The Excellent Lombards (21 page)

“No, thank you,” I said.

“You don’t like Honey Crisp?” Tommy said. “That what you’re telling me, young lady?”

“I prefer the heirloom varieties.”

“I see! I see!” He tried not to laugh some more.

I didn’t care that I sounded prissy. Tommy Sykes thought an apple with no real distinction was going to make his fortune—so let him.

The men walked on amiably and shook hands heartily at our car. As if I were a small child my father had to remind me to say good-bye to Tommy. “Bye,” I obeyed, and climbed into the car.

After some time on the ride home he said, “You’re quiet today, Marlene.”

It was disturbing, how often May Hill came into my head. Just then I’d been thinking how the one thing Tommy didn’t have was a May Hill. Even if I’d always forevermore be scared to death of her, even as I carried the Thing That Had Happened Years Ago as if it were a black stone around my neck, still I knew to be grateful for her machinery expertise. I said to my father, “What do you think would happen if a robber got up into May Hill’s house?”

My father never laughed at my questions. He said, “Well, let’s see. First, tell me—how would the robber get in?”

“Say he knew everyone was out working, and he slipped in to steal the money. Or—maybe just to look around.”

“A robber in daylight?”

“Yes. So May Hill wouldn’t have put the chair by the basement door.”

“Ah,” my father said.

“The robber,” I went on, “would start looking at—at everything but then, then, he’d realize that she was climbing up the stairs.” My heart was beating hard as I told this fictional although nearly true-life tale.

“May Hill coming upon a thief,” my father considered.

“What would she do?”

“I wouldn’t want to be the robber. Would you?”

“No,” I whispered. My voice was failing me. “Would she—would she knock him out? Would she injure him or—?”

“Hmmm,” he said. We were at a stop sign. He turned to look at me. I think it’s fair to say that if I had ever been in doubt that he loved me, which I hadn’t, but if I had, I would have known then that in fact he loved me maybe better than anyone. He didn’t drive on. We were at a standstill. He was smiling at me, a small, lopsided smile, and yet it was with his whole self. All the love in the world—it was in our car. “I imagine,” he said, “I bet she’d lock him up. The robber. Some of those doors have locks, as I recall. That would be punishment, don’t you guess, to be held just for a while, and to wonder how May Hill would deal with you?”

I nodded. I couldn’t look at him.

“Plenty of punishment,” he said, before he drove on down the road, saying he thought the Honey Crisp was probably a better apple than we had given it credit for.

I muttered, “Okay.”

“Give it a chance, Marlene,” he instructed.

Later in the summer I went with my father to a new farmers market that had been launched in a town six miles away. It was in addition to Sherwood’s market in Milwaukee and the market my father went to in Madison where, along with a crew of five others, we frantically did commerce from first light until noon. This new market, however, was for my father and it was for me.

I was happy for just about the entire vacation because Amanda went to three different band camps and I didn’t have to consider not playing with her, and also Coral was at horse camp and then at her family lake house in Michigan. It seemed that I had grown up enough not to need those girlhood companions, grown up enough to have consuming interests and obligations, even. I wasn’t at all the slightest bit lonely. Ten hours a week I worked at the library, a real paying job cleaning DVDs and doing the precision job of shelving. I didn’t get money for my orchard work, which was fine because I knew that when Sherwood had been a boy he hadn’t gotten paid, either. If you belonged to the work there was no reason to get money from it.

Best of all, every Friday, on our market day, my father and I loaded up the van with apple boxes, a basket of knitting worsted, the honeycomb display, the scale, the bundle of bags, the white tent, the cottage cheese container of change, and my carefully printed signs. Along the barricaded street opposite City Hall we made a line of stalls: the Lombard apple girl and man, the bread lady, the cheese lady, the sweet corn man, the plant people, the garlic and onion couple, the popcorn matron, the duck egg woman, the beef and pork guy, and at the opposite end, another apple vender, the Sykes Orchard representative. Tommy sent an employee to work the market who had the title
Sykes Orchard Manager
. He was twenty-three years old and his name was Gideon.

Like every other facet of the Sykes operation the hiring of Gideon, a dedicated, strong young person, was a genius business move by the gentleman farmer. Gideon, which means “Feller of Trees.” He had studied ag science for two years at the university before he’d dropped out to live his dream. In addition to his other gifts he was disciplined about waking at dawn, he was unsentimental about nature, and he knew chemistry. As much as Tommy’s grown children may have wanted to keep the farm in the family they had no interest in running it or even in living nearby. The understanding was that Gideon would make a life on the orchard, that he would not own the property but when Tommy eventually retired he would be the person in charge.

In July, at our first market, I wandered down to Gideon’s stand. I stood looking at his red blushy apples, varieties that were bigger than ours and shinier. “Did you spray for maggot flies this week?” I asked him.

He looked startled, I suppose because most people didn’t begin a conversation or an acquaintance with that question.

“Yep,” he said, “and for codling moth.”

“We did, too,” I said importantly. I said, “We’re trying that new disruption technology, the CM Flex.”

Maybe he laughed; it’s possible he was chuckling. “Good stuff.” He nodded. “It’s pretty effective.”

“I know it.”

Gideon was undeniably cute even though he was old, a man hardly taller than William, a pixie with soft-looking brown hair and pale-blue eyes. All at once I was aware of my knobby knees, my skinny legs, my shorts, my plain yellow T-shirt, my drab hair, my ragged fingernails. I had occasionally wondered what it would be like to kiss a boy and even though he was old, as I said, you couldn’t ignore Gideon’s upper lip, which had a freckle smack in the center, right below the philtrum. The other thing in addition to kissing, the thing I’d learned that was very different from the business of the ram and ewe, the tomcat and pussycat, the thing that President Bill Clinton and his intern had taught us—I had blocked that from my mind. Kissing Gideon’s freckle, the idea of it, made me feel sick enough. He was about to say something else to me when a woman butted in on us, blaring her righteous question: “ARE YOU ORGANIC?”

