The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' (68 page)

“The old guy I talked to down in Queens. The former driver.”

“Okay, so what we’ve got then is a behavior pattern: she’s volatile when she doesn’t get what she wants—which, in this case, let’s just say, for example’s sake, might have been blackmail money.”

It was hard to hear him describe her as being that devious, that unstable—hard because it sounded plausible. In the face of all that was coming to light, it was getting harder, too, to romanticize about my mother. I’d been outraged about the way the Quirks and everyone else had bullied her. Used their power against her. But I was beginning to see that, for whatever reason, Mary Agnes Dank had engineered most of her own troubles.

“The old guy you talked to down in Queens—the Rheingold driver. He said she was pregnant when he drove her back here from New York, right? Any idea when that was?”

“Yeah, nineteen fifty. Wintertime, because he said it started snowing on his way back to the city. March, I think he said. Pregnant with me, I thought—either by Sparks or the other guy she was seeing. The heir apparent at Rheingold, also married. But the math didn’t add up. If she was pregnant with me in March of 1950, then how the hell could she have given birth to me in October of ‘51? So then I figured, okay, maybe if my family had gone to the trouble to have that bogus birth certificate made up—to hide the fact that Mary Agnes was my mother—then maybe they’d lied about my date of birth, too. Maybe I was a year older than I’d been led to believe. I started thinking about things like how, by the end of sixth grade, I was already shaving. Already having wet dreams. I came up with all kinds of—”

“Sixth grade? Jeeze, I didn’t have my first one until high school. On an Explorers campout. Woke up dreaming about Joey Heatherton, and I started firing off like Mount Vesuvius. Thank God for sleeping bags, you know?” He was making wavy lines on his notepad. “Joey Heatherton: where is she now?”

“Probably in a nursing home,” I said. “But it was driving me nuts, you know? Not knowing how old I was, who my father was. Then this DNA test I had done said I definitely
was
a Quirk. That my father
was
my father.”

I told Jerry what I’d found out from Ulysses and later verified in that old newspaper article about my kidnapping. Told him about how I’d been taken away from Mary Agnes and “legitimized”—given a different mother who was passed off as the one who’d given me birth.

Jerry glanced down at the babies. “So who the hell are these two then? That’s what
I’ve
got to figure out.” He took out his cell phone and started punching buttons. I asked him who he was calling. “The station house. I’m going to have a couple of my patrolmen drive around, see if they can find our buddy Ulysses so that I can talk with him.”

“So you’re going to question him yourself?”

“Yeah, I figure he’d be more forthcoming if—Yeah, Gina? This is Captain Martineau. Who’s on this afternoon? Tanaka? … Okay, tell him I want him to see if he can find someone for me. And put Bill Meehan on it, too, while you’re at it. You know that old rummy who—”

“Hold up,” I said. I pointed toward the back door. Ulysses was sitting on the stoop, his head in his hands.

HE WAS PRETTY SHAKEN UP.
Pretty scared. “You drunk?” Jerry asked him.

He shook his head. “I wish I was.”

I started a pot of coffee, and Jerry told Ulysses, as gently as he could, that he had some questions he needed him to answer.

Ulysses looked back and forth between us. “Questions about what?” he asked. Jerry extended his hand toward the babies. “Oh. Yeah, okay.” He said he didn’t mind answering Jerry’s questions, but he’d just as soon not have to do it in the same room as “those things.”

“Fair enough,” Jerry said. They adjourned to the living room.

When the coffee was ready, I poured three mugs and went in there. “Mind if I sit in on this?” I asked. Jerry said it was okay with him if it was okay with Ulysses. Ulysses said he’d feel better if I did.

“And Jer, before you get started, do you think he needs to lawyer up?”

Jerry rolled his eyes. “What
I
think is that you’ve maybe been hitting the
Law & Order
reruns a little too hard.”

We exchanged smiles. “Point taken,” I said.

