Now Is the Hour

by Tom Spanbauer

  Mom’s almond-shaped hazel eyes and Sis standing in the hallway door.

  Good Lord, Joe, Mom said. Do you have to be so rough on the boy?

  Bits and pieces scattered like crumbs that only increased a yearning. A yearning for something more I didn’t know from him. And another time, a time special not because he touched me, but because I was with him, when he might have forgot I was even there, when I saw a side of my father I didn’t know existed. Just me alone with my father in his pickup out in the world. Snow and ice on the windshield. The windshield wipers, the blast of the heater. My stocking cap, my mittens, my galoshes, only my face sticking out. Outside our skinny white house, no Mom, alone in the cold, white, snowy world with the big man who lived with us, the mystery. At any moment anything could happen. My hands folded in my mittens, I sat as far across the seat I could get from him.

  Chains on the tires of the pickup. Clatters against the fenders. Past the spud cellar, Dad turned the steering wheel left, shifted down into first. Even back then only a child, I watched him shift the gears. Ahead of us a big drift of snow. Dad gunned the engine and let out a yahoo. I smiled and probably laughed. Everything amazed me about him, everything about him was big.

  Out the side window, the three railroad cars. I didn’t know the railroad cars stored grain. The railroad cars were just more of his mystery, a freight train through our farm. It made no sense, but I dared not ask.

  Dad turned the steering wheel right, shifted into second, the growl of tires over the steel bars of the cattle guard. Through the windshield, through the wiping windshield wipers, ahead of us was a long road, drifted over with snow. Each snowdrift we hit full on, each snowdrift a burst of snow across the windshield. With each snowdrift, Dad yelled, Hold onto your hat! Then he’d let out a loud yahoo! All the way down the road, one snowdrift after another, Dad yahooing and yelling for me to hold onto my hat. When we came to the biggest snowdrift, my hand on my stocking cap, I quick looked over at him. Maybe it was just the sun, but for a moment, there was a big bright shine in his eyes. Gold in Dad’s eyes, the way Mom’s eyes get. I’ve looked for it ever since, but that gold shine in my father’s eyes has been a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence.

  At the end of the road, on the other side of the Portneuf, at the rise of plateau that was the gravel bar, was the Mexican house. The Mexican house was old and square and gray and dirty, and nobody went in there except Mexicans, and in the summer lots and lots of brown-skinned black-haired Mexicans, who ate only tortillas and didn’t speak English, lived in the house while they worked for Dad thinning beets in the fields.

  After the magic had gone out of Dad’s eyes, and the cold seeped back into the pickup, I remember blowing a hole with my breath and looking through the hole at the Mexican house. Snowdrifts up as high as the windows. No trees, no bushes, just alone. The old gray house looked so cold and lost in the middle of nowhere.

  Now that I look back on it, my dad was like that house.

  No wonder he hated Mexicans and Indians and black people so much.

  Dad might have touched me on the head or put a washcloth over his face and chased me, or plowed me headlong through some snowdrifts, but the whole time I knew I had to be careful, that in a moment I could be pinned down under his body, gasping for breath, a Levi’s shirt pressed up against my nose and mouth.

  Mostly Dad was just far away in his seagulls, screaming.

  In those early days before Russell, Dad far away, circling, circling, there were times there when the only magic we had was us. Mom and Sis and me, and that was enough. Buttering cookie sheets, making frosting, cutting out patterns for pedal pushers. Mom and Sis and me, in our sun hats and seamed hose, rhinestones hanging on our ears, scintillatingly gorgeous, cinnamon toast and cocoa, sometimes oatmeal cookies or chocolate chip, the three of us singing our hearts out: We are poor little lambs who have lost our way.

  Out on Highway 93, my thumb out for over two hours now, I’m the little black sheep who has gone astray. I’m still crying. Baa baa baa. My mom and me and Sis — it was enough and just more than enough. I’d have written Mom off long ago if it weren’t for the early days.

  Mom’s magic wasn’t only about what she could give me, but what I felt I was giving her. It was a sense of things I’d always had, that there was something mysterious she longed for.

  When the wind blew sun and shade across her face, it whispered a sound only she could hear.

  Fernweh, sick with what was far away beyond the blue horizon.

