The Hour I First Believed

Chapter Five

LOLLY’S CAT WAS CAUTIOUS AT first, watching me from doorways, scooting from the rooms I entered. But half an hour into my homecoming, she sidled up to me, brushing against my pant leg. My aunt had given her some goofy name I couldn’t remember. “Where is she, huh?” I said. “Is that what you’re asking?”

In the pantry, I found a litter box in need of emptying, an empty bag of Meow Mix, and a note in Lolly’s handwriting: “Get cat food.” There were a couple of tins of tuna in the cupboard. “Well, whatever your name is, you’re in luck,” I told the cat. With the first twist of the can opener, she began bellowing. We were probably going to be friends for life.

Thinking I should call Maureen, I flopped down on Lolly’s sofa and grabbed the remote. The Practice was on. Okay, I thought. Not my favorite, but watchable. I stood up and brushed the grit off the sofa, sending cat fur flying. My aunt had many talents, but housekeeping wasn’t one of them; that had always been Hennie’s department. I pried off my shoes and put my feet up. Lolly’s cat hopped aboard, walked up my leg, and nestled against my hipbone. Gotta call Maureen, I thought. Soon as the commercial comes on….

WHAT? WHERE…? I stumbled toward the ringing telephone, realizing where I was: back in Three Rivers, back at the farmhouse.

“Hey,” I said. “I was going to call you. I must have conked out.”

Except it wasn’t Maureen. It was some doctor, talking about my aunt’s stroke. Yeah, I know all this, I remember thinking. That’s why I’ve come back. But somewhere in the middle of his monologue, it dawned on me that he was talking about a second stroke. Lolly hadn’t survived this one, he said. They’d pronounced her dead ten minutes earlier.

I went outside. Sat on the cold stone porch step. The sun was rising, coral-colored, over the treeline. Higher in the sky, the moon was fading away.

I went back inside. Called Maureen and woke her out of a sound sleep.

“Caelum? What time is it?”

“I’m not sure. It’s sunrise here…. She died, Mo.”

I waited out the silence, the sigh. “How?”

“Another stroke.”

“Oh, Cae. I’m so sorry. Are you at the hospital?”

I shook my head. “The farmhouse. I sat with her for a couple of hours last night, but then I came back here. They said when they checked her at four, she was stable. But then, twenty minutes later…Maureen, I don’t feel sad. I don’t feel anything. What’s wrong with me?”

“Nothing, Cae,” she said. “You just haven’t been able to take it in yet. Absorb the shock of it.” She said she’d talked to Lolly’s doctor the day before, while I was en route to Connecticut. More of the test results had come back; the damage had been massive. “She might not have been able to walk, or talk, or even swallow food. Lolly would have hated living like that.”

“They asked me did I want to come in and view the body. I said no. Is that something I’m supposed to do?”

“It’s a personal decision, Cae. There’s no ‘supposed to.’”

“I should have stayed with her last night. Slept in the chair or whatever. God, I hate that she died alone.”

Mo said should-haves weren’t going to do Lolly or me any good.

“Last night? I got up and started combing her hair. More out of boredom than anything else, I guess. I’d just been sitting there, watching her sleep. And her hair was all smushed down and I found this comb in her drawer and…and when I stopped combing? She opened her eyes. Stared at me for a few seconds.”

“Then she knew you’d come back.”

“No. Uh-uh. Nothing registered.”

“Maybe it did, Cae. Maybe knowing you were there, she could let herself die. The hospice team at Rivercrest always used to say that the dying—”

“Yeah, okay. Stop. I doubt it, but thanks.”

“How did it feel?” she asked.

“What?”

“Touching her? Combing her hair?”

“It felt…it felt…” The question made my eyes sting and my throat constrict. Trying to stifle tears, I uttered a weird guttural noise that caught the cat’s attention.

“It’s okay to feel, Caelum,” Mo said. “Just let yourself—”

“What’s her cat’s name, anyway?” I said, cutting her off. “I fed her tuna fish last night and now she’s like my shadow.”

“The black and white? Nancy Tucker.”

“Oh, yeah. Nancy Tucker. Where’d that name come from?”

“Some folksinger Lolly likes,” Mo said.

I stood there, nodding at the cat. “Liked,” I said.

Maureen asked me if I’d thought about what I needed to do that day. Should we go over stuff? Make a list? I told her what the hospital had said: that I had to let them know ASAP which funeral home they should contact to arrange for the transfer of the body. “I guess I’ll tell them McKenna’s,” I said. “We used them when my mother died, and my grandfather. My father, too, I think. Or did we? Jesus, that’s weird.”

“What?”

“I can’t remember my father’s funeral.”

“Well, you were so young.”

“No, I wasn’t. I was fourteen.” For a second, I caught myself thinking I’d have to ask Lolly about it.

Maureen said I should tell the hospital to notify Gamboa and Sons.

“The Mexican funeral parlor? I don’t think so, Mo. I doubt Lolly would have wanted a ‘cat licker’ sendoff.”

“A what?”

“Nothing. Never mind.”

