The Excellent Lombards

by Jane Hamilton

  Sherwood set his socket wrench down. “What business is it of yours?” he said to my father.

  “Business?” my father innocently wondered.

  “You think Philip is your worker?”

  “I—don’t think he’s anyone’s worker. I was only asking if you thought—”

  “Always trying to run everyone’s lives. That’s what you do.”

  My father wasn’t prepared for the biannual argument. It was still early in the spring. For a few seconds he did nothing but stand, holding the wooden gate he’d been about to tie to the makeshift fence. “I run no one’s life,” he said. “That I’m aware of. It would be convenient if I could. It would be great to run a life or two.”

  “Philip is none of your concern,” Sherwood said, picking up his wrench. And then somehow or other they were deep into the classic dispute, Sherwood saying, “When I went into the army my dad made clear the business would be here for me, that it would be mine when I got back. All of a sudden I learn that you’re on the place. I knew then, Jim, I knew how it would turn out, knew Aunt Florence would keep you, that you’d prove to the—”

  “You were away,” my father said. “Your dad and Aunt Florence—they needed young energy for the harvest.”

  “I was serving, as a matter of fact.”

  That was another facet of the argument, the deep cut about the war that had shaped their youth, my father with Conscientious Objector status, working at an old-fashioned state insane asylum in Minnesota, while Sherwood enlisted in the army. Even though he had spent most of his time at Fort Rucker as an informational specialist he had been in some danger when he was in Saigon.

  “Yes, you were serving,” my father conceded.

  “I come back, you’re running the operation, you act like you own the—”

  “Sherwood! Florence and your dad needed young energy for those years you were away.” My father finally set down the wooden gate he’d been holding.

  “Young energy,” Sherwood echoed in an unpleasant singsong voice.

  “Whatever you want to call our strength at the time, our energy,” my father said stiffly. “The older generation needed help. Call it what you want.”

  Even though the Lombard partners had the same argument over and over again their skills hadn’t improved much and so far there hadn’t been a real breakthrough. Sherwood never punched my father, which might have made him feel momentarily better, in that instant before my father turned the other cheek.

  “You think I couldn’t run this place by myself?” Sherwood at least was now shouting. He’d remained in his inventor’s corner, his shoulders thrust back, his mouth pursed, his nose wrinkled up, an alarming puggish face. That was not the Sherwood we were at all used to seeing. “You’re always shooting down every idea I have. Every single idea—you say no—”

  “You don’t ever communicate!” My father’s voice had also become shrill. “How can I say no when you don’t tell me what you’re going to do? You planted that block of Galas without talking to me. A major decision and you just—”

  “There you go, criticizing my work. Criticizing when I’m the one who grew up here. I’m the one who learned from Dad. I’m the one who didn’t go out for sports in high school, didn’t go to a fancy college, the one who was working—working, Jim, throughout the year, the one who had the long apprenticeship. I’m the one who learned the business.”

  “It happened, Sherwood!” My father’s anger still flaring. “We, you and I, became partners. More than thirty years ago. Time for you to get over it, to get used—”

  All at once that wrench was in my father’s face. “Shove grass—shove grass, Jim, way, way up your ass.”

  What? Grass? Grass up— How would you—? Why—? William and I, the two of us nearby in the old cistern with the salamanders, we stared at each other. Did warring men put grass there because then there’d be an explosion, the way wet hay could ignite a barn?

  No one, not a single person anywhere had ever said such an ugly, bewildering, violent thing to my father. That was not the way any of the Lombards ever spoke. And yet Sherwood, a Lombard through and through, had shouted the demand, the two of them near the back barn at that point. Those words were far worse than having a wrench rattling near your face. What would have happened next will never be known because at that moment Dolly cried out, pure distress penetrating the war zone. She may beforehand have been calling for her great-nephews, for Jax and Mason, but when we took notice she was screaming, first at them—“What are you two doing in there?”—and then she was screeching “Sherwood! Jim! Sherwood!” The two men sprang from the back barn, running around the long building to the forbidden shed where the spray materials were stored.

  Those Muellenbach boys had walked right into the spray room, the door somehow unlocked. Because Dolly was yelling at them they were afraid to come out. She herself seemed too unnerved to go farther in than the doorstep, Dolly shrieking to no one, “Poison control! Poison control!”

  Before the men could storm inside Philip Lombard was flying across the driveway from the basement and blasting into the shed; also before we knew it he’d emerged with the three- and the five-year-old in his arms. Dolly snatched Jax’s hands from his eyes. “Do you want to be blind? Don’t touch anything, you hear me?”

  Both of those boys started to howl. One of them was able to say that they’d only been trying to find Uncle Sherwood. Philip set the nephews down and began to examine their fingers and their clothing. My father, who had gone into the shed, said that a bag he thought had been sealed was open, Dolly crying out that they had to go to the emergency room immediately. Sherwood said, “Let’s be calm, let’s—”

  “You explain to Melody why her grandsons are blind,” Dolly snapped. “You explain to the judge why you didn’t take them to the hospital.” She hollered, “Why was the room open? Why was it not locked?”

