The Excellent Lombards (20 page)

In those months I most often played with Amanda, Gloria sometimes taking us to swim in a nearby lake, Gloria also making do without William. She had returned to us in June, right away taking up her Gloria things, gardening and knitting and working and talking about apples so that we soon forgot she’d ever had to go to Colorado. At the end of summer, William did without question come with us when we went to The Hills, we called it, the annual outing of the Lombards, the spree that took place in the briefest pause between the early apples and the beginning of the Macintosh harvest. Amanda and Adam, Frankie and William got in the back of the Ford pickup, Sherwood and my father in the dented cab, and over the path through the woods we shrieked when we bounced, and otherwise Amanda and I sang, bursting our lungs, William and Adam shouting at nothing, at the world passing. The loggers from the Forest Management Program had made a road right through to The Hills, which abutted our land and was owned by a gravel company, the mining far off in the future. Each grassy hill had been formed by the glacier in the last Ice Age, during the Pleistocene, Sherwood explained, the scooped-out valley a natural amphitheater.

Dolly and my mother met us at the highest peak, The Top Of The Earth, with the picnic baskets. Before lunch Sherwood produced his best invention: waxed cardboard boxes pulled apart with a little curl on the end, that was it, the sleds so simple. He always went down the hill a few times in order to pave the way, so that by our turn the trip to the bottom, with a great push, was as slick as a luge run, we were sure of it, holding tight to the lip of our cardboards, screaming our joyful fright. Sherwood and my father went down, too, behaving just as they must have when they were cousins together, when they were the boys of summer. In those hours it was as if the Lombard partnership had not yet occurred. My mother and Dolly watched from under the lone burr oak at The Top Of The Earth, Dolly relaying the antics of her siblings, twelve of them, never a dull moment in the Muellenbach clan. Nellie lay on her side with her elbow crooked to support her head and laughed and laughed.

I was at the bottom of the hill, tumbling off my cardboard, looking up at the mothers when it struck me that they never went to war. We all knew that it was fine for the fathers to blow up, we expected their biannual arguments, but the mothers of course would never speak harshly to one another, never show their true colors. In our kitchen Nellie Lombard might say fond, somewhat disparaging things about Dolly, or make jokes about her endless talking, but Dolly would never know about my mother’s unkindness. I sat down at the bottom of the hill with those thoughts that seemed pleasant, the idea of the mothers all of a sudden baring their fangs and shouting. Such a scene could be enjoyable and not at all frightening because I knew it would never happen. When I climbed back up the hill they were naturally still laughing.

That summer we were coming home along the path in the woods when who should we see but Gloria and a friend she’d made from her knitting club, two women in wide-brimmed straw hats, both in long-sleeved shirts and loose trousers. They looked like old-fashioned ladies, women who might find just the place to set up their easels to glorify the scene. When we stopped for them it was Gloria who told us the news. “The princess,” she said, “has been in a terrible, terrible car accident.”

“Princess Diana,” the friend clarified.

We hung over the side of the truck while Gloria told the story of the princess and her boyfriend tearing around Paris, how the princess had left her children and her country to take her own vacation with the foreigner. We all rode quietly after that, a princess who might die, Gloria so shaken she could not say more after the critical details. When we got back to the farm we learned that May Hill had gotten the tractor stuck in the thick mud by the goat shed, May Hill, who never made mistakes, and not only that, the sheep had found an opening in the fence, the entire flock not ambling but galloping up into the east orchard, lambs and mothers, heading into the great wide open. We couldn’t leave the farm for even three hours without the tractor getting stuck, the sheep escaping their yard, and a princess suffering an accident.

It was the next spring when my mother took Bert and William to a hotel outside Washington, DC, for the First Annual
Posse
Convention. The boys were unbearably excited to meet the actual players on their teams, which meant they said less than usual in our company, the two of them scraping along the driveway from the bus in their gangbanger pants, bottled up with their great secret life and times.