Mo said Lolly had used Gamboa and Sons for Hennie’s services—that Lolly and Victor Gamboa had been friends since the days when they’d worked together at the prison. “Lolly’s preplanned and paid for her funeral, Cae. After Hennie’s burial, she decided to do that. Which makes it easier, right? Now you won’t have to second-guess what she would have wanted.”

“Typical Lolly,” I said. “Miss Practical. So what do you think? You going to try to get back here? Because I’ll understand if you don’t think you can—”

Sure she was coming, Mo said. She’d call Galaxy Travel as soon as they opened and let me know when she had the details. Now that she thought of it, she’d better call the kennel, too. “Sophie drove them crazy last time, and they were hinting about not taking her anymore. But under the circumstances…Maybe you should try to plan the wake for Wednesday and the funeral for Thursday,” she said. “That way, if I can’t get everything in place until—”

“Today is what day?” I asked.

“It’s Monday, Caelum. Monday, the nineteenth.”

“Monday. Yeah, that’s right. I’m a little disoriented.”

“Well, that’s understandable. You were traveling all day yesterday. Plus, the time change. And you’re probably overtired on top of that.”

It wasn’t those things, though. It was being back home: remembering, not remembering. How could I not recall my father’s funeral? “I guess you better bring my suit,” I said. “And those shiny loafers you had me get.”

“Sure. Should we go over what you’ll need to do today? Make that list?”

I grabbed a pen, a scrap of paper. “Yeah, okay. What?”

First, I should call the hospital and tell them about the funeral home—get that done. Then I’d need to make an appointment with Gamboa’s to go over the details. “And you’re going to have to make some phone calls. Let her friends know.”

“How am I supposed to do that? She wasn’t exactly the Rolodex type.”

“Look in that little telephone table by the stairs. I bet she’s got an address book in there, or numbers written inside the phone book. Call the people whose names you recognize, and ask them to call whoever else they think might want to know. And Ulysses. Call him. I guess you’ll need to start thinking about what to tell him, job-status wise. Whether or not you’re going to keep him on for a while to look after the property. You’re her executor, right?”

“So she said.”

“Then you can probably write checks from her estate—pay him that way—but I’m not sure. I guess you’d better try to get an appointment with her lawyer, too.” Oh, great, I thought. Lolly’s lawyer was Lena LoVecchio, the attorney who’d represented me on my assault charge against Paul Hay. Just what I wanted to do: revisit that whole mess. “I’m sure most of the legal stuff can be put on hold,” Maureen said. “But there may be some short-term decisions to make, and while you’re back there, you might as well—”

“Oh, man.”

“What?”

“I suck at this kind of stuff. I’ll probably screw everything up.”

“No, you won’t, Cae. People will help you. They’ll want to help.”

“And you’re going to get here when?”

“Tomorrow, hopefully. Tuesday. Wednesday morning at the latest.”

“Oh, man.”

“Hey,” she said. “You know what? After you call the hospital, why don’t you go for a run? It’ll help clear out the cobwebs, get rid of some of that tension. Then go back, take a nice hot shower and—”

“There’s no shower here. Remember?”

“Oh, right. A nice hot bath, then. Even better. And eat breakfast, Caelum. You need to remember to eat.”

“What else?” I said. “For this list?”

She said if she thought of anything else, she’d call me, but that she’d better get off. The dogs were chafing to go out.

I didn’t want her to hang up. “Hey, I forgot to tell you. I saw Velvet before I left. At the airport. I guess she’s on a cleaning crew?”

“Was,” Mo said. “She called last night to tell me she quit. She saw you, too, she said. Oh, that reminds me: I better try and get ahold of her. She was going to meet me at school tomorrow to talk about reenrolling, but if I get a flight…okay, the dogs! I’ll let you know when I’m coming. Call me if you need to. I love you, Caelum. I’ll get there as soon as I can.”

I DIDN’T RUN, AS MO suggested. I wandered, from room to room downstairs and then up to the second floor. At the top step, I looked down the hallway. Stood there, rocking on the balls of my feet. I couldn’t do it.

From the house, I headed up the gravel road to the barn. Undid the latch, flipped on the overhead lights. Empty of cows, with its floor hosed and swept down to bald, cracked concrete, it was nothing but a glorified garage now—a parking place for the tractor and Lolly’s truck. “Come, boss!” I shouted, calling in the ghost-cows for morning milking. “Here, boss! Come, boss!” My voice bounced around and rose to the empty loft.

At the height of things, Bride Lake Farms had milked a herd of sixty-five registered Holsteins. Every other day, the Hood Dairy truck would pull up, pump nine thousand pounds of raw milk out of the tank, and drive it off for processing. As a kid, one of my chores had been to take care of our personal milk supply: put out two big pans for the barn cats and carry six quarts back to the house whenever we got low. Damn, but that was good milk: icy cold, cream on the top. “You drank it unpasteurized?” Maureen asked once, when I was comparing farm milk to the watery gray skim milk we bought at the KwikStop. “Yeah, and look,” I said. “I survived to tell you about it.”

