The Excellent Lombards(23)
William poked me under the table. I nodded, Yes, yes, Stephen is a spy. Remember the time in the barn? He was slippery in his loyalties and he was probably a practiced liar, we alone understanding the extent of his capacity to infiltrate.
My father laughed at his ridiculous wife. “Not true,” he said to his cousin.
Stephen was in the middle of putting a spoonful of bright green pesto in the center of his glossy noodles. He raised only his eyes, giving my mother a long, keen look, his spoon in midair. He said, “Nellie.” The word chilled us, her name. No one would want to be interrogated by him. “I…am…not…a spy.”
“Okay, okay!” She laughed nervously, her hands up, as if to say, Don’t shoot.
To his noodles Stephen said, “If I could find another job that had the same benefits and vacation schedule, a job that offers a sabbatical every ten years, I’d do it.” He suddenly sounded tired.
“I wish you would,” my father said. “It would be good to have you home, really home again.”
We didn’t know what he meant by home. Was home for Stephen the entire United States or was it our town or the manor house or maybe—was it our house? His most particular home at the moment didn’t seem to be on the outskirts of the orchard with Gloria, although he’d taken his big duffel bag over to her cottage. Even after he’d moved he sometimes sat in our kitchen for hours after dinner, the last to leave for bed. He was not domesticatable, so said my mother, a word that had something to do with sleeping, eating, folding laundry nicely, picking wildflowers as a present. I’d come downstairs to find the two of them, my mother and Stephen, in quiet conversation at the table. Gloria and my father were long gone, talked out and sound asleep. My mother had once mentioned that Stephen was the kind of person who opened up to you when you least expected it, no knowing when he might reward you with a confidence. Seeing them there at first always gave me a shock: What if—what if time had wavered, backward, forward—what if everything was now the same except that Stephen, Stephen was our father?
During the day for the most part we were happy he was staying on to pick apples. The harvest was a wild living thing that you were trying to tame while all the while it was dragging you behind, arms out, flailing, in the chase. But here was the miracle: Despite the chaos, the lack of planning, the bad feeling between Sherwood and my father, there was also an overriding unity of purpose, a reverence for the family history, a love for the soil within the property lines. Despite Sherwood’s and Jim’s temperamental differences the apples grew. They were harvested, thousands of bushels a year. Money, real currency, flowed from the customers’ pockets into the sellers’ wallets and thereafter to the secret cardboard boxes and elsewhere, and finally, when my mother could get around to it, into the bank. No one else had time to do the deposit. There were weeks in the autumn when there was money everywhere, envelopes hidden in the clean laundry, in the cat food bin, in the sock drawer, the visible reward stashed away. Sherwood, permanently on guard in the manor house, slept with the grandfather’s shotgun by his bed, and May Hill always put a chair against the basement door to trip up the robber, the clatter the big alarm.
On the golden-and-blue afternoons the driveway filled with customers, whole families piling out of cars, to taste and decide, to load up their trunks with bushels of apples and pears, with cider and honey and knitting worsted from the sheep and white packages of lamb chops and legs and shoulders. The Ukrainian women from the city liked the kidneys and tongues, and the Yugoslavs had to butcher the animals themselves, in the back barn. There were plenty of people who felt, the minute they started down our long driveway, that they were returning to a bygone time. “Don’t ever change a thing,” they cried. “Don’t fix that shed,” they beseeched. “The old surrey is down there, isn’t it, and the Model A? We love this orchard, you guys. It’s real, it’s special, it’s—” They sometimes got teary. “Tracie, Lizzy, get in here once and take a whiff of the apple barn, oh Lord, this smell!” Years before those customers had come with their parents or their grandparents, and they were returning with their children. It was nature itself, nature at every level that forced the Lombard operation to work. And if Stephen Lombard, with his great height and long arms, his strength and his stamina, was on the crew, we should not mind that he was in our kitchen far into the night. We shouldn’t care at all that he slept into the morning and that he was sometimes still picking apples in the dark. We should try to be happy he was home.
After Mrs. Kraselnik handed back the interview I put it somewhere or other. She had given Amanda and me ninety-three points. One hundred percent for creativity. Eighty, that shame, for not following the rubric. One hundred for grammar and vocabulary. Not long after that assignment I came downstairs, somewhat walking in my sleep, looking for Butterhead, the old cat, and there Stephen was, not with my mother and not with my father, not with Gloria, who was tucked up in her cottage. Stephen was sitting by himself, staring at the darkness outside even though he wasn’t technically living with us anymore. The light was on over the stove, one dim light, not enough to see even your own reflection in the glass, Stephen looking, then, at nothing. Because I was not quite awake the dreamscape of our kitchen with Stephen in it didn’t seem especially frightening.
I came to the table and began to talk. I told him our farm stories, we, the real children, with our own tales. I mentioned the autumn afternoon when Julia Child, Julia herself, a very old lady, a giant, taller than May Hill, in a tweed skirt and a cardigan, a pooch of a belly, got out of her car along with her friends, the queen of cuisine happening by the Lombard Orchard. Mary Frances Lombard bagged up three pounds of Wealthy apples for her, no charge, a variety from the chef’s youth, an apple that made her raise her famous voice in exaltation. I was the only person in my class who knew Julia Child, I boasted. I said again that she was a giant.