Ulysses said my father and he had buried the trunk and laid the cement floor over it in September of 1953.

“You sure about that?” Jerry said. “Because we’ve been trying
to piece this thing together, and we’re thinking it might have been 1950.”

Ulysses shook his head. It was about a week or so after he’d gotten his discharge from the navy, he said, and that was Labor Day of ‘53. Grandpa Quirk and Lolly had gone out of state to a cattle auction, he remembered, and left my father in charge of the milking. “That and looking after the old lady.”

“My great-grandmother,” I said.

Ulysses nodded. “She wasn’t too tappy at that point, but it was heading in that direction. They kinda had to keep an eye on her. Anyways, Alden called me up, asked me if I’d help him milk.”

My father had been released from the service sometime before, Ulysses said. “Something happened to him over there, and it made him snap, I guess. The navy couldn’t use him any more. Medical discharge, I guess it was. Alden never did say what it was. Lolly told me he was in bad shape when he first come home. Stayed up in his room most of the time. Didn’t eat, couldn’t sleep. By the time I got out, he was okay, pretty much. Drinking heavy, but other than that, the same Alden as before, far as I could tell. Except that he was a married man. He’d married on the quick, see? After Caelum here come along.”

“Yeah, speaking of that, where were Caelum and his mother that day you guys buried the trunk?”

Ulysses shrugged. Said all he remembered was that we weren’t around.

“We might have been up at the Cape,” I said. “Buzzards Bay. When she and I would visit her family, we’d usually stay over for two or three nights.”

“Okay, then,” Jerry said. “Go on, Ulysses.”

Grandpa Quirk had been after my father to help him build the apple house, he said. He was anticipating a bumper crop that year, and with it, he hoped, a bump in customers, too. “See, he’d just shelled out for that big cider press they used to have here. Thought it’d be a draw to get people out to the farm. Families with kids, that kind of thing:
show ‘em how cider’s made, and then they’d buy a jug or two and a basket of apples.” Ulysses looked from Jerry to me. “He was pretty shrewd, your grandfather. Knew how to tease out a dollar. But he wasn’t too happy with your father, because Alden had been dragging his feet on the building project, see? On purpose, see? Because he was waiting for an opportunity.”

“What kind of opportunity?” Jerry asked.

“A time when the old man wasn’t around. See, Alden had something he needed to do when nobody was around to see him do it.”

It was a scorcher that morning, Ulysses remembered. After he and my father finished morning milking, they’d begun drinking. “Working our way through a couple six-packs, and then, out of the blue, he says to me, ‘Come on, U! There’s something else you need to help me with.’ So I follow him up to the attic. And it was hotter’n hell up there, too. Like walking into a furnace.”

First, they had lifted a large highboy away from the wall. Then my father, with the claw end of a hammer, had pried off a wooden panel that that highboy had been parked in front of. “And there was this crawl space behind it, see? Alden said he’d discovered it back when he was a kid—that his grandma’s rule was that him and his sister were never supposed to go up in that attic unless she went up with them. And of course, the way Alden was, that was like handing him an open invitation to go up there and snoop around whenever he thought he could get away with it. And that’s what he done back when he was a boy: snooped around and found that secret passageway.”

My father got down on his hands and knees and disappeared into the crawl space, Ulysses said. And when he backed out again, he was dragging the footlocker. “And I remember, I says to him, ‘What do you got in there? Pirate treasure? ’ And he laughed, said he wished it was. Only he wouldn’t say what
was
in it. He told me it was better for me if I didn’t know.

“We put everything back the way we found it—tapped the wooden panel back in place, put the highboy back in front of it. Then we
hauled the trunk downstairs and out to the spot where the old man was planning to put up his apple shack.”

