The Excellent Lombards(60)

“What’s the matter?” May Hill said again.

I sputtered something about war.

“There’s always been war,” she said sharply. “War is nothing new.”

I sniffled and tried to dry my eyes.

“Crying is not going to help.”

“I know that,” I said.

She next made a somewhat funny remark. She said, “I wish I could sit around and cry when there are apples to be picked.”

“Oh,” I said. Although May Hill worked hard and was strong by any standards, but especially for a seventy-or eighty-year-old lady, however old she was, and although she was indispensable, she was also upstairs in her own house for great chunks of time probably sitting around reading. Not that I would point out such a fact to her. There that large face was in the window, once again proof that May Hill had none of the typical Lombard grace. Did an elderly person have the need to cry, or was crying something you probably outgrew? I wished something in words that I’d always wished with a feeling, that old situation, a knot, an ache trying to gather itself into meaning and possible action. That is, I wished May Hill wasn’t a Lombard, and more than that, I wished she’d disappear. I stared back at her, my tears over and done. Go away, I willed. Fall over dead.

Her face persisted in the window, that ogre head swelling because—because she was having the same thought about me, that wish engorging her mind. May Hill hoping to erase me as fervently as I wanted her to vanish, our wishes pitted one against the other. That clear fact frightened me so much I scrambled up in order to make sure she hadn’t paralyzed me, that her wish hadn’t frozen my limbs. I wasn’t too old to be that alarmed by her; a person, no matter how grown up, would always be alert to her powers.

I then remembered something my mother always practiced on her unpleasant patrons at the library. A tack that might possibly work, at least a little, on our fake aunt. Mrs. Lombard said that she killed the wretches with kindness, she became simpering with niceness, that being almost unbearably sweet to people who were itching for a fight caught them off guard and defanged them. Therefore, I mustered my strength and I said to May Hill, “I like your shirt.” Admittedly that was not the most believable compliment for a ratty piece of flannel, but it didn’t deserve a scowl.

She muttered a word that started with an m. Maybe it was mercy. But possibly murder. Or mongrel. Yes, mongrel, that’s what she’d said. She made her pronouncement about me before she turned and went up the sheep path and out the gate.



To mutter like that. The horrid word. And when I was trying to be nice! So the stone of May Hill was again heavy around my neck, all the bad juju of my encounters concentrated in that stone: the interview, the capture in her room, the pronouncement that I, and perhaps each of us, Amanda and Adam and William, too, were people beneath her contempt. Individuals with no breeding. But if there was a leader of the pack it was MF Lombard. I was certain that in her ordered mind I, above all others, was the vermin.

I might not have minded her condemnation so very much if there hadn’t been the matter of her plan. My parents now were often talking about it, a conversation I wanted to understand and also couldn’t bear to hear. We’d been at dinner a few weeks after the World Trade Center attacks when the topic first came up for our benefit. William and I were startled at the way my parents were speaking, as if the plan was common knowledge.

“What are you talking about?” I said.

May Hill was drawing up a document with a lawyer, my father explained, that would allow Philip to buy her out, to purchase the acres she owned on a land contract.

“A land contract?” I said.

He repeated the fact. May Hill was preparing to transfer her assets to Philip.

“Transferring her assets,” William echoed. “Why doesn’t she just will it to him? Why does he have to buy her out?”

“That’s not information I’m privy to,” my father said.

“May Hill is remarkably savvy,” my mother added.

“She can’t do that,” I cried. For starters, we all knew that her property included the right-of-way to the apple barn. She owned that stretch and the half acre the house sat on, but not the house itself. We had always understood that the owner of that strip held power, our great-uncle Jim for his own reasons conferring a certain influence upon May Hill.

“She can do whatever she wants with it,” my mother argued in her cross way.

“Of course she can,” my father replied.

“She considers Philip her heir.”

“That’s obvious, Mother,” William said.

“Someone has to think of the future,” she insisted. “Someone has to take steps to ensure this place isn’t going down the tubes.”

“That is such an insulting thing to say to Papa,” I shouted.

“Oh, he knows what I mean,” she said lightly. “Why Sherwood and Dolly aren’t in favor of Philip’s having ownership is beyond human comprehension.”

“It’s always a slow process, coming around to change,” my father said. He rubbed his eyes. “They’ll get there.”

“It would be ideal if they got there before you men are wheelchair-bound,” my mother said. She then chattered on about how Adam would soon be in college, how the guidance counselor at school had never heard of any of the institutions Adam was considering.