Now Is the Hour

by Tom Spanbauer

  There was a reception in the new reception hall in the basement of Saint Joseph’s School.

  Sis showed me her classroom, although we weren’t supposed to go upstairs.

  I heard Aunt Zelda say that it was such a blessing, there was so much wrong with him.

  Afterward we went home. Mom drove. Sis and I started singing Going to the chapel like we sometimes did in the car, but Mom told us to shut up. When we got home I changed my clothes and did my chores. The board was down from the window of the coop, and all the chicks were dead.

  It looked to me that those who weren’t killed right off by the owl had smothered in the corner, in a heap, trying to get away.

  2 After Russell

  AFTER ONE HUNDRED days of Russell crying, his screams, his coughs, his fists, the way he tried for air, everything was quiet. No baby screams from Mom and Dad’s bedroom. At night no Mom or Dad walking up and down the hallway holding Russell. No more poopy diapers soaking in the toilet. No bottles sterilizing in the big white pot on the cookstove. No white bassinet. No baby.

  Outside our skinny white house, winter set in hard, snow almost as high as the windows, bright white, white windows, ice on the windows. It hurt your eyes to look.

  Inside the house, I thought the stoves were turned up too high, or bathroom steam was out all over in the house, or the wood in the cookstove was wet and made the smoke. But it was none of these things.

  It was Mom. Something about her was lost, and what was lost wasn’t trying to find its way back. Pray and pray and pray. The rosary, the rosary, the rosary. That’s all we did.

  Then there were Mom’s migraines. A pain like God the Father coming down to dwell inside her head is how she said it hurt. When a migraine hit, it started with something far away, a drip, or the wings of a big bird, a sound that was low and faint and off-key. After she heard the faint and off-key sound, a couple seconds was all she had before the sound got so loud there wasn’t nothing but that sound.

  Dad said Mom was about to go around the bend. Dad and Sis and me had to speak in whispers and never laugh or be loud. One time I forgot and let the back door slam, and Dad hit my butt so hard I landed on the other side of the kitchen. Dad smacked Sis a couple times too. Got so that me and Sis spent most of our time in our bedroom with the door closed. It was cold in there and we had to wear our coats and mittens. We’d quit playing Door of the Dead, so Sis mostly played with her paper dolls. Dad wasn’t outside circling anymore, so I didn’t dare play paper dolls with her. I played with my truck.

  At night, after the rosary, and Dad turned all the lights out, I lay in my bed, the covers pulled up to my chin. It was never long before I’d hear my own faint off-key sound far away. No matter what I did, praying, singing quiet to myself, counting as far as I could, then counting backward, it didn’t matter, I couldn’t stop the sound. Sis knew it was Russell and my questions of why did God make him be born that way and die? Most of the time, Sis had to come lie in bed with me and touch the top of my head and whisper stories to me. Haji Baba and his magic flying carpet was my favorite.

  The following spring everything happened all at once.

  Harold P. Endicott and his phosphate plant put in a holding pond, and the Portneuf River dried up. Then Dad got on the yellow Caterpillar, moved the blade down just so, then pointed the yellow Caterpillar at our skinny white house. Dad waved over at Mom and me and Sis, and we waved back.

  The only thing still inside the house was the piano. The piano was old and burnt and came from a saloon in Niggertown, and it had no place in our new future. In just a couple of minutes, our house — roof and all, floors, walls, doors, and windows — was just dust and a pile of rubble.

  When the yellow Caterpillar got to the piano, the piano made an awful sound. Far away, the sound, at first. Low and faint and off-key. Like a big bird flying. I quick looked at Mom. Sure enough, Mom’s face got that migraine look to it, but I held on tight to her hand.

  Mom didn’t run. Maybe because she had no place to go. In the middle of the yard in the sun, the wind blowing at our straw hats, Mom pulled out her rosary, and we knelt down right there in the gravel and prayed the rosary. The sorrowful mysteries.

