The Excellent Lombards (9 page)

The hall ended at the living room, the two long windows looking out over the north orchard. If everything that May Hill owned was shabby, all of her belongings were nonetheless arranged neatly. Underfoot was a thick old braided rug of many dark colors, and there was a blond, scratched-up coffee table, and a television on a rickety cart, and shelves sagging under the weight of books, and a corduroy sofa mostly covered up with a diamond-patterned orange-and-green afghan. It was hard to think that May Hill herself had been the crochet artist. The place smelled of coffee, which seemed funny. And apples, there was the fragrance of applesauce on the stove. It was maybe a home, that is, May Hill’s home, where for some reason—neither of us could think it through—we had happened to find ourselves.

There was surprisingly nothing all that unusual in the living room unless you counted the eight card tables along the wall. Who owned that many card tables? They were set end-to-end, and they were covered with stacks of books bound in worn leather, and photographs in plastic sleeves, and a dagger, it looked like, and teaspoons, and a mink, the whole stuffed animal complete with toenails and the raisin nose and bright glass eyes. There were fragile-looking pieces of paper every inch filled up with faint cursive, and yellowed lace, and ivory kid gloves that a lady with slender fingers would have worn, and a pair of boots that buttoned up, to match. Each object was displayed as if the place were a museum.

“Sit down, Mary Frances,” she said. Her indoor voice was husky but also soft. She had to clear her throat. “And Amanda,” she added. She pointed at the folding chairs that clearly had been put in place for the interview. My heart was still racing but I was able to think two things: She remembered our names, and mine especially because I’d been named for Mary Frances Lombard, a special great-aunt, a semi-famous violinist. A woman who, despite the name, was not a Catholic, as I also was not, something I occasionally had to say to adult acquaintances. At any rate, May Hill had given us enough thought to keep track of us, which was either good or bad. And number two: William was downstairs. We could always leap up and make a dash for it back to safety, if, that is, we could figure out how to open the gate.

“Now then,” Aunt May Hill said. She rubbed her hands together, signaling readiness. Her fingers would not have fit into the lady’s gloves, but they were surprisingly thin. It seemed, even though it wasn’t true, that her lips, dry but fulsome, were for just a second turned up into something nearly like a smile. She appeared to be taller in her house and because she wasn’t wearing a hat or bandanna, an article that was always a part of her outside apparel, I could see her gray hair, which—and this was maybe the very strangest thing—was pulled back into a ponytail. May Hill with a little ponytail? I looked at Amanda, who was staring rudely at the beefy eyebrows. There was the broad, bony front, May Hill flat-chested, May Hill thin in some parts but she had a thick middle, her jeans zipping up snugly over the swell of the stomach, those jeans snapping halfway up her rib cage. You didn’t want to think about that middle part of her, or her wide, flat bottom. Gloria naturally should find someone to love but you’d never, ever think so about Aunt May Hill. My father always said she wasn’t a misfit, that no one should ever have called her by that cruel name. Whatever she was, I might tell him, she had a ponytail.

She walked back and forth, inspecting her showcase items, touching some of the books, wondering, it seemed, where to start. Although we had made a list of questions according to Mrs. Kraselnik’s specifications we didn’t remember any of them, nor did we recall that the instructions were in my pocket, or that I had a notepad and pen in my hand.

From the far table she picked up a small clothbound book. “The diary,” she murmured, “of Elizabeth Morrow Lombard.” She smoothed the first page before she looked at us. “Do you know who that is?”

We did not. We knew nothing.

She stood blinking, considering how to explain any of her card tables to people such as us. “Elizabeth was the cousin of your great-great-great-grandmother,” she said slowly, “born in 1801 in New Hampshire.” May Hill didn’t have a lisp exactly, but there was a slushiness when she hit an
s
or a
th
, which no one had ever mentioned. She lifted a pair of glasses that hung around her neck by a shoelace, set them on her nose, and began to read so quietly we had to sit forward.

I cannot recall a more dreary June, the dampness will be the death of us. Father has taken the two ponies off to Mr. Harding in hopes of a fair trade for a pair of oxen. I am desolate without Mother, and Cudworth is too sick to be of any use.