  “Give me your other hand, buddy,” Philip said, sniffing Jax’s palm.

  “Don’t you get poisoned,” Dolly advised the visitor in more moderate tones. “Wouldn’t that just be so wonderful, to send you home at death’s door?”

  The little boys were whimpering. Sherwood was looking for the key to the spray shed. Philip, who somewhere along the line had mentioned he was an EMT, was spreading Jax’s eyelid and studying the pupil. My father was kneeling near the boys, too, doing his own observation. That’s when we realized that May Hill was standing on the rise by the pump house, surveying the scene.

  “Good job,” Philip was saying to the other boy, to Mason. “Stick your tongue out at me, okay, bud? Excellent, excellent, my man, nice slab you got there.”

  May Hill did not need to announce the obvious, that it was her nephew who had come to the rescue.

  We’d hardly recovered from Sherwood saying what he had about the grass, and now there was the blindness of the Muellenbach boys to consider or the burning of their skin through to the bone, as well as the culprit, the Lombard Orchard partner who had failed to secure the building, not to mention May Hill standing above us, those big, high-waisted jeans always a shocker. If she realized that we could see the shape of her, if she knew, would she cover herself with a poncho? Without discussion William and I went off to dig out our canoe, which we kept stashed in the brush by the pumpkin field. We’d leave all of them behind, paddling in the wide deep blue marsh, drifting by the muskrat houses, peering into their hodgepodge of cattail stalks one on top of the next, great thatched messes. Good-bye, all of you on land, good-bye!

  “Do you think the Muellenbach boys will die?” I asked William. He was always in the stern, so he could steer. I hated the barbarians but the thought of them dying suddenly seemed pitiful. Poor little boys with fresh crew cuts laid out in pint-size coffins.

  “Philip thought they were okay.”

  “Papa wouldn’t let them die,” I said, more to the point. “Why did Sherwood—? How do you put grass—?”

  William struck the water with his paddle, a thwack.

  I
couldn’t think, couldn’t imagine Sherwood being a boy and believing the orchard was going to be his and only his. How could he have thought such a thing? How could he have failed to know that we belonged, too? Although I still loved Mrs. Kraselnik with all my heart I didn’t dream of her adopting me as frequently as I had at the beginning of the year. And yet for a minute I allowed myself the worn scene wherein she scoops me up from our house that’s in flames, and takes me to the mansion on the hill, draws me a warm bath, draping her fingers through the bubbles while I carefully undress. That romance wasn’t as thrilling as it had formerly been in the early days of the four–five split, and I ran my mind over it quickly, obligatorily. Before I could get to the end of the scene in my mind’s eye, though, Philip crashed in on it, Philip saving Jax, saving the Muellenbach terror. In real life he was performing the rescue in just the way I’d imagined Mrs. Kraselnik doing, Mary Frances lying on the ground, my teacher bent over me tenderly trying to pry open my eyelid. Wherever I went now, whatever I did, would Philip appear in the frame?

  “Stop rocking the boat,” William called out.

  We had to hold out against Philip Lombard! Right then William and I had to decide for good, for certain, that we would always protect Velta-Volta.

  “Stop it, Imp,” he said.

  “Stop what?”

  “The twitching. You’re making the boat tip.”

  “I can’t help it.”

  “You can too.”

  “I’m never getting married.”

  “There’s no law that says you have to.”

  “I’m not doing it!”

  “Okay.”

  “Are you?” I said.

  “Am I what?”

  “Getting married.”

  “How should I know?”

  “You could decide not to.”

  “That would be stupid.”

  “Nuns and priests don’t get married.”

  “Stop tipping!”

  “Only if you promise not to get married.”

  “Frankie! I can’t—”

  I began to not just tip the boat but rock it. I didn’t care if we went overboard into the murky depths of the marsh. A normal brother would have gotten furious, would have swiped the oar through the water and drenched his sister. Why was William so nice? That question made me even angrier. Why did he always have to be patient, so patient and kind, too? He made me sick. A sharp awful pain in the head. What was wrong with him? I changed my mind—I didn’t want to be an orchard partner with him. You’d have to be an idiot, you’d have to be impaired to be so good. I’d run away to Mrs. Kraselnik’s.

  He managed to guide the boat to our landing place as I continued to do my best to turn us over. He pulled it from the water, parked it, and waited for me to climb out. I dragged behind, refusing to walk with him. On the way home we had to go out of our way to avoid a great many things we did not wish to see. Sherwood and my father possibly back to their argument. The Muellenbach boys dead on stretchers. We did, against our will, see Philip learning chain saw etiquette from May Hill, the two of them in the orchard about to cut up an old Macintosh that had fallen down in winter. I could maybe like William the slightest little bit because he, too, skirted the path so we didn’t have to look.

  13.

  The Mistake, the Worst Mistake

  A few days later in that endless two-week vacation I was wandering around looking for my father when I noticed May Hill and Philip heading into the woods. They were again equipped with chain saws. Philip’s father had left us not long after he’d arrived, depositing his son to befriend May Hill, very amusing that suddenly May Hill could have a young person in her life, someone who could be her child, or maybe he was more like a dog, following her everywhere she went. No one said how long he was staying.