  Dad worked day and night on the new house. At Aunt Zelda’s, where we were staying, Dad was gone before breakfast and didn’t come home until after dark. Mom kept his supper warm for him in the oven. The only time we saw Dad in those days was in the afternoon when Mom made Dad a sandwich, and we brought the sandwich to him and a Coke. Power saws and hammering, two-by-fours poking up at right angles into the sunny blue sky, sawdust and the smell of plywood, is what I remember. Dad and his cousin Uncle John and Aunt Zelda’s husband, Uncle Bob, three big men, cussing and laughing and sweating in the sun.

  By the following winter, where there had been one house was another house. The old house, long and white and wooden and skinny. The new house, modern and brick and split-level.

  The way I figure it, Dad thought he could fix Mom by fixing her up with a new house. Mom liked the new house all right, at least that’s what she showed Dad. But if you looked close, you could tell something important had changed. Mom was there, but no matter how hard I looked I couldn’t find her eyes. And then the migraines would return, and she’d disappear altogether again behind the door to the bedroom.

  Dad didn’t know what to do. He’d built his family a new home, had kept the farm going, and now he had to take care of his two children. He didn’t like any of it. It was easy to see how awkward he felt, it was easy to see how sad he was at the death of his son. What I saw more than anything, though, was his anger. More anger than ever. He was a big man with rough hands and grease under his fingernails, but there he was cooking dinner — scrambling eggs and frying potatoes. Dad’s one of those frontier guys, John Wayne, a man of few words and a loaded gun in the pickup. He belonged outdoors, and there he was in the house doing the wash and folding his wife’s underwear, making sack lunches for Sis and me and getting us ready for school. And putting up with me. As soon as he could, he disappeared back outside to the farm work.

  As I look back on it, this was the time me and Sis could’ve got closer to my father. A shared death can do that, for some families. It would have been the perfect time to take me fishing. But not my family, not my dad. He was around the house, and we were underfoot more than any time in my life. But that didn’t mean he talked any more, and he never once talked about Russell or tried to. How he might feel about it. Or how we were supposed to feel about it.

  It seems pretty clear now he was determined not to feel anything, and even though day after day, night after night, we lived cheek by jowl with him, he kept his distance from us, however scared and alone we might feel. One ornery bastard. That’s what Mom said about Dad’s father once. So it was with my father. Cold, irritable, impatient. One ornery bastard.

  In a lot of ways, Sis and I were on our own. Any mistake, any sign of weakness, and it was the ornery old bastard we had to deal with.

  The trouble for me was I was afraid to fall asleep. That’s what Russell’d done — fallen asleep. And that’s the only explanation Sis and I had ever heard: Russell fell asleep and went to heaven.

  As soon as I’d get in bed, I could hear the faraway noise, wings of a big bird, faint and off-key. No matter how much I prayed, I couldn’t get the sound to stop. In our old house, Sis and I shared a bedroom, and I could sneak into her bed, and she’d hold me and tell me stories. Sis’s voice and being next to her always worked, and I’d be asleep in no time, getting up at first light so Mom and Dad wouldn’t find us together. But in the new house my bedroom was down in the basement, and the journey to Sis’s room through the quiet, dark house was fraught with peril because I had to pass by Mom and Dad’s room. Dad caught me soon enough. Maybe if he’d been another dad, he’d have asked why I had to be close to Sis. I probably couldn’t have told him but still it would’ve been nice to be asked. Maybe he might have taken me by the hand and walked with me to my room and then he’d
sit on the end of my bed after he’d tucked me in. Maybe my father alone with me in the dark could’ve kept the faraway sound away. But Dad was not another dad. There was him cussing me out, then there were the spankings, and because I was headstrong and liked to make a spectacle of myself, there was the trips to the saddle room with the belt. Finally, there was a dead bolt on the outside of my door. I had to pee in a Mason jar.

  In Dad’s world, there is no fear. No room for it. If you don’t believe it’s there, you don’t have to deal with it. And if there’s no fear, then there’s no need for comforting fear. Too bad. Maybe in giving he could have got some comfort for himself. But there are some things that just aren’t allowed.

  Mom’s way of coping with the darkness that could descend at any moment was to fall back on what she’d always fallen back on. The Catholic religion. For her, it couldn’t be any other way.

