Free Faraway Places by Tom Spanbauer

remember the day Mr. Hoffman first said that history was always just somebody’s interpretation of the events, and not the events themselves. Sitting in Mr. Hoffman’s class that day, I looked out the window and thought about what Mr. Energy had said at the Blackfoot State Fair, about everything being an illusion.
    I spent a lot of time thinking about those two things, about illusion and interpretation , about the truth and stories about the truth, about reality and how things appear—and what I came up with was a headache.
    The only thing I knew for sure was that it was a free country and that what both of those men were saying was that howthings were, and how things seemed to be, were not always the same.
    I got to be pretty good friends with Mr. Hoffman. Sometimes I would eat my lunch in his classroom and read Time magazine and we would talk. He gave me a book as a present. The name of it was Manifest Destiny and it was about American history— a pretty good interpretation , Mr. Hoffman had said.
    There were three photographs in that book Manifest Destiny that I always used to look at. Sometimes at home, at night, when my mother and my father were asleep, I would turn on my light and look at those three pictures. One was a picture of Chief Joseph, not St. Joseph, Chief Joseph of the Nez Percé. I used to like to look at what he was wearing: beads and feathers that he had traded for Manhattan. His hair was long and braided. He had eyes that reminded me of the nigger’s—of Geronimo’s.
    The second was the photograph of men dressed up in white sheets like priests, standing around a burning cross. In the background was a Negro man hanging.
    The third photograph was of a big factory in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. There were big smokestacks with smoke and fire pouring out across the sky. The factory was made of tin as bright as the toolshed in the sun. Under the photograph was a chapter head: “The Industrial Revolution.”
    AND SOMETHING ELSE different happened that year: at the end of September I received the sacrament of Holy Confirmation. I was late by a year—the year before, the bishop had been sick, and only the bishop could perform the sacrament of Holy Confirmation. My whole class at the St. Joseph’s School had to wait till he was better.
    Confirmation is the sacrament when the Holy Ghost comes down upon you. Once you’re confirmed, you’re grown-up in the eyes of the Church. To receive the sacrament you had to memorize the entire Baltimore catechism from cover to cover. You had to know it all, every page, because the bishop would ask youquestions in front of the whole congregation about what was in that book. You never knew which one he was going to ask.
    My mother bought me a suit for the occasion, a secondhand one from the St. Joseph’s Church rummage sale. She bought second-hand because I would just outgrow it. That suit was navy blue with wide lapels and awful baggy pants to match.
    That Sunday, the Sunday of my Holy Confirmation, my mother and my father and I drove into town like usual, not saying much. We got to the church at eight-thirty and I told Monsignor Canby what I had done and how many times I had done it. Monsignor gave me a penance—five Our Fathers and five Hail Marys—and then I went up to sit with the rest of the confirmandees—that’s what they called us: confirmandees . There were six of us and, as it ended up, the bishop only asked me one question. It was the second one in the book:
    â€œIf God is everywhere, why cannot we see Him?” the bishop wanted to know.
    No problem. I stood up straight like I thought a saint would stand and imagined that a tongue of fire—the Holy Ghost—was coming down on me right then. I answered the question, my voice echoing in the nave. I answered like a grown-up Catholic: “We cannot see God because He is a Pure Spirit and cannot be seen with bodily eyes.”
    The bishop’s