The Excellent Lombards (22 page)

The battle started in the spring, a few months before camp, on the day the yearlings went to slaughter. I was fourteen, William fifteen. The lambs had just been shorn, their sturdy musculature plain to see, and without the wool on their faces their watchful brown eyes were nakedly soulful, philosophers, you might think, all of them. Or anyway they were filled with life even though we knew they were terrifically brainless. William and I got up early on that April morning to help with the loading. When my father appeared in the lower yard with the grain bucket some of them did their twisting and popping jumps, joy—you could not call their feeling anything less than joy. It was still dark, which made the whole scene even worse. For as many times as we’d been through this exercise, as hardened as our hearts should have been, we were downcast. In the upper yard The Old Sheep came to the fence to pay her respects, her wool ragged over her sharp hips, her knees bald, her baaing guttural, a useless warning. There was always one in her position, a ewe in her last spring.

My father carefully spread some grain in the feeder, making sure to leave spaces between the portions so the lambs wouldn’t crowd as much as usual, so they could be peaceful during their final meal. When they were finished he walked backward, tapping the bucket, toward the pen we’d made for them, a hemmed-in space that went right up to the back of the truck. We hoped we could get them up the ramp, get them loaded without any of them spooking, the whole mob then stampeding over each other, trampling the weaker stock to death. That’s how dim-witted they were.

Because they trusted my father and because William and I were at their heels they followed him, thinking,
More of our favorite and most delicious Sheep Formula? And so early in the morning? Honestly? You’re going to give us more?
When the last was inside the vault of the truck I brought down the door. The clang, and another bell tolling with the latch. No childish plea for mercy, no spider weaving words into a web, no last-minute stay of execution. “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “So long, Dandelion,” I said, the runt I’d bottle-fed. At the slaughterhouse no one would care anything for them, already pieces of meat while still living. They would wait jammed together in a low tight room and be yanked one by one to the death slab.

My father crawled from the back through a small opening into the cab. It was cold but even so he unrolled the window. He raised one hand, the farewell. We waited by the gate while he adjusted the mirror. When he was ready he turned the key in the ignition and with the beeping that signaled “reverse,” those solemn notes, the truck moved slowly out of the yard.

We were still thinking of the lambs, still downcast after dinner. It was my mother who suggested we play Euchre, the ideal game for us, four persons, a game that requires some concentration and strategy but allows for sociability. This would cheer us up, she’d decided.

At the table William and I as usual insisted on being partners. There was no other way to match ourselves up even though we, as a team, made the game laughably uneven. The truth was my father became spacey over cards. We played Euchre several times a year and he couldn’t ever remember the rules. Each time we had to explain all the details again, what trump meant, what the left bower was, the right bower, who started when, how you kept track of points. My mother, however, in her own way was worse. She more or less remembered the basics but she was like an idiot savant, not knowing what was going on at a fundamental level, and yet sometimes not only managing to do the correct thing, but blowing us out of the water. William and I, therefore, could not have either one of them as partners, neither the oldster nor the wild card.

We sat diagonally from our partners at the kitchen table, William dealing in his suave high school style, a flicking of the wrist, throwing out the cards two and three at a time.

“Wait,” my father said, “how many should I have?”

“You have five,” William explained.

“Is that the right number?”

“Yes. Yes it is.”

“Five? It doesn’t seem like enough.”

“Papa!” I cried. “We each get five cards.”

“Five,” he repeated.

“Good Christ,” William muttered.

My mother didn’t even scold him. It went to me to make the pronouncement, to order up the suit. I said, “Trump is diamonds.” William reiterated, “So, diamonds is trump.”

Exactly half a second later my father said, “What’s trump again?”

“Diamonds,” my mother said. She laid down the first card, an audacious play.

“Whoa, tiger,” William said. “Good move.”

“Thank you.”

“What’d you just do?” my father said.

“Papa!” I cried again. William blazed at me. I telegraphed to him,
He’s deranged! And Mama is, too. She is even more. You wait.

When she put her card down two tricks later William said, “You know that’s trump, right?”

“Oh!” she giggled. “I forgot.”

I snorted and did the glance at William,
See?
To forget that the left bower is still trump after playing for decades really is mental retardation.

“I always forget that,” my father said.

“You should not admit it,” I instructed.

“What is wrong with you people?” William couldn’t help asking.

My mother glared at her cards. “We’re just old,” my father explained. “That’s all.”

“Well, snap out of it.” Softening, William added, “Do you want me to review the rules again?”

“I think we’ve got it.”

We paused between rounds for the making of cocoa, the milk simmering, the woman of the house busying herself at the stove. She said, with her back to me, “I was talking to Coral at the library today about the drama camp Mr. Dronzek has been recommending. Up in Hayward.”

What was she doing talking to Coral? “I’m not going to camp,” I said.

She came to the table with a tray. “Why not?”

“Because.”

“May I inquire because why?”

“Because I love summer at home. Because I want to do the market with Papa. Because I don’t want to miss hay making and apple picking. And because, for your information, I’m helpful and useful and maybe, just maybe I’m indispensable.”

“No one is indispensable,” she said, on her high horse. She set out our mugs and sat herself down. “Except May Hill. I’ll give her that.”

William was dealing.

“I like this,” my father said, looking at his hand.

“It’s four weeks,” my mother continuing her campaign.

“Good for it,” I said. I tried to appeal to my father. “You need me, Papa.”

“I always miss you when you’re not here,” he said somewhat absently. “But you should have your adventures.”