  Everyone on that afternoon was otherwise engaged, William off at his friend Bert Plumly’s, Amanda practicing her French horn, my mother working at the library; Gloria was still in Colorado recovering from her love affair, my new best friend, Coral LeClaire, had gone to Disney World with her family, no one at liberty for Mary Frances. For quite some time in the fall I’d had a plan to steal into Mrs. Kraselnik’s house; it was in a dreamscape, that is, my hiding in her bedroom closet and popping out at her. In the sequence she was delighted to see me. Possibly that’s why it occurred to me without much premeditation that I could creep up the basement stairs into Dolly’s kitchen. Amanda’s horn after all was noisy. Adam would probably be in the living room on the computer. As for Dolly, her car was gone, Dolly elsewhere. Sherwood was out by the barn underneath the sprayer, trying to fix a leak. The downstairs was not, however, my final destination. I could get through the kitchen and then run up the back stairs into May Hill’s house, open the gate, and find the room Philip was using. I would discover something, surely—evidence. Information about his intentions, information that would discredit him, some no-good incriminating piece. I was not related to Stephen Lombard for nothing, our shared talent a fact he must have recognized that night we’d stayed up in the kitchen nearly until dawn, discussing spy craft. We were both brave. We were both adventurers.

  Suddenly the pique I’d felt about my lack of playmates, the dreary vacation, William spending far too much time at Bert Plumly’s, even Philip’s visit to us, all that misery faded in my fright and exhilaration, tiptoeing up the stairs to the gate. The long hall was dark, my heart at the back of my throat as I began to open doors looking for signs of a college boy. Every room I put my head in was like a jumbled attic, a confusion of artifacts and what looked like trash. The fourth door was the winner, the room by the kitchen, a room that must have belonged to one of Sherwood’s many sisters long ago. There was a vanity table with a mirror, the clue. It wasn’t much of a guest room but one of the twin beds at least had been cleared of boxes and clothing and books and records, all the stuff that Louise or Margaret or Emma Lombard had once cherished but not enough to haul up to Alaska and the other places they lived. Philip’s backpack was on the floor, his notebooks and paperbacks on the desk, underwear, socks, and shirts folded neatly on top of a cardboard box, a little island of Philip things. The notebook: a black-and-white-speckled composition book with unlined pages. I opened it. Lists, he was a list maker. Lists of books to read, items to pack, people to write, music to listen to, recipes to cook, and there were drawings, as well, of mushrooms and flowers, a new lamb, and the bridge-graft he’d done with my father down in the west orchard. No master plan for his life, no mention of love or money or William and me or even May Hill. Only the lists, the drawings, and also he had written out poems, poetry by John Keats and William Shakespeare. I turned every page until there was no more writing. It was the most disappointing document I could have imagined, but maybe he used invisible ink for his true feelings? I spit on a page to see if water brought up a message. No. Nothing. On the desk there was a tube of lipstick in a clutter of markers and pencils, erasers and paper clips, the relics from the time of Louise Lombard. I took the cap off, the dull red tongue of it brand new even though it was something like fifty years old. Without thinking I carelessly applied it to my mouth and then I planted a kiss on that fresh page. “The end,” I said. “Ha, ha.”

  Where, I wondered, did May Hill sleep? I was no longer quite so frightened or alert, an easy thing, really, to steal through someone else’s house, especially when they were out chopping down the forest. I went along the hall again and stopping midway, with exquisitely tuned radar, I opened a door. Although at first I thought it was only another junk room, I saw instead that I had chosen correctly. It was clearly May Hill’s room because on the bed there was a pair of neatly folded sweatpants and a big top, May Hill’s pajamas no doubt, and by the pillow a book of some kind, her nighttime reading. You had to be attentive to the clues, however, to understand it was a bedroom because the place was filled, from floor to ceiling, with boxes, a narrow aisle to the adjoining bathroom and a corridor also to the window. I carefully made my way along the towers in order to look out
to the orchard. Down below I could see my father hauling brush and all the way across the road there was our house, May Hill able to keep track of everyone if she took the time to squeeze along through her maze. I would leave in just a minute, I thought. Wouldn’t William be surprised by my expedition!

  Since the interview I had sometimes imagined that May Hill might be one of those people who made whole miniature towns out of bottle caps, or she’d have fabricated a family of paper dolls that were intricately cut with tiny little scissors, the kind of thing lonesome people do to keep themselves occupied. But there in her room were no astonishing worlds, her boxes stuffed with what looked like newspaper clippings and some of them had labels such as CHECK STUBS, 1978–80, and TAX BILLS, and BANK STATEMENTS. There were several towers of ancestral letters, documents I guess she needed to sleep with. A few items seemed nice, an enormous jar of buttons on a shelf, for one, and a crock of marbles for another, and a blue padded book of the sort my father had, filled with coins of silver. I opened it up to see the half-dollars. So there were those pretty things to look at, and to be glad about, too, glad that May Hill had a great many unusual and ornate buttons, and maybe the agates and the coins were worth hundreds of dollars, which probably made her happy.