Now Is the Hour

by Tom Spanbauer

I’m standing in front of the new house, right next to the blue spruce. Squinting into the sun. I am holding Dad’s fishing pole the way a soldier holds his rifle on his shoulder.

  That fishing pole meant I had a father, and that I was his son.

  And you can bet your life, that’s the photo that went into my backpack next to Theresa’s painting, which I brought along into the world with me.

  School was no refuge. I was big for my age, a head taller than anybody else in class. It was hard sitting in my desk because my legs were so long. Another thing I could do was run. Running was important because being good at it meant I could outrun Scardino. It was always Scardino and his thugs, Vern Breck and Michael Muley, chasing me all over the playground. They couldn’t catch me, but there was three of them and only one of me and sooner or later it was me down on the ground under a Scardino pile.

  Exasperated. I could spell exasperated but couldn’t do anything about it. No matter what I did, I always turned out the loser. I prayed and prayed, but there just wasn’t any help. It was the universe, I guessed, conspiring. You’d think Sis would’ve helped me out after all we’d been through. But as Sis got older in the sixth and seventh grades, most of the time she didn’t want anything to do with me. Insult to injury, sometimes Sis let Scardino carry her books to the bus stop at Pocatello High School.

  It wasn’t just me that Scardino tortured, though. Really, he had the whole class over a barrel. One time he stuck Stephanie Smith’s ponytail in the inkwell. Another time he came to class with an inked-in tattoo on his hand and his hair slicked back in a duck’s ass. Sister Teetha flipped because the tattoo was a tattoo of the Pochugas, a gang in LA. Sister Teetha scrubbed the ink off Scardino’s hand herself, then combed his hair down straight. The rest of arithmetic she spent lecturing to the class. That day she said something to the class that’s always stuck with me. She said, I may be an old nun, but I’m not stupid. Don’t think I don’t know what every new hairdo and trinket bracelet and ink tattoo means. I know what’s going on inside those young bodies of yours.

  The reason why I remember Sister Teetha saying that was the look on Scardino’s face. The look that he knew what she was talking about. Of course, I didn’t have a clue. But I didn’t let on. I just put a smirk on my face the way Scardino had on his.

  Then there was the afternoon after civics class I got a note from Scardino. It landed on my desk right next to the inkwell. After civics was over, and before reading class and Ichabod Crane, I slowly unfolded the note.

  Meet me after class by the lilac bush in front of the school. I’ve got a question for you about your sister. Scardino.

  After the three o’clock bell, after I got my coat and lunch pail out of the cloakroom, I walked outside to the front of the school. Scardino was standing by the lilac with Vern Breck and Michael Muley. When I saw the three of them standing there like that, I almost turned around and ran. But I kept walking. Tried to put an expression on my face that didn’t look scared and walked right up to them.

  Scardino’s face could be a lot of ways. I got so I could read him almost as good as I could read my mother. I’d had years of practice. Something usually was going on just underneath the way he smiled. The way he was smiling that day wasn’t good.

  Hey, Klueless, Scardino said.

  Over the years, Klusener had become Kluse, which became Klueless.

  Then Breck and Muley said hey too.

  My heart was pounding in my ears.

  Hey, I said.

  The three of them stood there not saying anything. Just lilac smell. Then Breck slugged Scardino on the arm, and pretty soon they were all pushing one another around. I tried to make like I was having fun too. So far none of them had hit me.

  Your sister, Scardino said.

  Vern Breck and Michael Muley were really laughing, so hard it got Scardino laughing too. Finally, Scardino blurted it out: Does your sister have pussy hair?

  Believe it or not, I know a little about honor among men. I’d never experienced that kind of honor firsthand. Still, at that moment, I knew I should somehow defend the virtue of my sister. I wanted to smash their faces in. But what was the use. They were three, they were Scardino, Breck, and Muley, and they were indestructible, and I was only me. Plus my sis let him carry her books. My hands were fists, but my fists were like Russell’s, a baby’s fists, and the only thing I could do was throw a big baby tantrum. So I didn’t do anything.

