Faraway Places (8 page)

Miss Parkinson also taught speech third period. Once, she had us give impromptu speeches. Each of us had to go up and stand in front of the whole class and give a speech on a topic that Miss Parkinson made up right then. I did terrible on the one she gave me: “Important Decisions I Have Made.” I couldn't tell them about jumping in the river and all it led to. I really hadn't made any other decisions so I didn't have much to say. What I ended up saying was that I was glad that I decided to take speech class instead of Spanish class, but I couldn't say much more than that because right then I hated speech class.

Jimmy Terrel got the topic of beans. He recited a little poem about how beans give you gas and make you toot. Everybody laughed, even Miss Parkinson. I laughed so hard I had to leave the class. It was funny—farting always seemed funny to me then—and to talk about it in the class made it even funnier. It was too much. I told my mother how I had laughed in speech class and why. I told her Jimmy Terrel's poem and she laughed just about as hard as I had laughed, so then I went ahead and told her about the time that my father farted—my father was always farting loud when he wasn't around my mother—when he was fixing the hay rake one day. Our dog, Toby—this was before he died—was sitting right there under my father at the time. When my father farted so loud, Toby's ears perked up. He tilted his head a little to the side, sniffed, then got out of there real fast.

I had never seen my mother laugh so hard as when I told
her that story. I loved that she was laughing like that. That day, I decided I would try to make her laugh like that more often.

I'd studied American history at the St. Joseph's School, but those Holy Cross nuns didn't teach American history like Mr. Hoffman did at the Hawthorne Junior High School. He was old and smelled like cigarettes and his own self. He taught us that history was just a story that somebody was telling, and what happened in the story often depended on who was telling it. An
interpretation
, is what Mr. Hoffman always said that history was—like, for example, we think it was a good deal for us to buy Manhattan for twenty-four dollars in trinkets, but how do the Indians feel about that transaction? And Custer's Last Stand wasn't a massacre at all as far as the Indians are concerned. And how would you like it if the Ku Klux Klan hated you because of how
you
were? It was all a matter of
interpretation
.

Mr. Hoffman said that America was formed by people trying to get away so they could be how they were and exercise their right to their own interpretation and not be like governments and religions were saying they had to be.

It's a free country
, is another thing Mr. Hoffman said over and over.
It's a free country
. I started saying that to myself, too:
It's a free country
.

I remember the day Mr. Hoffman first said that
history
was always just somebody's
interpretation
of the events, and not the events themselves. Sitting in Mr. Hoffman's class that day, I looked out the window and thought about what Mr. Energy had said at the Blackfoot State Fair, about everything being an illusion.

I spent a lot of time thinking about those two things, about
illusion
and
interpretation
, about the truth and stories about the truth, about reality and how things appear—and what I came up with was a headache.

The only thing I knew for sure was that it was a free country and that what both of those men were saying was that how
things were, and how things seemed to be, were not always the same.

I got to be pretty good friends with Mr. Hoffman. Sometimes I would eat my lunch in his classroom and read
Time
magazine and we would talk. He gave me a book as a present. The name of it was
Manifest Destiny
and it was about American history—
a pretty good interpretation
, Mr. Hoffman had said.

There were three photographs in that book
Manifest Destiny
that I always used to look at. Sometimes at home, at night, when my mother and my father were asleep, I would turn on my light and look at those three pictures. One was a picture of Chief Joseph, not St. Joseph,
Chief
Joseph of the Nez Percé. I used to like to look at what he was wearing: beads and feathers that he had traded for Manhattan. His hair was long and braided. He had eyes that reminded me of the nigger's—of Geronimo's.

The second was the photograph of men dressed up in white sheets like priests, standing around a burning cross. In the background was a Negro man hanging.

The third photograph was of a big factory in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. There were big smokestacks with smoke and fire pouring out across the sky. The factory was made of tin as bright as the toolshed in the sun. Under the photograph was a chapter head: “The Industrial Revolution.”

