The Excellent Lombards

by Jane Hamilton

  We did not. We knew nothing.

  She stood blinking, considering how to explain any of her card tables to people such as us. “Elizabeth was the cousin of your great-great-great-grandmother,” she said slowly, “born in 1801 in New Hampshire.” May Hill didn’t have a lisp exactly, but there was a slushiness when she hit an s or a th, which no one had ever mentioned. She lifted a pair of glasses that hung around her neck by a shoelace, set them on her nose, and began to read so quietly we had to sit forward.

  I cannot recall a more dreary June, the dampness will be the death of us. Father has taken the two ponies off to Mr. Harding in hopes of a fair trade for a pair of oxen. I am desolate without Mother, and Cudworth is too sick to be of any use.

  First of all, Cudworth? And second, was it possible that in real life May Hill was reading to us? Again, I couldn’t think how such a thing had happened. As she read on about Elizabeth’s day scrubbing the kettle and weeding the turnips and airing the bedding, you might have thought May Hill was in the middle of a murder mystery. She was glued to the page, and her voice, so quiet at first, was getting louder. Her energy made me feel sick once more, as if somehow my stomach had become the eardrum, the words going straight to that sensitive place, and also, it was as if her excitement was something sad. Amanda was slouching in her chair and swinging her legs. It almost seemed—almost—that May Hill was nothing but a regular old lady. Someone pitiful who lived alone, who had nothing to care about but the diary of a pioneer. What if she had brought out the card tables in order to make the displays just for us? That notion was a heavy sinking thing, something I didn’t want, something I was trying to forget—but wait! Suddenly there was an Indian in Elizabeth Lombard’s house. An old-fashioned redskin in a loincloth. Amanda stopped the swinging. I sat up straight. “The smell was terrible,” May Hill was reading. “He looked weak, his chest frail, but his eyes were blazing at me with hatred.” There followed three sentences in which Elizabeth Lombard snatched an ax and brained that savage.

  We both covered our mouths. May Hill looked up and that time I was sure of it, certain she was smiling at me. It wasn’t a large goofy grin or a pretty showing of teeth, but instead a smile of satisfaction, of having expertly accomplished a task. Her blue eyes, which were ordinarily cast down, were wide, those eyes asking the question, What do you think of that!

  “The bleeding on Mother’s braided rug was something awful,” she read, “and I could not help but think, with the swiftness of the death, and what I could see was an easy acquiescence, that he had been ill, that he’d been feverish.”

  I lifted my feet from the rug because if it was the very same rug that had absorbed the Native American’s blood, then, as we’d been taught in school, you should not ever touch someone else’s bodily fluids, wet or dry, because of AIDS.

  It had begun to rain in New Hampshire in 1820, the brother, Cudworth, had woken up with the commotion, and the two of them dragged the corpse to the burning pile and set it on fire. “When Father came home he commended me for my bravery, but he was sorry that I had had to do the work of a man. I was not sorry to have killed a savage because there is no good savage alive, and I did feel proud even as I prayed to our Lord to forgive me, and to show me mercy at the final judgment.”

  May Hill looked up once more in that new way of hers, May Hill serenely triumphant. Amanda was scratching her knee. “Oh,” I managed to say. William was downstairs, I said to myself. I could stomp on the floor if I had to. And scream. We might have moved on to another artifact but the diary reading continued. In Elizabeth’s life there was a trip to market, more rain, a visit from a traveling preacher, rain again, the new ox hurt its foot, two rabbits were killed for dinner. No further mention of the ax or the butchery, no mention of removing the stain from the rug. I kept waiting for the subject to resurface but after a while it began to seem as if it, the murder, was a secret that May Hill had told us. Something you’d say only once. Amanda and I continued to forget that we were supposed to ask our subject questions. But even if we’d remembered our assignment May Hill gave us no opportunity to butt in. Where before in our whole long lives she had rarely spoken a few words in our presence, where we had imagined that she was willfully mute or maybe even a little brain-damaged, now we suddenly worried that she might never stop reading the diary.