My new acquaintance began to explain the Sykes Orchard spray program, the Integrated Pest Management, a system designed to keep chemical applications to a minimum, the farmer spraying in relation to the pests’ life cycles. We used IPM, too, and like Tommy were in close contact with the university entomologists, running trials for research, trying to wean ourselves away from pesticides where possible. I had been at market before when those mothers assaulted us.
The Crones Against Cluster Cancers.
That’s what William called them. They were women who never wanted to know the hard science of your practice. They weren’t interested in parts per billion or the rate of breakdown or the lab results of residue, statistics that, if they’d just listen, would lower their blood pressure and maybe make them reasonable. Those mothers only wished us to know that we were the individuals poisoning their children and Gaia.

I said two things in front of Gideon just then. I said to the lady, “Do you like biting into a worm when you eat an apple?”

“I beg your pardon,” she said to me.

To the pork and beef guy right next door I asked, “How do your animals fare after their surgeries?” Really, that’s the kind of inane question those women were likely to ask.

Gideon stopped talking. His pale eyes seemed to spin. He said to the mother, “You should check out the Lombard Orchard. I think you’ll like their program and their apples better.”

The woman walked away. Gideon burst out laughing. He said, “When you’re older do you think you might consider marrying me?” He laughed again. “You are hysterical.”

His question made me run as fast as I possibly could back to our own stand. I got in the van that was parked by our stall and locked the doors. My first proposal of marriage, my very first proposal—Gideon, I thought, had maybe, in a certain way, meant it. Which made me feel dizzy and warm and pleased and distressed all at once—that freckle on his lip, for one thing.

What did it take to fall in love? That was a ridiculous question to have to ask when I’d seen Gloria topple over and when I myself had been in love with Mrs. Kraselnik. That is to say, you didn’t ask for it, you didn’t plan, but the spell was cast upon you anyway. Abracadabra: swoon.

Or maybe Gideon Hup and Mary Frances Lombard would have an arranged marriage, our union on the order of the House of Hanover and the Stewarts commingling. My father thought very highly of Gideon. And if William was too dreamy to farm, if he was going to be a
Posse
player for the rest of his life, then I’d have to make do with Gideon. We at the Lombard Orchard would steal Tommy Sykes’s manager, Tommy’s hope, steal him away in a blaze of duty to our enterprise, Gideon and me, with our expertise and enthusiasm impressing Sherwood and even May Hill. William would realize too late that what he’d wanted after all wasn’t for the having.

And anyway if you were Gideon, would you rather have a perfected operation to rule, one that you would never own? Or would you rather, by marriage, possess the property, a place that, yes, was a little bit of a catastrophe, but a place that was crying out for your organizational skills and your brawn, a place where the institutional knowledge meant the apples were truly delicious? Of course he would choose the Lombard Orchard, saying
I do
to Mary Frances and her entire family.

So in that period I supposed, one way or another, that my future was fairly secure. I always avoided Gideon at the market but I considered him slantwise; in the abstract and from a distance he was my betrothed. In my own room at night all alone I’d think haughtily to William,
Gideon and I will do thus and such
, outlining all the orchard improvements we would make. I did that even though in my mind Gideon was like an Amish doll with no face. Still, I was the only middle schooler that I knew of who had a firm proposal of marriage, no small accomplishment.

Late

17.

In Which We Play Euchre

M
any events, some that were logical, and some that were not, took place in the next few years. In my school career I was in several plays and was for a time in love with Mr. Dronzek, the lord of drama who taught at both the middle and high schools. Mrs. Kraselnik remained the best teacher I was sure I’d ever have but she was not long for our particular world. She and the doctor got divorced when I was in seventh grade and they both moved away from the dream house. Brianna probably was responsible for all their unhappiness, but as with so many things, that was my secret. My father continued serving on the commission to study farmland preservation. Sherwood built an apple sorter that for the most part worked, a machine that incorporated Adam’s and Amanda’s baby blankets as cushioning for the fruit. At the library Nellie Lombard as always coerced young people to read quality literature and charmed babies to a stupor with lap-sit story time. We outgrew Cart Drill and without us it fizzled. Once William got to high school he scored many awards, including a cash prize for his robot up in Madison. No one told him he shouldn’t win.

It was after the four–five split that Amanda and I had stopped spending so much time together, depending on each other only when no one else was available. After the Geography Bee I had briefly assumed that our association was over but when she lost at the county level we were equal in our way again. There was no feud that divided us, no concrete before and after. It was funnily enough geography that changed our habits. Once I was in sixth grade we were in different buildings, the universe of the middle school a block away from the elementary school. Also, she had become interested in chess and Russia, her goal to be a diplomat and grandmaster stationed in Moscow. Whereas Coral and I, and our friend Jay, were busy writing plays together and learning lines for Mr. Dronzek’s productions, and going to vintage clothing shops in the city with Mrs. LeClaire, Coral’s mother. Because Coral had a tremendous singing voice and often spoke in a British accent, because of her general theatricality, my father referred to her as Sarah Bernhardt. To her face he’d say “How are you, Say-rah?” and “Have a good show, Say-rah,” which she pretended to be outraged by, calling my father Slim. “’Ey, Slim,” she’d say in her Cockney accent. It was extremely hard to stomach, their cornball. My mother sometimes called him Slim, too, which also was not terribly funny.

Although I was interested in the theater, at the end of eighth grade, in that summer, it was against my will that I went to drama camp. My mother forced me to do so, my mother starting The Four Rivers Camp Warfare.