The day after the party my mother went off to work, still furious with her husband. Stephen, all set for Washington and beyond, had asked my father for a ride to the airport. Gloria, he said, probably wouldn’t be equal to the task. We had to go along to pick up the secret agent because on the way to the city we were hopping off at our friends, the Plumlys.
My father parked on the gravel down the slope from Gloria’s cottage. We got out of the car thinking to quickly play with the cats on the porch while the luggage was loaded, while Stephen and Gloria had their smoochy good-byes. When we all got up the little hill Stephen opened the door. He leaned out, saying to my father, “Got a small problem here. A glitch.”
“You all right?”
“My passport is not, ah, it’s not available.”
Gloria appeared next to him, her face a reddish blotch, the puffiness of her eyes magnified by her glasses. She crossed her arms over her chest and stood staring as well as she was able at Stephen, her lids so swollen her irises were hardly visible.
My father talked softly to her. Stephen went back inside but she remained guarding the entrance, now staring at my father’s lips, staring in a determined blank way, as if to say that every word coming from his mouth had nothing to do with her. He made simple statements. “You know you can’t hold him here.” “It’s time.” “In a few minutes you’ll go and get the passport.” “Gloria, please, now, get the passport.”
His lulling, gentle demands finally prompted her to disappear into the house, the clock ticking away to the airplane’s departure. Stephen returned to the door, he and my father standing there not saying anything. When she came back she slapped the document into her lover’s hand.
“Thanks,” he said.
“No.” She shook her head and began to cry. “No!” She tried to get the passport out of his clutches even though she’d just given it to him.
My father grabbed Stephen’s arm and pulled him onto the porch. “It’s time,” he said again.
“No!” This was a crooked noise, jagged, not at all a Gloria kind of sound. She pitched herself at Stephen, as if by sticking hard she might be able to go along with him to Washington. Even though she didn’t look or sound or behave like herself, so that it seemed private, these various aspects of her, we set the cats down and gawked.
My father yanked Stephen toward the car. Gloria jerked him by the other arm toward the house. Stephen had a felt hat with a ribbon around it, the kind of hat fathers wore to work in the 1950s, which made him especially look like someone who should not be at the center of a tug-of-war. In one brilliant motion my father both let go of his cousin and plucked Gloria from Stephen’s coat. He held her, her back to his chest while she screamed and kicked and flapped her arms, trying to scratch. “Go,” my father cried to Stephen over her commotion, “get in the car right now.”
Stephen stumbled down the slope of the yard holding his hat to his head with one hand, and in the other the long green sausagey duffel. He threw it in the back of the van, dove in after it, and locked the doors. To us my father said, “Find Mama.”
The library wasn’t far off. This errand was more important than being the instruments of the pumpkin visitors. We had rarely been so excited and certainly never felt so essential as we ran, as we steamed into the library to the circulation desk. When she saw us she instantly intuited the general circumstances. She called to Hildegard Bushberger to keep an eye on the place, and somehow, in her clogs, she galloped across the baseball diamond, through the stand of cedars, and up the incline to the cottage. She took Gloria from my father’s arms—Gloria was beginning to get tired out, bent over and sobbing—and led her into the house while my father hurried to the car to drive Stephen away. In the heat of the moment we had all forgotten that we were supposed to go to the Plumlys’ house.
My parents had also forgotten their anger about the dinner party and the broken plate, so that was good. We thought every time the librarians visited and my mother tried to behave in a sophisticated way, like an intellectual, maybe Gloria could have an emergency that would force them to work together. We sat on the porch and petted the cats, not looking at each other, for a while not speaking while we listened to Gloria wailing inside. She must have realized the truth about Stephen, that he’d once been a Lombard child, and that’s why he needed to stay. She’d only been trying to get him to live where he was meant to live, everyone, except my mother, who liked to complicate matters, on the same side. We had to cover our ears, Gloria’s sorrow pooling out, as if she thought her distress would reach Stephen even as he drove farther and farther away.
