The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' (66 page)

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 …

^*
Popper most likely refers to Louisa May Alcott, who contracted typhoid fever during her nursing service. A hospital physician treated Alcott with calomel, which cured her of the disease but left her with the mercury poisoning that eventually took her life in 1888 at the age of fifty-six. Upon leaving her hospital post, Alcott returned home to Concord, Massachusetts where she wrote a poignant but humorous account of her nursing experiences, published as
Hospital Sketches.
Her novel,
Little Women,
followed six years later and made her famous.

“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 old. 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.”

“Yeah, we know that,” he said. “But farming would be cool. I was thinking about that the other day.”

“Really? What would you cultivate? Pot? Poppies?”

I had said it to piss him off, but he smiled at me instead. “Been clean and sober for 597 days now. But who’s counting, right?”

I kept my face expressionless. Said nothing. If he was looking for a high five or a congratulatory pat on the back, he was going to have a long wait on his hands. He was going to have to fucking wait forever.

“The thing is,” he said. “That morning? Just before she hit him? I was busting his stones. Scaring him, okay? I’d just found out some
shit about him, and I was threatening to tell my mom and everyone else who thought he was perfect. Which was basically everybody. But then he bolted, and
bam.
… So, in a way, I’m responsible, too. And I’ve had to live with that, okay? That, and a whole bunch of other crap I did. Because if someone had to get killed that day, it should have been me, not Morgan. That’s what my mother thinks, I guess. She still won’t speak to me, have anything to do with me, and she probably never will. And if I could’ve changed places with him, I would have done that for her. But I couldn’t. The only thing I could do was deal with my shit and clean up my act. Get straight and stay that way. Work the steps…. Which is why farming would be kind of cool, you know? Something positive. Grow stuff, produce stuff. Have you ever, by any chance, been to Epcot?”

“Epcot?” I was still trying to negotiate his remorse. Why were we suddenly going to Disney World?

“They got this building there called The Land. And you go downstairs and there’s this ride, okay? You get in these little boats and they take you past these farms of the future. You know what hydroponics are? Because I was thinking that might be cool: hydroponic farming.”

Two hundred acres of farmland, and he wanted to grow things in water?

“Or herbs, maybe,” he said. “Not, you know,
herb.
Herbs like parsley and paprika and shit. You ever watch the Food Channel?”

I reminded him that I was busy.

“Yeah, okay. Thanks again, man.” He walked over to his bike. “Or llamas, maybe. A llama farm would be cool. But hey, you never know. Maybe we won’t win and you’ll be able to stay put. I’d be cool with that, too.” He straddled his bike. It roared to life. “Thanks again, man! See you soon!” he yelled. He lurched forward, helmetless, down the rutted dirt driveway and onto Bride Lake Road.

ULYSSES AND I LIFTED THE
trunk and carried it from the back stoop to the kitchen. I got an old sheet and spread it so that the floor wouldn’t get crapped up with dirt and whatever else was in there. “Mind if I have a drink to steady my nerves?” Ulysses asked. His hand was already on the vodka bottle that I’d forgotten to put away the night before.

“Not now, U,” I said. “Let’s get this done.”

I knelt before the footlocker. The left-side clasp opened no problem, but the right one was bent beyond cooperating. “There’s a screwdriver in that drawer beneath the microwave,” I said. “You want to grab it for me?”

“Funny you just called me U,” he said. “That’s what your dad always called me.” He held out the screwdriver, sharp end out, and the damn thing was dancing so crazily in his trembling hand that I had to steady his wrist so I wouldn’t get jabbed. “Take it easy,” I told him. “We found it. We dug it up. It’s all good, right?”

He shook his head. “Just so you know, I had no idea what was in there the day we buried it,” he said. “I asked him, but he said I was better off not knowing. He didn’t tell me till later.
Years
later, it was. He was cocked and I wasn’t, and he says, ‘Hey, U, remember that day you and me buried that trunk out past the orchard? ’ And that’s when he come out with it.”

“Uh-huh.”

I got the clasp pried apart and raised the lid. The smell of dead air and dry rot hit my nostrils. It was no wonder the thing had had some heft to it.

I unpacked the contents one by one, lining things up like Russian nesting dolls. Jammed inside the trunk was one of our old wooden apple crates, its label “Bride Lake Farms” still vivid with color. Inside the crate was something that had clearly been my mother’s: some kind of zippered suitcase from her modeling days—oval shaped, light blue, vinyl covered. The name she’d gone by ran diagonally across
the front of it, professionally lettered in darker blue with gold trim and punctuated with an exclamation point: “Jinx Dixon!”

