The Excellent Lombards (13 page)

Russia, didn’t Russia border that sea? Amanda didn’t answer immediately. She was breathing heavily, her lips tightly pursed. The harsh gym lights, the sound of her breathing, the trick question, the digital clock in front of us—all compounded my illness and fatigue. Mrs. Kraselnik hadn’t said a Nordic country, which would have been expected if the answer was Norway. Were there Vikings in Russia in the Middle Ages? Maybe I’d missed that unit. I couldn’t think exactly where Norway was, and what of Finland, my mind was suddenly no good, the maps gone dark. It had to be Russia, Russia touched the Barents Sea. With two seconds on the clock Amanda said, “No way.”

No way
?
No way
was not a country.
No way
most certainly could not stand as the answer. And yet next I knew Mrs. Kraselnik was hugging Amanda on stage, this before our teacher outlined the future. “Right here, in our presence,” she then said, “a possible county champion, and who knows, a girl who could get to state and maybe beyond.” Never, Mrs. Kraselnik said, had she worked with such dedicated students, but now in our gym she meant that only Amanda was the truly dedicated one.

As an afterthought Mrs. Kraselnik said, “Let’s give another hand for the excellent Lombards.”

I had slunk down the steps, even though I was supposed to stay on as the loser, as the runner-up, the alternate, in the event that in the weeks to come Amanda had a change of heart or broke a limb. Or damaged her vocal cords trying to learn Standard English. I ignored my mother’s outstretched hand and went to sit next to William. He may have spoken to me—I don’t know. I wanted to stand up and shout the truth, to explain my reasoning. On the way out many people tried to hug me but Dolly especially made a point to draw me to her ample breasts. She’d never hugged me before but I had to let her. “You girls did so well!” she screamed even though I was pressed into her. “So wonderfully well!”

Gloria hugged me, too. She murmured one of her incomprehensible Gloria sentences. She said, “You have so many advantages, Mary Frances. I’m very proud of you.”

When William and I were grown, when Dolly and Gloria were old ladies, maybe we’d put a plate of pie by the door of the manor house. Say the men had gone away, and it was only the history hermit upstairs, the farmer’s wife downstairs with her black bob, and Gloria, the three women stuck with each other. They would all be closed up with May Hill, and like May Hill they wouldn’t even celebrate Christmas or Thanksgiving, never a holiday. Maybe we wouldn’t feed them at all.

That’s what I was thinking all the way home in the car, while my parents and William kept talking about how much I knew, their praise and jubilation no more noise than a door banging in the wind or hail on the roof.

10.

How Hard Must the Pumpkin Visitors Work?

A
t the County Geography Bee in December, which I was too ill to attend, Amanda stayed in the contest for an admirable length of time. Ultimately the hopefuls were defeated by a seventh-grade whiz kid, a boy predictably from India. It was said that she cried on stage. That was too bad. After the four–five split bee I’d more or less recovered from my loss, our teacher making me the assistant director for the class holiday play, Mary Frances Lombard with clipboard, pen tucked behind her ear, keeper of the details. Even so, I was sick to my stomach for the County Bee in Racine, and stayed home.

For that competition Stephen did his duty as uncle and went along with Gloria, my mother riding with them, which she afterward said made her want to put a bullet to her brain. Even though my mother’s exaggerations were not funny, we’d understood after Halloween why she made such dire comments about the couple who were something like newlyweds.

In that fall she was often asking my father accusing questions as if Jim Lombard were responsible for the couple, questions such as, “Why can’t Stephen be good to Gloria, Jim? Why can’t he just once look at her when she says something? Would it kill him to act as if she exists?”

My father didn’t have an answer, my father unable to choose sides.

We did wonder if Gloria put her arms around Stephen the way she did to us, kissing his head longingly although he was right there firmly in her clasp. We thought she might do that, and therefore we were squarely in Stephen’s camp. Until, that is, until the night the pumpkin visitors came to the Lombard Orchard for the last time.