When she quieted somewhat we remembered how she had found us in the woods when we were lost, and so it seemed only fair that we perform a feat to help her. I reminded William that when we’d been curled up in the tree’s roots he had told stories to comfort me.
“I didn’t tell you stories,” he said.
“You did too. You told me about the girl who lived near the end of the world. Our own house picked up its skirts and came to find me.”
“You made that up. That’s your own stupid fairy tale.” He pinched me on my arm. William almost never hurt me, and although I could not have put words to it I understood, I think, that he was pinching me because of Gloria’s upset. Still, it was unjust. I was about to screech when a Gloria blast came from the house, a cry out of proportion to my injury. William and I looked at each other and shut up. Maybe I was mistaken about our fright in the woods but it didn’t matter because I would always believe that while we were lost William told me stories, and also, with or without stories, we would never be as lost as Gloria seemed to be in her own cottage.
After some time Dolly came along the path from the manor house, the news apparently having traveled. It wasn’t that she didn’t see us, right there on the porch, but that we didn’t concern her. She didn’t say hello. Her approach to the door was cautious, her voice at the screen tentative. “Yoo-hoo? Nellie? Are you there?”
My mother came clonking down the stairs from Gloria’s bedroom. She let Dolly in, instructing us to go to the library and make sure Hildegard was all right. We again felt important as if, if Hildegard wasn’t all right, looking after her own children and the circulation desk, we would manage the library ourselves.
Later we learned that my mother and Dolly were trying to settle Gloria and at the same time figure out how to get her committed; her case seemed that acute. It was my father who ended up staying in the cottage for three days and three nights before Gloria’s mother could come to care for her. He had to stay with her because she refused to come to our house, his camping there the last resort. The work of the orchard was suspended for him, no way to get those spring days back, a long falling-behind. Gloria then went away for two months, back to her hometown in Colorado, two entire months when the Lombard Orchard needed her for grafting and planting, mowing and lambing.
When the excitement was over my mother asked my father, “Why did you save Stephen? Why didn’t you let him figure out how to get out of his own mess? You betrayed Gloria by doing the rescue, you know.”
“It wasn’t possible to stand by and do nothing,” he said.
“No, I suppose not.” She went behind him and chop-chopped his shoulders the way he liked. “They’d probably still be in a standoff on the cottage porch if you hadn’t shown up.”
Although by then William and I knew well enough that we couldn’t marry each other, in those days we were even more determined to live together in our house and sleep in our bunk beds forever. I know this because the night of the incident I said, “I’m always living here.” William’s soft bristly hair first appeared over the side of the top bunk, his forehead next, his eyes, and his skinny arm, which he extended to me. I reached for his hand. He was not only saying he was sorry about the pinch, he was making his promise.
Middle
12.
The New Hero
The first time I saw Philip Lombard it was spring vacation, Amanda, William, my fath
er, and I in the back shed, the four of us concerned with the lambing. This took place in the time of the four–five split. Philip’s father was May Hill’s older brother. He’d been in college when his parents died, via the silo accident and then the mother hanging herself. An older boy, therefore no need to be adopted by Sherwood’s family. That man and his son were visiting, something that we’d learned from Dolly was going to take place. Philip, ah ha, May Hill’s nephew, the boy in the photograph. The pair, father and son, were going to sleep in one or two of the closed-up rooms in May Hill’s house, May Hill receiving visitors, an event we couldn’t remember ever happening before. Philip himself was now in college, we’d been told, in Portland, Oregon, and had grown up in Seattle. That was the extent of our knowledge about the poster boy, the living person among May Hill’s historical pantheon.
