The Excellent Lombards(46)
That summer we were coming home along the path in the woods when who should we see but Gloria and a friend she’d made from her knitting club, two women in wide-brimmed straw hats, both in long-sleeved shirts and loose trousers. They looked like old-fashioned ladies, women who might find just the place to set up their easels to glorify the scene. When we stopped for them it was Gloria who told us the news. “The princess,” she said, “has been in a terrible, terrible car accident.”
“Princess Diana,” the friend clarified.
We hung over the side of the truck while Gloria told the story of the princess and her boyfriend tearing around Paris, how the princess had left her children and her country to take her own vacation with the foreigner. We all rode quietly after that, a princess who might die, Gloria so shaken she could not say more after the critical details. When we got back to the farm we learned that May Hill had gotten the tractor stuck in the thick mud by the goat shed, May Hill, who never made mistakes, and not only that, the sheep had found an opening in the fence, the entire flock not ambling but galloping up into the east orchard, lambs and mothers, heading into the great wide open. We couldn’t leave the farm for even three hours without the tractor getting stuck, the sheep escaping their yard, and a princess suffering an accident.
It was the next spring when my mother took Bert and William to a hotel outside Washington, DC, for the First Annual Posse Convention. The boys were unbearably excited to meet the actual players on their teams, which meant they said less than usual in our company, the two of them scraping along the driveway from the bus in their gangbanger pants, bottled up with their great secret life and times.
My father and I thought about them somewhat at first while they were away in Washington but after no more than an hour had passed we became unexpectedly happy on our own. Over the four days we got the garden planted and we did twenty loads of manure, cleaning the lower barn, the sheep dung compacted into sheaves so that instead of digging at them it was an archaeological matter of peeling away the layers with the fork. We bleached the area to cleanse the place of parasites, and afterward we stood in the doorway admiring our work. We hardly had to speak to understand each other.
In the evenings we leaned against the sink and for dinner had menus such as chocolate malts and saltines with melted cheese. No big production necessary.
Back during the four–five split I sometimes used to imagine my mother not dead exactly but removed, so that Mrs. Kraselnik could adopt me. During the Posse Convention I recalled the pleasure of my mother being gone, the idea of it. I wasn’t wife of course to my father but I didn’t feel like daughter, either. He asked me questions as if he valued my expertise, as if all along on a different track I’d always been his partner, and only now had surfaced in this old but new dimension. “Where should we spread this load, Marlene?” he’d ask me as he was heading off to fertilize a field or part of the orchard. At the sink he’d say, “What varieties do you think we should graft this spring? What should we have more of? What do you like best?”
We did now and again bring up the convention, nine hundred boys in the hotel ballroom, boys and their pizzas, boys electrified by Mountain Dew. My father said, “No more hip bone connected to the hip bone in the electronic age. No more thighbone connected to the thighbone. Homo sapiens, good-bye. A new race is coming.” He trolled around in his glass for the last dregs of his malt. “The ennobling future, I guess.”
We thought of my mother in the hotel on her king-size bed, lying around reading, maybe ordering room service, the only Lombard who didn’t work on the farm. I said to my father, “If Mama was a Posse player what would her name be?”
“Savage Librarian,” he said without having to think.
We had to hold our stomachs to laugh. Next we sat at the table and talked about all the work we would get done the next day, on Sunday, and we reviewed the good works we’d done that day, too. We talked until the candle burned down. It was as if talking at the table and sleeping were one and the same, and by and by we climbed the stairs trailing words and went to bed.
16.
A Possible Marriage Match
Another spring turning to summer, my seventh-grade year over and done, my friend Coral LeClaire bleeding, I knew, even though she hadn’t told me. I’d seen the telltale sign, the supplies in her backpack. Also, she had breasts that appeared to be getting more enormous by the second. My mother seemed to think I was not going to need pads for some time or even a serious brassiere, that I was going to be a slow bloomer.
Already at age thirteen, though, I had plenty of accomplishments, the walls of my room completely covered with ribbons from the fair, blue ribbons for my cat drawings, my grapevine wreaths, my hand-spun, hand-knitted scarves, and my zucchinis. Certainly that summer there would be more prizes. In addition to preparing for the fair I would work as always with my father. And just as he sometimes watched a ball game there would now and again be a small holiday for me, a little rest, Mary Frances briefly parking in the hammock, the mosquitoes at bay, the butterflies fluttering in their warped flight patterns, the sound of the tractor in the distance, the mower going in the orchard, all the labor happening around me while I read lowbrow historical novels, books my mother said were trash, books she wanted to yank from my hands and incinerate.
Soon after our vacation began I went along with my father to visit the neighboring orchard, ten miles away, the Sykes Orchard our main competition. William no longer came with us on our jaunts, the job of keeping my father now falling solely on my shoulders. “Well, Marlene,” he said, “it looks like a nice day for a drive to the great Sykes plantation.” He meant it was a good day to point out to each other which fields were wheat, which rye, to admire the growing corn, and at one intersection there was always a tired old Appaloosa standing still in her yard, Our Friend The Horse, we called her. Our Friend The Horse now and again used to show up in my father’s stories, in the tales of Kind Old Badger. It was on that drive to the Sykes Orchard that I realized I couldn’t remember when the last one had been told, or if we’d known it was the last as it was happening. Or even what the story was, if there’d been a conclusion. I wanted to ask my father about Kind Old but I couldn’t; I couldn’t think what the real question was, and also I had the feeling whatever the question he wouldn’t be able to answer it.