Now Is the Hour (10 page)

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.

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.

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.