This was different than the other stuff I’d recovered—the magazine ad and newspaper clippings, the cassette of my interview with Peppy Schissel. Here was something my mother had used and carried. I lifted it out of the crate and placed it in front of me. Sat back on the floor with my legs bracketing it. I took hold of the zipper’s metal tab and pulled, slowly, hesitantly. It stuck a little in one spot where the teeth had rusted, but when I pulled a little harder, it gave. I lifted the lid.

Inside the suitcase was a small cast-iron chest—an antique, could have been, from the looks of it, though I was no expert on that kind of thing. Its lid was shut tight with spring-held clamps. I loosened the tension and removed the cover. For a second or two, I didn’t know
what
I was looking at. Then, Jesus Christ Almighty, I
did
know. Lying side by side on a bed of fine-grained white sand were the remains of two human infants.

Palms against the floor, I crab-walked away from them, only half-aware of my own mantra:
What the fuck? … What the fuck? …

Ulysses was saying something, but his words weren’t quite registering. He was crying. He had hold of the vodka. I stood up, reeling a little, and snatched the bottle away from him. Grabbed a glass, poured him an inch or so, and poured the rest down the sink. “Here !” I said, shoving his drink at him. “Drink up! And as soon as I come back here, I want some answers!”

“Why? Where you going?”

I wasn’t so much going someplace as getting away. I hurried, stumbling, from the back of the house to the front, knocking into things as I went. Banged open the front door and broke into a run, down the porch stairs, down the driveway. Crossing Bride Lake Road, I barely noticed the screech of brakes, the rebuke of some faceless driver. “Asshole !” I ran alongside the road, weaving in and out, muttering
to myself. They hadn’t fucked me up enough already with all their lies and secrets? Now
this?
…

I ran past the prison and into our fallow cornfields. Ran to where the maze had been—the place where they’d come out of hiding to take their stolen food, the table scraps of decent people’s lives. I screamed it over and over as if, with enough repetition, it might travel back in time so that they’d get the message:
I hate you. I love you. I hate you. I love you….

I don’t know how long I was out there, but by the time I was limping back up the driveway, the sun was halfway across the sky and my throat was raw, my foot throbbing from having kicked something out there, I didn’t recall what. The front door gaped open. I went back in the house.

In the foyer, I stopped before the framed photo hanging at the bottom of the staircase, the one that pilot who’d had to emergency-land on our property had flown back later and taken as a gift to my grandfather: “Bride Lake Farm, Aerial View, August 1948”…. My eyes moved left to right—from the neat and orderly rows of corn to the prison compound with its ant-sized inmates, its brick buildings and sparkling lake—the lake where the legendary largemouth bass, Big Wilma, had swum, uncaptured and uncapturable, and where my mother had drowned herself…. Near the photo’s right border was the apple orchard and the open field beyond it. No apple house. It hadn’t been built yet, and so those babies out in the kitchen hadn’t yet been buried under it. I stood there in front of that old picture, rocking back and forth on the balls of my feet, dreading what I had to do. I started back toward the kitchen.

Ulysses was gone. I walked slowly up to the iron chest and stood there, peering down at them, willing myself not to look away…. They weren’t twins—they couldn’t have been. They didn’t look like they’d come from the same planet, let alone the same mother.

The bigger one, dressed and bonneted, looked like some kind of weird freak-show attraction. Its smiling face was partly missing and
partly mummified, upholstered in leathery brown skin. Its jaw and cheekbone were partially exposed on the left side where the skin had deteriorated. The bonnet it wore had a wide, old-fashioned brim decorated with colorless ribbon. Along the hem of its dingy, half-rotted dress someone had stitched a prayer or a plea in thread of a color now faded and nondescript: “God Bless This Child.”

The other, smaller one was an unclothed skeleton. Its legs were drawn up toward its chest. Its fists, no larger than walnuts, were clenched in front of its face as though it had died in pain. Had my mother given birth to it? And what was its connection to its bizarre companion? Why had they been put together in that chest? … I kept looking away from them, then looking back. My gaze returning, over and over, to the smaller of the two—the one frozen in suffering.

When I glanced back at the empty blue suitcase, I saw, on the bottom, something I hadn’t noticed when I’d lifted out the chest: a letter or note, torn into small pieces. I gathered them up and carried them open-palm to the counter, then pieced it together like a jigsaw puzzle. It was printed, not written: capital letters, fountain pen ink from the looks of it—a man’s forward-leaning, no-nonsense script on stationery from some Chicago hotel. I figured some of the pieces might be missing, but it was all there. The letter was undated.