want the illusion spoiled for the little ones (which made me feel like a big one, a sensation I enjoyed). They agreed, and I don’t think either of them peached, but the lights in the church basement were much brighter than those in the parsonage garage, and if you stood close to the landscape and peered at it, you could see that Peaceable Lake was really just a wide puddle. You could see the grooved track, too. By Christmas, everyone knew.
“It’s a big old fakearoonie,” Billy Paquette said to me one Thursday afternoon. He and his brother Ronnie hated Thursday Night School, but their mother made them go. “If he shows it off one more time and tells that walking-on-water story, I’m gonna puke.”
I thought of fighting him over that, but he was bigger. Also my friend. Besides, he was right.
II
Three Years. Conrad’s Voice. A Miracle.
Reverend Jacobs got fired because of the sermon he gave from his pulpit on November 21, 1965. That was easy to look up on the Internet, because I had a landmark to go by: it was the Sunday before Thanksgiving. He was gone from our lives a week later, and he went alone. Patsy and Morris—dubbed Tag-Along-Morrie by the kids in MYF—were already gone by then. So was the Plymouth Belvedere with the push-button drive.
My memory of the three years between the day when I first saw Peaceable Lake and the day of the Terrible Sermon are surprisingly clear, although before beginning this account, I would have told you I remembered little. After all, I would have said, how many of us remember the years between six and nine in any detail? But writing is a wonderful and terrible thing. It opens deep wells of memory that were previously capped.
I feel I could push aside the account I set out to write and instead fill a book—and not a small one—about those years and that world, which is so different from the one I live in now. I remember my mother, standing at the ironing board in her slip, impossibly beautiful in the morning sunshine. I remember my saggy-seated bathing suit, an unattractive loden green, and swimming in Harry’s Pond with my brothers. We used to tell each other the slimy bottom was cowshit, but it was just mud (probably just mud). I remember drowsy afternoons in the one-room West Harlow school, sitting on winter coats in Spelling Corner and trying to get poor stupid Dicky Osgood to get giraffe right. I even remember him saying, “W-W-Why sh-should I have to suh-suh-spell one when I’ll never suh-suh-see one?”
I remember the webwork of dirt roads that crisscrossed our town, and playing marbles in the schoolyard during frigid April recesses, and the sound the wind made in the pines as I lay in my bed, prayers said and waiting for sleep. I remember my father coming out of the garage with a wrench in his hand and his MORTON FUEL OIL cap pulled low on his forehead, blood oozing through the grease on his knuckles. I remember watching Ken MacKenzie introducing Popeye cartoons on The Mighty 90 Show, and how I was forced to give up the TV on the afternoons when Claire and her friends arrived, because they wanted to watch American Bandstand and see what the girls were wearing. I remember sunsets as red as the blood on my father’s knuckles, and how that makes me shiver now.
I remember a thousand other things, mostly good ones, but I didn’t sit down at my computer to put on rose-colored glasses and wax nostalgic. Selective memory is one of the chief sins of the old, and I don’t have time for it. They were not all good things. We lived in the country, and back then, country life was hard. I suppose it still is.
My friend Al Knowles got his left hand caught in his father’s potato grader and lost three fingers before Mr. Knowles could get the balky, dangerous thing turned off. I was there that day, and remember how the belts turned red. I remember how Al screamed.
My father (along with Terry, his faithful if clueless acolyte) got the Road Rocket running—God, what a gorgeous, blasting clatter it made when he revved the engine!—and turned it over to Duane Robichaud, newly painted and with the number 19 emblazoned on its side, to race at the Speedway in Castle Rock. In the first lap of the first heat, the idiot rolled it and totaled it. Duane