We took it for granted that everyone understood the utmost importance, every Halloween, of the pumpkin visitors coming to Velta. If you’d heard about them, of course you understood. For the special guests to appear, it had to grow dark. We sat at the table eating spaghetti and store bread soaked to sponge in garlic butter, and probably we were describing our classmates’ costumes when suddenly, suddenly, there, out the kitchen window. A pumpkin, was it a pumpkin in the night? Its lopsided toothless grin all joy, glowing at us?

“Papa! Papa! The pumpkin visitors have come!”

“What?” He’d hurry into the kitchen from somewhere or other. “Where?”

“Look!”

“They came,” my mother would say in a hush.

We ran to the front door to see if the sidewalk visitor had made the trip, and yes, there he was, crooked teeth as usual. Up the stairs we chased to find the two roof visitors outside our window, the ones with question marks for ears and eyebrows thin and curved like seagulls in flight.

“They came!” I had to needlessly point out.

Gloria, wearing her gypsy costume, having followed us, put her arms around me, singing out her
hello, hello
, as if through the double-paned glass they could hear her. The visitors sometimes left us notes, not of course inside their shells with the burning candle but on our pillows, formal, short messages wishing us good cheer and fortune. Once, when William started to wonder how they occupied themselves during the rest of the year, he started to cry. He had made the mistake of thinking outside the bounds of their magic, glimpsing their loneliness, such sad creatures who could only be useful one night of the year. The Easter Rabbit, too, doomed to 364 days of leisure. My father soothed William by involving the pumpkin visitors in Kind Old Badger’s life and times, the visitors’ rotund fleetness an asset for any number of adventures. But even so it wasn’t long after William’s upset that my father decided to bring him into his dark enterprise.

When I was seven we were at dinner as usual, the spaghetti, the garlic bread, the discussion of the costumes at school. I happened to look up from my plate just as a tower of flame shot into the sky out in the hay field. “William!” I screamed. “A rocket!”

He ran to the window. “It’s—it’s…the brush pile? The brush pile, ohmygosh! It’s on fire!”

“How in the world—?” My mother was too surprised to finish the sentence.

“Could it be—?” I tried. “Do you think—?”

“What could it be?” Gloria sang out, the bells on her gypsy costume tinkling.

“The pumpkin visitors?” I said it, what no one else had yet understood.

“The pumpkin visitors! The pumpkin visitors!”

All of my family was with me, no possible way anyone at the table had made it happen. I was not so stupid as to at least wonder. “A whole bonfire this time,” I shouted. As always we flew to the front door. The proper visitor was on the walkway, and we tore upstairs, our old friends there on the roof.

The following year I had to learn—it was necessary to be told—that William had climbed out of my father’s office window and lit the perfectly appointed woodpile. He’d lit the pumpkins, too, before he’d slipped back into the house. The fire hadn’t roared up until he’d been peaceably eating his dinner. I would have been glad to pretend not to know, everyone forever doing the trick to amuse Mary Frances, but that year I was called into service.

My grandmother was dying up in St. Paul. She had been in a locked ward for a few years, a little lady in her own room with a swivel table over the bed for mealtimes. For the most part we didn’t listen to the bulletins of her suffering. Finally, my father got the call and he had to break away from the harvest to drive to Minnesota. Only a catastrophe could get him out of an apple tree. He arrived and an hour later Athena Hubert Lombard died. “Very peacefully,” he told my mother on the phone, so that she said, “Oh, Jim, I’m glad.” We had seen the ram on its back kicking and kicking right before he died, when the shearer had nicked his artery, so we knew what she meant.

When he returned it was Halloween night. He was almost too tired to eat, my mother sitting close by, pointing out what was most delicious.

She had instructed us to do the work of the evening. The pumpkin visitors, she claimed, would cheer him up. Even though it was Grandmother’s time, even though she’d died in her sleep, he still would need the comfort of tradition. We understood the importance of doing it perfectly. While my mother went on speaking quietly to my father William and I stole outside. The barn cats were like minnows in the shallows, moving around our legs as we carried the visitors from the bushes and went pumpkin to pumpkin, lighting the candles. Once the faces were illuminated even the big-headed torn-up toms crouched low, frightened and full of respect.