  When at last she finally did set it down even so she went on talking. She moved from table to table, every object, every story holding for her equal excitement. The relative who dug up bodies in the cemetery in order to study anatomy just as captivating as the price of corn in 1835. Moses Lombard’s death in the Civil War by saber no more astonishing than the number of beavers in the marsh in 1909. The presentation to us of the great etc. grandmother’s baby curl, a silky blond loop, made me again feel unwell, Elizabeth Morrow Lombard, I thought, perhaps responsible for that curl, the baby murdered and burned. No, that wasn’t right. It couldn’t be. But the curl, all by itself, in a ribbon—I wanted to clutch my throat. May Hill went on about the Lombard fanning mill factory, the purchase of the business by J. I. Case, the establishment of the dairy farm, the run for the state assembly by Thaddeus Lombard.

  Amanda by then was as close as you can get to lying down on a chair, her eyelids drooping. I kicked her just the once. It was hard to tell how much time had passed. I myself might have eventually fallen asleep if I hadn’t noticed a photograph in a plain black frame on a bookshelf on the other side of the room. May Hill was picking up a small silver-handled pistol, the size of a cap gun, when I cried out, “Who is that?”

  It was the only photograph from modern times in the entire place, at least as far as I could see. No solemn ancestor with muttonchops, no girl with a gigantic bow in her ringlets and a lacy white dress, but rather a clean-shaven boy, older than William, a high school student, probably.

  May Hill looked startled, as if she’d been intending to take a shot with that little pistol but now she had to answer my question. I’d covered my mouth again, feeling shame because as my mother often reminded me, I was impetuous. She was forever telling me I needed to learn self-control. What had I done but forgotten to exercise it in a place where I should have been supremely careful. Nonetheless, May Hill replied. She said, “That’s my nephew.”

  He had light curly hair and an eager smile, and straight teeth, and a smile in his eyes, too, a twinkle, you might even say. What was his name? Where did he live? And why did May Hill, who didn’t like children or people, why in her living room did she have a large framed color photo of someone in whom she should have no interest? She set the pistol down. “Do you have any gwahm cwackhuhs?” Amanda asked.

  All at once May Hill and I were on the same exact side, both of us stunned by the question.

  “I eat them like I’m a beavuh.” Amanda made as if to put a cracker to her lips and gnaw at it. The girl with the monstrous IQ was sometimes the stupidest little baby, and it must have been from nerves, or let’s say a wish to elevate the conversation that I blurted out a legitimate interview question—although it was not at all the question I’d wished to ask. I said, “How did your father die in the silo?”

  I knew the technical answer, knew that silage produces gases that are colorless and can kill farmers quickly, or a grown man can die in his sleep hours later if he’s breathed too much of one gas or another. May Hill’s big brow wrinkled. Her mouth was slightly open, no trace of the smile. It was at that moment when William called up the back stairs. “Excuse me? Um, Aunt, Aunt May Hill? Frankie? Excuse me.”

  We had been in the living room well past the scheduled hour and my brother had come to tell me it was time for our piano lessons. Additionally, he no doubt wanted to see what he could of the long hall with scuffed flooring, the walnut doors, the yellow light from the kitchen. The place I had been brave enough to enter. Without thanking her, without doing more than mumbling good-bye, Amanda and I sprang from the chairs and ran to the gate, which William was holding open for us, we tore past him, flew to the bottom of the s
tairs, safe at last in Dolly’s kitchen. We were out of breath, too dazed to laugh or cry or say anything at all.

  “Did you girls get what you needed?” Dolly said.

  The interview! No! We’d gotten nothing, not so much as a word on my pad, not even a little tiny period. We were going to Fail, something we had not ever imagined possible. But even worse, Mrs. Kraselnik would suffer disappointment. Her two star pupils, those marvels of scholarship, not living up to her expectations, not fulfilling our promise. She’d be shattered. “I think so?” I said to Dolly.

