The Excellent Lombards

by Jane Hamilton

  “He remembers,” my father said. “Of course he does. He’s grateful.”

  “Of course he does! My God, Jim.”

  They were blissfully quiet for a while but then my mother had to start it up again. “Anyway, the normal course of action, if you weren’t going to make a sanctimonious gesture to your cousin—wouldn’t it be to give your share into my custodial care until William and Francie could have a crack at it? Assuming they want to inherit the bounty of the ages. And carry on the…cult.”

  We recalled what she’d said about the farm. It was true that our orchard was the most important feature of the world.

  “Assuming,” she went on, “that the Queen and her right-of-way, and her other well-placed acres, doesn’t ruin everyone.” My mother called Aunt May Hill the Queen, a name that did not suit her.

  “Would you stop talking? Please, Nellie.”

  Yes, yes, we were absolutely on his side—he should give her an apple to fill her mouth, a gentle stuffing.

  “I think what you’re saying, Jim, is that if I had ownership I’d screw Sherwood over. Which, okay, I admit, is sometimes an appealing thought.”

  My father was again gazing out the window, as if fields under snow was a landscape that had variation of untold interest.

  “You actually,” she said, “you actually don’t trust me.” She said this as if she’d been stricken by awe.

  “That is absurd,” he cried. “And you know it.” Jim Lombard went ahead and at that very particular moment made a remark that was out of place in the timetable of the fight. He said, “There’s a rest stop in two—”

  When she lurched back against the seat, preparing to be shrill, I finally yelled, “What are you talking about?”

  William took up the call, sticking his head between their high-backed seats, as tall as thrones. “You shouldn’t argue.”

  “We’re not,” my mother spit, “arguing.”

  “It sounds like it,” William pointed out.

  My father, who was always truthful, said, “We are arguing.”

  “Here’s what I want, Jim.” My mother, for her part, did not like to leave a task unfinished. “I want Sherwood, when you’re gone, to implement every single one of his lunatic ideas. May Hill will have to wrastle him to the ground, think of that! When the whole operation is in complete disarray William and Francie will step in and save them. That,” she snapped, “is my dream.”

  We were not only further bewildered by their discussion but, more critically, unsure now about whose side we were on. My father’s for agreeing with us about their arguing or my mother’s for foretelling our marvelous future? I wanted to cry because of their game and also because the conversation reminded me of a secret I had, a sliver of talk I’d once overheard, something awful my mother had said to Gloria, the hired hand. It was a snippet I couldn’t even repeat to William. They’d been in the kitchen maybe a year or two before when Gloria asked my mother if she thought William and I would stay on the farm when we were grown, if we’d want to take it over. My mother said, “Oh, who knows! Don’t you think William’s too dreamy and too interested in other things to be a farmer? And Francie”—she burst out laughing—“is too full of spleen.”

  Spleen? What was that? Why was it funny? For the life of me I could not find out what spleen meant; I couldn’t understand the largest component of my character. I couldn’t ask William because what if it was a hideous stain or germ, amusing to an observer, that was soon going to overtake my hands, my legs, my face? The spleen was going to keep me from being a farmer and when I remembered that fact I was very sorry for myself, a sad glum girl.

  In the car my father said, “We’re going to get out and stretch.” In order to ensure that his wife take the exit ramp he added that he himself had to use the bathroom.

  “Take the ramp or not take the ramp?” my mother considered. “Make you hold it all the way to Minneapolis? Oh, Jim, let me think about this.”

  They both then did something we couldn’t stand. They both unaccountably started to laugh. “You’ll be the death of me,” he said to her.

  “And then I’ll be stuck with that asinine will. Jesus Christ.”

  They laughed again.

  “If you croak,” she said, “if you leave me with Sherwood and Dolly and May Hill, I’ll hunt you down.”

