The Excellent Lombards(29)

That’s what I was thinking all the way home in the car, while my parents and William kept talking about how much I knew, their praise and jubilation no more noise than a door banging in the wind or hail on the roof.





10.


How Hard Must the Pumpkin Visitors Work?




At the County Geography Bee in December, which I was too ill to attend, Amanda stayed in the contest for an admirable length of time. Ultimately the hopefuls were defeated by a seventh-grade whiz kid, a boy predictably from India. It was said that she cried on stage. That was too bad. After the four–five split bee I’d more or less recovered from my loss, our teacher making me the assistant director for the class holiday play, Mary Frances Lombard with clipboard, pen tucked behind her ear, keeper of the details. Even so, I was sick to my stomach for the County Bee in Racine, and stayed home.

For that competition Stephen did his duty as uncle and went along with Gloria, my mother riding with them, which she afterward said made her want to put a bullet to her brain. Even though my mother’s exaggerations were not funny, we’d understood after Halloween why she made such dire comments about the couple who were something like newlyweds.

In that fall she was often asking my father accusing questions as if Jim Lombard were responsible for the couple, questions such as, “Why can’t Stephen be good to Gloria, Jim? Why can’t he just once look at her when she says something? Would it kill him to act as if she exists?”

My father didn’t have an answer, my father unable to choose sides.

We did wonder if Gloria put her arms around Stephen the way she did to us, kissing his head longingly although he was right there firmly in her clasp. We thought she might do that, and therefore we were squarely in Stephen’s camp. Until, that is, until the night the pumpkin visitors came to the Lombard Orchard for the last time.

We took it for granted that everyone understood the utmost importance, every Halloween, of the pumpkin visitors coming to Velta. If you’d heard about them, of course you understood. For the special guests to appear, it had to grow dark. We sat at the table eating spaghetti and store bread soaked to sponge in garlic butter, and probably we were describing our classmates’ costumes when suddenly, suddenly, there, out the kitchen window. A pumpkin, was it a pumpkin in the night? Its lopsided toothless grin all joy, glowing at us?

“Papa! Papa! The pumpkin visitors have come!”

“What?” He’d hurry into the kitchen from somewhere or other. “Where?”

“Look!”

“They came,” my mother would say in a hush.

We ran to the front door to see if the sidewalk visitor had made the trip, and yes, there he was, crooked teeth as usual. Up the stairs we chased to find the two roof visitors outside our window, the ones with question marks for ears and eyebrows thin and curved like seagulls in flight.

“They came!” I had to needlessly point out.

Gloria, wearing her gypsy costume, having followed us, put her arms around me, singing out her hello, hello, as if through the double-paned glass they could hear her. The visitors sometimes left us notes, not of course inside their shells with the burning candle but on our pillows, formal, short messages wishing us good cheer and fortune. Once, when William started to wonder how they occupied themselves during the rest of the year, he started to cry. He had made the mistake of thinking outside the bounds of their magic, glimpsing their loneliness, such sad creatures who could only be useful one night of the year. The Easter Rabbit, too, doomed to 364 days of leisure. My father soothed William by involving the pumpkin visitors in Kind Old Badger’s life and times, the visitors’ rotund fleetness an asset for any number of adventures. But even so it wasn’t long after William’s upset that my father decided to bring him into his dark enterprise.

When I was seven we were at dinner as usual, the spaghetti, the garlic bread, the discussion of the costumes at school. I happened to look up from my plate just as a tower of flame shot into the sky out in the hay field. “William!” I screamed. “A rocket!”

He ran to the window. “It’s—it’s…the brush pile? The brush pile, ohmygosh! It’s on fire!”

“How in the world—?” My mother was too surprised to finish the sentence.

“Could it be—?” I tried. “Do you think—?”

“What could it be?” Gloria sang out, the bells on her gypsy costume tinkling.

“The pumpkin visitors?” I said it, what no one else had yet understood.

“The pumpkin visitors! The pumpkin visitors!”

All of my family was with me, no possible way anyone at the table had made it happen. I was not so stupid as to at least wonder. “A whole bonfire this time,” I shouted. As always we flew to the front door. The proper visitor was on the walkway, and we tore upstairs, our old friends there on the roof.

The following year I had to learn—it was necessary to be told—that William had climbed out of my father’s office window and lit the perfectly appointed woodpile. He’d lit the pumpkins, too, before he’d slipped back into the house. The fire hadn’t roared up until he’d been peaceably eating his dinner. I would have been glad to pretend not to know, everyone forever doing the trick to amuse Mary Frances, but that year I was called into service.

My grandmother was dying up in St. Paul. She had been in a locked ward for a few years, a little lady in her own room with a swivel table over the bed for mealtimes. For the most part we didn’t listen to the bulletins of her suffering. Finally, my father got the call and he had to break away from the harvest to drive to Minnesota. Only a catastrophe could get him out of an apple tree. He arrived and an hour later Athena Hubert Lombard died. “Very peacefully,” he told my mother on the phone, so that she said, “Oh, Jim, I’m glad.” We had seen the ram on its back kicking and kicking right before he died, when the shearer had nicked his artery, so we knew what she meant.