When my father at last turned to see the toothless beauty in the kitchen window he did something that surprised us. All of him right there at the table seemed to dissolve. My mother didn’t shush him or say that soon he’d feel better. Together they huddled in his wide old chair, both of them weeping. There was no comfort—we could see this, none to be had—and so we crept away to our room and into our bunks. We cried not for our grandmother, a woman so ancient she didn’t know us. We were crying because the visitors, for the first time in their long history, had failed to bring happiness. We had done the work wrong, or it wasn’t for us to do, or their powers were over and done? Somehow, we had made a mistake.

Later, my father came upstairs to tell us how much he loved the magic. He said he couldn’t have imagined a better homecoming, and if Grandma were still with us—plus, he meant, still had her mind—she would have enjoyed the story. It was a nice try. We appreciated his effort but we knew that the pumpkin visitors would never come again.

It must have been the next Halloween when Stephen was more or less living with Gloria. Again my mother was the one who made the suggestion about the visitors. Why didn’t William and I make them appear at the cottage? We promptly forgot about the disaster of the previous year, all of a sudden excited and serious. With utmost care we picked out several pumpkins from our private patch. There was the carving to do, the four of us working together at the table, the great emptying to make the creatures live, the wet pulp in mounds on the newspaper.

When all was ready we set out. My father had the brute in his arms, my mother with the moderate girlish one, William and I each carrying two small howling faces. In a line we crossed the road and went through the old orchard, the long knobby branches laid out in shadows on the moonlit ground. We trooped past the potato garden and the marsh, considering the muskrats deep inside their thatchy houses. At the cottage we went to our stations, working in complete silence, as a spy must, setting the visitors on the porch and the walkway and in the back window. My father had hidden a ladder near the barn early in the day for the purpose of placing one pumpkin on the roof, outside the bedroom.

We were hiding in the bushes, admiring the display, when the door opened. Gloria came sweeping out in a long, floaty gown, her hair wrapped in a leaning and towering scarf. She wasn’t wearing her glasses, but on that night perhaps full vision was hers. Gloria, who never wore jewelry of any kind, was covered in beads and bangles and she had long glittery earrings, each a set of chimes, a percussion section unto herself. In her hand she held a taper, her face ghoulishly lit. We laid ourselves flat, trembling with glee as she drifted among the pumpkins, singing in her high thin voice, greeting them one by one, a shivery vibrato in her
thank you
s. We remembered what was easy to forget, that Gloria every year often became nearly as magical as the visitors. On that night, there the peculiar and graceful spirit was, dancing in the yard. A spirit who had somehow intuited that she should be ready for the spectacular.

The door opened once more. Stephen, in ordinary clothes, stepped out. “Where’d these come from?” he called. He apparently, somehow, was not familiar with our customs.

“The pump-kin visitors,” Gloria sang in her fairy voice, the coins around her waist jangling. “The pumpkin vis-it-ors, oh, the pump…kin visitors, have come”—up went the note in a wild leap—“have come to us.”

Without saying a word Stephen leaned over the big fellow on the porch and blew out the candle.

“What’s he doing?” William whispered.

On the walk Stephen pinched the light inside my little screamer. “Make him stop,” I said.

“Time’s up,” my father pronounced, moving low on monkey hands, he and my mother going in their knuckled run. We started to scoot after our parents but in the same instant we turned back. Gloria had stopped singing. She was standing at the bottom of the slope facing her dark cottage. There was only the single pumpkin on the roof still shining into her bedroom, the one visitor who must do all the work, trying to bring generosity and merriment to that place and to that couple.

“Come on, Frankie,” William said, but I wanted to look a little longer at the last pumpkin visitor. There would never be another. And so together we stood saying our own private farewells.