The Hour I First Believed

by Wally Lamb

  Ozzie’s remark came flying back at me: Give G.I. Joe a hand. The way his buddies had high-fived him in the hallway after class. “Amazing how cruel people can be, isn’t it? What’s that about, anyway?”

  “I don’t know. Self-loathing? Survival of the fittest?…Some nights I just climb up onto her bunk and hold her, rock her until she cries herself to sleep. I could get in trouble if they caught me. We’re not supposed to be on each other’s beds. But she’s just a baby, Caelum. She needs to be held.”

  She looked so sad, so beaten down by it. Even her new hairdo seemed to have wilted. A few minutes later, the guard at the desk announced that visiting time was over. I stood, embraced her across the table and gave her a peck on the cheek. “See you day after tomorrow,” I said.

  Maybe yes, maybe no, she said. According to the jailhouse grapevine, a lockdown was coming, sooner rather than later.

  “God, I can’t wait until you get out of here,” I said.

  She sat down again, and I walked away from her and toward the door. Silly superstition or not, I held to my policy. I did not look back.

  chapter thirty

  PASSING THE GUARD STATION ON my way out of the prison, I swung right and started the quarter mile up Bride Lake Road to the farmhouse. Then, spur of the moment, I braked, U-turned, and headed into town instead. I pulled into the strip mall on Franklin Street. Got a six-pack at Melady’s and a foot-long at Subway. Decided to swing by the Mama Mia to see if Alphonse was still there. Al was always good for a few laughs, something I sorely needed.

  But the bakery was dark. A sign taped to the door, scrawled in Al’s handwriting, read “Re-open soon. Sorry for the incovience. We appreciate your buisness.” Two misspellings in one sign: the guy was hopeless. Was it his folks? Had he had to go down to Florida again? If so, why hadn’t he called to let me know?…Well, I guess I knew the answer to that one. He’d left several e-mails and phone messages in the past weeks. What’s shakin’ Quirky? How’s Maureen? Did I want to get together and grab some dinner? Did I want to go for a spin in the “dream machine” that widow from Rhode Island had finally sold him? I’d deleted all his overtures.

  Home again, I tossed my sandwich onto the table and put the six in the fridge, minus the bottle I opened and emptied in two long gulps. Went into the bedroom to change out of my teaching clothes. That’s when I heard it, echoing from somewhere out back. Bang…Bang!…Bang!

  Was someone stupid enough to be hunting deer at dusk? Didn’t sound like gunfire, though. It was loud and percussive—something slamming against something else. What the hell was it?

  Bang!…Bang!

  Standing at the back door, I tried to pinpoint where it was coming from. Grabbed my jacket off the hook and headed out toward the orchard. There was a motorcycle parked in front of the barn and, beside it, Moses and some guy shaking hands. “Okay, then,” I heard Moze say. “I won’t be back from New York until midday Monday. Why don’t we start you on Tuesday morning?”

  “Hey!” I called. “You know what that sound is out there?”

  Moze shrugged. “I was wondering that same thing my damn self. Hey, breaking news, man. This here’s our new guy.”

  I nodded at the lanky kid standing next to him: shaved head, hooded sweatshirt, baggy hip-hop jeans. He looked familiar—a former student, maybe? Whoever he was, my mind was elsewhere. “Nice to meet you,” I called, although we hadn’t really met.

  Bang!…Bang!…Bang!

  I took a few more steps toward the orchard, then stopped, called back. “Hey, Moze! You talk to Alphonse lately?” He shook his head. “I just went over to the bakery. It’s closed.” He shrugged.

  I walked through the abandoned orchard. Most of the trees were just standing dead wood, and those that were still hanging on had yielded the pathetic, nugget-sized apples that littered the ground. Would’ve sickened Grandpa Quirk to see what had become of things.

  I stopped when I got to the clearing. Stood there a moment and took it in: Ulysses swinging a sledgehammer over his shoulder and bringing it smashing down against the concrete slab that had been the apple house floor.

  “Hey!” I called. “What the hell you doing?”

  He stopped, turned and looked at me for a second or two. Then he tossed aside the sledgehammer and started picking up chunks of the busted cement and throwing them onto the pile in the wheel barrow.

  “I can’t pay you now.”

  “You don’t have to pay me,” he said. “This is just something I gotta do.”