First of all, Cudworth? And second, was it possible that in real life May Hill was reading to us? Again, I couldn’t think how such a thing had happened. As she read on about Elizabeth’s day scrubbing the kettle and weeding the turnips and airing the bedding, you might have thought May Hill was in the middle of a murder mystery. She was glued to the page, and her voice, so quiet at first, was getting louder. Her energy made me feel sick once more, as if somehow my stomach had become the eardrum, the words going straight to that sensitive place, and also, it was as if her excitement was something sad. Amanda was slouching in her chair and swinging her legs. It almost seemed—almost—that May Hill was nothing but a regular old lady. Someone pitiful who lived alone, who had nothing to care about but the diary of a pioneer. What if she had brought out the card tables in order to make the displays just for us? That notion was a heavy sinking thing, something I didn’t want, something I was trying to forget—but wait! Suddenly there was an Indian in Elizabeth Lombard’s house. An old-fashioned redskin in a loincloth. Amanda stopped the swinging. I sat up straight. “
The smell was terrible
,” May Hill was reading. “
He looked weak, his chest frail, but his eyes were blazing at me with hatred.
” There followed three sentences in which Elizabeth Lombard snatched an ax and brained that savage.

We both covered our mouths. May Hill looked up and that time I was sure of it, certain she was smiling at me. It wasn’t a large goofy grin or a pretty showing of teeth, but instead a smile of satisfaction, of having expertly accomplished a task. Her blue eyes, which were ordinarily cast down, were wide, those eyes asking the question,
What do you think of that!

“
The bleeding on Mother’s braided rug was something awful
,” she read, “
and I could not help but think, with the swiftness of the death, and what I could see was an easy acquiescence, that he had been ill, that he’d been feverish.
”

I lifted my feet from the rug because if it was the very same rug that had absorbed the Native American’s blood, then, as we’d been taught in school, you should not ever touch someone else’s bodily fluids, wet or dry, because of AIDS.

It had begun to rain in New Hampshire in 1820, the brother, Cudworth, had woken up with the commotion, and the two of them dragged the corpse to the burning pile and set it on fire. “
When Father came home he commended me for my bravery, but he was sorry that I had had to do the work of a man. I was not sorry to have killed a savage because there is no good savage alive, and I did feel proud even as I prayed to our Lord to forgive me, and to show me mercy at the final judgment.
”

May Hill looked up once more in that new way of hers, May Hill serenely triumphant. Amanda was scratching her knee. “Oh,” I managed to say. William was downstairs, I said to myself. I could stomp on the floor if I had to. And scream. We might have moved on to another artifact but the diary reading continued. In Elizabeth’s life there was a trip to market, more rain, a visit from a traveling preacher, rain again, the new ox hurt its foot, two rabbits were killed for dinner. No further mention of the ax or the butchery, no mention of removing the stain from the rug. I kept waiting for the subject to resurface but after a while it began to seem as if it, the murder, was a secret that May Hill had told us. Something you’d say only once. Amanda and I continued to forget that we were supposed to ask our subject questions. But even if we’d remembered our assignment May Hill gave us no opportunity to butt in. Where before in our whole long lives she had rarely spoken a few words in our presence, where we had imagined that she was willfully mute or maybe even a little brain-damaged, now we suddenly worried that she might never stop reading the diary.

When at last she finally did set it down even so she went on talking. She moved from table to table, every object, every story holding for her equal excitement. The relative who dug up bodies in the cemetery in order to study anatomy just as captivating as the price of corn in 1835. Moses Lombard’s death in the Civil War by saber no more astonishing than the number of beavers in the marsh in 1909. The presentation to us of the great etc. grandmother’s baby curl, a silky blond loop, made me again feel unwell, Elizabeth Morrow Lombard, I thought, perhaps responsible for that curl, the baby murdered and burned. No, that wasn’t right. It couldn’t be. But the curl, all by itself, in a ribbon—I wanted to clutch my throat. May Hill went on about the Lombard fanning mill factory, the purchase of the business by J. I. Case, the establishment of the dairy farm, the run for the state assembly by Thaddeus Lombard.