Ulysses said they dug the hole, lowered the trunk, and shoveled over it. Then they rolled the ground to level it, built the staging for the floor, and started mixing cement. “I said to him in the middle of it, I said, ‘Jesus, it’s hot out here. How about we quit for a little while now? Wait till it cools off a little? ’ But Alden said No, no, we had to keep going so’s we could get everything done by the time his old man got back. So all afternoon, we mixed and poured cement, two wheelbarrows at a time. Then we … then …”

He had been staring into the distance as he recalled that long-ago day, but suddenly he was back in the present, back in the farmhouse living room. He looked at me, surprised. “I just remembered something,” he said.

“What’s that?” Jerry asked.

“The old lady. Alden’s grandmother.”

Now that he had retrieved the memory, he said, he could picture it plain as day. “In the middle of all that cement mixing we were doing, she come wandering out from the house. She’d always been the prim and proper type, you know? But when she come out there, she was barefoot and her hair was kinda helter-skelter. Wearing a housedress that was buttoned up all wrong…. See, Alden’d been so busy rushing around, trying to get everything finished, that he’d forgotten about her. But then, there she was. When Alden seen her, he kinda froze up. Because this thing we were doing was supposed to be top secret, see?

“She walks up to him, barefoot like I said—walks right through the slop from the spillover around the wheelbarrow. Grabs Alden by his wrist. Now, I’d seen her do that same thing often enough when I was a kid—grab him by the wrist with one hand and start hitting him with the switch with the other, because of something bad she’d caught him doing. But that day, she walks up to him, grabs his wrist, and she says to him, close up to his face, she says, ‘What did you do
with it? ’ Meaning the trunk, see? We hadn’t realized it, but she must have seen us that morning, carrying it down from the attic. And I said to myself, Uh-oh, the jig’s up now. Alden’s in trouble again. But then—and this surprised me—Alden looked right back at her, kinda bold-like, and he says he done what should have been a long time ago : put it in the ground where it belonged. And the old lady stood there, not saying anything at first. It was like a face-off, you know? Like a contest between the two of them. Then she nodded, decisive-like, and said, ‘Good.’ And then Alden took her by the arm and brung her over to the water bucket. Washed that wet cement off her feet and walked her back to the house…. Funny how memory works, ain’t it? All those years ago, and now that I remember it, I can see her standing there plain as day. Hear her saying that one word when he told her that he’d buried the trunk: ‘Good.’”

Ulysses clunked down his empty coffee mug. “More?” I asked.

“Nah. I could use a little nip of something, though.”

“No way, José,” Jerry said. “We’re not through yet. And you’re not supposed to be drinking anyway.”

Ulysses nodded and turned to me. “How about one of them beers you were drinking last night, then? You got any of them left?” But before I could respond, Jerry asked him if there was anything else about that day that he remembered.

He shook his head. “Just that, when the old man come home that night, he was pleased as punch. Kinda shocked, I guess. Not only hadn’t the farm gone to hell in a handbasket with Alden in charge, but the building project had moved forward, too.” He said the next to me. “Didn’t happen too often that your grandpa was pleased about something your dad had done. But he was that night. He was falling all over himself about how we’d laid down that floor. Course, he had no idea
why
Alden had gotten so hardworking all of a sudden—that he’d been waiting for the chance to get that chest out of the attic, bury it, and make sure it stayed buried.”

Ulysses told us he had to stop talking and take a leak. But when
he got up, he started heading toward the front door instead of the bathroom. “Wrong way,” I said. “It’s off the kitchen. Remember?” He said he’d just as soon relieve himself out in the yard if it was all right with me—that he’d rather not walk past “those two” again if he didn’t have to.

While he was outside, I told Jerry that it didn’t sound to me like Ulysses had been an accessory to anything except helping out his buddy. “So far, I’d say you’re right,” Jerry said. “But we’re not through yet.” He took out his phone again. Called the station house and directed his dispatcher to contact the coroner and give her a heads-up. He wanted the babies’ remains and the other contents of the footlocker picked up and brought to the forensics lab later that afternoon. He said he also wanted Officers Meehan and Tanaka to meet him here at three o’clock so that they could have a look up in the attic and cordon off the hole out back.

