Now Is the Hour

by Tom Spanbauer

  On the porch, before I went in, before I asked her, I could smell her bathing him. I took off my coat, my cap, my mittens, pried off my overshoes on the top step, and all the while in there, in the kitchen I could smell her: the Ivory soap, the steaming water in the porcelain pan, the baby oil, the clean diapers. All of those were her smell, and his. When I asked her, Mom put her almond-shaped hazel eyes onto me, gold just around the edges. Then she did something she hadn’t done in a long time. She picked me up. She leaned her body so that her hip held me. Her arm was around me, the flesh of her arm against my arm, the smell from her armpit from under her red housedress. She showed me Russell’s head and said, You see how his head is so much larger than the rest of him is?

  And then she showed me his foot. His foot went over to the side, and she moved it up so that it was straight, and then she let it go, and the foot went crooked again.

  That’s his foot, she said, and then she set me on the table. She took Russell’s hands in hers. They will not open, she said. I have to open them for him and put powder in there for him.

  She pried open his right hand and told me to put my finger in there. I didn’t want to do it because his palm looked like a terrible blossom to me, or like an egg that the rooster had got to.

  She said, Come on, you wanted to know.

  So I put my finger inside Russell’s palm, and my brother grasped my finger.

  Those days when Mom was pregnant, I don’t remember much. There is a photo of me and Mom and her big belly and Sis standing and squinting into the sun that I think I remember living in. But it’s hard to say which came first, the photo of me and the experience of living it, or the living of it reminded by the photo.

  I do remember six things: I remember our dog Toby died, and before he died he came over to me and stood next to me for a while, and then did the same thing with Sis, and then he went into the barn and died on the hay.

  I remember Mom saying that animals do that, that they say goodbye before they die.

  I remember a lightning storm that blew one of the poplars along Tyhee Road over. The sky was black, and it was day, and we prayed the rosary loud and lit a candle, and Dad wasn’t home.

  I remember Mom taking the paring knife out of where the silverware was in the kitchen and going outside and sitting on the patch of lawn she had planted and digging dandelions out of the grass with the paring knife.

  I remember the Door of the Dead. It was a game Sis and I played, and the way you played it was you would go into a room, into the room that Sis and I had together, and we’d close the door and then you’d say that the closed door was the Door of the Dead, and then we’d get scared, or I should say, I would get scared, and then after saying The Door of the Dead The Door of the Dead over and over again, we’d make scary sounds, and then Sis would open the door, and it was always the same thing, I always was the one who ended up yelling, no matter how many times I told myself I wouldn’t yell this time.

  I remember that everybody said brood lamp.

  When Mom was pregnant and before she went to the hospital and before Russell came home, that’s it. Six memories. After Russell came home, though, and before he died, those one hundred days are not just a memory, not just some things I’m recalling, and it’s always been that way for me.

  The house was warm all winter, that winter, and there was steam on the windows that I was not allowed to swipe through, which was ice in the morning and blue, and orange when the sun was up. Dad carried in wood and stacked it high by the cookstove and on the porch. Sometimes I helped.

  Seemed like all Russell did was cry. But there were times when Russell was not crying and he was sleeping. I wasn’t allowed near him because I had a lot of childhood diseases in me like measles and mumps that he could catch and make him more sick, but I still snuck in a lot and looked at his head and his foot, but most of all I looked at his hands, to see if they had opened up yet. Sometimes Russell was awake and not crying and he just lay there quiet, his eyes rolled back up a little, as if he was looking at his head too, as if he was wondering what to do with all the mucus I could hear up there, wondering when the egg would hatch, as if it was a problem and he was planning a solution, a way to make it go away, and he was trying so hard that it made his hands fists.

  I woke up once.

  It was spring I think by then. The river was high, and Russell was crying and I was surprised that he was crying just the same way that I had been surprised by his crying when he first got home in the winter, and then I wondered if my brother had always been crying and if I just didn’t hear him anymore or if he had stopped for a while, for days, weeks, and then started up again. My brother’s cries were like the sound the pipes made when you turned on the water in the bathtub, that sound, and then the sound like the pipes were singing high, off tune. Sometimes the pipes didn’t make that sound, but mostly they did, and sometimes I didn’t hear them when they did, and only remembered that they had made that sound when it was over.

