth at sixteen or seventeen, don’t you think you might have reacted with your characteristic anger?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe. But that doesn’t—”

  “And do you think you might have turned some of that anger on her? Or on her soul mate, perhaps? Your brother?”

  “Maybe.”

  “And back onto yourself, perhaps? Is it possible that the knowledge you sought, delivered at the wrong time and with no real support to help you fathom it, might have made you somewhat self-destructive?”

  “Self-destructive, how?”

  “Well, in the socially sanctioned ways American boys are self-destructive, I suppose. With alcohol, perhaps? Or drugs? Behind the wheel of a car? All of the above?”

  “But even so. That still doesn’t give her the right to keep it from me.”

  “Don’t misunderstand me, my friend. I’m neither condoning nor validating your mother’s decision. I certainly agree that you had every right to know who your father was. I’m merely trying to present an alternate theory as to how she may have been thinking. Why she might have kept the knowledge from you.”

  She stood. Walked over to the window where I was. Placed her hand on my shoulder and looked out, beside me, at the gathering storm. “I don’t for a moment accept your theory, by the way,” she said. “That she withheld the information from you because she hated you or wanted to punish you—to make your life miserable, for some reason. You don’t really believe that. Do you?”

  I took a deep breath, exhaled slowly. “No.”

  “Well, then, we’re making progress.”

  “Are we?”

 
“Oh, I think so, yes. I’ve been watching your hands as we’ve talked. Three times, now, I’ve observed one hand undo the opposite fist. Are you aware of that, Dominick—that you’ve been prying your fists apart? It’s a healthy sign, I think. Come, sit down.”

  In ancient myths, she said—in stories from cultures as far-flung as the Eskimos and the ancient Greeks—orphaned sons leave home in search of their fathers. In search of the self-truths that will allow them to return home restored, completed. “In these stories, knowledge eludes the lost child,” she said. “And fate throws trial and tribulation onto his path—hurls at him conundrums he must solve, hardships he must conquer. But if the orphan endures, then finally, at long last, he stumbles from the wilderness into the light, holding the precious elixir of truth. And we rejoice! At last, he has earned his parentage, Dominick—his place in the world. And for his trouble, he has gained understanding and peace. Has earned his father’s kingdom, if you will. The universe is his!”

  “And everyone lives happily ever after,” I said.

  “Sometimes,” she said. “Sometimes not. I mention it because it is one way to interpret the recent turn of events: perhaps in order to find your father, you had to earn the right to him.”

  I sat there, hands in my pockets, my right hand fingering the oval rock.

  “Now,” she said. “Our time is up. We should both go home before this tempest that’s descending blows the two of us away.”

  This tempest, I thought. Tempesta, Drinkwater, Birdsey . . . I started home and then changed my mind. Drove over to Rivercrest, instead. I wanted to check in on Ray.

  He was pissed that I’d come. “Jesus, get the hell home, will you? What’s the matter with you, driving around with a hurricane coming? I’m okay. I’m fine. Go home.”