My father and I thought about them somewhat at first while they were away in Washington but after no more than an hour had passed we became unexpectedly happy on our own. Over the four days we got the garden planted and we did twenty loads of manure, cleaning the lower barn, the sheep dung compacted into sheaves so that instead of digging at them it was an archaeological matter of peeling away the layers with the fork. We bleached the area to cleanse the place of parasites, and afterward we stood in the doorway admiring our work. We hardly had to speak to understand each other.

In the evenings we leaned against the sink and for dinner had menus such as chocolate malts and saltines with melted cheese. No big production necessary.

Back during the four–five split I sometimes used to imagine my mother not dead exactly but removed, so that Mrs. Kraselnik could adopt me. During the
Posse
Convention I recalled the pleasure of my mother being gone, the idea of it. I wasn’t wife of course to my father but I didn’t feel like daughter, either. He asked me questions as if he valued my expertise, as if all along on a different track I’d always been his partner, and only now had surfaced in this old but new dimension. “Where should we spread this load, Marlene?” he’d ask me as he was heading off to fertilize a field or part of the orchard. At the sink he’d say, “What varieties do you think we should graft this spring? What should we have more of? What do you like best?”

We did now and again bring up the convention, nine hundred boys in the hotel ballroom, boys and their pizzas, boys electrified by Mountain Dew. My father said, “No more hip bone connected to the hip bone in the electronic age. No more thighbone connected to the thighbone. Homo sapiens, good-bye. A new race is coming.” He trolled around in his glass for the last dregs of his malt. “The ennobling future, I guess.”

We thought of my mother in the hotel on her king-size bed, lying around reading, maybe ordering room service, the only Lombard who didn’t work on the farm. I said to my father, “If Mama was a
Posse
player what would her name be?”

“Savage Librarian,” he said without having to think.

We had to hold our stomachs to laugh. Next we sat at the table and talked about all the work we would get done the next day, on Sunday, and we reviewed the good works we’d done that day, too. We talked until the candle burned down. It was as if talking at the table and sleeping were one and the same, and by and by we climbed the stairs trailing words and went to bed.

16.

A Possible Marriage Match

A
nother spring turning to summer, my seventh-grade year over and done, my friend Coral LeClaire bleeding, I knew, even though she hadn’t told me. I’d seen the telltale sign, the supplies in her backpack. Also, she had breasts that appeared to be getting more enormous by the second. My mother seemed to think I was not going to need pads for some time or even a serious brassiere, that I was going to be a slow bloomer.

Already at age thirteen, though, I had plenty of accomplishments, the walls of my room completely covered with ribbons from the fair, blue ribbons for my cat drawings, my grapevine wreaths, my hand-spun, hand-knitted scarves, and my zucchinis. Certainly that summer there would be more prizes. In addition to preparing for the fair I would work as always with my father. And just as he sometimes watched a ball game there would now and again be a small holiday for me, a little rest, Mary Frances briefly parking in the hammock, the mosquitoes at bay, the butterflies fluttering in their warped flight patterns, the sound of the tractor in the distance, the mower going in the orchard, all the labor happening around me while I read lowbrow historical novels, books my mother said were trash, books she wanted to yank from my hands and incinerate.

Soon after our vacation began I went along with my father to visit the neighboring orchard, ten miles away, the Sykes Orchard our main competition. William no longer came with us on our jaunts, the job of keeping my father now falling solely on my shoulders. “Well, Marlene,” he said, “it looks like a nice day for a drive to the great Sykes plantation.” He meant it was a good day to point out to each other which fields were wheat, which rye, to admire the growing corn, and at one intersection there was always a tired old Appaloosa standing still in her yard, Our Friend The Horse, we called her. Our Friend The Horse now and again used to show up in my father’s stories, in the tales of Kind Old Badger. It was on that drive to the Sykes Orchard that I realized I couldn’t remember when the last one had been told, or if we’d known it was the last as it was happening. Or even what the story was, if there’d been a conclusion. I wanted to ask my father about Kind Old but I couldn’t; I couldn’t think what the real question was, and also I had the feeling whatever the question he wouldn’t be able to answer it.