  That afternoon she ran out of the bedroom and walked around the house inside, near the walls. I was making incubators with my Tinkertoys on the brown carpet with the flowers on it in the front room. Sis wasn’t back home from school, and Dad wasn’t home. I could hear Mom crying and walking around and around. I thought she might run out into the field and that Dad would have to bring her back again, and he wasn’t even home like the last time. I didn’t know what to do when she cried but cry, and I didn’t know at all what to do if she ran out into the field. And then she said, Rigby, you have to be a grownup now. I’ll make some coffee and we’ll put the cloth on the table and we’ll have a cigarette. I’ve got something I’ve got to tell you, but you must be a grownup for it to work, and then you must never tell anybody ever. Do you promise?

  Yes, I promised.

  She took out the cloth tablecloth as she spoke to me, and floated it down on the table. I had seen her do that with Russell, float his blanket up in the air like that, like a fan, and then let it settle on him, and then flip it up again and then let it settle again. Russell liked that. I think I could see him almost smile whenever she floated the blanket down on him like that, floated it onto him, so soft, like a big bird flying.

  Right then, I wanted to be lying on the table and let the cloth tablecloth come down on top of me, that clean wave of air, her smell, the slow, graceful descent.

  She put four tablespoons of coffee into the percolator and plugged it in. She went to the bathroom and pulled the bobby pins from her hair and fluffed it out, penciled in her eyebrows, and put lipstick onto her lips, Ruby Scarlet, and blotted her lips with a square of toilet paper, and let the square float from her hand into the air, onto the floor, by her high heels with no toes in them. She had put on her high heels and her nylons with the seam in them and her brown dress with the orchid all the way down the front.

  I wet my hair and parted it, and put the clip-on tie on my white shirt on the collar, and polished my shoes the way I would do if I was going to church.

  Mom poured us coffee in the cups that matched the saucers, and she smoked. I smoked too. French-inhaling, my hair slick, me in my tie with her, with her having coffee in the afternoon.

  But I didn’t smoke.

  There was her Ruby Scarlet lipstick on her Viceroy, and there was her lipstick on her cup.

  Just now, when I was sleeping with Russell, she said, I woke up and I was lying on top of him. I thought I had smothered him. I thought he was dead. Rigby, you know what that means, don’t you? Dead?

  Yes. I lied. I didn’t know.

  I knew the Door of the Dead. When our dog Toby died, he said goodbye first, then went into the barn and lay down in the hay.

  Mom put the Viceroy to her lips, pulled in the smoke deep.

  I thought I had killed him, Mom said, and this is the part where you have to be grownup and never tell, Rigby. Rigby John?

  The smoke inside her came out her nose.

  I was glad, my mother said.

  It was spring when the
pigs got out. Some time within the last ten days of his one hundred days, and this day, the day that started with the pigs getting out, is the most important of all of the one hundred of those days.

  Mom had bought a window fan for the window in her bedroom for Russell with her S&H Green Stamps. The June grass was already going dry, and the river was back down. Dad had built a pen out of wire fencing and old doors in the corral behind the barn, with part of the pen in the river so that the pigs could lie around in the water and the mud.

  Those pigs were in the water all the time. Dad called them the bathing beauties. The brood sow he called Esther. Esther Williams he called the brood sow.

  That day when they all got out, it was Saturday because school was still on and Sis was home and wasn’t sick, and it wasn’t Sunday because we didn’t have our Sunday clothes on and didn’t go to church. Dad was usually home on Sundays because there wasn’t supposed to be any servile work on Sundays, and he wasn’t there that day, and so that was the day when Sis and I walked out the back door of the barn and there were the pigs, out of their pen, squealing around the corral.

  Pigs are out! Pigs are out! Sis yelled, and then I yelled it too.