  We could hardly move, William and I, in the parking area. My father giving the farm to Sherwood? My mother hunting him down—what did that mean? My father dying—no! He wasn’t really going to do that, but the rest of us without a house? Sherwood building a metal home with a marble run? “I don’t have to go,” I said. Their sudden laughter, the way their argument seemed to end, was possibly the most confounding thing of all.

  “Yes, you do,” my mother said.

  “I don’t.”

  William squeezed his eyes shut for her, he bore down, as if he were trying to summon urine for her pleasure. “I’m fine,” he concluded.

  When my parents gave up on us and went off to the visitor center on their own I started to cry. We were left, we were left, we were left now and we were going to be left later, left without the orchard. William looked out the window to the cold travelers walking their dogs in the dirty snow. He was crying, too, the Lombard children as good as orphans, might as well start now, brother and sister, hand in hand, abandoned on the highway, an apple each, a favorite book, a few Jolly Ranchers, green only, a song to sing for company, nothing, nothing else, no place to roam but everywhere.

  3.

  The Situation

  The orchard, the family affair, was a compound with three houses, three barns, four hundred acres of forest and arable fields and marsh, the sheep pastures, and the apple trees. The woods were wild and dense, no hiker’s path of shavings, no sign at the start announcing points of interest, the lady’s slippers hidden in the broad ginger leaves, the morels—we weren’t going to tell anyone where they were. There was no warning about future dangers, such as the cougar maybe making a comeback in our state. By the far west fence there was an Indian burial mound that we took for the shape of an owl, and in a thicket nearby the remains of a settler’s cabin. Once, digging around, we found a tin cup, dented and packed with dirt. William picked it up, he sniffed it, sniffed the rim, where lips would have touched. I asked should we take it with us? He held it in both hands, looking off into the distance, seeing, I guessed, the fairy-tale children of long ago. An ogre of course and a father with an ax. Without deciding exactly we buried the cup as if it were a little pet we’d cared for.

  Home we went over the wooded hills. The last glacier coming down into Wisconsin had stopped just south of us, dumping its remaining load of gravel, ideal country for an apple orchard, the soil rich enough, the drainage superb. In truth, though, we were more interested in what was to come than in what had already happened in the time of weather and pioneers. William and I were the fourth generation born unto the operation, heirs to a historical property and a noble business, far more than our friends could say about their fathers’ jobs and their houses on quarter-acre lots.

  What worried us was a possible hitch, a potentially tricky web. Because we were not the only heirs. The major candidates in our minds were our good playmates and cousins, Adam, the oldest of us four, the boy for William, and Amanda, the youngest, the girl for me. They lived across the road in the manor house, a house far enough away and shrouded by trees so that it was not visible from our side. Amanda and Adam lived in Volta. William and Mary Frances lived in Velta. Our divided kingdom, William inventing the names, Velta and Volta, for what was true. Our cousins in Volta on the whole hated to work, disliked the out-of-doors, and never went into the woods unless their father coaxed them. Adam had cause to protest because he had the bee sting allergy, a cruel joke for a boy living in the middle of an orchard. But aside from their natural disinclination, their mother, Dolly, was always describing to them their college lives, way off, already excited about their adulthood in the city. So Amanda and Adam usually didn’t t
rouble us too much, but what about the cousins who lived elsewhere, in Alaska or California, children whose parents had grown up on the farm, those strangers who might arrive and seize the road? Children we had never met. For the most part after our trip to Minnesota we forgot that our father might someday give the farm to his partner, to Sherwood, or maybe we heard our parents not long after discussing their will in reasonable and generous terms. With that fear out of the way we had to make ourselves afraid on our own steam, pretending we were royal orphans, our right to rule threatened by the thugs at the palace door. Then we put on our capes and crowns and we climbed on top of the old chicken shed for our rapture: Bring me my bow of burning gold! Bring me my arrows of desire! Bring me my spear!