  “Yeah? Why’s that?”

  “Unfinished business.”

  He picked up the sledgehammer again and swung it.

  Bang!…Bang!…Bang!

  I could feel the violence of each blow in the pit of my stomach. Technically, he was trespassing.

  “Getting too dark out here,” I called. “Another twenty minutes and you won’t even be able see what you’re swinging at. You could get hurt.”

  “Full moon,” he said, pointing to the sky as proof. “They give me some tests at the clinic. Said my liver’s shot. I’m living on borrowed time.”

  I told him I was sorry. Told him he could come back tomorrow if that was what he needed to do. “And I’ll give you a hand. We can finish it up together. Come on. I’ll drive you home.”

  He stood there, panting, his hands trembling badly. “Tomorrow? Yeah, okay. How about if I stay here tonight then? Sleep on your couch, maybe?”

  “No, I don’t think—”

  “I ain’t seen Nancy Tucker in a while. Kind of like to have a little visit with her, if that’s okay. And that way, I can save myself the trip back here. Get an early start. I do better in the morning.”

  Against my better judgment, I agreed.

  “You’re good people,” he said. “Take after your aunt.”

  Maybe things weren’t as bad as they’d said they were, I told him. Maybe he should get a second opinion.

  “Nah. When your time’s come, it’s come.”

  In the house, under the harsh kitchen lights, he looked like he was dying: his skin tone was ghastly, the whites of his eyes were yellow. He had an odor about him, too—b.o. and alky stink, sickening and sweet, the way Daddy had smelled near the end.

  “You hungry?”

  “Nah. I ain’t got much of an appetite these days. I could use a little nip, though, if you got one. Little something to calm the jitters, help me get to sleep. That way, I can get up bright and early tomorrow and finish the job.”

  “You don’t have to finish it on my account,” I reminded him. “And maybe you shouldn’t be taxing yourself. Busting concrete’s hard work.”

  “So what do you think? Can you spot me a little something to drink?”

  As long as he ate a little something, I told him. I put half of my sandwich on a plate and placed it in front of him. Put a shot glass and an unopened quart of vodka on the table. What did it matter at this point?

  “None better than Lolly,” Ulysses said. “That gal was salt of the earth. Whenever I think about that day I come over here and found her wandering out there by the clothesline. Socks on her hands, talking gobbledy-gook….”

  He was right about the jitters. As he poured his first shot, he got more vodka on the table than in his glass. Spilled some more on the way to his mouth. He downed it in one gulp. I poured him his second.

  “Tell you the truth, I was always a little bit sweet on Lolly,” he said. “All the way back to high school, when I used to come over here and pal around with your dad. Didn’t dawn on me until later that I had the wrong equipment. You know what I mean?”

  I nodded.

  “I was a little dense about that kind of stuff back then. I knew from the service about queers. But I didn’t realize that some women…You know when it dawned on me? About Lolly? Happened right here in this kitchen, before your dad and me shipped out to Korea. We were sitting around the table, having some beers. Just wasting time, you know? And we started horsing around, roughhousing and such. Tipped over a coup
la chairs, I remember. And Lolly come in from the barn and said she’d take us both on in arm-wrestling and come out the winner. And we said yeah, yeah, sure you could, and then that’s just what she goddamn did. Took me on first and beat me without much of a problem, and she’d just beaten her brother when the old lady walked in. The grandmother. She was getting up there by then, but she still ruled the roost. She looked around at the empty beer cans and the tipped-over chairs, and I thought, uh-oh, Alden and me are in for it. But she didn’t say nothing to us. What she done was, she lit into Lolly like nobody’s business. Read her the riot act about what a sad state of affairs it was that she could teach all those prisoners next door how to act like ladies but her own granddaughter was a lost cause. Alden just sat there, kinda smirking, I remember. Enjoying not being the one who was in trouble for a change, I guess. But that’s when it dawned on me. Hit me like a ton of bricks: Lolly had more man in her than woman. Probably all that farm work she did, I figure. Turned her mannish.”

  “It’s not about what kind of work you do,” I said. “It’s about who you are. Gay or straight’s something you’re born with.”

  “Oh. That right?” He reached again for the vodka bottle. “But she was always good to me, Lolly. Helped me out plenty of times.”

