During the day for the most part we were happy he was staying on to pick apples. The harvest was a wild living thing that you were trying to tame while all the while it was dragging you behind, arms out, flailing, in the chase. But here was the miracle: Despite the chaos, the lack of planning, the bad feeling between Sherwood and my father, there was also an overriding unity of purpose, a reverence for the family history, a love for the soil within the property lines. Despite Sherwood’s and Jim’s temperamental differences the apples grew. They were harvested, thousands of bushels a year. Money, real currency, flowed from the customers’ pockets into the sellers’ wallets and thereafter to the secret cardboard boxes and elsewhere, and finally, when my mother could get around to it, into the bank. No one else had time to do the deposit. There were weeks in the autumn when there was money everywhere, envelopes hidden in the clean laundry, in the cat food bin, in the sock drawer, the visible reward stashed away. Sherwood, permanently on guard in the manor house, slept with the grandfather’s shotgun by his bed, and May Hill always put a chair against the basement door to trip up the robber, the clatter the big alarm.
On the golden-and-blue afternoons the driveway filled with customers, whole families piling out of cars, to taste and decide, to load up their trunks with bushels of apples and pears, with cider and honey and knitting worsted from the sheep and white packages of lamb chops and legs and shoulders. The Ukrainian women from the city liked the kidneys and tongues, and the Yugoslavs had to butcher the animals themselves, in the back barn. There were plenty of people who felt, the minute they started down our long driveway, that they were returning to a bygone time. “Don’t ever change a thing,” they cried. “Don’t fix that shed,” they beseeched. “The old surrey is down there, isn’t it, and the Model A? We love this orchard, you guys. It’s real, it’s special, it’s—” They sometimes got teary. “Tracie, Lizzy, get in here once and take a whiff of the apple barn, oh Lord, this smell!” Years before those customers had come with their parents or their grandparents, and they were returning with their children. It was nature itself, nature at every level that forced the Lombard operation to work. And if Stephen Lombard, with his great height and long arms, his strength and his stamina, was on the crew, we should not mind that he was in our kitchen far into the night. We shouldn’t care at all that he slept into the morning and that he was sometimes still picking apples in the dark. We should try to be happy he was home.
After Mrs. Kraselnik handed back the interview I put it somewhere or other. She had given Amanda and me ninety-three points. One hundred percent for creativity. Eighty, that shame, for not following the rubric. One hundred for grammar and vocabulary. Not long after that assignment I came downstairs, somewhat walking in my sleep, looking for Butterhead, the old cat, and there Stephen was, not with my mother and not with my father, not with Gloria, who was tucked up in her cottage. Stephen was sitting by himself, staring at the darkness outside even though he wasn’t technically living with us anymore. The light was on over the stove, one dim light, not enough to see even your own reflection in the glass, Stephen looking, then, at nothing. Because I was not quite awake the dreamscape of our kitchen with Stephen in it didn’t seem especially frightening.
I came to the table and began to talk. I told him our farm stories, we, the real children, with our own tales. I mentioned the autumn afternoon when Julia Child, Julia herself, a very old lady, a giant, taller than May Hill, in a tweed skirt and a cardigan, a pooch of a belly, got out of her car along with her friends, the queen of cuisine happening by the Lombard Orchard. Mary Frances Lombard bagged up three pounds of Wealthy apples for her, no charge, a variety from the chef’s youth, an apple that made her raise her famous voice in exaltation. I was the only person in my class who knew Julia Child, I boasted. I said again that she was a giant.
Stephen opened his hand, a gray wafer in his palm. “What’s that?” I said.
“A travel alarm clock.”
“You going somewhere?”
“Never know.”
“Because you’re a spy?”
“Everyone really thinks that, don’t they?”
I must have come fully awake then, because I was surprised to find myself in the semi-darkness looking at Stephen’s chiseled handsome face. And more surprising, excitement was blooming in my chest.
“If I was a spy,” he said, holding between his thumb and index finger what looked like a dime, “don’t you think I’d be able to figure out how to put a battery in my clock?”
“That depends.”
“It does?”
“You could maybe truly know how to insert it, but you’re pretending to be clumsy. For your cover.”
“Ah ha,” he said. “You are very clever.”
“Are you afraid, sometimes, in your job?”
I think he was looking at me in his hard, keen way, although I couldn’t be sure. “Yes, very frightened,” he said, “but not for the reasons you imagine.”
“Well,” I said importantly, “maybe a lot of jobs are like apple picking. You could fall and kill yourself but mostly you don’t do that, and instead, you’re working hard all day long and sometimes it is very boring.” I had heard one of the lady apple pickers speaking about the harvest in exactly those terms.
“But guess what?” Stephen said conspiratorially.
“What?”
“When Sherwood shows up, it’s not at all boring because he’s telling you the cell phones of the future will play movies, TV shows, anything you want to see.”
Stephen was speaking about his own brother, Stephen clearly on our side in the future war.
“And,” I said, “Sherwood’s also building a telescope out of aluminum foil, old storm windows, a good pair of binoculars, a rearview mirror, and a cheesecloth.”
Stephen rewarded me with laughter. “Don’t forget,” he said, “it also turns inside out to examine your liver and kidneys.”
“Reversible,” I said.