  Mom started going to daily Mass. Every morning, even Saturday, Mom and Sis and me got up an hour early. For breakfast, Sis boiled two eggs and boiled water and we made Nestle’s Quik. Mom had just a cup of coffee, then drove Sis and me to seven o’clock Mass. Mom prayed extra-hard those days. You could see her trying. From the minute she walked into the church, everything about her was trying to get God’s attention. At the consecration of the Mass, when Monsignor Cody held up the host, Mom beat her breast and said, Lord, I am not worthy, but you could tell. Mom didn’t really mean it. Or mean it like she wanted to. Some mornings you could hear Mom crying in the confessional, and one time she came storming out and slammed the confessional door. Mom had to take me home with her because God the Father had settled hard in her head. The migraine was so bad on the way home I had to help her hold the steering wheel.

  One night, after Lassie on TV, we all knelt down on the new turquoise flowered carpet in the living room to pray the rosary. Mom was just about to make the sign of the cross, when Sis said: Why don’t we ever pray the joyful mysteries? Why do we always have to pray the sorrowful ones?

  Mom kept on making the sign of the cross, but while she was making the cross she didn’t say, In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. The way her face looked right then, I couldn’t have told you who my mother was. What Mom said, she said quiet: There is no joy here, she said.

  Even the new piano Dad bought her didn’t do much good. It was a new Steinway with a walnut finish. Looking into the surface of that piano was like looking into a pool of dark walnut water, or a piece of walnut-tinted glass. The piano sat in the corner of the living room, always shined up, on the new turquoise flowered carpet, against the wood paneling on the wall, just left of the folds of orange drapes on the aluminum window. Mom hadn’t ever played that piano, not even once. One afternoon when I came home from school, I caught Mom sitting at the piano. She was staring down at the piano keys. Like it was a deep mystery that promised some answers. But Mom’s hands were at her sides. She didn’t even see that I was looking, and I was standing right there.

  Gradually, slowly, Mom did seem to be coming back. She was up and about more and more anyway, so Sis and I didn’t have to do so many of the house chores. Sometimes, I’d come home from school, and there would be the old familiar smell of cookies coming from the kitchen. A few times I can remember some fresh-cut flowers on the kitchen table. But I still couldn’t find my mother’s eyes, and there was something new about her, real differnt, a brittleness, as if she was a piano string strung too tight, and a finger coming down on a key a bit too hard could make her snap.

  Adding to the troubles were the bills. With the new house and Dad’s new ’57 Buick and Mom’s new piano, plus the new hi-fi, Mom had something new to worry about. How were we going to get all those goddamn bills paid?

  All she did, I mean besides pray the rosary and go to Mass every morning and try and cook and clean, was sit at her new kitchen table, hair flying, her head buried in a mountain of pink slips, her new black horn-rimmed reading glasses down on the end of her nose, cussing a blue streak, her rough, red farm hands, her cut-to-the-quick fingernails pushing a pencil around on a piece of paper, her tiny Catholic numbers adding, subtracting, and dividing, always coming up with not enough.

  With Mom like that, Sis and I tried to keep our distance. I don’t know how Sis felt about it, but I didn’t like it. Mom had always been the person who let me know who I was and how I felt. So keeping a distance was something I had to learn, and the lesson was a tough one. Our second Christmas in our new house, Uncle Pat gave me his Lionel train set. It was complete with everything — the tracks, the engine, boxcars, the red brick train station — everything except the transformer.

  In Montgomery Ward, there was a beautiful transformer. It was shiny black and cost twenty-five dollars. The transformer had a dial for how fast you wanted the train to go and a red light that blinked on and off when the train came into the train station. I could curl my hands around the transformer and not touch my fingers.

  Christmas Eve, when I looked down and saw the shiny black transformer in the Christmas lights under the Christmas tree, it was a miracle. Right off, I ran downstairs and hooked up the transformer. The red light went on, and when I turned the dial it was another miracle. The Lionel train started running. Round and around that train all night. Going through the station, going through the tunnel in the mountain, stopping at the signal to pick up the mailbag. The red light blinking on and off was so cool.