  Even back then, I knew that place in her. Where no one touched. The yearning she felt to be touched there.

  I tried to touch her, tried to make myself a way that she could catch the falling star and put it in her pocket. No one else would do it. It’s for damn sure Dad couldn’t do it. And Sis didn’t know. So it was up to me, and I tried and tried, but it hardly ever worked. Besides church, it was only when Mom was at her piano. Her alto voice low and sweet when she sang her romantic songs. Really, her music was her only way to carry herself to where she’d never know. How full and happy she was then, how beautiful. Her eyes closed, her chin up a little, singing her heart out.

  There was a moment in time, though, when the universe conspired. It was spring, a bright day, and that mysterious place in Mom came out from inside her and stuck around all day, from sunrise to way past sunset. Such a rare day, when Mom was happy, when my whole family was happy, and we were all together as a family should be. One day of how it might have been, but wasn’t. A day to remember.

  My maiden aunt Alma, Mom’s oldest sister, was coming to visit. Alma and her roommate, an artist from Portland, Theresa Nussbaum, were traveling the six hundred miles from Portland in Alma’s new Chevy convertible coupe with a rumble seat and the top down.

  We were up by the crack of dawn. Everyone in a tizzy with this visit from sophisticated city folk. That house got scrubbed from top to bottom, starting with the kitchen. Even Dad was in the kitchen, Dad wasn’t out in the fields, and he was wearing an apron, his big hairy hands in the hot soapy water. Mom brought out her best of everything. Her best dishes with the Puritans on them having Thanksgiving with the Indians. Her best real silver silverware she kept in a wooden box in her cedar chest lined in red velvet. Her best linen tablecloth and linen napkins. Nothing was too good for Alma.

  Sis and I vacuumed the front-room carpet while Mom scrubbed every inch of every surface of the bathroom. The bathroom smelled so much like Clorox, Mom had to open the window and spray some of her perfume in there so you could breathe. Sis and I dusted the front room. We had that old piano shining. Mom checked up on every cleaning project. It had to be just right.

  At five o’clock, the Big Ben alarm went off, which meant it was time to bathe. Mom and Sis and I all used the same bath water, but Dad got his own tub of water. Mom put on her best gold dress, green and gold and kind of see-through, so she’d dyed her underwear in Rit the same color green so her underwear didn’t stick out. And new lipstick, not the old red lipstick. She’d bought the new Orange Exotica lipstick on sale a month before. Aunt Alma’s visit was the perfect excuse to break it open.

  When I walked past the bathroom once, Mom was smiling at herself, one shoulder up a little, her head tilted back. No doubt about it, scintillatingly gorgeous.

  Sis wore her yellow sundress. I wore my Sunday pants and white shirt and clip-on red and white bow tie. I polished my Sunday shoes. Dad put on his navy blue suit and blue tie and black shoes, and his dress socks and his garters. He looked like Fred MacMurray.

  Six o’clock, Mom had the chicken fried. The spuds were mashed. The gravy made, the canned green beans with Campbell’s mushroom soup on top. The pineapple upside-down cake Mom pulled out of the oven made the world smell like heaven.

  Mom paced the rooms for anything out of place. Everything had to be perfect. Alma, Mom’s big sis, who had worked her way up from a secretary in Blackfoot, Idaho, to a high-paying job in the faraway city of Portland. Alma, a woman who had made her way through
the world on her own. Alma, perfectly coifed and dressed in the latest styles. Alma who rode to work on a trolley car. Alma with her important friend, an artist, was paying a visit to us.

  When Aunt Alma drove her Chevy coupe into the dusty yard, Toby, our dog before Nikki and Tramp, started barking, and the cats started running every which way, then Toby started chasing the cats.

  It was some kind of magic Aunt Alma. A whole new world we didn’t know. A whole new kind of magic that wasn’t my mother’s. The magic of a faraway Brenda Starr or Nancy Drew, the Queen of England in a tan coupe, her long yellow scarf, her long red hair, with her friend, Theresa, the artist from Portland.

  Mom was a green and gold streak into the bathroom. I ran into the bathroom after her. I just didn’t know what else to do. In the mirror, Mom was smiling real wide to see if there was Orange Exotica on her teeth. Still holding her mouth that way, Mom told me to get the hell out of there. So I ran into our bedroom. Sis didn’t know what to do either, so she crawled under her bed and hid. I did too.