  “You know, Ulysses, maybe after you finish your sandwich, you’d like to clean up a little. Get out of those clothes and grab a shower.”

  “Nah, that’s all right,” he said.

  “Because to tell you the truth, you smell a little funky.”

  “Oh. I do? Okay then.”

  “I can lend you some clothes. Put yours in the washer.”

  He lifted his arm and sniffed. “Yeah, all right. I didn’t realize.”

  When I heard the water going, I made him a little pile: sweatshirt, sweat pants, underwear, socks. Thinking he was already in the shower, I opened the bathroom door to place them on the hamper. He hadn’t stepped into the tub yet. He stood there, naked and cadaverous, sobbing at his steam-clouded image in the mirror. He turned and faced me. “I fucked up my whole goddamned life, didn’t I?”

  He had; there was no denying it. Still, I tried to think of something. “You were never a mean drunk,” I said. “That counts for something.” I handed him the clothes and left the room.

  I put sheets down on the couch. Got him a blanket, a pillow. By eight o’clock, the vodka bottle was half empty and Ulysses was face-down and fast asleep. Nancy Tucker had climbed aboard and made herself at home on the small of his back. She was sleeping, too.

  Standing there, watching the two of them, I couldn’t help but smile. He’d had a crush on Lolly? Good thing he’d never acted on it; she probably would’ve clocked him…. Another couple of months, I thought, and the last of the trio would be gone: those three naïve buddies who’d strolled down to the recruiting office on their last day of high school and signed on to help fight the Commies in North Korea. Poor, old, cirrhotic Ulysses was finishing his unfinished business….

  I thought about Kendricks then—his shoving his daughter off his lap after she’d made that innocent comment; his need to make himself a “hard target” in a classroom where no one was shooting at him…. Thought about those poor Columbine kids—how they’d hidden in plain sight under tables, behind counters and copy machines, and then the two of them had marched in and shot them like fish in a barrel…. Thought about how, strange as it was, that one of their potential victims had followed us back East and ended up living right here at the farmhouse. Velvet had found herself a safe haven, first down at the bakery when I was working the night shift, then here, upstairs with the Micks. She’d found work she liked, too, or maybe even loved: mixing, pouring, and finishing those foot-high sculptures, then packaging and shipping them off to strangers. Decorating her grotesques….

  In the bathroom, I pissed away the beers I’d drunk and picked Ulysses’s clothes off the floor. I set the washer—small load, hot water—and started the cycle. “Long freakin’ day,” I announced, out loud, to no one. I grabbed Janis’s manuscript off the counter where I’d left it that morning and headed into the bedroom. Propped my own and Mo’s pillows against the headboard, climbed between the sheets, and opened Lizzy’s story to the place that, that morning, I had bookmarked with a napkin. I read.

  In March of 1863, Lizzy Popper received by telegram a succinct response from the Union’s nursing superintendent Dorothea Dix: “You will suffice. Come as soon as possible.” Suffice, indeed: Popper was just the sort of nurse Dix sought. Strident and unpopular with the medical personnel she often confronted, Dix had little use for nurses who were young and pretty because, intentionally or not, they might “awake the lusts” of the battle-weary men they served. Dix was equally wary of the Catholic Daughters of Charity who served the sick and wounded without army pay; the nuns, she suspected, preyed on the sickest patients with an eye on accomplishing deathbed conversions. Dix specifically sought Protestant nurses of proven character who were “plain-looking, over thirty, and competent.” Lizzy Popper qualified on all three counts.