  Some things are just too good to be true. The day after Christmas, Mom changed her mind and took my transformer back to Montgomery Ward. She said the transformer cost too much, and with all our bills we couldn’t afford it. Mom bought the little transformer, the tin one that cost ten dollars and didn’t have a light, and you could see how it was screwed together. It fit in the palm of my hand.

  Only a nine-year-old boy used to a new pair of Levi’s every year for his birthday knows what it’s like to suddenly have and then lose a Lionel train transformer. I had seen my mother hunched over the bills at the kitchen table enough times to understand the connection between those piles of paper and the fifteen dollars she’d just saved. I didn’t like it, but I understood.

  What happened soon after, though, was something that sent me reeling. I’ve told you how important dress-up was. It was something Sis and Mom and I used to do together when Dad wasn’t around. With Mom a bit better, Dad had gone back out to the fields, and Sis and I again started visiting the steamer trunk. Mom didn’t play with us anymore, but still it was fun being scintillatingly gorgeous.

  One afternoon, I stayed home with a pretend headache from school. Mom was pushing the vacuum back and forth over the new turquoise carpet with the flowers, and just like that she shut off the vacuum. She looked up as if God were speaking. She made the sign of the cross. Then it was straight to the bedroom.

  My knuckles against her mahogany bedroom door made a hollow sound. You go on and play, Mom said.

  Mom? I said. Can I play dress-up?

  If you play downstairs, Mom said.

  It took me awhile to ask because none of us had ever said it.

  What if Dad comes in? I asked.

  He won’t be in until supper, Mom said.

  The green plaid dress buttoned up, the shiny black velvet hat with the flower brooch, the black high-heel shoes with the ankle strap. The rhinestone bracelet. The cameo necklace. The pleated green scarf tied around my neck. The red purse with the gold latch. The gold ring. The white gloves.

  There I was standing inside the light of the trunk, in the perfect outfit, and the light of the trunk was the whole world, the strange magic Wizard of Oz world, the world that smelled of Eiffel Tower.

  Scintillatingly gorgeous.

  I didn’t hear the other world, the world we live in every day, coming down the basement steps.

  In all my days, I don’t think I’ve ever been so terrified.

  It was Ott Lattig. Dad’s tall, skinny usher friend from church. He was yelling. Ott Lattig’s face was red, and he was yelling. He kicked the steamer trunk, and the
steamer trunk went crashing over. He pulled the red purse from my hands, pulled the gloves off my hands, the gold ring. Yelling and yelling, Ott Lattig slapped the black velvet hat off my head, Ott Lattig put his hands around my neck, pulled at the green scarf, pushed me back, pulled at the Peter Pan collar, ripped the green plaid dress open, tore the buttons off.

  I tried to hide behind the fallen steamer trunk. The straps of the black shoes were caught around my ankles.

  Then Mom was standing there. With these same two eyes, I looked up and there was my mother, and she didn’t have a migraine, and she had her eyebrows on, and her Orange Exotica lipstick, and her almond-shaped hazel eyes were all green, no gold at all staring down at me.

  I mean, how old was I? No more than nine.

  Then Mom says — you won’t believe this, but my mother turns to Ott Lattig, and she says — Thanks, Ott, she says. See how my son plays. His father is so ashamed of him.

  Shame.

  That’s the word all right.

  Fuck. Who are these people?

  Not long after the Ott Lattig incident, one day when Dad was out in the field, I went down into the furnace room alone. I did not open the steamer trunk. I pulled the old coal stool over, climbed the rungs of the stool, stood on the stool, and reached up and took the fishing pole down.

  The fishing pole was wood and had tiny loops on it where the fishing line went through. The reel was green. The handle, where you turned, was green. There was never any fishing line in the reel.

  The way the reel felt in my hands, how the reel sounded when I turned it, the feel of the wood in my hands.

  Sis had a new Brownie Instamatic. At first, Sis wouldn’t take the photo. She didn’t want a photo of her little brother. Sis was turning into somebody I didn’t know. I had to give her a dollar.