  Then we heard Mom sing out loud: If I knew you were coming I’d have baked a cake!

  Even under the beds you could feel it. The whole house was buzzing. Aunt Alma’s voice, Theresa’s voice passing by in the hallway. So refined, so exotic, their laughter so gay. In nothing flat, Sis and I crawled out from under our beds.

  In the front room, when I could make my eyes finally look at them, Aunt Alma and her friend, Theresa, the artist from Portland, were both wearing pants with pleats. They were smoking Herbert Tareytons. Besides the cigarette smoke, they smelled of perfume. Evening in Paris, my mother whispered to me when I asked, the both of them.

  Late afternoon light through the window, dark gold. Aunt Alma’s lipstick was red on her lips and red on her cigarette. Her red hair, her green sweater fit tight.

  Aunt Alma took hold of my hand. Her fingernails were perfect fingernails and they were painted red.

  Rigby John, Aunt Alma said, I’d like you to meet my friend, Theresa. She lives with me in Portland.

  My hand was so tiny in Theresa’s hand.

  Pleased to meet your acquaintance, I said.

  I didn’t look at Theresa. I looked at Aunt Alma instead.

  You have sensitive hands, Rigby John, Theresa said. Are you an artist as well?

  Theresa wore no lipstick. Her black hair was cut short and came off her forehead in a marcel wave.

  Her eyes were too big to look into so I lifted my hands, palms up, and looked at my hands.

  I didn’t know what to say.

  Dad says I draw flies, I said.

  After supper, after the dishes were done, when the sun got pink and behind the cottonwoods on the road, Dad walked out to the milk barn with the milk pails to do the milking.

  Mom and Aunt Alma went into the front room with their coffees and sat on the davenport. When Aunt Alma reached for a cigarette, Mom asked for one. Mom leaned in close with the cigarette in her mouth. Aunt Alma lit Mom’s cigarette with a silver lighter she flipped open. Mom inhaled, and a lick of smoke came out her mouth and went up her nose. I didn’t even know until then that Mom could even smoke. Alma’s smile was everywhere. Sis sat down between Aunt Alma and Mom, and it wasn’t long before those three females were laughing so hard their gums showed.

  Outside on the front lawn, Theresa and I sat at the picnic table. Her oil paints on the picnic table in two lines of round spots, colors I’d never even known existed she carried in a wooden case.

  Sitting that evening in the flat world, at the green picnic table, the skinny white house we lived in, the red brick barn, the gas pump behind us, I watched her, Theresa, the artist from Portland, dip the brush in the round colors, painting what was out there, painting what I had never really looked at before, brushes of color onto the white canvas the way the world looked. My elbows on the table, her with the gold, the green, the blue, the alfalfa green blooming purple, me with the colors and her, her long body next to me, her Evening in Paris, the sun going down, sun on my neck, the purple-orange-pink-dark-gold sun on Theresa’s face and arms.

  It was almost dark when Theresa laid her brush down.

  Is the painting finished? I asked.

  For now, she said.

  I touched the painting around on the four edges.

  I asked: Have you ever seen The Wizard of Oz?

  Yes, Theresa said, I love that movie.

  The magic part where black-and-white turns to color, I said, is my favorite.

  Who knows what Theresa said then, maybe she just looked at me. Maybe she wanted to know why I said that. All I remember is that the way her eyes looked at me gave me the gumption to ask.

  At the end of the alfalfa field. I said, All’s I can see out there is flat. Where’d the green and purple mountains come from?

  If I wasn’t up close I never would’ve noticed that she smiled. When she spoke, Theresa spoke the biggest magic ever. Words my mother could never give me.

  The forest and the green mountains are inside, Theresa said. That’s what an artist does. She travels the world looking for something inside.

  Now twelve or so years later, here’s me looking with these same two eyes at my two tennis-shoe feet on the gravel on the side of Highway 93 on my way to San Francisco. Right next to my feet, my backpack. The moon is so bright, the backpack has its own shadow.

