The Excellent Lombards(3)
At first as we drove west to the Twin Cities we were happy. My mother up front did her imitations of her patrons at the library, where she worked, and my father opened his mouth as if he were having a dental exam and howled. No one made him laugh as hard as my mother. She’d say the amusing line and then sit back to watch him at the enterprise of enjoying her little story. She had a black heart, she once said to him, the result of smoking, had she ever smoked? Could she have been so stupid and so terrible? And yet that shriveled charred heart somehow beating was a feature my father found funny, and therefore we must try not to worry.
For a while we sang along to one of the folksingers on our tape, songs about baby whales and delightful banana pickers and abandoned ducklings, songs we were getting too old for but nonetheless they were our favorites. We weren’t self-conscious about singing, not quite yet, unable to help ourselves, belting out the quack quacks and the Day-os. Daylight come and me wan’ go home. Somehow William was able to sing and at the same time even in travel draw on paper tacked to a board across his lap, the artist making boy-type inky castles, tight lines, extreme architectural detail, the dungeons equipped with outlets and computer stations.
Halfway across the state my mother took the wheel and soon after we both must have fallen asleep.
“What are you saying?” She was speaking quietly to my father but urgently, the blast of her t, the incredulity in the word what the sound that woke us. We didn’t move, both of us lodged against our windows, a little damp, a little drooly.
“I want him to be able to carry on the business, Nellie,” my father said. “To make it as easy as possible for him to keep going. You’d want him to do the same for me.”
“Carry on the business,” my mother said, leaning forward, her face practically to the dashboard. “As easy as possible for him,” she repeated.
“You’d better pull over.”
“I’m not going to crash the car.”
My father said, with deep apology in his voice, “I shouldn’t have brought it up. We need a will, that goes without saying. I’m thinking out loud—”
“I just want to get it straight, your plan.”
“It isn’t a plan—”
“Your thought is to will the property and the business—every one of your assets—to Sherwood. To make it easy for him. The property that includes the house we live in.”
My father looked out the window, which we understood to mean he did not wish to continue talking, something my mother didn’t seem to know.
“It would be nice, Jim, it would be considerate, in the event of your death, to be able to remain in the house.” She said that sentence so distinctly, and sweetly, too, it seemed.
“Nellie—”
“Just so I have it straight, is all. So I can prepare. You’re giving the whole of everything to Sherwood—and Dolly, let’s not leave Dolly out of the discussion. Imagine leaving Dolly out.” She had to pause, stunned at such an omission. “If you’re going to give the place up to them, I should probably start putting my spare change in a jar. So I have enough to care for our children, food, shelter, clothing, that kind of thing. A dime or two for college. In the event of your death,” she added, her tone even more agreeable.
Our father dying? William’s eyes were narrowed in concentration. Our parents were having a joke, I thought, or maybe playing a car game. My father dying and his business partner and cousin, Sherwood, owning every acre, this funny, hard game something like My Grandmother’s Suitcase or I Spy. As for college, that also was ridiculous. William and I were never going away.
“Aunt Florence and Uncle Jim passed down the farm to you and Sherwood and May Hill.” My mother reviewing ancient history.
“Yes, Nellie, all right, let’s not go into a tailspin. Let’s let the funnel cloud settle elsewhere.”
“And so maybe you feel obligated to honor that history. Maybe,” my mother mused, “Sherwood will build me a house out of the scrap metal in the sheep yard. Imagine the house that Sherwood could make! No, no, this will be fun.”
We could tell she didn’t mean real fun in this game of theirs. Sherwood famously invented all kinds of never-before-heard-of contraptions, and he tried to build regular tools and machines, too. It was unlikely—we knew this—that he could successfully erect a whole house.
“Our palace,” she was saying, “oh, Jim! It will have a laundry chute, like a marble run, underwear, socks, washcloths skating down tubes through all the lopsided, slanting rooms, kicking off bells and whistles before they land in the washing machine. How great is that?” She turned to my father, looking at him for longer than seemed a safe driving practice. “The floors,” she went on, “will be made of arable soil, you mow it instead of mopping. Plus, we can grow radishes under the table.” Another hard look at him. “And play golf.”
“Nellie,” he said wearily. “Get off at the next exit, will you please?”
“I do understand that for you the farm is the most important feature of the world,” she said quietly, and almost sadly. “I do know that. I’m not going to dwell on the money I put into the operation—gladly, I put the nest egg in gladly.”
What money? We were always puzzled about money, whose was what, and why my father’s jaw went taut when the subject came up. He turned around to see if we were still sleeping, our eyes snapping shut. “You do dwell on it.” His voice was in the back of his throat, my father rumbling, a rare occasion. “You are dwelling. You dwellth.”