Tommy Sykes’s estate was a showcase farm, tulips blooming, lawns tended, the houses and buildings in good repair, every apple tree wide open, kept short and flat-topped by a crew of itinerant Hispanic men. “Those trees are hideous,” I said at the entrance, “like poor dogs who’ve been shaved.”

“He gets a good yield,” was all my father said.

There was a patch beyond the white barn where Tommy kept a few useless things, but first off, it was a small area, and second, the junk was lined up in a shipshape row. He had retired from being a financier and taken up farming, plowing his fortune into shiny new machinery and planting fashionable varieties and always looking for the next sensation. He looked like an executive on vacation, a man who wore fleece sweatshirts to farm, a chiseled, gray-haired playboy in loafers with no socks. Because he’d been sitting at a desk all his life and keeping fit on a treadmill he now had energy to burn, a horse crashing out of the gate.

There was a house up a tree for the customers’ children. Even though I was too old for a playhouse I climbed the rope ladder while Tommy and my father talked their business. The house had a bright-red metal roof and yellow shutters, and inside a blue wooden telephone that had stacking parts, a baby toy. What did we have at our orchard for the children? A flock of sheep. Also we kept four goats plus Roger, the neutered billy with tremendous curly horns. Goats and lambs greeted the shoppers, dutifully eating apples from any outstretched hand.

Maybe, I considered, a visiting child to the Sykes farm on the busiest selling day would fall out the playhouse window, land on her head, and be paralyzed for life. But then for probably about the fiftieth time since the four–five split I remembered what Mrs. Kraselnik had said about putting good in the world. Still, I didn’t care, I didn’t—and anyway where had following her instructions gotten me besides losing the Geography Bee? And what’s more, such a wicked wish could not be helped when it came to Tommy.

After my father had talked to the big Mister for what seemed like a full hour we walked through the bright clean selling area, past the sorting shed where the ladies in season wore clear plastic shower caps and gloves to grade the fruit, as if they were in surgery, past the cider room with the gleaming press from Holland, a press that was so mechanized all Tommy probably had to do to make cider was remotely press a button. We toured the storage shed where he kept every supply imaginable on freshly made pallets. The room smelled of that new wood. There were decorated paper peck bags with smiley faces within the apple logo, and bushel baskets yellow as butterscotch with bloodred rims, and towers of plastic containers for their famous pies, and the great tall bags filled with cider jugs, tightly packed in rows, Tommy Sykes a captain of industry.

He used controlled atmosphere, a regulated room with precise amounts of oxygen, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen, to keep the apples firm, and he was also experimenting with a new technology involving 1-methylcyclopropene, a colorless gas that naturally slowed ripening and aging, Tommy always on the cutting age, Tommy with endless capital to invest in his operation. And no Sherwood to dog his steps and blow up at him. He showed us the chambers for each, my father exclaiming, my father reduced to saying “Ahhh,” and “Tommy, this is amazing.” Although it was summer, Tommy had saved a certain amount of last year’s crop for a lucrative taffy apple account, Tommy supplying a high-end candy store in Milwaukee. And so on the way back to our car he offered me one of those lollipops, straight from the assembly line in their commercial kitchen.

“What kind of apple?” I asked.

“The little connoisseur!” He laughed. “More interested in the apple than in the thick shell of gooey caramel? Thick and soft right now—I’m telling you.” He was all melodious-like, taunting. “And studded with peanuts.” When I didn’t respond he said, “The apples are Honey Crisp.”

The Honey Crisp had just come on the scene, a variety my father had brought home from a conference in the last year to try. I knew that a Sykes Honey Crisp would be fracturey hard but have no flavor, knew for a fact that Tommy had no idea when varieties were ripe and should be picked. But even under the best of circumstances the showy Honey Crisp was without character, a fruit only a philistine would grow.