“Why not?”
While I knew those people were possible candidates a curious thing had been happening while he’d been repeating the questions. So that the next day, when Amanda came over after school and while she lay on the floor and made Sculpey animals, I typed up the interview. It wasn’t hard to do after all. Because May Hill was old and strange I wrote that she was born at the turn of the century. A twist of a doorknob, the turn of a century, May Hill walking over a threshold and entering a new time. Most of my story—for as it happened it was a story more than an interview—was about May Hill’s father being trapped in the silo, in his case the door closing behind him, no way out of that dark round chamber, the smooth walls, the sink of silage, the gasping as he suffocated. His time over and done. May Hill, a girl, knowing already that her face and her big body would never improve, was standing outside, down below, screaming. Which was why in general she talked so little now, having long ago exhausted herself while her father slowly perished.
That’s the answer I’d wanted from her when I’d asked the question in the interview about her father’s death. I would have liked to have been a real reporter. What were you doing while your father struggled to breathe? Who found him? Did you want to see what he looked like? And then right away, did your mother march to the barn and hang herself? Mrs. Kraselnik always instructed us to write using detail.
She was named May Hill, I wrote, because she was born on a cold winter day, and her parents wished her to know that spring would come. As I was writing, without realizing I began to want May Hill’s story to contain some bit of happiness. It probably wasn’t possible to bring a suitor into the assignment, Mr. Gilbert who kept exotic reptiles maybe a logical man friend? Or Melvin Pogorzelski, the big reader who was writing his novel in the back room of the library, day after day? No. But there could be someone living whom she felt devoted to. So I wrote another something that was perhaps not exactly nonfiction. I wrote that she had a picture in her parlor of a beautiful boy and that every day she closed her eyes and prayed to him, even though he wasn’t a god but a person. For extra credit I thought I might someday write a sequel, a tale about May Hill walking into the manor house for the first time as the orphan. That would be a scene to think about, everyone staring at May Hill, learning that she was going to be the new sister.
Without showing my work to Amanda I penned our names on top of the five-page project, mine in bright purple, hers in standard black, and the next day handed in our assignment to Mrs. Kraselnik.
8.
Meanwhile Stephen Lombard Halfway Moves in with Gloria
This was how we knew Stephen Lombard was a certifiable spy. A few summers before the Gloria romance he’d been visiting us. He had come upon William and me in the upper barn, and for some time, without our realizing it, he’d watched us. It was a cool rainy afternoon, no dust streaming in through the slatted boards, the stinging, chaffy heat at bay, the nocturnal creatures, the raccoons and mice and bats, burrowed into the bales or tucked up in the beams, far above us.
That day, first, Sherwood had appeared, as he sometimes did when we played in the barn, calling out Hallo, Francie, hallo, William, respectfully announcing himself. He’d taken a swing or two on the rope that hung from the ceiling, jumping onto the wooden seat from the high place, the endless long sweep through the air, Sherwood yipping. We couldn’t believe it, always we could hardly laugh, the rope or the beam, both, creaking, Sherwood sounding like a Native American. “That’s enough for an old man,” he’d say before he went off back to work. Or he might stop to tell us the gravity-defying stunts he’d done when he was a teenager. And we’d say, “Really?”
And he’d reply modestly, “Oh, we did all kinds of hijinks up here.”
Then he’d go away, and we’d begin. We could do hijinks, too. In our games I was the royalty and William the servant. He liked this arrangement because it was then his task to make my splendid life possible, or he could save me from the cruelty of my captors with a contraption he’d have to build. Where Sherwood’s inventions didn’t always work, William’s creations usually delivered water to me or helped me slide down from a high perch.