The Excellent Lombards(55)
He was a very special, unusual person, my mother often said.
So that of an evening when I sometimes saw the young man and the hermit walking together, or if they were down in front of the manor house, digging around in May Hill’s garden plot, it was clear that they were behaving like old friends. He’d kneel in a mulchy aisle nodding as she talked, as they picked beans, and they’d put their heads together to examine a bug of some kind, and then she might hand him a sweet little tomato, which he’d pop into his mouth. It was a tableau I’d spy on if I happened to be at a distance and yet it was a miserable sight that always made me feel as if somehow all along I had understood nothing.
In our house, when Philip wasn’t around, there were conversations taking place that William and I were not a part of, our parents often talking long after we’d left the table. We’d come upon their discussions and they’d abruptly scoot their chairs back and again make bright little remarks that signified something but gave nothing away. Okay! So, ah, well, that’s that! My father was nearing sixty but everyone said he looked like a hale and hearty forty-nine. Sherwood had broken his arm the year before and it hung in a slightly crooked way from his shoulder, which didn’t mean that he had lost his strength or that he still wasn’t a superb apple picker. They were fine, the men, they were lean and magnificent.
One Saturday morning in the first fall Philip was with us I came late to pick in the Jonathan row, late because I was playing Penelope Sycamore in You Can’t Take It with You. Philip was in charge of the weekend crew, two older women from town and a retired science teacher. I’d slipped on my picking bag and was up a ladder before he saw me. “Mary Frances!” he called out. “Welcome! Glad you’re here.”
I had never flipped anyone the bird but right then I could completely understand the impulse. He then had the gall to say, “Great performance last night.”
Philip had come to my play? As if he was an uncle or teacher or friend? My parents and William had seen it the previous weekend, no one saying the Seattle visitor would be in the audience.
He said, “You played her with just the right edge of daffiness. Not crazy, not over the top, but sweetly daffy.” He apparently was an authority on everything. “Congrats.”
How could I not say Thank you? I had to thank him. He’d forced me to.
Even though I had a natural dislike for him, as I said, it was sometimes, however, hard to maintain an unequivocal feeling about him. It seemed that you could assume one thing about his character but two seconds later consider the exact opposite, and adding to the puzzlement, you might be correct on both counts. One time, for example, my father was trying to corral the lambs in order to castrate them. He went dashing toward a big fellow but missed his mark and was falling, falling, possibly going to smash his head on the shed wall if Philip wasn’t by his side, the annoying presence, who before my father cracked his brow somehow righted him and also at the same time scooped up the lamb.
“Philip!” my father exclaimed. “Whew! Thanks!”
The superhero said, “No problem, man!”
And another instance. We were well into high school the night William and I attended a crucial town board meeting, where, to our surprise, the cousin turned up, too. At that point he’d been living in the stone cottage for about a year. We were along with my father because we had some idea what was at stake not only for him but for us, too. My mother had ironed his shirt and demanded he wash his hair. We were proud of Jim Lombard for being the chairman of the Farmland Preservation Committee, the chairman, which, when we’d been small, we’d thought of as a kind of king. For seven years he and the committee had been working on a draft of a land-use document that would restrict developers in order to preserve farmland in the township, a township that through the decades was becoming more and more suburbanized. My father, with a handful of faithfuls, wanted to prevent future piano key subdivisions, no more quarter-acre lots, the farm fields jammed with house after house, driveway aprons, basketball hoops, lawn mower sheds made to look like little barns. The plan was also to prevent the development of the highway corridor, presently corn and beans and woodland, into the usual one long stretch of Walmart/Home Depot/Walgreens/Taco Bell/Menards/Dollar Depot/Aldi/Ford Dealership/Mattress World/US Cellular/Wendy’s/Best Buy/Staples/Burger King/Dollar World/CVS/Long John Silver’s/Verizon.
The meeting that night was the last in a series of informational sessions and was supposed to conclude in a vote. The board would decide to adopt the Plan or they’d reject the committee’s work and permanently shelve the idea of preservation. We’d long known that if my father didn’t get his way then by the time we were ready for the farm it might be an island, houses like the Plumlys’ surrounding us. The taxes through the roof. But even if we could pay up it would be difficult to spray and raise noisy, smelly livestock, the new neighbors thick upon us, no room for the foxes, the cranes, the field mice, no space, it sometimes seemed, for the stars. My father didn’t say that it was so, but we knew that without a Plan, without his vision, there might not be a place for us.
The meeting room was a low dark hall with no windows, the hanging panel of fluorescent lights doing us no favors, the fifty metal chairs set up on the linoleum a respectable distance from the dais, chairs for fifty persons, the clerk’s generous estimation of attendance. Four of the town board members were men, their stubby fingers stained with oil, men who worked in machine shops or owned farms, men, my mother said, who would not have been orators in ancient Rome or in any other civilization. The fifth member, Pam Getchkey, was a woman with prickly short hair who bred Dobermans. My father didn’t usually imitate people but when he performed Pam snapping her gum we always suddenly realized that he was the funny one.