I walked over to Grandpa Quirk’s beat-up wooden desk, still parked against the barn’s south wall. It was covered now with half-empty cans of paint and turpentine. Back in the day, Grandpa had sat there, hunched over his bills and receipts and ratios. He’d hated that monthly math, I remembered, but God, he’d loved his milkers. Named them after movie stars: Maureen O’Hara, Sonja Henie, Dorothy Lamour. Whenever one of his girls started producing, he’d take three Polaroid pictures of her: a head shot, a body shot, and a closeup of her udder. He’d label them on the back, date them, and put them in his big tin box. Standing there, I recalled something I hadn’t thought about in years: a game Grandpa and I had played. I’d pull one of the udder shots out of the box, hand it to him, and he’d look at it—study it at arm’s length, hold it close, scratch his chin. Then he’d identify whose milk bag it was. He never got any wrong. Had there been some trick to it? Could Grandpa really recognize all those girls by their udders?

I spotted his cowshit shovel, still hanging from its same nail in the wall, identifiable by its chipped red handle. As a girl, Lolly’d painted it for her father as a birthday surprise, but she’d overturned the paint can in the process and gotten a surprise of her own: a spanking. Most, but not all, of that red paint had worn off the handle now. I lifted the shovel from the wall and tamped its blade against the cement floor. My fingers fit in the valleys Grandpa’s grip had worn into the wood.

Or maybe his father’s grip had made them. Who knew how old that damn shovel was? Four generations of Quirks had farmed here, if I remembered the history right. Five, if you counted me, which I didn’t. I’d done my share of farmwork growing up—from junior high through grad school and beyond. But I’d never liked farming much—had never been interested in taking over. For the past several years, whenever Lolly mentioned my inheriting the farm, I’d cut her off. “Get out of here, you old coot,” I’d say. “You’ll outlive me.” But she hadn’t. And now, like it or not, this place was mine—the history and the burden of it.

Leaving the barn, I spotted Lolly’s plaid jacket hanging from a hook—the one she was wearing the day she’d waved us off to Colorado. I reached out and grabbed the sleeve. Clutched it in my fist for a few seconds, and then let it go.

Most of the two dozen trees in the orchard looked blighted. Not long before we moved to Colorado, I’d helped Lolly cut down three or four of the dead ones. I saw her now, goggles on, chain saw in hand. “You’re a maniac with that thing, old lady!” I’d yelled, over the buzz and the blade’s bite, and she’d laughed and nodded like it was high praise. The apple house was in sorry shape, too—busted windows, half-collapsed roof. Well, what did it matter? The cider press was gone—sold to Olde Mistick Village years ago. There was nothing left in there that the rain could wreck. Let the bats and mice have it.

I headed back down, crossed Bride Lake Road, and started toward the cornfields on the far side of the prison. Walking along the road, I thought about how fucked up the layout was: a fifty-acre women’s prison parked in the middle of a two-hundred-acre family farm. Lolly had filled me in on the history of the farm a few years back. Christmas day, it was—Maureen’s and my first trip back home after we’d moved west. Mo and Hennie were in the kitchen, cleaning up, and Lolly and I had lingered at the dining room table, drinking brandy and passing around the old family pictures. I’d heard a lot of Lolly’s Quirk family stories before, but that day, for some reason, I was more interested in them than usual. Why was that? Because I’d finally escaped Three Rivers? Because I’d reached my mid-forties? Whatever the reason, part of the pleasure that day was witnessing Lolly’s pleasure in telling them to me.

The sale of land to the state had been a desperation move, Lolly’d said. The original Caelum was MacQuirk, a native of Glasgow, Scotland. He’d married into manufacturing money and come to America to oversee his father-in-law’s latest acquistion, the Three Rivers Bleaching Dyeing & Printing Company. But Caelum MacQuirk had failed at both textile mill management and marriage, Lolly said; he’d operated the company at greater and greater loss and fathered a child out of wedlock. To be rid of him, his father-in-law had bought him off, and with the money MacQuirk had purchased a two-hundred-and-fifty-acre tract of land along the southernmost boundary of Three Rivers. He’d married the child’s mother and taken up farming, but had failed at that, too. “Hung himself,” Lolly said, matter-of-factly. “Left his widow and son land-rich but cash-poor.”

It would have made more sense for the widow Quirk to sell acreage at either the east or west end, but, according to Lolly, the state of Connecticut strong-armed her into selling them the tenderloin of the property, lake and all. Still, it had all worked out, in its own way. The deal they negotiated called for the widow’s son, Alden—a recent graduate of Connecticut’s agricultural college—to be installed as the new prison’s farm manager.

“You remember my Grandma Lydia, don’t you?” Lolly asked me. “Your great-grandmother?”

I nodded. “The tappy old lady with the rag doll.”

“Well, she was a hell of a lot more than that. Back in her prime, Lydia Popper was a force to be reckoned with. Got her salt from her grandmother, she always used to say. She politicked for years until she wore down the state legislature and got ’em to buy the land and build her her ladies’ jail. The cottage-and-farm plan, she called it. Designed it, and ran the place for forty years. And raised a son all by her lonesome while she was doing it.”