  There were many dwellings that we would someday own part of if the strict lineage wasn’t interrupted. The manor house, the size of a ship, of a destroyer, was made of granite and cedar shakes, and had been built for our great-grandfather, the lawyer, the state senator, the gentleman farmer. Sherwood, Dolly, Amanda, and Adam lived in the downstairs, although my parents owned three-eighths of the entire house. We always wondered, Which part?—hoping one of the four bathrooms was in our share. Also, we would need a slice of either the upstairs or downstairs kitchen. Aunt May Hill, one-fourth owner, was someone we didn’t want to think about for any number of reasons.

  For instance, when May Hill was a young person her father, a relative of ours, had accidentally suffocated in a silo on his farm in Indiana, and shortly after that her mother found a rope and hanged herself from a barn rafter. May Hill’s brother was in college but she, a high school girl, had to be adopted by Sherwood’s parents. One day she was a teenager at home and soon after she arrived at the Lombard farm in Wisconsin to take her place among a two-, three-, five-, and six-year-old—that was Sherwood—and a baby on the way. If she had been in a book we probably would have loved that downtrodden orphan. She was brilliant, everyone said. A solid girl, a girl with a large frame. When she grew older, instead of going to college or finding a job she stayed upstairs in her room reading, she tinkered in the tool house, she chopped wood, she studied auto mechanics on her own, and she invested in the stock market. It was common knowledge that she’d become rich. No woman we’d ever seen had such thick rectangular eyebrows. Not that we saw her very often. We understood that she did not like anyone, that she did not wish to see you on the path. The fact we knew most certainly was that, no matter her solitary habits, May Hill was the farm’s pure gold. Because breakdown was daily and went according to the seasons: the Ford tractor and market truck sputtering in fall, the sprayer clogged in spring, the baler and mower fizzing in summer, the snowplow intractable in winter. Each piece of equipment poised to quit in the time of its urgent need.

  Aside from May Hill’s holdings everything else was split fifty–fifty between Sherwood and my father. Down the drive past the manor house was the apple barn where the customers came, where the cider was made, the apples sorted and stored, and behind that was the sheep yard for the flock of thirty ewes. Also, there in the yard, the museum of cars and other implements from as far back as 1917, plus rusted stanchions mostly buried, stacks of bicycles, wagon wheels, refrigerators, lawn mowers, barrels of used twine, chipped crocks—nothing of particular use but each item in a casual pose, caught as if in the middle of a task, as if trapped in time by lava or ice. You might think, studying the jumble, that the ancestors had done very little but ride bikes and churn butter. We sometimes worried that if Sherwood and my father had a real war we wouldn’t be able to get to the apple barn to do business, to feed the sheep, to rattle around in the junk, to play with Amanda and Adam. We’d be prisoners cut off from the supply.

  The war would start because of the ancient argument, and one irrevocable thing would be said, something bitter and true. Sherwood and my father would then fall silent not for a few minutes but for years. It would be a war with no punches and certainly no shooting, no physical injury of any kind because that’s not how the Lombards behaved. The problem for Sherwood was my father, Jim Lombard, his cousin who hadn’t grown up on the farm. Jim had only spent his summers on the orchard, working alongside his maiden aunt, Aunt Florence. Whereas Sherwood was raised full-time in the manor house, the boy who had always known he was the rightful and only heir. After college my father came to help out, to rescue the operation while Sherwood was in the army. To Jim Lombard’s own surprise and joy, he never left. Sherwood came back from his posting, he and my father were made partners, one by one the older generation died, my parents got married around the same time Dolly and Sherwood tied the knot, Adam and Amanda were born, we were born, everything beginning all over again. But the tickler, the fundamental question lurked: Was my father, the city person, the interloper—did he belong? Did his pedigree and his summer roots constitute a claim?

