The Excellent Lombards by Jane Hamilton
For WOM and his associates
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . as we grill the salmon
we spiked with juniper berries the other one thinks
the plural pronoun is a dangerous fiction the source
of so much unexpected loneliness
—from “Bear” by Ellen Bryant Voigt
Early
1.
This Story Always Starts Here
We were making hay. Everyone who was there still remembers it, how the sky was its usual high immense self, and as we went along a wash of clouds moved in, the ceiling suddenly quite low. There was the usual sweet smell of hay drying, the swallows swooping and scolding, and the oil and dust of the baler, a bitter black fragrance. It had been windy and hot when we started but the heat stilled, dirty and wet; or that was us at least, chaff stuck in our mouths, chaff in our bloodshot eyes, chaff like sequins on our clothes, our flesh. My father wore what were originally his dark-blue coveralls, the material over his back bleached by the sun to a pinkish white, the fabric drenched and glued to his skin. He didn’t wear an undershirt on hot days, so you could see his thick chest hair—which always surprised me—that wet black fur. He had a wild foamy look, a person not to interrupt, no saying a word or crossing his path. My brother, William, was there, and our very distant cousin Philip, and the Bershek twins from down the road, and our hired hand Gloria, and me, and Aunt May Hill, we called her, across the wide field on the Allis-Chalmers, the baler spitting out the old-fashioned square bales.
Aunt May Hill was not a typical lady, May Hill our prize because she could fix any broken thing. She was sixty or seventy—we weren’t sure. In the olden days they’d apparently called her a misfit but that wasn’t quite right. My mother sometimes laughed a May Hill story away, saying she was certifiable, mildly certifiable, she’d say, aiming for accuracy. Eccentric, is all, my father corrected. We naturally assumed Witch. Whatever she was she’d been working on the baler for three days, trying to get the twines to make their knots, trying to remind the mechanism of its own intelligence. It seemed to work most consistently when, at my father’s suggestion, one of us walked alongside it, just being there, not touching it, the baler in need of assurance or companionship or maybe it loved an audience. As much as we were generally afraid of May Hill we were grateful for her tenderness with that rattletrap.
“You guys can’t upgrade or anything?” one of the Bershek twins asked, pulling down on his lid to get a bug out of his eye. “For the millennium, how about. Your great-uncle, or whatever, got the baler used in, like, 1955? That what your dad said?”
The twins were in high school and they’d bound around the field, leaping, skipping, doing barbell stunts with the bales—such goofs—as if they’d never get tired, as if the heat couldn’t ever drop them flat. We, William and I, eleven and twelve years old, we knew better, knew enough to walk between the bales, no jetés, no handsprings for the Lombard children. We knew to conserve our strength. When we were small we’d had matching striped coveralls, sunglasses and leather gloves and boxy orange work boots, no one more serious or poised to make hay. We would have been enraged if anyone had called us cute. Even now we were still not quite ourselves in our tattered chambray shirts, the heavy jeans, the worn gloves, our caps tight on our heads, our clothes a costume plucked from our future, when we’d run the farm.
William didn’t answer the twins and I didn’t, either. We were not going to get a pop-up bailer, no, never have enormous round bales that only a machine could pick up. There was no point talking about the nobility of the labor, the ancient gathering up of the field, no use explaining it if you didn’t get it at this late date.
Earlier in the day there’d been talk on the weather discussion board about the building of the system, the possibility of thunderstorms, 40 percent chance. My father had meant the baling to start earlier but there’d been the usual conversation, the long silences with Aunt May Hill, Aunt May Hill always reluctant to commit, worried that there was too much moisture in the mix, she the one who knew about danger. Nothing to do then but wait, kicking around until she agreed to start the work, until in her estimation the hay was near enough to dry perfection. But we had knowledge, too, we did, bending the stems, sniffing, the goods leafy and sweet, a vintage the sheep would be pleased to eat.
Finally, she took her place on the Allis, and soon after we fanned out, throwing the bales on the wagon, a rickety thing with no sides. My father always constructed the load, ninety bales that he stacked long ways and crossways, five tiers, the structure holding through the woods on the jolting trips to the barn, all of us riding on top, admiring the view. And ducking, to keep from getting clocked by the limbs hanging over the rutted path. There would be three to four loads, my father thought, maybe more. If Sherwood showed up, my father’s partner, if he came we’d be done sooner.
It got hazy in the middle of the fourth load, the low sky a dull white and then suddenly—it was like that—all at once, out of the west, a wind, a black bank coming at us, the seams of lightning doing their zigzag, a quick count, one and two and three, the boom, the crack so close.
“Papa!” William cried. “We’re not going to make it.” William, who never called my father Papa anymore, was trotting alongside the wagon, gripping the edge, as if he meant to stop the whole contraption. There were thirty or so bales left in the field, another fifteen minutes to pick them up. My father was knocking one hard into place on the fourth tier with his knee, standing high, standing steady.