When he got off the phone, I asked him if he thought he could keep the media away. He couldn’t make any promises, he said. He’d urge his people to be as discreet as possible, but if the paper or the TV news people got wind of the investigation, he wouldn’t be able to withhold information from them. “I think you better brace yourself, Caelum,” he said. “Some of my guys are pretty chummy with the reporters. And I won’t be able to control what does or doesn’t come out of the coroner’s mouth. Let’s face it: hidden remains, a mummified baby—it’s pretty sexy stuff for
Live at Five
and
Eyewitness News,
details at eleven.’ I wouldn’t be surprised if you got some national media sniffing around out here. Maybe not. Maybe I’m wrong. I hope I am.”

I looked at him and sighed.

When I went outside to retrieve Ulysses, I found him leaning against the side of the house, looking exhausted and sick. “You all right?” I asked. He shook his head. All he wanted to do, he said, was go back to his place, get a few drinks in him, maybe, and go to sleep.
“Well,” I said. “Come on in, then. Let’s get this thing finished, and then I’ll drive you home.”

“Yeah, okay,” he said. “You’re not mad, then?” The answer to that one was pretty complicated, but I told him no, I was weary but not mad—not at him, anyway. He was one of the few people in my life who had told me the truth. I put my hand on the small of his back and led him back inside.

“Okay,” Jerry said. “So if Alden wouldn’t tell you what was in the footlocker the day you buried it, when did he tell you?”

Ulysses turned to me. “What year was it that train hit him?”

“Nineteen sixty-five,” I said. “May the twenty-second.”

He nodded. “That’d be about right. It was springtime, I remember. He told me maybe a week or two before he got killed. Right at that same spot, too.”

“The same spot?” I said. “What do you mean?”

“Me and him were fishing for buckies off the trestle bridge. I was on the wagon at the time; I’d been sober for the better part of that year. Minister and his wife at the Lutheran church had kinda tooken me on as a project. But Alden, he was drinking pretty heavy that day. And outa the blue, he starts spilling his guts about Mary Agnes. It was kinda unusual, see? Alden could be a happy drunk, and he could be a mean one, but that was the only time I ever seen him get weepy when he was cocked.”

Ulysses said my father started pouring out his heart about how he should have listened to his grandmother when she’d warned him all those years earlier that Mary Agnes was bad news, same as her mother, and that she would ruin him. “The way he put it was, that she was a disease he picked up when he was a kid and hadn’t ever been able to shake. Alden had a way with words, you know—a way of saying something so’s you’d remember it. Back in grammar school—we were in the same class together, him and me—the teacher’d be cracking the ruler against his knuckles one minute because of something
bad he done, and the next minute she’d be handing him a gold star and having him stand next to his desk and read his paper out loud because it was the best one in the class.”

I had never heard anything about my father’s having had a gift for words and would have liked Ulysses to tell me more, but Jerry said he needed to get back to that day at the trestle bridge.

Ulysses nodded. “Alden said he thought he’d finally got himself free of her after she moved away—went after bigger fish down there in New York. But then she come back and ‘reinfected’ him all over again. She’d gotten herself pregnant, see? By some guy who hadn’t done right by her. Alden was in the navy by then, but this was before they sent him to Korea. He was home on leave from Portsmouth, waiting for his orders. And Mary, she come back with her tail between her legs and a bump in her belly. She was renting a room up in Jewett City—one of those places where they let you pay by the day and nobody bothers you with questions. What she done was, she tracked Alden down at the Cheery-O and begged him to help her. She had no money, she told him, and no future, either, if she was gonna get stuck raising that kid.” Ulysses leaned in and whispered the next. “See, it was a colored fella who’d knocked her up, so that complicated things even worse.”