The Excellent Lombards(20)
I cannot recall a more dreary June, the dampness will be the death of us. Father has taken the two ponies off to Mr. Harding in hopes of a fair trade for a pair of oxen. I am desolate without Mother, and Cudworth is too sick to be of any use.
First of all, Cudworth? And second, was it possible that in real life May Hill was reading to us? Again, I couldn’t think how such a thing had happened. As she read on about Elizabeth’s day scrubbing the kettle and weeding the turnips and airing the bedding, you might have thought May Hill was in the middle of a murder mystery. She was glued to the page, and her voice, so quiet at first, was getting louder. Her energy made me feel sick once more, as if somehow my stomach had become the eardrum, the words going straight to that sensitive place, and also, it was as if her excitement was something sad. Amanda was slouching in her chair and swinging her legs. It almost seemed—almost—that May Hill was nothing but a regular old lady. Someone pitiful who lived alone, who had nothing to care about but the diary of a pioneer. What if she had brought out the card tables in order to make the displays just for us? That notion was a heavy sinking thing, something I didn’t want, something I was trying to forget—but wait! Suddenly there was an Indian in Elizabeth Lombard’s house. An old-fashioned redskin in a loincloth. Amanda stopped the swinging. I sat up straight. “The smell was terrible,” May Hill was reading. “He looked weak, his chest frail, but his eyes were blazing at me with hatred.” There followed three sentences in which Elizabeth Lombard snatched an ax and brained that savage.
We both covered our mouths. May Hill looked up and that time I was sure of it, certain she was smiling at me. It wasn’t a large goofy grin or a pretty showing of teeth, but instead a smile of satisfaction, of having expertly accomplished a task. Her blue eyes, which were ordinarily cast down, were wide, those eyes asking the question, What do you think of that!
“The bleeding on Mother’s braided rug was something awful,” she read, “and I could not help but think, with the swiftness of the death, and what I could see was an easy acquiescence, that he had been ill, that he’d been feverish.”
I lifted my feet from the rug because if it was the very same rug that had absorbed the Native American’s blood, then, as we’d been taught in school, you should not ever touch someone else’s bodily fluids, wet or dry, because of AIDS.
It had begun to rain in New Hampshire in 1820, the brother, Cudworth, had woken up with the commotion, and the two of them dragged the corpse to the burning pile and set it on fire. “When Father came home he commended me for my bravery, but he was sorry that I had had to do the work of a man. I was not sorry to have killed a savage because there is no good savage alive, and I did feel proud even as I prayed to our Lord to forgive me, and to show me mercy at the final judgment.”
May Hill looked up once more in that new way of hers, May Hill serenely triumphant. Amanda was scratching her knee. “Oh,” I managed to say. William was downstairs, I said to myself. I could stomp on the floor if I had to. And scream. We might have moved on to another artifact but the diary reading continued. In Elizabeth’s life there was a trip to market, more rain, a visit from a traveling preacher, rain again, the new ox hurt its foot, two rabbits were killed for dinner. No further mention of the ax or the butchery, no mention of removing the stain from the rug. I kept waiting for the subject to resurface but after a while it began to seem as if it, the murder, was a secret that May Hill had told us. Something you’d say only once. Amanda and I continued to forget that we were supposed to ask our subject questions. But even if we’d remembered our assignment May Hill gave us no opportunity to butt in. Where before in our whole long lives she had rarely spoken a few words in our presence, where we had imagined that she was willfully mute or maybe even a little brain-damaged, now we suddenly worried that she might never stop reading the diary.
When at last she finally did set it down even so she went on talking. She moved from table to table, every object, every story holding for her equal excitement. The relative who dug up bodies in the cemetery in order to study anatomy just as captivating as the price of corn in 1835. Moses Lombard’s death in the Civil War by saber no more astonishing than the number of beavers in the marsh in 1909. The presentation to us of the great etc. grandmother’s baby curl, a silky blond loop, made me again feel unwell, Elizabeth Morrow Lombard, I thought, perhaps responsible for that curl, the baby murdered and burned. No, that wasn’t right. It couldn’t be. But the curl, all by itself, in a ribbon—I wanted to clutch my throat. May Hill went on about the Lombard fanning mill factory, the purchase of the business by J. I. Case, the establishment of the dairy farm, the run for the state assembly by Thaddeus Lombard.
Amanda by then was as close as you can get to lying down on a chair, her eyelids drooping. I kicked her just the once. It was hard to tell how much time had passed. I myself might have eventually fallen asleep if I hadn’t noticed a photograph in a plain black frame on a bookshelf on the other side of the room. May Hill was picking up a small silver-handled pistol, the size of a cap gun, when I cried out, “Who is that?”
It was the only photograph from modern times in the entire place, at least as far as I could see. No solemn ancestor with muttonchops, no girl with a gigantic bow in her ringlets and a lacy white dress, but rather a clean-shaven boy, older than William, a high school student, probably.
May Hill looked startled, as if she’d been intending to take a shot with that little pistol but now she had to answer my question. I’d covered my mouth again, feeling shame because as my mother often reminded me, I was impetuous. She was forever telling me I needed to learn self-control. What had I done but forgotten to exercise it in a place where I should have been supremely careful. Nonetheless, May Hill replied. She said, “That’s my nephew.”