The Excellent Lombards(5)

3.


The Situation




The orchard, the family affair, was a compound with three houses, three barns, four hundred acres of forest and arable fields and marsh, the sheep pastures, and the apple trees. The woods were wild and dense, no hiker’s path of shavings, no sign at the start announcing points of interest, the lady’s slippers hidden in the broad ginger leaves, the morels—we weren’t going to tell anyone where they were. There was no warning about future dangers, such as the cougar maybe making a comeback in our state. By the far west fence there was an Indian burial mound that we took for the shape of an owl, and in a thicket nearby the remains of a settler’s cabin. Once, digging around, we found a tin cup, dented and packed with dirt. William picked it up, he sniffed it, sniffed the rim, where lips would have touched. I asked should we take it with us? He held it in both hands, looking off into the distance, seeing, I guessed, the fairy-tale children of long ago. An ogre of course and a father with an ax. Without deciding exactly we buried the cup as if it were a little pet we’d cared for.

Home we went over the wooded hills. The last glacier coming down into Wisconsin had stopped just south of us, dumping its remaining load of gravel, ideal country for an apple orchard, the soil rich enough, the drainage superb. In truth, though, we were more interested in what was to come than in what had already happened in the time of weather and pioneers. William and I were the fourth generation born unto the operation, heirs to a historical property and a noble business, far more than our friends could say about their fathers’ jobs and their houses on quarter-acre lots.

What worried us was a possible hitch, a potentially tricky web. Because we were not the only heirs. The major candidates in our minds were our good playmates and cousins, Adam, the oldest of us four, the boy for William, and Amanda, the youngest, the girl for me. They lived across the road in the manor house, a house far enough away and shrouded by trees so that it was not visible from our side. Amanda and Adam lived in Volta. William and Mary Frances lived in Velta. Our divided kingdom, William inventing the names, Velta and Volta, for what was true. Our cousins in Volta on the whole hated to work, disliked the out-of-doors, and never went into the woods unless their father coaxed them. Adam had cause to protest because he had the bee sting allergy, a cruel joke for a boy living in the middle of an orchard. But aside from their natural disinclination, their mother, Dolly, was always describing to them their college lives, way off, already excited about their adulthood in the city. So Amanda and Adam usually didn’t trouble us too much, but what about the cousins who lived elsewhere, in Alaska or California, children whose parents had grown up on the farm, those strangers who might arrive and seize the road? Children we had never met. For the most part after our trip to Minnesota we forgot that our father might someday give the farm to his partner, to Sherwood, or maybe we heard our parents not long after discussing their will in reasonable and generous terms. With that fear out of the way we had to make ourselves afraid on our own steam, pretending we were royal orphans, our right to rule threatened by the thugs at the palace door. Then we put on our capes and crowns and we climbed on top of the old chicken shed for our rapture: Bring me my bow of burning gold! Bring me my arrows of desire! Bring me my spear!



There were many dwellings that we would someday own part of if the strict lineage wasn’t interrupted. The manor house, the size of a ship, of a destroyer, was made of granite and cedar shakes, and had been built for our great-grandfather, the lawyer, the state senator, the gentleman farmer. Sherwood, Dolly, Amanda, and Adam lived in the downstairs, although my parents owned three-eighths of the entire house. We always wondered, Which part?—hoping one of the four bathrooms was in our share. Also, we would need a slice of either the upstairs or downstairs kitchen. Aunt May Hill, one-fourth owner, was someone we didn’t want to think about for any number of reasons.

For instance, when May Hill was a young person her father, a relative of ours, had accidentally suffocated in a silo on his farm in Indiana, and shortly after that her mother found a rope and hanged herself from a barn rafter. May Hill’s brother was in college but she, a high school girl, had to be adopted by Sherwood’s parents. One day she was a teenager at home and soon after she arrived at the Lombard farm in Wisconsin to take her place among a two-, three-, five-, and six-year-old—that was Sherwood—and a baby on the way. If she had been in a book we probably would have loved that downtrodden orphan. She was brilliant, everyone said. A solid girl, a girl with a large frame. When she grew older, instead of going to college or finding a job she stayed upstairs in her room reading, she tinkered in the tool house, she chopped wood, she studied auto mechanics on her own, and she invested in the stock market. It was common knowledge that she’d become rich. No woman we’d ever seen had such thick rectangular eyebrows. Not that we saw her very often. We understood that she did not like anyone, that she did not wish to see you on the path. The fact we knew most certainly was that, no matter her solitary habits, May Hill was the farm’s pure gold. Because breakdown was daily and went according to the seasons: the Ford tractor and market truck sputtering in fall, the sprayer clogged in spring, the baler and mower fizzing in summer, the snowplow intractable in winter. Each piece of equipment poised to quit in the time of its urgent need.

Aside from May Hill’s holdings everything else was split fifty–fifty between Sherwood and my father. Down the drive past the manor house was the apple barn where the customers came, where the cider was made, the apples sorted and stored, and behind that was the sheep yard for the flock of thirty ewes. Also, there in the yard, the museum of cars and other implements from as far back as 1917, plus rusted stanchions mostly buried, stacks of bicycles, wagon wheels, refrigerators, lawn mowers, barrels of used twine, chipped crocks—nothing of particular use but each item in a casual pose, caught as if in the middle of a task, as if trapped in time by lava or ice. You might think, studying the jumble, that the ancestors had done very little but ride bikes and churn butter. We sometimes worried that if Sherwood and my father had a real war we wouldn’t be able to get to the apple barn to do business, to feed the sheep, to rattle around in the junk, to play with Amanda and Adam. We’d be prisoners cut off from the supply.