  When Sis and I told Mom the pigs were out, she flipped her fingers the way she always does when she gets nervous. Mom went into the bedroom and looked at Russell, who was sleeping. Sis and I stood in the hallway with the red linoleum and the wallpaper with the butterflies and dice and looked in after Mom. The bedroom was dark and the fan was on. Mom turned to us and put her finger to her lips and waved her hand at us to get out of there, so Sis and I went into the kitchen. We weren’t in the kitchen for long before suddenly a streak of red shot past us. It was Mom.

  Last one out of the corral gate’s a cow’s tail! Mom yelled, already down the steps of the back porch, stretching out the screen-door screen and running out into the bright, large, flat dusty world. We hadn’t seen Mom like this since Aunt Alma and Theresa. Sis and I followed her, first past the little green square of lawn with no dandelions in it, then past the Seven Sisters rose hanging onto the back fence, then past the gas pump, the ’48 Buick, then onto the graveled yard that stretched out acres between us and the corral gate, Mom ahead, the skirt of her red housedress flying up above her knees, Sis right behind her, my sister’s hair blowing like Mom’s, her legs like Mom’s — those females.

  I stopped running.

  I stopped running and stood and watched them running.

  Mom cleared the three poles of the fence like a bird flying, like something wild leaping, and Sis never hesitated. My sister dived under the bottom pole and rolled and stood up next to Mom. They smiled at each other. I stood there and watched, and my mother and my sister smiled at each other. A flock of sparrows flew over the ridge-pole of the barn then, between me and the sun, and I shaded my eyes and I was there watching things. The barn, the house, the pole fence, the gate, the pigs out, Mom and Sis, everything differnt, differnt and bright, nothing the same, and I felt as if I had never been anything before.

  Come on! Come on, cow’s tail! my sister yelled at me, waving her arm. We have to get these pigs in before they get into the river!

  Sooo-eeee! Mom yelled.

  Sooo-eeee! Sis yelled, and so did I.

  We circled the pigs. Mom got between me and the river, Sis got in the middle, and me on the other side, and slowly, slowly, we herded the pigs back into the pen, our arms out to make us wider.

  Sooo-eeee! we all yelled.

  One of the doors of the pen was down, the closest door to the barn, so we had a corner to herd them into. We were doing pretty well until Sis pointed to the door lying on the ground, to the door that was part of the pigpen, which the pigs had knocked over, which was lying there like a door into the ground, underneath the dry cow manure. My sister pointed to that door and said, just so only I could hear, The Door of the Dead.

  I was almost standing on it.

  I was almost standing on the Door of the Dead.

  I jumped right out of there and yelled with all my might, which spooked the pigs, and they ran back out into the corral, through the place where I was supposed to be standing, and went straight to the river. Esther Williams in the lead, and the rest of them after her, the rest of the bathing beauties running after Esther Williams.

  When that fat sow dived off the riverbank, the same way I think a ballerina would dive, poised in the air, and then, when she hit the water, gliding like a seal, gliding as Esther Williams would glide, through the current to the small island of brambles and scrub elms some feet off from the bank, when that pig just went like that, I stopped and looked again, looked as I had looked before, stopped and looked at what the world looked like. It was a world that was suddenly full of things, mysterious things, things that weren’t me.

  I could see my mother and my sister doing everything they could do to keep those pigs out of the drink. They were screaming and waving their arms and putting their bodies in front of the pigs, but it was no use. Mom was able to grab one pig by the hind leg and drag it away, but the pig kicked and squealed and Mom didn’t have the strength to pull it any farther, so there they stood, Mom and the pig, in the middle of the corral, a standoff, the pig kicking and my mother jerking with every kick. Finally she just had to let go. The pig ran and dived, just like the others, and swam, just like the others, to the island where Esther Williams was with the rest of the bathing beauties.

  It got quiet then.

  Mom just sat down right there in the manure.

  They were gone.

