The Hour I First Believed

by Wally Lamb

  Thee should have seen Mazie and George in their borrowed habits. Just as the newly-made Papists were about to board the train, a wind came up and their white bonnets flapped like pigeons’ wings. It’s a wonder they did not lift into the sky and fly to Heaven or Rome!

  Lizzy’s glee ended soon enough. When an outraged Cheeks learned of her part in the escape of his slaves, he moved to have her arrested. A letter signed by seven of Shipley Hospital’s twelve physicians, stating that she was indispensable to the sick there, saved her from the jailhouse. Abner Winkle wrote a letter of complaint to the Union’s Secretary of War, charging Popper—a paid employee of the United States government—with the flouting of federal law. The letter also accused Nursing Superintendent Dorothea Dix of an inability to control her subordinates. The already embattled Dix was furious at having been unfairly implicated, and she excoriated Popper. In a letter to Anna Livermore, Lizzy gave a colorful account of the exchange between the two:

  For a quarter of an hour, DD railed against me. I was told I was guilty of arrogance, pridefulness, and treachery. She said she knew full well what I was up to—that from the start I had been plotting to unseat her as Directress so that I might have the position for myself. As she spoke this piffle, it was with such spleen that her face turned red, her eyes bulged like a frog’s, and I wondered if, at any moment, she might express steam from her ears! My nursing was passable, I was informed, but I was more trouble than I was worth. In turn, I informed DD that if helping the Lord’s children break the chains of slavery made me a troublemaker, then I accepted the title gladly, and if she could not support me in what I had done, I should call her not Dragon Dix as the others did, but Traitor to the Cause!

  Dix dismissed Popper on the spot. Lizzy surrendered her keys, signed her dismissal papers, and left on the evening train “with neither protest nor teary farewells.” Her service as a Civil War nurse had come to an end.

  Although Lizzy Popper continued to support the Union cause through her work with the Ladies’ Soldiers Relief Society, her efforts were greatly reduced during the final year of the war. Charles had returned to their New Haven home, and the couple seemed to have entered a period of domestic calm. For Lizzy, it was a time of reflection rather than active engagement with the world. On April 11, 1865, two days after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, she wrote in the diary she had begun to keep:

  At last, the gunfire has ceased, the last soldier has fallen. No more new widows will be made today, no other mother’s heart will break. Today is a day for taking stock. The Union has been saved, but at astounding and hideous cost. The Lord has returned Charlie to me as I have asked Him to do, but my Willie wanders I know not where. The marble busts of his slain brothers sit atop their pedestals in the drawing room, cool to the touch and far too smooth, no substitute for flesh and blood and human imperfection. Many times each day, my mind returns me against my will to Shipley Hospital, and I hear once more the stifled sobs and delirious shouting, the phlegmy death rattle of men breathing their last. I see the piles of severed limbs being carried away for burning. I feel a dead man’s eyelids as I thumb-shut them, feel my fingertips press against the pulsing artery of a frightened boy who will die when I let go. What fools men are, and what an evil thing is war.

  Yet today I threw open the kitchen window and heard birdsong in the trees, the rush of melted snow in the brook at the wood’s edge. In the yard I saw squirrels at frolic and that burst of yellow the forsythia bush delivers faithfully to us each spring. Gifts from God, these sights and sounds, this placid here and now, and I wonder—was my hospital life the dream, or is this?

  Lizzy Popper’s diary entries and letters, so forthright and soul-baring, tempt the twenty-first-century reader to assign modern diagnoses to her psychological state. What to make of her descriptions of the horrific things she saw, heard, and touched when her mind involuntarily transported her back to Shipley Hospital? Was she merely processing difficult memories or, perhaps, suffering the flashbacks associated with posttraumatic stress disorder? Did her earlier swings between heightened productivity and immobilizing depression indicate that she was responding to the needs of a nation and to difficult personal losses, or that she suffered from bipolar disease? There is no way to know. What can be concluded from Popper’s postwar life, however, is that in her later years she arrived at a state of emotional stability. Lizzy was sixty-one years old when she returned home from the war, and would live another twenty-seven years. Further personal hardships and professional obstacles awaited her, but she would confront these with a newfound equanimity.