AND SOMETHING ELSE
different happened that year: at the end of September I received the sacrament of Holy Confirmation. I was late by a year—the year before, the bishop had been sick, and only the bishop could perform the sacrament of Holy Confirmation. My whole class at the St. Joseph's School had to wait till he was better.

Confirmation is the sacrament when the Holy Ghost comes down upon you. Once you're confirmed, you're grown-up in the eyes of the Church. To receive the sacrament you had to memorize the entire Baltimore catechism from cover to cover. You had to know it all, every page, because the bishop would ask you
questions in front of the whole congregation about what was in that book. You never knew which one he was going to ask.

My mother bought me a suit for the occasion, a secondhand one from the St. Joseph's Church rummage sale. She bought second-hand because I would just outgrow it. That suit was navy blue with wide lapels and awful baggy pants to match.

That Sunday, the Sunday of my Holy Confirmation, my mother and my father and I drove into town like usual, not saying much. We got to the church at eight-thirty and I told Monsignor Canby what I had done and how many times I had done it. Monsignor gave me a penance—five Our Fathers and five Hail Marys—and then I went up to sit with the rest of the confirmandees—that's what they called us:
confirmandees
. There were six of us and, as it ended up, the bishop only asked me one question. It was the second one in the book:

“If God is everywhere, why cannot we see Him?” the bishop wanted to know.

No problem. I stood up straight like I thought a saint would stand and imagined that a tongue of fire—the Holy Ghost—was coming down on me right then. I answered the question, my voice echoing in the nave. I answered like a grown-up Catholic: “We cannot see God because He is a Pure Spirit and cannot be seen with bodily eyes.”

The bishop's sermon was about the Holy Trinity and how the Holy Trinity was a Divine Mystery: Three Beings in one and the same God: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

After Mass, in front of the church, my father took my picture, with my mother behind him telling me how to smile so my crooked bottom teeth didn't show.

But being confirmed didn't change things as much as I'd hoped. It didn't stop any of those red flags, if you know what I mean. The only difference, as far as I could tell, was that I got a new name. I got to choose the name of the saint I most wanted to be like. From then on, it would be my confirmation name for the rest of my life.

I read
The Lives of the Saints
to help decide which saint to pick. Jacob was my given name, but the original Jacob was no saint; he wasn't even in the New Testament, let alone a Catholic.

One night, as the story goes, Jacob was just lying there in his bed when an archangel named Penuel descended and started wrestling with him. Jacob thought Penuel was a devil. All night they wrestled, breaking things and knocking things over, Penuel making that flapping sound with his wings. When morning came, Jacob had got the best of Penuel even though Penuel was an archangel. That's when Penuel told Jacob who he was. Jacob told Penuel he wouldn't let go until Penuel blessed him. Penuel had no choice. He gave Jacob his blessing.

In
The Lives of the Saints
I started reading about St. John Vianney. As soon as I read his story, I knew, he was the one: St. John Vianney, the Curé of Ars. I didn't know what that meant, “the Curé of Ars,” but I chose him because he said he had wrestled with a devil, a real one. He was just lying there in his bed and a devil descended and St. John knew it was a devil right off. He wasn't fooled for a minute. I figured this St. John Vianney guy could help me out. He knew a devil when he wrestled with one. Plus he was a Catholic. So I chose him.

My confirmation certificate was written in that fancy kind of writing and it said that I had received the Sacrament of Holy Confirmation and that my confirmation name was John. I hung the certificate up on my bedroom wall next to the picture of the guardian angel helping the two little kids across the bridge.

I liked my new name a lot for about a week, but then, as it turned out, I never really got to use it. Everybody at the Hawthorne Junior High School was a Mormon so they wouldn't have understood about my new name, not that I ever talked to them much anyway. The only other people I talked to were my mother and my father and they didn't call me any name when they called to me. My father called me “lunk-head” now and then, so I just stuck to my regular name and Haji Baba when I was in the loft of the barn or up in the cottonwoods.