  There was my piano lesson to get through, that weekly tragedy. And then dinner, in which my parents also asked me about the interview. My mother wanted to know if we’d gotten good information, and my father said that May Hill must have been pleased to show us her stash. I nodded. All I could think of was the bloodstained rug and the photograph of the nephew. I might have told them about Elizabeth Morrow Lombard and the Indian but more and more that seemed to me May Hill’s secret, something I shouldn’t repeat. There’d been the half smile on her face when she’d bestowed her treasure upon us, a piece of history we hadn’t asked for, a story we didn’t want. For some reason I said that May Hill had given us graham crackers and my mother said, “Wasn’t that nice of her!”

  It wasn’t until later in our room, the door shut, the two of us finally alone, that William was able to ask me about the trip to the upstairs. I admitted it, admitted that we hadn’t been able to ask May Hill even one question from our list. He was on the top bunk reading Tintin. “What do you mean?” he said.

  I was standing on the first step of the ladder, starting to cry, handing him up the sheet. “Nothing,” I whimpered.

  He pulled himself to sitting and read the questions out loud:

  What year were you born?

  Where did you go to high school?

  What is your profession?

  What historical events have you lived through?

  What do you consider the greatest invention of your time?

  What is the most interesting thing about your town?

  William said, “You didn’t ask a single question?”

  “I couldn’t. She—she talked.”

  “What do you mean?” he said again.

  “She talked and talked. More than Dolly. More than anyone, more than Mrs. Bushberger. She kept talking. She has a sort of lisp. A sort of lisp, a lisp.”

  He snapped his fingers in my face. “Wake up!”

  I cried harder because maybe I had been hypnotized. I had almost thought during the interview that May Hill was something like a normal person but I had to come back, come back, back to my understanding of her true nature.

  “Imp! You must have gotten some information. You must know some of the answers.” He read again, “What is your profession?”

  “What is your profession?” I echoed.

  “Hmmm,” he logically said. Even though May Hill was a part of our family the question was unanswerable. We felt like numskulls but justified; indignant, even, about our ignorance. Because our bafflement was all her fault. She was like a hired man but she was also like an English gentleman, owning property and working sometimes. Or you could say she was a mechanic in a garage, but then again the stock market had made her wealthy. At least that’s what my mother thought.

  I didn’t tell William about the photograph of the nephew. He kept rereading the questions, both of us thinking to ourselves about the answers. “You can interview Pa,” he said to me. “Or someone else. How about Gloria?”

  “Gloria?”

  “Why not?”

  While I knew those people were possible candidates a curious thing had been happening while he’d been repeating the questions. So that the next day, when Amanda came over after school and while she lay on the floor and made Sculpey animals, I typed up the interview. It wasn’t hard to do after all. Because May Hill was old and strange I wrote that she was born at the turn of the century. A twist of a doorknob, the turn of a century, May Hill walking over a threshold and entering a new time. Most of my story—for as it happened it was a story more than an interview—was about May Hill’s father being trapped in the silo, in his case the door closing behind him, no way out of that dark round chamber, the smooth walls, the sink of silage, the gasping as he suffocated. His time over and done. May Hill, a girl, knowing already that her face and her big body would never improve, was standing outside, down below, screaming. Which was why in general she talked so little now, having long ago exhausted herself while her father slowly perished.

  That’s the answer I’d wanted from her when I’d asked the question in the interview about her father’s death. I would have liked to have been a real reporter. What were you doing while your father struggled to breathe? Who found him? Did you want to see what he looked like? And then right away, did your mother march to the barn and hang herself? Mrs. Kraselnik always instructed us to write using detail.

  She was named May Hill, I wrote, because she was born on a cold winter day, and her parents wished her to know that spring would come. As I was writing, without realizing I began to want May Hill’s story to contain some bit of happiness. It probably wasn’t possible to bring a suitor into the assignment, Mr. Gilbert who kept exotic reptiles maybe a logical man friend? Or Melvin Pogorzelski, the big reader who was writing his novel in the back room of the library, day after day? No. But there could be someone living whom she felt devoted to. So I wrote another something that was perhaps not exactly nonfiction. I wrote that she had a picture in her parlor of a beautiful boy and that every day she closed her eyes and prayed to him, even though he wasn’t a god but a person. For extra credit I thought I might someday write a sequel, a tale about May Hill walking into the manor house for the first time as the orphan. That would be a scene to think about, everyone staring at May Hill, learning that she was going to be the new sister.

