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?”