I still liked the story of Jacob and the Archangel Penuel and St. John Vianney and the devil going at it, though, and there were a couple of nights I woke up ready for a fight, but I was alone.

I SAW THE
nigger two more times before I saw him hanging there from the winch in the back of the barn, strung up with the ropes of my swing, although I really didn't see the nigger the first of these two times.

The Matisse County Mounted Posse hadn't been around for some time, and the nigger's lean-to looked no different from the first few times that they had ransacked it—the window was still broken, the back door was open, and there was stuff strewn all over the backyard, busted up. I figured the Matisse County Mounted Posse had long since given up on the nigger since I hadn't seen them around for so long. One evening I heard my father tell my mother that the sheriff had told him that the nigger had probably hopped a freight and gone south—back to his own kind. “Or joined the circus,” I said aloud in the hallway of the butterflies and dice when I heard my father tell my mother about the nigger jumping a freight. Ever since I heard that that's what the sheriff thought, that the nigger had jumped a freight, I would say, Geronimo and Haji Baba jumped a freight; it got to be a chant, joined the circus. Geronimo and Haji Baba jumped a freight, joined the circus, a freight for Nantucket, Oshkosh, Timbuktu; I'd say it to myself over and over again while I was ticking off the red flags, while I was swinging, shooting for sunset, and a bull's-eye.

It was a Saturday the first time I saw the nigger. That was the time I just knew that he was there. I'm sure it was a Saturday because there wasn't any school that day and it wasn't Sunday because we didn't go to church that day. It was Saturday in the late afternoon. The sky was golden, the way it gets that time of year, that time of day. There was a steady wind and you could hear things from a long way off. I was sitting by the narrow,
fast place in the river—my father called them the Popcorn Fart Falls because the river was so low that year—in a sunny spot.

An orange peel shaped like a heart floated over the falls and down, and then an orange peel shaped like a diamond floated over and down, and then an orange peel shaped like a four-leaf clover floated by; finally an orange peel shaped like a spade floated over the falls and vanished. I turned to look upstream and saw a beautiful boat floating down the river, a barge. It looked Egyptian—like something Cleopatra would have to float down the river. The boat was made from a pod from the catalpa tree, and in the pod, in the boat, there was a layer of orange-peel carpet and trees made out of sticks with orange-peel tops. There were hollyhock ladies in full hollyhock skirts and wide-brimmed hollyhock hats. There were magical animals made from tinfoil that stood around the hollyhock ladies under the orange-peel trees, and there were orange-carpeted steps that went up to an altar.

There was a photograph of her there, of that woman Sugar Babe.

But the photograph looked like a lot of women I knew. The photograph looked like Cleopatra, like Hedy Lamarr, like the woman in the ticket booth at the Blackfoot State Fair; the photograph looked like the Virgin Mary, like my mother.

Around the photograph of that woman was a frame of ribbons and feathers and the beads that bought Manhattan and little white flowers and pieces of sagebrush and silver leaves from the cottonwood trees.

All around the photograph there were dollar bills that stuck out from the frame, dollar bills pinned to the photograph; pinned to the altar; dollar bills everywhere, sticking out from the orange-peel carpet and the orange-peel trees. Some of the magic animals stood on dollars.

I had never seen so much money, ever.

I did not touch a thing, not a dollar, not a flower. In fact, I moved back out of the river and sat myself down on the lava
rock and pulled my knees up. I watched as the barge went over the falls, slowly. There wasn't much current. I sat in the niche of the lava rock in a sunny place that the wind passed by and the sky didn't get to, and watched the barge as it went over. It went down fast and rammed into a rock. The pod split, the orange trees fell into the river, the hollyhock ladies in their hollyhock hats flew overboard, the magic animals went over the side, their shiny foil sinking into darkness. The dollar bills, the flowers, the beads, and the ribbons went down. The picture sank. Nothing floated back up.