  When I left home this morning, besides my Levi’s, two pairs of socks, my other T-shirt, a couple of pairs of jockey shorts, my toothbrush and my toothpaste, my roll of toilet paper and sack lunch, my white shirt with the iron burn on the collar, I packed three things in my backpack.

  Grandma Queep’s corncob pipe.

  A photograph, and in my pocket a wadded-up piece of paper and a dollar bill — I’ll tell you about the photograph and the wadded-up piece of paper and the dollar bill later.

  And Theresa Nussbaum’s painting. A magic that long ago set me off into the world, into myself. A magic my mother never knew.

  I was careful and put a plastic sack around Theresa Nussbaum’s painting. Laid the photograph alongside. Tied the sack on with rubber bands. Put my socks and underwear around the painting and the photo and the pipe so they won’t get squished.

  Theresa Nussbaum’s trees and green mountains are traveling through the world with me, an artist, looking for what’s inside.

  Later on that evening, after Dad finished milking the cows, Mom called out the kitchen window to Theresa and me to come in and eat dessert. Theresa and I set the painting on a shelf on the back porch to dry.

  Pineapple upside-down cake and vanilla ice cream. Dad got to have two pieces, but us kids got only one piece, but I went in the kitchen anyway, and chipped away a piece of cake and brown sugar stuck to the black frying pan, and ate it.

  Then it was just adults talking and smoking and then at one moment, my father said, Hey, Mom, why don’t you play us a tune.

  Asking Mom to play the piano was like asking Mom to breathe. But this night my mother leaned back and folded her hands, her cut-to-the-quick fingernails, her rough, red farm hands, into the lap of her new green and gold and kind of see-through dress, her slip dyed the same color green. Her mouth one thin Orange Exotica lipstick line.

  And there they were. My mother’s eyes. Her almond-shaped hazel eyes, one pitched a little south, the other east, every which way the light in them traveled right on past, right on through, or hardly ever settled on me at all.

  The faraway place in her where no one touched. The yearning she felt to be touched there.

  Dear broken Mother, here, let me hold myself in such a way that you will see me, and if you see me, if I can make you smile, the trouble will leave your eyes and your eyes will go soft and be gold.

  Some other time, Mom said.

  Then to her oldest sister, the sister with the piano lessons, Mom said: Alma, Mom said, the piano is old and burnt and needs some tuning, but why don’t you play something for us.

  The way Aunt Alma played the piano was so differnt. The way sh
e played and what she played. The way she played sounded like an old lady playing, all kinds of trills and fancy stuff. The songs she played were nice enough, like “The Blue Danube,” and the Northwest Mounted Canadian police song that goes, I am calling yououououououou. And something fast called “Gloria Mazurka,” but Alma’s songs weren’t at all like Mom’s songs, “The Beer Barrel Polka,” “Du, du Liegst Mir im Herzen,” “Little Brown Jug,” nothing like them at all.

  My aunt Alma and her friend Theresa may have brought the gift of exotic sophistication into my life, but my mom could still kick ass on the piano better than her sister any day.

  Everything changed when Russell came home, and the magic of that day with Alma and Theresa, and the magic that came down to grace us at other times — not as often as I wanted, but often enough — became all the rarer in our lives. Russell came home screaming, and he screamed for a hundred days, and no one could sleep, and then he died. Mom was never the same. The music stopped, and she locked herself inside her room with Dad, and me and Sis were outside her room, and her eyes were never the same. I couldn’t find her anywhere in them, couldn’t find me, she was so far away.

  Before Russell was born, the new word that everybody said was brood lamp. After he was born, they said incubator, disease, and cripple. That’s what the doctor told Mom, that she had a cripple, and because of his disease he had to be in an incubator. I heard those words all the time and thought about them all the time, even when I did my chores. I asked Sis to write them out in longhand. I thought about them even more after Russell came home. But he looked just like a baby to me. After all that talk, after all those words so many times, my brother looked like a baby to me.

  One day I asked her to show me what was wrong with him. It was still winter when I asked, sometime within the first ten days of his one hundred days, after he got home from the hospital, before the time when she thought she had smothered him, before the time when the pigs got out, before he died in the spring, after the chores were done, and after school and before supper. Not day and not night, when the shadows were long and running in together, and when the chickens flew up to roost, to sit, and to listen to the world.