“I don’t need adventures.”

“You’re a teenager,” my mother observed. “What teenager wants to stay home with her parents? Honestly, Francie, sometimes I wonder if you are a freak of nature.”

“Freak of nature?” I repeated.

“Nellie,” my father said in his warning voice.

“Are you serious, Mother?”

“Forget it,” she said, as if that was an apology or explanation.

When she played her second card William said, “Hmmm. Why—why on earth would you do that?”

She hissed in his face. “Do you want to see my cards?”

“Easy, old girl, easy now.” He’d been talking that way to her, when necessary, for about a year.

She slapped her hand down, destroying the round. “This is what I’ve been dealt. See? Do you see? Or are you just going to pronounce me a stupid idiot?”

“Or freak,” I said. “Let’s say you’re a freak.”

“Simmer down there, Old Betsy,” William said to her. “Simmer down. It’s all right.”

“You did the only thing you could.” My father supporting his wife.

It was as if my mother hadn’t spoken to me in that way, as if her question, her wonderment about my freakishness, now existed only in my ear, everyone else excusing her.

When the dealer was again William, when he was shuffling the cards something untoward occurred. Possibly my mother had been hypnotized without our knowledge. Or she was having a stroke. Whatever the cause, she began to declaim on the most peculiar subject possible. “I remember,” she said slowly, “when we lived with Aunt Florence in the manor house. And we were trying to have a baby.”

“Oh, please,” I said. We all knew that when my mother was very young and first married she’d lived with the ancient aunt and my father, who at that point was also old, sixteen years Nellie’s senior; none of that was news.

“Florence,” she went on, “used to come into the bathroom to wash her teeth, her dentures. Do you remember, Jim?”

“Let’s play the game,” he said.

She went on, “We were in the bedroom that connects to that bathroom, downstairs, you know, the room that’s Sherwood and Dolly’s now.” She was studying her cards as she spoke. “It was so generous of such an old lady to allow me to live in her house with her nephew. Especially when she’d been living with you already for years, Jimmy, the two of you in your way like a married couple. So generous. I don’t know what I can do here, with this hand. Anyway, I used to have the feeling—it’s crazy, I admit it—but I used to think that the noise of her teeth in the glass, the clinking of those dentures as she brushed them next door, right by our headboard? Was the sound that sperm and egg make as they collide, as they become one.”

William was squinting at her, as if she were difficult to see and hear. I had literally just about thrown up in my mouth. If my father was going to say one thing that made them laugh I was going to ax murder the both of them. Fortunately he looked nearly as disgusted as we felt. He’d even closed his eyes against her for a second. “It’s getting late,” he noted.

Nonetheless, we arranged our cards, trump was called, we began to take the tricks. It occurred to me, it hit me that Nellie Lombard, as grotesque as her little story was, had been speaking in a riddle, and that the riddle was for me. When it came my turn to deal I couldn’t help it. I said, “Why did you bring that up?”

“Bring what up?” my father said.

“I’m talking to Nellie.”

“What?” she said.

“Are you trying to say that our birth was the result of the immaculate conception? Teeth plus egg, the clinking becomes William? Is that it? The big reveal?
You were not adopted, kids, but there’s something we need to tell you
?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said breezily. “I just remember feeling like I was having a baby by all the Lombards and for all the Lombards.”

“Hearts,” William called out, staring at me—
this isn’t happening!
“Hearts is trump.”

“I…don’t know…what! You are doing,” I said elocutionarily to my mother. I was going to remain at home all summer long to be the good, kind, strong daughter to my father, to be indispensable to him. I was going to do so even if I had been conceived to be a worker bee, a Lombard slave. I said, “I’m not going to Camp Four Rivers, in case you did not understand my earlier comment. I have no interest in the rustic cabins, the bonding, the stupid girls, the stupider boys, the competition for parts, and whatever else. I don’t care if Coral is signed up. Get it through your head that I am not going to Hayward.”

“It’s not like Frankie needs drama camp,” my brother pointed out.

My mother’s jaw was wonderfully clenched, the muscles twitching near her ears. I had perhaps never been so satisfied by anyone else’s suppressed rage, but then we Lombards, we freaks, were a tribe renowned for our decorum.

For the rest of the spring I did my best to maintain silence when in my mother’s company. Furthermore, when she signed me up for camp without my approval or knowledge, when I found out, I also said nothing. I went through the house and slammed all the doors, making the tour four times. The violence to the structure was, I hoped, permanent. Coral was very excited about going, and maybe secretly I was a little bit interested, but I did nothing to pack, that chore left for Madame Librarian. On the seven-hour drive north I said absolutely nothing to my mother. I did not say good-bye to her or even look at her when the time came to part. During the course of the one-month session, I did not write as much as a line on a postcard, even though we were supposed to correspond with our parents. I lied about my output to the beautiful, amazing counselor Nona Nelson, whom I loved even more than I’d loved Mrs. Kraselnik, something I had not known was possible. When my mother came to pick us up I didn’t say hello to her. I got in the car with Coral, and both of us cried all the way home, writing letters to our new friends and gazing at our jars of water that we’d collected from the lake.

When I got back I was further enraged to find that in my absence Philip had returned to the orchard, and that he was once again living upstairs with May Hill.

18.

Mail-Order Bride

O
h, by the way, Philip is spending the summer with us,” my mother said as we were pulling in our driveway. That’s how she told me. Before I could recover from the shock she said in a haughty way, “And in case you’re interested, Gloria is moving on.”