  All the pigs got wild, got crazy on us, and swam away, dived the way they weren’t supposed to, got out of there, swam like other animals, like sea animals, not like pigs, swimming, dumb farm animals diving, swimming, escaping, showing off, making a spectacle of themselves.

  It was then I saw the owl in the tree on the other side of the river, just above the bank, just a little ways past the island where the pigs were. In shallow water you could wade right to the tree where the owl was. If you moved your eyes a little, the owl would disappear like magic, but then, if you knew how to look, it would appear again, out of the leaves and out of the twigs, there were its eyes.

  Sons of bitches! Mom yelled.

  She picked herself up off the ground and picked up a hard horse turd and threw it at Esther Williams. And then she picked up a rock. She spun in circles, around and around, winding up for the pitch, twirling, a dust devil, her arms in the air, her skirt riding up, a dance, and hurled the rock with a sound from her inside, deep, a grunt, and the rock sailed through the air and went through the window of the chicken coop, the side where the baby chicks were. There was a little sound, a slight shattering in the sunny afternoon, and that was all.

  Sons of bitches! Mom cried, her fists, like Russell’s, aimed at the sky. Damn sows, damn sows, sons of bitches!

  I didn’t tell Dad about the broken window in the coop because Russell died the next day. No, actually, it was Monday that Russell died, because the next day, the day after the pigs got out, was Sunday, and on that day Dad got the pigs back in with our horse, Chub. Had to lasso each pig and bring each pig across one at a time, even though it was Sunday, but it was an emergency and not that servile.

  I was picking up my Lincoln Logs off the brown carpet with the flowers in it in the front room, or Tinkertoys. Sis hadn’t been home long, and I had done the chores. I had leaned a board in front of the broken window and was going to tell Dad about it at supper. We were going to make cocoa because Russell wasn’t crying. Mom was sitting in her special chair, her and Russell’s special chair, holding him the way she always did, rocking, when she said: Go get your father — Russell’s dead.

  This part is not as clear as the other parts.

  What happened next are these things: Monsignor Cody was there, and so were Aunt Marguerite and Uncle Pat, and more people. I was supposed to stay in my room and so was Sis. In the kitchen, on the table, was the cloth tablecloth and the percolator and the cups with matching saucers, a
chocolate cake with chocolate frosting and red Jell-O with fruit cocktail in it and bananas.

  They put Russell in his bassinet in the bedroom. I wasn’t supposed to go in there, but I went in there when nobody was in there, even though there were lots of people everywhere, some of them crying. The fan was off and there were candles all around him and everything was white: the blankets, the bassinet, his nightie.

  It smelled like him in there, like her.

  Russell was just lying in the bassinet the same way I had seen him so many times, his eyes closed, the covers pulled around him. I touched him a little on the shoulder, through his nightie, and he was no differnt. But then I pulled the cover back and saw his hands. They were open, palms up, sunny side.

  On the day of the funeral it rained. Sis says it was sunny, but I remember that there were umbrellas and that we all stood next to a huge elm tree under umbrellas, and that I was wearing my overshoes. I stood to the right of Monsignor and the altar boys. I got to smell the incense. My grandmother was behind me. Sis stood by me on the side, and then Aunt Marie, Aunt Zelda, Aunt Alma, Theresa Nussbaum, Aunt Marguerite, and then Mom on the other. Dad had bought her a new coat. It was navy blue with big buttons. Behind Dad stood my other grandmother and Great-aunt Monica.

  When they lowered the casket, I thought about the Door of the Dead in the corral on the ground that day the pigs got out and that Russell was still alive, but this is what is most important about what happened that day and the thing that I remember most of anything, in those days, those one hundred days. It’s that Dad started crying so hard that they had to wipe the rain off the folding chair so he could sit down. As soon as I saw Dad sit down like that, I was on my way to him, and I was halfway there, just past Aunt Alma and almost to Aunt Marguerite, before Grandma, the one behind me, got a hold of my arm and pulled me back, past the flowers, past the Door of the Dead, and put me back in my place, in my place in front of her, back in my place, seven females from my father.