  Freed now from the fear that her beloved Willie had perished, and armed once again with a righteous cause, Lizzy Popper returned to form. With the help of Martha Weeks, she reactivated the Ladies’ Soldiers Relief Society, putting two hundred women to the tasks of sewing, baking, canning, and gathering needed supplies. She traveled the state to collect donations from the executives of textile mills, department stores, distilleries, and apothecary supply houses. The woman who had been immobilized with grief in January had, by mid-May, closed her house, informed her husband of her plans, taken a week’s worth of nurse’s training in New York, and traveled by ship, train, and carriage to her assigned post at Washington’s Alonzo P. Shipley Hospital, a converted lyceum hall and ballroom on Connecticut Avenue. She did not arrive empty-handed. Popper reported for duty accompanied by no fewer than four carriages weighted with bags, barrels, and boxes of supplies. These provisions included clean bandages, linens, shirts, and stockings for the bedridden; cakes, tonics, pickles, and beef and wine jellies for the malnourished; whiskey for amputees in need of anesthetic; and medicinal plants and herbs such as sassafras, mayapple, pomegranate, ginger, and horseradish for the treatment of maladies ranging from diarrhea and constipation to bronchitis and nervous agitation. For months, there had been a bloody stalemate between Union and Confederacy on the war’s eastern front, and as the numbers of sick and wounded had increased, government supplies had dwindled. Lizzy Popper’s replenishments, perfectly timed and greatly appreciated, afforded her an instant cachet with the hospital’s ward masters and executive officers. At first, Popper’s favorable reputation pleased Directress Dix, as it affirmed her stance that plain-looking elder nurses served the cause most effectively. Later, however, Popper’s popularity would become a source of conflict between the two.

  In a June 7, 1863 letter to Martha Weeks, Popper recounted her duties at Shipley Hospital, revealing the physical and emotional challenges of her service.

  Sister,

  No doubt thee has waited for words from me these past weeks, and I have meant to send thee some, but the days here are long and full, and by nighttime my bones remind me of their years. After my sick have had their supper and the gas lights have been set aglow, I surrender to the night matron and climb the stairs to my attic quarters. I mean only to rest my eyes and lift my swollen feet from the floor for a moment before taking pen in hand or putting hands together to pray. Next thing I know, there is clatter downstairs and, in the muddy street below, the clip-clopping of horses’ hooves and the caterwauling of Irishwomen. “Milk for sale! Warm still from the cow! Come buy your morning milk!” More reliable than the rooster’s cry are these “Donnegal Dames,” as another nurse calls them. Time to rise, wash, give thanks for the new day, and serve again.

  When I arrived here a fortnight ago, much was made of the provisions thee and I had collected from the good folk of Connecticut. Indeed, my entourage of boxes, bins, cakes, and casks gave me immediat
e prominence with both the medical staff and the sick. “Mother Bountiful” some of the men took to calling me, and “Mother Christmas.” Thee who knows me, sister, knows that, while I do not love attention drawn to myself, I am happy to use the prestige for the good of others, particularly the contrabands.

  Many darkies have attached themselves to this hospital. They serve as attendants in the kitchen and laundry, and on the wards. Some are freemen. Others are contrabands on the run. All live in fear of slave hunters, and for good reason. Several of the doctors at this hospital are Southern sympathizers. Dr. Winkle, a Kentuckian, has made it clear to me and others that if an owner from Lexington or Louisville came looking for his lawful property, he should be obliged to surrender it. “It, yes, but never he or she,” I said. Dr. W answered that even abolitionists were obliged to observe the laws of the land. I told him I was obliged to observe the laws of human decency before any man-made laws, then walked away, so that I should have the last word on the subject and not he. Father Abraham was hailed when he issued his Emancipation Proclamation earlier this year, and rightfully so, but he made a grave mistake when he excluded from liberation those slaves from the border states. Last Sunday afternoon, I walked past Mr. Lincoln’s grand white wedding cake of a house on Pennsylvania Avenue and had a mind to knock on his front door and scold him for this error. Thee who knows me best knows I would have had the gumption to do it, and may do it yet. Freedom for some slaves, but not for others. Pshaw!

  Sister, I shall do my best to describe to thee what my surroundings are like. Shipley Hospital is a three-story brick building in the Georgian style, one of many here on Connecticut Avenue. Before the war, it was a lyceum hall with a grand ballroom upstairs, and I pray it will soon be so again. Better Virginia reels and elevating lectures than young men torn and dying. The first floor houses doctors’ quarters, kitchen and dining area, chapel, morgue, and a twenty-bed ward for injured officers. On the high ceiling of the second floor, a great painted Federalist eagle flies to remind the sick that they have sacrificed for the salvation of the Union. The ballroom has been divided into two wards. Each has forty-five beds with barely a space between them. The Daughters of Charity serve one of these wards, Miss Dix’s nurses the other. Surgeries are performed at the back of the room behind a curtain, but the cries of pain can be heard throughout. The third floor is a low-ceilinged attic and has been set up as a dormitory for the female staff. My quarters there are simple but satisfactory.