  I shifted the pillows, glanced over at the clock radio. Only nine twenty-three? God, it felt more like midnight.

  In the years following the Civil War, many female abolitionists transferred their energies to the causes of…In the years following the Civil War, many female abolitionists…their energies to the causes of…many female abolitionists…

  I fought it for as long as I could, attempting over and over to get to the end of that same sentence. Then I surrendered to sleep….

  THE PHONE WOULDN’T STOP SCREAMING. I lunged for it, more to shut it up than to see who was calling. Lizzy’s story fell off the bed with a thunk.

  “Yeah? What?”

  “Oh. Hi. Can I please speak to Mr. Quirk, please?…The teacher?”

  A young woman’s voice. What the hell time was it, anyway? Two a.m.? Three? Who’d be calling me at…But when I squinted at the red numerals on my clock radio, they said 10:16 p.m.

  “Speaking.”

  “Oh, hi, Mr. Quirk. It didn’t sound like you. I’m sorry to be bothering you, but I been crying all night and my mother keeps going, ‘Call your teacher, call your teacher.’ I got your number off the Internet White Pages cuz I remembered one time you said you lived in Three Rivers. I hope it’s all right I’m calling you. I didn’t wake you up, did I?”

  “Who is this?”

  “Mari. From your class. Marisol Sosa. I just keep crying and thinking about how, maybe if I had just talked to him—asked him how he was doing or whatever. And about how me and Daisy complained to you about him. And how Ozzie said that thing to him…. And then last week, Mr. Quirk? Me and my friend Melanie? We were in the Student Union having lattés and talking about our soaps? And he came in, and I go, ‘That’s that weird army guy from my class who’s always switchin’ his seat.’ And then right after I said that, he walked over to our table and said hi, and I said hi, and he asked me, he said, did I mind if he sat down with us? And Melanie was all trying not to look at his hand, and I said, ‘No, sorry, cuz we’re kinda busy studying.’ But we didn’t, you know, we didn’t even have no books out or anything. We were just talking about our soaps. But now, all’s I keep thinking about is that maybe if I had said, ‘Yeah, sure. Have a seat. This is Melanie,’ then—”

  “Marisol, I don’t…What happened?”

  “That guy from our class,” she said. “The army guy. Oh, my God, you didn’t hear about it?”

  ON THE ELEVEN P.M. NEWS, they showed pictures: Kareem Kendricks’s high school yearbook photo, a portrait of him in his dress uniform. In the third photo—one of those group portraits that families have taken at Sears or someplace—Kendricks, both hands intact, stands with one arm around his daughter, all pigtails and plaits, and the other arm around the pretty, petite young wife he wounded that afternoon in the Department of Children and Families parking lot. At that hour, the news anchor said, Taneeka Hawkins-Kendricks, a dental hygienist and part-time waitress, remained in serious but stable condition. The social worker who had been supervising Private Kendricks’s parental visit had been shot, too, but hers was a superficial wound. She was being kept overnight for observation and would most likely be released in the morning. Private Kendricks was dead—a bullet to the neck, self-inflicted. His daughter had witnessed the injuring of the social worker but not of her mother, the news anchor said, and not her father’s suicide. She had been placed in protective custody pending the arrival of her maternal
grandparents from out of state.

  “It was the war that messed him up,” I had kept reassuring a near-hysterical Marisol over the phone. “Not anything you said, or did, or didn’t do. It was the war.” She hated George Bush, she said. She tried hard not to hate anybody, but she hated President Bush and Vice President Cheney and that Condi lady—all of them. She couldn’t help it. In the morning, she’d pray for forgiveness, but that night she was just going to let herself hate them. Her cousins, Frankie and Modesto, had both been injured in that stupid war, and a guy whose family lived in the apartment down the hall in their building had been killed. “And he was nice, too,” Mari said. “He was always laughing.”