Out in the sheep shed, the three of us underaged veterinarians were used to examining the ewes’ long pink vulvas, watching for a bloody drip, the first sign of impending birth, without suffering any embarrassment. We also didn’t bat an eye at the new mothers lying in the maternity stall leisurely chewing their cuds, their lambs sleeping nearby, the pink balloons of bag and fleshy tit sometimes promiscuously exposed. On that day Old Speckle Face, the problem ewe, as usual had done her yearly prolapsing stunt, the enormous blister, the veiny globe that was her birth canal dangling from her behind. We did not allow my father to ship her even though she was a liability, and anyway we knew he loved her, too, and wouldn’t have done such a thing. William straddled her and I held her head. Amanda’s job was to hand my father the tools while he tackled the back end. It took him a while to tenderly tuck the gigantic bubble in, and quickly he then inserted a beer bottle up into that delicate place—a technique that often worked and kept the real vet out of the picture. My father was concluding the procedure when a person wearing a red stocking cap, green Wellingtons, and a red-and-white-checked flannel shirt appeared in the doorway. First of all, his clothes seemed like a costume, attire you’d imagine you should wear for The Farm. The gigantic Christmas elf blocked out the sun. “Hey there,” he said.
My father was still adjusting the beer bottle. “Philip,” he cried, glancing up, “hello!”
“How’s it going?” The intruder stepped closer. He squinted at the swollen parts of Old Speckle Face and in a girlish way his hand went to his mouth. “Looks kind of intense in here,” he managed. Next he noticed us. “Hey, cousins.”
“Hey.” William had never said hey before in his life.
Amanda and I said nothing. Philip was a second or third cousin, a relation that was so dilute it hardly counted.
“We’re hoping to keep this lady from delivering prematurely,” my father explained. He took a large darning needle from Amanda, a thin shoestring looped through the eye, and proceeded to stitch a crisscrossing hold for the bottle across the thick walls of the naked pink slit. The poor mother opened her mouth, her square teeth like ours, grade-school-size, and made an otherworldly groan, her eyeballs flipped back into her head. William and I had to keep a firm hold on her.
“Whoa,” Philip said.
“There.” My father removed his rubber gloves but even so he said, “Consider your hand shaken.”
Philip laughed, a sputtery noise. He did not look like May Hill. His nose was without bumps and a modest size. Blond curls peeked from under his hat, and his thick golden lashes plus the particular blue of his eyes were not features he’d inherited from the Lombard side. He was stockier than his aunt, his shoulders were broad, his legs sturdy, his hands meaty, a person clearly graced with strength.
“This is Amanda, Sherwood’s daughter, and William here, and Mary Frances,” my father said.
“Cousins,” Philip reaffirmed. “Great to meet you.” Old Speckle Face was released from our hold but didn’t know what to do now that she had a bottle up there. She stood looking at the stranger. He said, “She going to be all right?”
“She does this every year,” my father replied.
Philip nodded. He started to talk about his hopes and dreams. “I’ve wanted to come to the farm for basically my whole life. My father’s told me stories about you people and this place and I’ve always been like, Why can’t we go visit Wisconsin? What’s so important in Seattle that we can’t take a trip to the family homestead?”
“It’s great you’re here,” my father said.
William and I looked at each other. In a matter of two minutes we already knew enough to think, No, it isn’t.
“Thanks!” Philip said to my father. “So, I wanted to let you know I’d love to help out—whatever assistance you need this week. My dad’s going off to a meeting in Chicago but I’ll be here. May Hill has some projects for me, too, which I’m psyched about, but honestly? If anything needs doing? I’m at your service.”
“Wonderful,” my father said.
May Hill had projects for him? He was at our service? William and I left the shed right away, muttering our good-byes. In the six minutes it took us to trek through the orchard, to get to the road and cross to Velta, my initial impression had undergone an evolution. I didn’t just dislike him. I said, “I hate him.”
“As much as the Muellenbach boys?” The Muellenbachs were Dolly’s barbarian nephews.
“More,” I said. “I hate him more.”
William nodded, as if I’d given the correct answer.