  I may not have been able to hold my own at school, but I was older and bigger and Dad thought it was high time I started pulling my own weight on the farm. Thus began our new father-son relationship, he the boss, me free labor. To keep the bill collectors at bay, Dad had expanded the farm into a bigger operation, so now we had a herd of Hereford heifers on top of the milk cows and all the crops. There was plenty of work for his new hand. I didn’t mind it so much, though. With Mom’s eyes still gone, and Sis preoccupied with high school and boyfriends, doing chores was a way to escape. As long as I didn’t have to work with Dad, I got along just fine. I even started staying out after chores were done. What kept me out were the secret places I’d started to think of as my own.

  I had differnt secret places for differnt purposes, differnt moods, differnt activities.

  When I needed to feel safe, I went to the loft of the barn. Something about being on the loft floor looking up at the roof way up there made me feel like a big old pair of hands had me cupped inside. Night wind made the barn a mysterious place. Creaks and groans, cat yowls, little animals scurrying. Moonlight on the yellow straw, the quick, white flash of the dove’s wing. The stars through the holes in the roof. A lick of warm wind against the back of my neck, and everything that was ordinary turned to magic.

  There were other places.

  When I just wanted to get away from it all, there was on top of the railroad cars. Three boxcars in a row. When you sat up top on the boxcars, on the wood walkway, especially at sunset, and if there was wind, which usually there was wind, if you squinted your eyes and moved your body like it was on a train, from up there on top of the railroad cars you could see just about everything. The Ganges River. The Vatican. The Eiffel Tower. The Golden Gate Bridge. The Chrysler Building. The Via Dolorosa. Mount Kilimanjaro. Castles in Spain. Faraway places with strange-sounding names. Sometimes all of them, one right after another after another, in the same evening.

  The grain elevator was the circus. I’d go there when I wanted to make a spectacle of myself. The grain elevator set out just behind the spud cellar and was shaped like a big teeter-totter with the one end that attached to the tractor heavier than the other. At the high end, the grain elevator was the height of me four times over.

  What you did was you’d crawl up the flanges of the grain elevator. When you got to the middle of the grain elevator, you’d be sitting right above the wheel, which was the fulcrum point. Each step you took out farther from there was a step into midair, really, because halfway between the fulcrum point and the grain elevator’s top end the elevator started to go down with the weight of you.

  The trick was to hit perfect balance. I can’t tell you how many evenings after supper I was under the big top on the top half of the grain elevator, a Flying Wallenda, hanging in midair perfectly still. Still as my shadow on the ground hanging down off me.

  The spud cellar was mostly a smell. Deep under the earth, dark, cool, and the smell of earth and raw potatoes. There were two big wood doors where the spud trucks drove in and out, and then there was the little door to the side.

  Once inside, it was the smell, right off it was the smell. Peel a potato sometime, then put the peel up to your nose, and take a whiff. Then bite off a piece of the raw potato and chew on it. The spud cellar was that smell and that taste times a thousand.

  When I walked down into the spud cellar, I was transformed into somebody else from another time, another place. Sitting down there on the dark ground, next to a spud pile, I was a Christian during Roman times in the catacombs hiding from the Romans,
or I was somebody Chinese lying on my cot in an opium den, my head filled with stark blue skies crisscrossed by fluttering flags of Chinese red and Chinese gold. Or I was an American soldier in World War II, a parachuter behind enemy lines.

  Then there were the granaries. Not the wood granary on the ground, but the four round corrugated-steel granaries, which Dad set next to one another so they formed a square, and then raised the four round granaries up about twelve feet on a scaffolding of railroad ties set in concrete, so you could drive the grain truck under them and all you’d have to do is reach up and pull the steel trap open, and the grain poured down into the truck and you didn’t have to shovel so much. Between the two granaries that face east is a little notch up there with a welded steel-plate floor that’s shaped like an hourglass. It’s shady in the late afternoon and looks out over the spud cellar and the pigpens and beyond.

  In that notch was also where I really learned to smoke and took to reading the first time. The Bowery Boys were boring. Nancy Drew was better. But still, you can read about Nancy in her jumpsuit, driving jauntily in her roadster, being chagrined, for only so long.