  I turned off the news, reached over to turn out the light. I saw Lizzy’s story on the floor, facedown, where it had dropped when I’d reached for the phone. I picked it up, smoothed out the bent pages, and read a random snatch:

  “‘I’m sorry, Missus! I was thinkin’ you was Johnny Reb! I’m scared! I want my Ma!’ I pulled him against my breast, cradling him and whispering not to be afraid….”

  Some nights, Mo had said, she climbed up onto that girl Crystal’s bunk and held her. She had to, whether she got in trouble or not, because that girl was just a baby herself. She needed to be held.

  Lying there in the dark, I kept telling myself the same thing I had told Marisol over the phone: that none of us could have anticipated he’d do something so desperate. That nothing we could have said or done would have prevented it….

  But what if, that afternoon in my office, I had stood up, come out from behind the safety of my desk, and held out my arms to him? Let him fall against me and release some of that pain and fear and unbearable isolation?…Do you ever regret not having children? Janis had asked me that day up in Hartford, and I’d surprised myself by saying I did…. Dad, Velvet sometimes called me, and I’d roll my eyes, not let on that I kind of liked it….

  Kareem’s father had walked out of his life, had not even made it to Walter Reed. Well, I knew what paternal abandonment felt like, didn’t I? What if, that afternoon in my office, I had stood and risked fatherhood? Offered him a pair of sheltering arms? Would it have been enough to keep him from going down there and doing what he did? What if? What if? What if?…

  Bang!…Bang!…Bang!

  I cracked my eyes open and squinted at the clock. Fucking 5:43 a.m., and he was already up and at it. Well, I had promised I’d help him. The sooner I got out there, the sooner we’d finish and I could put him in my car and take him home. I felt sorry for the guy, but I wasn’t about to turn this place into a hospice. I was no Maureen.

  I got out of bed, stumbled into the kitchen and started some coffee. Went to the front door. The newspaper was there—Kareem Kendricks in his army uniform, the same picture, I figured, that they’d superimposed on his welcome-home cake. Had his wounded wife survived the long night? Was his daughter okay? How was his dad doing—the guy who’d thought fatherhood could be bought back for the price of a couple of football tickets?

  Bang!…Bang!

  I pulled his wet clothes out of the washer. Threw them in the dryer and hit start. I poured two mugs of coffee, checked the outside thermometer. Cold out there: twenty-six degrees. I pulled on my hooded sweatshirt, my stocking cap and gloves. I figured I’d better get something warmer for Ulysses to wear, too. As I grabbed for my frayed old wool-lined canvas jacket, a memory fired off in my brain: me tossing this same jacket to Velvet on that chilly morning way back in Littleton, when she’d sat on top of our picnic table—a tough little cookie scared to death of the two wimpiest dogs in the world. God, that had been a lifetime ago: Maureen’s and my Colorado life. Our lives before they’d said, “Go! Go!” and started shooting.

  Bang!

  “Okay, okay. I’m coming.”

  Both of the Micks’ cars were gone. Janis was probably in the air by now, en route to Tulane; she’d said she had an “insanely early” flight. Moze was probably halfway to New York with his display cases and order forms—his angels and fiends.

  Bang!…Bang!

  Passing by the barn, I recalled Moze’s near-introduction. Breaking news, man. This here’s gonna be our new guy.

  I’d seen that kid from somewhere. A student at Oceanside? One of my high school kids from further back? Whoever he was, he’d better be trustworthy. There was no toilet out there in the barn. When Moze or Velvet had to go, they came back to the farmhouse and used my bathroom rather than climb the back stairs to the Micks’ apartment. I supposed this new guy would expect access, too. Well, Moze had better have done a background check then, or checked his references at the very least, because I wasn’t crazy about letting someone I didn’t know have the run of—

  I stopped, took a sharp intake of breath. I knew who he was. Moze’s new hire was Jesse Seaberry, Morgan’s bad-news older brother.

  Bang!

  chapter thirty-one

  “DIG RIGHT ABOUT THERE,” HE said. “No, not that far. Two or three feet to the left of that…. No? Nothing? Son of a bitch. I was thinking we buried it on the north side, but now I’m not so sure.” We was Ulysses and my father. Surrounding us was a chaos of disturbed earth and busted-up cement.

