The Excellent Lombards(37)

“You explain to Melody why her grandsons are blind,” Dolly snapped. “You explain to the judge why you didn’t take them to the hospital.” She hollered, “Why was the room open? Why was it not locked?”

“Give me your other hand, buddy,” Philip said, sniffing Jax’s palm.

“Don’t you get poisoned,” Dolly advised the visitor in more moderate tones. “Wouldn’t that just be so wonderful, to send you home at death’s door?”

The little boys were whimpering. Sherwood was looking for the key to the spray shed. Philip, who somewhere along the line had mentioned he was an EMT, was spreading Jax’s eyelid and studying the pupil. My father was kneeling near the boys, too, doing his own observation. That’s when we realized that May Hill was standing on the rise by the pump house, surveying the scene.

“Good job,” Philip was saying to the other boy, to Mason. “Stick your tongue out at me, okay, bud? Excellent, excellent, my man, nice slab you got there.”

May Hill did not need to announce the obvious, that it was her nephew who had come to the rescue.

We’d hardly recovered from Sherwood saying what he had about the grass, and now there was the blindness of the Muellenbach boys to consider or the burning of their skin through to the bone, as well as the culprit, the Lombard Orchard partner who had failed to secure the building, not to mention May Hill standing above us, those big, high-waisted jeans always a shocker. If she realized that we could see the shape of her, if she knew, would she cover herself with a poncho? Without discussion William and I went off to dig out our canoe, which we kept stashed in the brush by the pumpkin field. We’d leave all of them behind, paddling in the wide deep blue marsh, drifting by the muskrat houses, peering into their hodgepodge of cattail stalks one on top of the next, great thatched messes. Good-bye, all of you on land, good-bye!

“Do you think the Muellenbach boys will die?” I asked William. He was always in the stern, so he could steer. I hated the barbarians but the thought of them dying suddenly seemed pitiful. Poor little boys with fresh crew cuts laid out in pint-size coffins.

“Philip thought they were okay.”

“Papa wouldn’t let them die,” I said, more to the point. “Why did Sherwood—? How do you put grass—?”

William struck the water with his paddle, a thwack.

I couldn’t think, couldn’t imagine Sherwood being a boy and believing the orchard was going to be his and only his. How could he have thought such a thing? How could he have failed to know that we belonged, too? Although I still loved Mrs. Kraselnik with all my heart I didn’t dream of her adopting me as frequently as I had at the beginning of the year. And yet for a minute I allowed myself the worn scene wherein she scoops me up from our house that’s in flames, and takes me to the mansion on the hill, draws me a warm bath, draping her fingers through the bubbles while I carefully undress. That romance wasn’t as thrilling as it had formerly been in the early days of the four–five split, and I ran my mind over it quickly, obligatorily. Before I could get to the end of the scene in my mind’s eye, though, Philip crashed in on it, Philip saving Jax, saving the Muellenbach terror. In real life he was performing the rescue in just the way I’d imagined Mrs. Kraselnik doing, Mary Frances lying on the ground, my teacher bent over me tenderly trying to pry open my eyelid. Wherever I went now, whatever I did, would Philip appear in the frame?

“Stop rocking the boat,” William called out.

We had to hold out against Philip Lombard! Right then William and I had to decide for good, for certain, that we would always protect Velta-Volta.

“Stop it, Imp,” he said.

“Stop what?”

“The twitching. You’re making the boat tip.”

“I can’t help it.”

“You can too.”

“I’m never getting married.”

“There’s no law that says you have to.”

“I’m not doing it!”

“Okay.”

“Are you?” I said.

“Am I what?”

“Getting married.”

“How should I know?”

“You could decide not to.”

“That would be stupid.”

“Nuns and priests don’t get married.”

“Stop tipping!”

“Only if you promise not to get married.”

“Frankie! I can’t—”

I began to not just tip the boat but rock it. I didn’t care if we went overboard into the murky depths of the marsh. A normal brother would have gotten furious, would have swiped the oar through the water and drenched his sister. Why was William so nice? That question made me even angrier. Why did he always have to be patient, so patient and kind, too? He made me sick. A sharp awful pain in the head. What was wrong with him? I changed my mind—I didn’t want to be an orchard partner with him. You’d have to be an idiot, you’d have to be impaired to be so good. I’d run away to Mrs. Kraselnik’s.

He managed to guide the boat to our landing place as I continued to do my best to turn us over. He pulled it from the water, parked it, and waited for me to climb out. I dragged behind, refusing to walk with him. On the way home we had to go out of our way to avoid a great many things we did not wish to see. Sherwood and my father possibly back to their argument. The Muellenbach boys dead on stretchers. We did, against our will, see Philip learning chain saw etiquette from May Hill, the two of them in the orchard about to cut up an old Macintosh that had fallen down in winter. I could maybe like William the slightest little bit because he, too, skirted the path so we didn’t have to look.