  Mom and Dad wanted me reading only good Catholic stuff. The only good Catholic stuff to read are your daily missal and the Bible and The Lives of the Saints, so anything that was any good I had to hide. I had to smuggle Steinbeck and Willa Cather and Hemingway inside my pants. Reading made everything differnt. I was no longer stuck in a world with my mom and my dad and my sis and Catholics and Mormons on a goddamn farm out on the Tyhee Flats. Before books, my secret places were just places I could hide. Now my places were where I could go to read and find out about people who were like me. Of Mice and Men, My Ántonia, Winesburg, Ohio, A Moveable Feast.

  The Mexican house was still too far away for me. Plus it was flat land for almost a half mile and not a damn thing to hide behind if Dad was around. Later on, though, soon as I hit five foot, Dad started me driving the pickup and every day after school, after I got my barn chores done, I had a new chore to feed twenty-five bales of hay to the two hundred head of Hereford steers Dad bought and corralled in his new feedlots up by the Mexican house.

  When I first started driving up to Dad’s new feedlots and feeding the cattle, during the summer, when I drove past the Mexican house, usually there was a bunch of dirty kids just in their underwear playing in the dirt. One family one summer had a skinny yellow dog that Tramp hated, so when I drove up the land, you could see that dog put his ears back and pull his tail down and run under the Mexican house.

  In the fall, after the Mexicans had gone back to Del Rio, sometimes I’d walk around the house kicking up the dusty earth that turned to sticky mud when it rained. There were three windows, and I’d look in each of the windows. I didn’t go in, though. It was too dirty in there.

  Before I met Flaco and Acho, Mexican people were just a part of the scenery in the springtime and summer. They pulled in the yard in their old Ford pickups loaded down with stuff. I don’t even know what kind of stuff. Just a pickup full of stuff and kids all over in the stuff. They moved up to the Mexican house, stayed there while there was work, while it was hot, and then they left.

  They didn’t speak English. They were Catholic, but they didn’t go to Mass. My mother never tried to get them to go to Mass.

  The best secret place of all, though, was the swimming hole. The swimming hole was as far away from the house as you could get and still be on the farm. And it was hard to get to because you had to drive on the narrow canal bank for at least a quarter of a mile. You had to be a real good driver to drive the narrow ditch bank, and I wasn’t a good enough driver until I was thirteen.

  There was a waterfall at the swimming hole, not like Yosemite or anything, but there was about a six-foot drop, water flowing over and through an outcropping of slick, dark lava rock. Just below, cement walls from either side of the canal came together at a head gate and gathered up the water in a pool that was six, some places eight feet deep. On top of the cement walls was the one long two-by-twelve bolted down that you could walk over.

  There was one scrub cedar there on the lava rock. The cedar was across the border, on the rez, not on our farm, just a couple feet out from the yellow, planted deep in all that red. Crooked as the wind.

  Sometimes, sitting up there on the bolted-down board that crossed the head gate, or swimming, or sometimes at night in summer when I hiked up to the swimming hole, the wind blowing through the cedar made the sweetest sound.

  Sweet, I guess, is the best way you can say that sound. Sad too, but something nice about the sad. The way you feel after you cry hard, or sometimes after you come. “Now Is the Hour” kind of sad. And there was a secret too. The wind through the boughs of the cedar made you feel like there was a secret. A great big secret, a huge secret about the mystery of life you’ll never know.

  Georgy Girl told me the sound of the wind in the cedar tree was the voices of his ancestors speaking. He said if he listened hard enough, he’d know what to do with his life.

  If he could only quit drinking long enough to hear.

  My prayer to Georgy’s ancestors was that he heard.

  I had my books and secret places, Viceroys stolen from my father, and a longing I could not name. But I recognized it. The longing in me was my mother’s longing. I always thought I could take hers away, and there I was with my own. Wandering around in a world I didn’t make, never really where I was, dreaming of somewhere else. Still, though, I imagined that if I could find myself in her eyes, somehow she could find herself in mine.

