The Excellent Lombards(69)

“Ma’s out of her head with worry,” my father added.

William just then began to pound, with his bare hands, on the gigantic upturned platter of roots and earth. Very melodramatic for anyone but for William especially surprising. Was he crying or choking? I couldn’t tell.

“So go away,” I remarked. To tell the truth, it was frightening, his display. I said, “Would you please just leave.” I meant it in a local way.

At that he sprang into the hole. “Ow!” I yelled. “Get off me! Stop it!” As I said, the hole was considerably smaller than it had been when we were five and six.

“GODDAMN IT, Imp!” He seemed to hover before he came down upon me. I suppose it happened quickly. The press of him, a darkness in my mind, my brother smothering me. Such weight, the boy himself in his padded canvas jacket. Before you knew it you could be snuffed out, you might surrender, one bright bloom in your head, the last flowering firework, almost a happiness to have everything over and done. I heard him cry out, “YOU ARE SUCH A—BABY.”

BABY like an ugly word, like the worst curse. It was close to me, that word in the hole, and yet it didn’t matter, the canvas like an old chapped hand, William’s jacket covering my face and in my mouth. Before I could try to struggle, even as I was thinking to, my father was yanking William, my father with all his strength pulling his nearly grown son up out of the hiding place. All at once the light was back in my eyes, I was gasping for breath. There was noise, my father I think talking to William, maybe he was saying something, a confusion even though the main action had already taken place. I thought, Okay, I am now going to climb out. I could see that there was no reason to stay put. They had found me, I wasn’t dead from suffocation, perhaps my point had been made, time to go home. I couldn’t exactly think in the moment what the point was. But before I could get out, before I realized what was happening my father had also dragged me up and next I knew he somehow had hauled me over his shoulders. Wait! The duvet had fallen away, my father, as old and as tall as I was, my father adjusting me as if I were a sack of grain, as if he thought I wouldn’t come home with them, as if he thought I’d try to fight. I could still feel the weight of William, the jacket, that stuffing, in my mouth. I should tell my father that he could let me down but I couldn’t think of the words. Baby. That’s what I kept hearing.

We set off down the path. William was running ahead probably. I couldn’t hear him, didn’t think he was with us. I was not easy to carry, my father faltering. I imagined I was going to say Let me down and so I must have because he stopped. I was then walking beside him. He smelled of apples, the fragrance thick and sweet, the smell bonded deeply into his jacket and his coveralls, his hair, his skin. Even though I was no longer slumped over his back I felt as if I were being carried along in a dream, the night, my father, the two of us maybe walking forever. Where was William?—Oh yes, in the dream, remember he is gone? On we went until we came out of the woods. We walked down the dark drive of Volta and crossed the road to Velta.

Just inside the door at home my father was good enough not to turn on the hall light but nonetheless I at once remembered my part. I tossed the keys on the floor in the hall, Fine, there they are, what you wanted. And then I ran up to my room and I locked myself inside.

It wasn’t until I was in my bed that I began not merely to tremble but to shiver in an uncontrollable way. I wasn’t even all that cold. As usual I wondered if I was losing my mind. The shivering was not, I thought, prompted by William’s unnerving, unique histrionics or my inability to speak to my father on the path. No, my teeth were rattling because of the resemblance that was occurring to me: Gloria. Long ago Gloria had stood in the door frame of the stone cottage, forced by my father to produce Stephen’s passport. Had I become Gloria? Had I become a person going insane? There were moments, I could now see, when it was understandable to completely go off your rocker. The easiest and most reasonable and maybe proper thing to do in the world, to lose hold of yourself. What were my parents doing downstairs but probably trying to figure out how to commit me. They were discussing the fact that I was certifiable. So the question before me: Was I indeed crazy?

Yes or no.

MF Lombard driven mad by a departure?

I wasn’t sure. I didn’t know. Before I could make a determination the Stephen photographs leapt to mind. I hoped they were going to be all right out in the hole for the night. I loved those pictures. I loved them so much I could hardly stand it, but not, it seemed, in an insane way. Loving the pictures simply did not feel like lunacy. Loving the pictures, there was nothing to be done but lie quietly at the mercy of the suffering.

After some time I got out of bed and went into William’s room. My heart sped up, the thin hum in my ears as I approached the threshold. Had the woods been a dream for him, too? Would the correct approach be to laugh, to cry, to do nothing but sit down and lean against his shelf? He was at his desk playing Posse. His fine wispy hair was long enough in the back so that a wind might make it tickle his neck. I loved his neck, which he may or may not wish to know.

“Um,” I said.

“What,” he said.

“Are you going?”

“Early tomorrow morning.” He kept playing his game.

I managed a great summoning of my courage and I said right out, “What are you thinking you will do when you get out of college?”