Amanda by then was as close as you can get to lying down on a chair, her eyelids drooping. I kicked her just the once. It was hard to tell how much time had passed. I myself might have eventually fallen asleep if I hadn’t noticed a photograph in a plain black frame on a bookshelf on the other side of the room. May Hill was picking up a small silver-handled pistol, the size of a cap gun, when I cried out, “Who is that?”

It was the only photograph from modern times in the entire place, at least as far as I could see. No solemn ancestor with muttonchops, no girl with a gigantic bow in her ringlets and a lacy white dress, but rather a clean-shaven boy, older than William, a high school student, probably.

May Hill looked startled, as if she’d been intending to take a shot with that little pistol but now she had to answer my question. I’d covered my mouth again, feeling shame because as my mother often reminded me, I was impetuous. She was forever telling me I needed to learn self-control. What had I done but forgotten to exercise it in a place where I should have been supremely careful. Nonetheless, May Hill replied. She said, “That’s my nephew.”

He had light curly hair and an eager smile, and straight teeth, and a smile in his eyes, too, a twinkle, you might even say. What was his name? Where did he live? And why did May Hill, who didn’t like children or people, why in her living room did she have a large framed color photo of someone in whom she should have no interest? She set the pistol down. “Do you have any gwahm cwackhuhs?” Amanda asked.

All at once May Hill and I were on the same exact side, both of us stunned by the question.

“I eat them like I’m a beavuh.” Amanda made as if to put a cracker to her lips and gnaw at it. The girl with the monstrous IQ was sometimes the stupidest little baby, and it must have been from nerves, or let’s say a wish to elevate the conversation that I blurted out a legitimate interview question—although it was not at all the question I’d wished to ask. I said, “How did your father die in the silo?”

I knew the technical answer, knew that silage produces gases that are colorless and can kill farmers quickly, or a grown man can die in his sleep hours later if he’s breathed too much of one gas or another. May Hill’s big brow wrinkled. Her mouth was slightly open, no trace of the smile. It was at that moment when William called up the back stairs. “Excuse me? Um, Aunt, Aunt May Hill? Frankie? Excuse me.”

We had been in the living room well past the scheduled hour and my brother had come to tell me it was time for our piano lessons. Additionally, he no doubt wanted to see what he could of the long hall with scuffed flooring, the walnut doors, the yellow light from the kitchen. The place I had been brave enough to enter. Without thanking her, without doing more than mumbling good-bye, Amanda and I sprang from the chairs and ran to the gate, which William was holding open for us, we tore past him, flew to the bottom of the stairs, safe at last in Dolly’s kitchen. We were out of breath, too dazed to laugh or cry or say anything at all.

“Did you girls get what you needed?” Dolly said.

The interview! No! We’d gotten nothing, not so much as a word on my pad, not even a little tiny period. We were going to Fail, something we had not ever imagined possible. But even worse, Mrs. Kraselnik would suffer disappointment. Her two star pupils, those marvels of scholarship, not living up to her expectations, not fulfilling our promise. She’d be shattered. “I think so?” I said to Dolly.

There was my piano lesson to get through, that weekly tragedy. And then dinner, in which my parents also asked me about the interview. My mother wanted to know if we’d gotten good information, and my father said that May Hill must have been pleased to show us her stash. I nodded. All I could think of was the bloodstained rug and the photograph of the nephew. I might have told them about Elizabeth Morrow Lombard and the Indian but more and more that seemed to me May Hill’s secret, something I shouldn’t repeat. There’d been the half smile on her face when she’d bestowed her treasure upon us, a piece of history we hadn’t asked for, a story we didn’t want. For some reason I said that May Hill had given us graham crackers and my mother said, “Wasn’t that nice of her!”

It wasn’t until later in our room, the door shut, the two of us finally alone, that William was able to ask me about the trip to the upstairs. I admitted it, admitted that we hadn’t been able to ask May Hill even one question from our list. He was on the top bunk reading Tintin. “What do you mean?” he said.