  When William and I learned a new detail of my father’s story, or when we heard more about the argument as the years passed, each piece was usually an understandable part of the predicament. Very rarely did additional information surprise us. Because the feeling between Sherwood and my father, that hum, was outside of us and also within us; surely it was so because otherwise we would not have entertained the war as we did, considering our stores of food, planning to hold fast to our little house across the road, the falling-down clapboard heap my parents had done their best to rescue, built circa 1860. We plotted how we’d get to the stone cottage near the village where Gloria the employee lived, Gloria, in the role of the hired man, living in the original Lombard house in the state of Wisconsin. Would I have to hate Amanda, who was a year younger than me, or would we be like lovers who were separated, sending each other messages in code, the upholders of the best, the pure Lombard spirit? William and Adam would sneak notes, too, the children reminding the elders who we were.

  By the time we were in high school we understood enough to consider the hardships each bore. For certain Sherwood and Jim had the same funny pride in their independence and parsimony, but even though their goals were identical and their love equally deep, still, the fact remained that there perhaps have never been two men more unsuited to be in business together, the pair a marvel of incapacity. Sherwood the visionary—how we sometimes loved him for his leaps, his forays into the future! And Jim the commander of all details, the prophet of routine. The force of each diminishing the other’s power. But what the men respected in their situation, once they were business partners, was their rage, each for the most part keeping a lid on it, their semi-annual blowouts usually occurring in November and May. In-between times the majesty of the woods around the manor house and the size of the house itself, and the elegance of the apple barn, which originally had been meant for horses, and along the rise the dignity of the long straight rows of apple trees: All those beauties were a reminder of the grace and the good breeding of the Lombard clan itself.

  There was a time when everyone came together in a purpose beyond farming. We were lost, William and I. After dinner we’d wandered down the lane that went out to the hay field, sure of ourselves because already at five and six we had helped with the hay in our complete costume: coveralls, gloves, boots, sunglasses, straw hats. It was the end of June and we’d started finding wild raspberries, straying farther and farther from the path, as sheep do, with no regard to the way back. After a while William looked up, his lips stained black, his eyes at once bright with fear. “It’s getting dark,” he noted. We started running, the thorns scratching our arms, our legs, our cheeks. Although we’d been told there were no bears or wolves in our part of the state, we knew that when night fell the savage beasts from out of time would emerge from their dens. We were already bloodied by the thicket, by mere plants. When we came to a hillside William led me up the brambly slope into a hole, a great gouge that had been made by a tree falling down. We climbed over the dead limbs and got ourselves into the torn earth, arranging ourselves among the roots. “Don’t cry, Frankie,” he said, but he himself was shivering. He held me in his arms and so alt
hough I was afraid, I was strangely happy, too. I started to try to sing a little song but he said we should probably listen for—for what? Our father, of course our father would come. Even though we knew he would find us, all the same we began to see—without speaking of it—the whole story of our being the dead children.

  There was so much to miss in the life we wouldn’t lead, the Lombard girl and boy who despite his dreaminess and her spleen were supposed to carry on the orchard, those two snuffed out before they could be the farmers. William and I continued to tremble as if it were winter. Ghosts, that’s what we’d be, standing at our places at the apple sorter wearing our XXX Small brown cotton gloves, child laborers who were glad to undertake any task even in death. We’d been going to marry each other, my brother and I having solved that problem of adulthood early. It was William who’d firmly told me about the arrangement, who had the good idea, the two of us continuing on in our bunk beds, William above with his raspy breathing, that lullaby, the parents staying put in their room.

  For a little while in the woods he told me a story that began this way: “Once there was a girl who lived near the end of the world. Her name was Miss Imp.” Miss Imp! That was me, a girl who was always annoying everyone but in a way they secretly enjoyed. When Miss Imp got lost her house right on the edge of the world picked up its skirts and came to find her, it loved her so much. With that conclusion we listened to the darkness again, remembering that in fact we were still lost and were probably going to die.

  Gloria was the person we first heard calling. “WILL-YUM! FRAAAAN-SEA!” Our own names out in the night.

  William called back, “Here we are.” His thin song like an insect’s steady announcement in the grass, hereweare, hereweare. We heard in the farther distance my father calling and my mother’s cries. It dawned on us that although they were looking they might not find us, and then what?