  Without showing my work to Amanda I penned our names on top of the five-page project, mine in bright purple, hers in standard black, and the next day handed in our assignment to Mrs. Kraselnik.

  8.

  Meanwhile Stephen Lombard Halfway Moves in with Gloria

  This was how we knew Stephen Lombard was a certifiable spy. A few summers before the Gloria romance he’d been visiting us. He had come upon William and me in the upper barn, and for some time, without our realizing it, he’d watched us. It was a cool rainy afternoon, no dust streaming in through the slatted boards, the stinging, chaffy heat at bay, the nocturnal creatures, the raccoons and mice and bats, burrowed into the bales or tucked up in the beams, far above us.

  That day, first, Sherwood had appeared, as he sometimes did when we played in the barn, calling out Hallo, Francie, hallo, William, respectfully announcing himself. He’d taken a swing or two on the rope that hung from the ceiling, jumping onto the wooden seat from the high place, the endless long sweep through the air, Sherwood yipping. We couldn’t believe it, always we could hardly laugh, the rope or the beam, both, creaking, Sherwood sounding like a Native American. “That’s enough for an old man,” he’d say before he went off back to work. Or he might stop to tell us the gravity-defying stunts he’d done when he was a teenager. And we’d say, “Really?”

  And he’d reply modestly, “Oh, we did all kinds of hijinks up here.”

  Then he’d go away, and we’d begin. We could do hijinks, too. In our games I was the royalty and William the servant. He liked this arrangement because it was then his task to make my splendid life possible, or he could save me from the cruelty of my captors with a contraption he’d have to build. Where Sherwood’s inventions didn’t always work, William’s creations usually delivered water to me or helped me slide down from a high perch.

  That afternoon after Sherwood left, I was in my bower of hay, demanding that the two kittens keep their doll bonnets on properly while William worked on his pulley system. We were both talking to ourselves, William explaining his threading process, and I suppose to the cats I was deploring the king for depr
iving me of food and water.

  How long had Stephen been watching us from just inside the granary door? Practicing his spy craft. I went on chattering about my plight even after William had straightened up, staring at the tall man in the shadows. The man with a telephoto lens. When at last I understood that we were being observed I, too, stood still, a scream lodged in my throat. Did Stephen call out to assure us as an average citizen would have? No. He said nothing. For the first time I felt not just embarrassed to be a child, but ashamed. It didn’t seem possible to return to our private world after he went out through the granary door, although we did eventually gather ourselves back into the story. Stephen was nothing like Sherwood coming to have a swing. Stephen was not a yipper, for one, and for another, he had not called out Hallo.

  Fast-forward a few years, to the summer of Gloria. At dinner one night our mother, having drunk perhaps more than her usual one or two glasses of wine, said so merrily, “We all think you’re a spy, Stephen.”

  William poked me under the table. I nodded, Yes, yes, Stephen is a spy. Remember the time in the barn? He was slippery in his loyalties and he was probably a practiced liar, we alone understanding the extent of his capacity to infiltrate.

  My father laughed at his ridiculous wife. “Not true,” he said to his cousin.

  Stephen was in the middle of putting a spoonful of bright green pesto in the center of his glossy noodles. He raised only his eyes, giving my mother a long, keen look, his spoon in midair. He said, “Nellie.” The word chilled us, her name. No one would want to be interrogated by him. “I…am…not…a spy.”

  “Okay, okay!” She laughed nervously, her hands up, as if to say, Don’t shoot.

  To his noodles Stephen said, “If I could find another job that had the same benefits and vacation schedule, a job that offers a sabbatical every ten years, I’d do it.” He suddenly sounded tired.