  We’d been at it for an hour, and I was getting tired of humoring him. Tired, too, of his cat-and-mouse evasiveness. I’d asked him two or three times what it was, exactly, we were trying to locate, but he’d kept deflecting the question. I figured it had to be stolen money or stolen goods of some kind—that I’d soon be adding burglary, or maybe even robbery, to my father’s illustrious résumé. But now I was beginning to wonder if this treasure hunt had been triggered by the imaginings of a brain pickled in alcohol.

  “Good thing the ground’s not frozen over yet, huh?” he said.

  Yeah, I thought. Lucky us. Three more shovelfuls, I told myself, and I’m done. It was getting a little old: him acting like my job foreman.

  He faced east, took eight or nine steps away from me, and tapped the toe of his boot against the ground. “Try here.” When I did, I both felt and heard metal hit metal. Ulysses heard it, too. “That’s it,” he said.

  A few minutes later, I had loosened and pulled from the ground the dented gunmetal-gray footlocker that Ulysses identified as the one they’d buried that day. “Jesus, it’s heavy,” I said. “What’d he steal? Bricks?” He shook his head, eyes fixed on what I’d just unearthed.

  Squatting before the trunk, I brushed away the caked dirt still clinging to it. But as I moved to open it, his hand stopped mine. “Not out here,” he said. “Bring it inside.” I’d have ignored him had he not looked so sick and stricken.

  We each grabbed a handle and started back toward the house. He got winded a few times, and we had to put it down. I offered to lug it myself or go get the car, see if I could fit it into my trunk. He shook his head.

  As the barn came into view, my eyes bounced from Jesse Seaberry’s motorcycle to the kid himself, shaking the door handle at the side entrance of the barn. I motioned to Ulysses to put down the trunk. “Hey!” I yelled, approaching Seaberry. “What are you doing?”

  When he’d come by the day before, he said, he’d taken out his cell phone to silence it and put it on Moses’s desk instead of back in his pocket. Then he’d forgotten to grab it when he left. Had Moze left for New York yet? I said he had. Did I have a key to the studio? I did, I said, but I was busy. He’d have to wait until Moze got back.

  “Dude, I rode all the way here from Glastonbury. I really need that phone, man. It’ll just take a minute.” I waited until he looked away from my gaze. Then I pulled my key ring out of my pocket. The quicker he got his phone, the faster I’d get him off my property.

  But as I slipped the key into the lock, I couldn’t resist. “Why is it you want to work here?” I asked. “So that you can check out the lay of the land? Start planning what you’re going to do with it if you guys win?”

  That wasn’t it, he said. He’d been loading trucks for FedEx for a while, but that job was getting ol
d. He’d seen Moze’s ad on Craigslist.

  “Yeah? Gee, there’s a funny coincidence.”

  He nodded, seeming not to register my note of sarcasm. “I’ve always kinda liked gargoyles and shit. And Mr. Mick seems like he’d be a pretty cool boss to work for.”

  “Don’t be too sure you’re going to be working for him,” I said. “Because when he gets back, I’m going to let him know who you are and what your family’s trying to do.”

  “He knows, man. I told him. He said it made no difference to him. Dude’s a businessman, you know? I guess he figures he’ll be able to stay put no matter which way the lawsuit goes.”

  That stopped me. He was probably right about Moze.

  “Dude, it’s not me or my dad so much. It’s more my mom. She’s still pretty bitter. And, you know…”

  “What do I know?”

  “She killed him. While she was driving stoned.” This time I was the one who looked away first.

  I unlocked the side door and flipped on the lights. “Yes!” he said. “There it is, right where I left it. Thanks, man.”

  I turned the lights back off, locked the door. I followed him as he walked back toward his bike. “Just so that you all know, my aunt signed a preservation agreement with the state back in 1980-something. And it’s binding, too, no matter who holds the deed. This property has to remain farm land. So it’s not like you guys are going to be able to turn around and sell it to some condo developer or something.”