  I think it was the summer of the fifth grade that Sis and I went to 4-H camp. It was the first time Sis and I had been anywhere. I had my duffel bag packed, and I got up early. I wasn’t at all afraid to leave home. After a special breakfast, I put my duffel bag in the trunk and got in the back seat of the Buick. Sis sat up front with Dad. When Dad pulled out of the driveway, I turned around and waved at Mom. She was standing alone in the bright sun at the screen door. She was wearing her other housedress, the red one. She had that faraway look in her eyes. As soon as I saw that look, I started crying real hard. Then Dad started cussing because I was crying. He thought I was crying because I was afraid to leave my momma. That isn’t why I was crying, though. I was crying because she was home alone with all that work and no fun. I was crying because she wasn’t going to have me to look out for her. I was crying because she was going to be alone with him.

  I’d watched Mom all my life. Watched her pray. All those years praying the rosary, going to Mass, making novenas to Our Mother of Perpetual Help. All the litanies and aspirations to sweet Jesus, the only son of God, who suffered and died for our sins and saved the world from hell. Somewhere around in all that watching, I figured out that Jesus wasn’t going to save Mom from anything. Unless I helped. God the Father and His Son Jesus and the Holy Ghost were a little hard of hearing. It was up to me to lend them a hand. I’d make of myself a loving-kindness for her and be that presence in her life, and her prayers would be answered. She was so alone and sad with Russell and all, she needed all the help she could get. Dad didn’t really see her. She was just his wife. Dad didn’t understand about her piano and her secret longing to be a star is born. And if he did, he didn’t care.

  There was one afternoon after school the following year. It was Friday, and Sis was staying at a girlfriend’s house for the weekend. I got off the bus, and the bus drove on, and I stood on the gravel. The drapes were drawn, which meant Mom had a migraine. I went in through the back door, the way I usually went into the house so I wouldn’t track mud. Inside in the mudroom I was surprised because I smelled chocolate cookies. There was no mistaking the smell of chocolate cookies.

  Inside, the house was dark. Even the shade in the kitchen was drawn. On the green Formica counter, on a sheet of waxed paper, lined up in neat rows, were the dark brown cookies. The cookies weren’t frosted yet, and in the sink was the green mixing bowl filled with dirty water. The rubber spatula was in the mixing bowl and the be
aters to the electric mixer. The electric mixer, Mom’s new Mixmaster, was still plugged into the socket.

  The oven was still warm. I touched one of the cookies, and the cookie was warm too, and I ate the cookie even though we were supposed to wait until they’d cooled and were frosted.

  I opened the oven, and inside the oven was empty.

  Mom must have just got through with the cookies before the migraine hit.

  I’d watched Mom make chocolate frosting so many times, so I decided to go ahead. As quiet as I could be, I got a bowl and put powdered sugar in the bowl, then melted a cube of butter in the flat pan and poured the hot butter into the powdered sugar. Then I added the Hershey’s chocolate powder. Two tablespoons.

  I didn’t use the Mixmaster because noises like that drove Mom mad when she heard them with a migraine. I used the wooden spoon and folded the butter and the chocolate and the powdered sugar in together. It took awhile to get the right consistency. I was always taking licks.

  When I got the chocolate frosting right, the cookies were cool enough, so with a table knife I spread each cookie with frosting.

  There was over a half a bowl of frosting left when I was done, so I ate the rest of the frosting. The only sound I made when I washed the dishes was the water turning on and off.

  I filled the percolator with water, put two tablespoons of coffee in the percolator in the little aluminum thing with holes in it, smoothed out the coffee, slid the aluminum thing with holes in it down over the aluminum pole, put the lid on the percolator, and plugged it in.

  Pretty soon the house was filled up with the smell of coffee percolating and the chocolate cookies.

  Mom liked her coffee with a little cream but no sugar. From off the top of the milk pitcher, with the tablespoon, I skimmed off some cream, put the tablespoon of cream into one of Mom’s cups that matched the saucers, stirred in the coffee.

  The two chocolate cookies went onto the little plate with gold around the edge that Mom got from Aunt Alma one time.