The Excellent Lombards(2)
He didn’t even turn to look at the roiling sky, pure wrath above, my father, who was a cautious person under most circumstances. We heard him say, “We’ll be all right.”
“We won’t! It’s almost here, it’s— Pa! Look!”
A bale tumbled up at my father, and another, the Bershek twins on a roll, forever on a roll, my father grabbing the first by the twines, jamming it into a slot in the stack, Gloria on the wagon, too, thrusting the second up to him. Our cousin Philip had been driving, our cousin a native of Seattle, a city dweller. He jumped off the tractor and tore ahead of the wagon, hauling the bales that were far flung into stacks, consolidating them near our path. We wouldn’t take notice of his usefulness, we would not, because in our opinion he couldn’t have any real knowledge about weather.
“Doesn’t Papa see it’s going to hit?” William shouted at me. “Frankie! Doesn’t he see?”
“I know it!” I, too, kept moving.
One of the twins called in my direction, “Good times, Mary Frances, good times.”
Our father, the living skeleton, Exhibit A, underneath the coveralls nothing but hanging bones, and on display all the teeth, the hard grin signifying great effort, our father going at it as if he were still a teenager himself and not in his fifties; and yet of course he wasn’t crazed and of course he would not ever put a single person—except himself—in any kind of jeopardy. But my brother yelled again, a frayed, tearful sound—“Come down, Papa! Let’s get out of here.”
The Bershek boys weren’t stopping, my father wasn’t telling them to, my father taking the bales ever higher as if another crack hadn’t gone right over our heads, as if there really was sin, each worker supposed to wait in the open air for his punishment. Aunt May Hill in her floppy straw hat and sunglasses, Aunt May Hill almost glamorous if you didn’t know how plain she was, had already driven the baler back to the barn and was safe. William moved faster, keeping on without meaning to, almost without knowing he was still working. In his head, I think, he’d made for home.
At dinner it was a story of triumph for my mother, the first drop, a drop so ripe, so heavy, that drop falling in the instant the wagon was unloaded, William in that second handing off the last bale into the barn. It was then that Sherwood, my father’s cousin, turned up, arriving to help just when we were finished, a talent of his. We had to tell my mother that funny part of the story, Sherwood and his legendary timing. All together we had stood in the wide open door of the barn laughing at the force of the downpour, the rain soon hard as bullets, ricocheting off the metal feeders. In the field the bales had flown up into my father’s hands, all of us moving as if in black light; time sped up for us even as the storm was outside of time. At the table my brother said very little. He couldn’t be glad for the miracle, not entirely, a bitterness in his own self, for his doubt.
You know you believe it, I beamed to him across the platter of corn. You know you believe the one pure thing! William couldn’t say the words out loud, didn’t want to sound insincere or childish. But that night of the hay baling he was reminded of the truth. He knew what we’d always known, that our father could outwit a storm. It was so. It had happened. He knew there was no point, not in anything, if our father wasn’t on hand, quieting the wind; and no point, either, if we weren’t there to see it.
2.
Two Terrible Discussions
Our greatest fear must have been with us always because even before we went to school we did play at holding to our own fortress. We imagined war with the other family on the orchard. We considered it a siege more than a war, the standoff with our relatives, with our cousins who in ordinary life were our friends. It wasn’t until we were seven and eight, though, that we were first frightened in real terms about the farm, both of us just beginning to suspect that the future, that empty wide forever, might contract, it might narrow and start to spin, it might touch down, sweeping us into itself.
We were on our way to Minnesota to visit our forgetful, wandering grandmother when we got the inkling. It was rare that we took a vacation all together, and more than anything we were excited about the seven-hour drive. The backseat of the van had been made up like a pasha’s tent, beautifully draped and soft with our blankets and pillows, a box of tapes in alphabetical order, books on a makeshift shelf, magnetic games, a full tub of markers and new pads of paper, enough supplies to entertain us to the West Coast if for some reason that became our destination. Even though it was winter we got in the car an hour before departure to anticipate the pleasure of the trip, wrapped up and sitting mindfully in the tidy splendor. William had his red toolbox, something he couldn’t travel without, construction always in progress of a mixed-race quadruped, part Lego, part Capsela, a few mutant Erector Set parts for the personality who might someday speak to us, gestures and all. We were only slightly ahead of the age of handheld electronics for every boy and girl, and yet how impossibly old-fashioned we sound already. The thermos of hot chocolate, that timeless delight, and the basket of apples and cookies and nuts were by our side.
We liked the setup so much William said, “Let’s pretend this is our house, Frankie. This is where we really live.”
I loved that idea.
For most of our lives we’d been mistaken for twins. I was as tall as William, and we both had light-brown hair, his softly sprouted and growing in a swirl as if from a single originating point at his crown. Mine was cut in a pageboy, thin and blunt. Looking at William, I always knew I was not ugly. We seemed for a time to have the same plain standard-issue child noses, his turning up slightly. Whereas I dreamed we were twins, Siamese even, conjoined in utero, attached at an easy juncture, the little finger shared, or just a sliver of the hip—whereas I often believed this had to be so—it would never have occurred to my brother to consider altering the details of our birth.