The spring vacation dragged on. It was the end of March and hardly warm and there was very little to do in the damp outdoors. Adam and William were building a computer from components they’d found somewhere or other. Amanda wanted to do nothing but play chess. The Kraselniks had gone away to the Bahamas, no point in climbing the tree to watch for signs of my teacher. Despite the cool temperatures we were already calling the season spring because my father had sprayed the oil application on the dormant orchard. For us true spring arrived when we first heard the sprayer revving up before dawn, Sherwood or my father on the tractor. It was important to properly aim the sprayer nozzles, the heady brew in the great tank, to shoot the insecticides and fungicides into the trees when the air was as still as possible, thus the early hour.
There was comfort of a kind, waking up to the groaning sprayer engine, even as my father in his orange waterproofs and his gas mask and goggles might have looked menacing to a stranger, driving up and down the aisles of the orchard, at the painstaking, critical task of mass genocide on pests that could destroy the crop.
But also I wasn’t comforted when my father sprayed, and I did have the habit now and again of not going to school when it was his turn in the saddle, or if it was vacation I’d stay in bed. It was essential to hold tight to my bunk while he drove through the orchard, important to keep track of him. That is, it was my vigilance that maybe protected him. The especially murderous point was mixing the materials in the sprayer tank, because if even a drop of insecticide in concentrated form made contact with your skin, it would burn a hole through you. From my bed I chanted, Careful, careful, careful, careful, careful. If the sprayer was up and running everything was fine, but sometimes it would stop, an abrupt quiet. Are you hurt? Did you break down? Are you DEAD? I’d have to wait for the sound of his galoshes, the jangly tread as he came through the orchard, his mask resting on his head. “Screwdriver’s not in the tractor toolbox,” he’d call up to my window. Implicating either himself or Sherwood for not returning it to its proper place, but probably Sherwood had been the careless one. William and I had not once, not ever, considering going into the locked spray room where the barrels and bags of poison were stored, that shut door a barrier we had no wish to go beyond. No one in his right mind would go in there, which was why the disaster with the Muellenbach boys wasn’t exactly a surprise.
The second time we saw Philip just happened to be on that afternoon when Dolly’s nephews were hanging around—so many ragtag cousins at large at once. The short history of the Muellenbach boys: Dolly had somehow snagged Sherwood and married him but her sisters had not been so lucky
. Melody, for instance, was a mother of four who could not keep a husband for more than a few years at most. She’d had the children, each with a different man, each father gruffer and larger than the last, and also, she chain-smoked, she herself was obese, and there was some problem about her taking prescription painkillers, another hazard we’d learned about in D.A.R.E. Her oldest daughter had had a couple of babies before she was seventeen, again different dads for each. The two mothers and the five boys, ages three through thirteen, lived together in an apartment forty miles away. And some or all of those boys used to come to the orchard now and again for a day with Uncle Sherwood. It was funny that he couldn’t convince his own children to perform much farm labor but the Muellenbach boys were always running after Sherwood, dedicating themselves to him, hanging on his arms, climbing him as if he were a pole. William and I worried about the sheer number of those boys—like an entire nation of Chinese males in that two-bedroom apartment. Because of their romantic association with the farm surely they’d want to be part of the operation when they got older.
It was three or four days after Philip had arrived for his visit that my father was in the back barn trying to get the space ready for the shearer. We were aware of Dolly calling the Muellenbach boys in for lunch, for us the promise of quiet while they gobbled up their food. My father was slapping together pens that would be holding areas for the ewes, and clearing a corner to store the fleeces. Sherwood was there, too, working on a contraption that would lift hay bales off their stack in the barn, set them on a roller, and slide them down into the feeder, one of the many rattling things he’d been messing with for years. He had a leather carpenter’s apron around his waist, a level in hand, and a pencil above his ear, as if in his heart of hearts he thought he was a builder. It’s possible he hadn’t realized that the Muellenbach boys had arrived. My father made the mistake of wondering out loud, in passing, if Philip would like to help with the grafting of apple trees, a springtime task.
The Excellent Lombards Page 11
