The Excellent Lombards(6)

The war would start because of the ancient argument, and one irrevocable thing would be said, something bitter and true. Sherwood and my father would then fall silent not for a few minutes but for years. It would be a war with no punches and certainly no shooting, no physical injury of any kind because that’s not how the Lombards behaved. The problem for Sherwood was my father, Jim Lombard, his cousin who hadn’t grown up on the farm. Jim had only spent his summers on the orchard, working alongside his maiden aunt, Aunt Florence. Whereas Sherwood was raised full-time in the manor house, the boy who had always known he was the rightful and only heir. After college my father came to help out, to rescue the operation while Sherwood was in the army. To Jim Lombard’s own surprise and joy, he never left. Sherwood came back from his posting, he and my father were made partners, one by one the older generation died, my parents got married around the same time Dolly and Sherwood tied the knot, Adam and Amanda were born, we were born, everything beginning all over again. But the tickler, the fundamental question lurked: Was my father, the city person, the interloper—did he belong? Did his pedigree and his summer roots constitute a claim?

When William and I learned a new detail of my father’s story, or when we heard more about the argument as the years passed, each piece was usually an understandable part of the predicament. Very rarely did additional information surprise us. Because the feeling between Sherwood and my father, that hum, was outside of us and also within us; surely it was so because otherwise we would not have entertained the war as we did, considering our stores of food, planning to hold fast to our little house across the road, the falling-down clapboard heap my parents had done their best to rescue, built circa 1860. We plotted how we’d get to the stone cottage near the village where Gloria the employee lived, Gloria, in the role of the hired man, living in the original Lombard house in the state of Wisconsin. Would I have to hate Amanda, who was a year younger than me, or would we be like lovers who were separated, sending each other messages in code, the upholders of the best, the pure Lombard spirit? William and Adam would sneak notes, too, the children reminding the elders who we were.

By the time we were in high school we understood enough to consider the hardships each bore. For certain Sherwood and Jim had the same funny pride in their independence and parsimony, but even though their goals were identical and their love equally deep, still, the fact remained that there perhaps have never been two men more unsuited to be in business together, the pair a marvel of incapacity. Sherwood the visionary—how we sometimes loved him for his leaps, his forays into the future! And Jim the commander of all details, the prophet of routine. The force of each diminishing the other’s power. But what the men respected in their situation, once they were business partners, was their rage, each for the most part keeping a lid on it, their semi-annual blowouts usually occurring in November and May. In-between times the majesty of the woods around the manor house and the size of the house itself, and the elegance of the apple barn, which originally had been meant for horses, and along the rise the dignity of the long straight rows of apple trees: All those beauties were a reminder of the grace and the good breeding of the Lombard clan itself.



There was a time when everyone came together in a purpose beyond farming. We were lost, William and I. After dinner we’d wandered down the lane that went out to the hay field, sure of ourselves because already at five and six we had helped with the hay in our complete costume: coveralls, gloves, boots, sunglasses, straw hats. It was the end of June and we’d started finding wild raspberries, straying farther and farther from the path, as sheep do, with no regard to the way back. After a while William looked up, his lips stained black, his eyes at once bright with fear. “It’s getting dark,” he noted. We started running, the thorns scratching our arms, our legs, our cheeks. Although we’d been told there were no bears or wolves in our part of the state, we knew that when night fell the savage beasts from out of time would emerge from their dens. We were already bloodied by the thicket, by mere plants. When we came to a hillside William led me up the brambly slope into a hole, a great gouge that had been made by a tree falling down. We climbed over the dead limbs and got ourselves into the torn earth, arranging ourselves among the roots. “Don’t cry, Frankie,” he said, but he himself was shivering. He held me in his arms and so although I was afraid, I was strangely happy, too. I started to try to sing a little song but he said we should probably listen for—for what? Our father, of course our father would come. Even though we knew he would find us, all the same we began to see—without speaking of it—the whole story of our being the dead children.

There was so much to miss in the life we wouldn’t lead, the Lombard girl and boy who despite his dreaminess and her spleen were supposed to carry on the orchard, those two snuffed out before they could be the farmers. William and I continued to tremble as if it were winter. Ghosts, that’s what we’d be, standing at our places at the apple sorter wearing our XXX Small brown cotton gloves, child laborers who were glad to undertake any task even in death. We’d been going to marry each other, my brother and I having solved that problem of adulthood early. It was William who’d firmly told me about the arrangement, who had the good idea, the two of us continuing on in our bunk beds, William above with his raspy breathing, that lullaby, the parents staying put in their room.

For a little while in the woods he told me a story that began this way: “Once there was a girl who lived near the end of the world. Her name was Miss Imp.” Miss Imp! That was me, a girl who was always annoying everyone but in a way they secretly enjoyed. When Miss Imp got lost her house right on the edge of the world picked up its skirts and came to find her, it loved her so much. With that conclusion we listened to the darkness again, remembering that in fact we were still lost and were probably going to die.