“You made that up. That’s your own stupid fairy tale.” He pinched me on my arm. William almost never hurt me, and although I could not have put words to it I understood, I think, that he was pinching me because of Gloria’s upset. Still, it was unjust. I was about to screech when a Gloria blast came from the house, a cry out of proportion to my injury. William and I looked at each other and shut up. Maybe I was mistaken about our fright in the woods but it didn’t matter because I would always believe that while we were lost William told me stories, and also, with or without stories, we would never be as lost as Gloria seemed to be in her own cottage.
After some time Dolly came along the path from the manor house, the news apparently having traveled. It wasn’t that she didn’t see us, right there on the porch, but that we didn’t concern her. She didn’t say hello. Her approach to the door was cautious, her voice at the screen tentative. “Yoo-hoo? Nellie? Are you there?”
My mother came clonking down the stairs from Gloria’s bedroom. She let Dolly in, instructing us to go to the library and make sure Hildegard was all right. We again felt important as if, if Hildegard wasn’t all right, looking after her own children and the circulation desk, we would manage the library ourselves.
Later we learned that my mother and Dolly were trying to settle Gloria and at the same time figure out how to get her committed; her case seemed that acute. It was my father who ended up staying in the cottage for three days and three nights before Gloria’s mother could come to care for her. He had to stay with her because she refused to come to our house, his camping there the last resort. The work of the orchard was suspended for him, no way to get those spring days back, a long falling-behind. Gloria then went away for two months, back to her hometown in Colorado, two entire months when the Lombard Orchard needed her for grafting and planting, mowing and lambing.
When the excitement was over my mother asked my father, “Why did you save Stephen? Why didn’t you let him figure out how to get out of his own mess? You betrayed Gloria by doing the rescue, you know.”
“It wasn’t possible to stand by and do nothing,” he said.
“No, I suppose not.” She went behind him and chop-chopped his shoulders the way he liked. “They’d probably still be in a standoff on the cottage porch if you hadn’t shown up.”
Although by then William and I knew well enough that we couldn’t marry each other, in those days we were even more determined to live together in our house and sleep in our bunk beds forever. I know this because the night of the incident I said, “I’m always living here.” William’s soft bristly hair first appeared over the side of the top bunk, his forehead next, his eyes, and his skinny arm, which he extended to me. I reached for his hand. He was not only saying he was sorry about the pinch, he was making his promise.
Middle
12.
The New Hero
The first time I saw Philip Lombard it was spring vacation, Amanda, William, my father, and I in the back shed, the four of us concerned with the lambing. This took place in the time of the four–five split. Philip’s father was May Hill’s older brother. He’d been in college when his parents died, via the silo accident and then the mother hanging herself. An older boy, therefore no need to be adopted by Sherwood’s family. That man and his son were visiting, something that we’d learned from Dolly was going to take place. Philip, ah ha, May Hill’s nephew, the boy in the photograph. The pair, father and son, were going to sleep in one or two of the closed-up rooms in May Hill’s house, May Hill receiving visitors, an event we couldn’t remember ever happening before. Philip himself was now in college, we’d been told, in Portland, Oregon, and had grown up in Seattle. That was the extent of our knowledge about the poster boy, the living person among May Hill’s historical pantheon.
Out in the sheep shed, the three of us underaged veterinarians were used to examining the ewes’ long pink vulvas, watching for a bloody drip, the first sign of impending birth, without suffering any embarrassment. We also didn’t bat an eye at the new mothers lying in the maternity stall leisurely chewing their cuds, their lambs sleeping nearby, the pink balloons of bag and fleshy tit sometimes promiscuously exposed. On that day Old Speckle Face, the problem ewe, as usual had done her yearly prolapsing stunt, the enormous blister, the veiny globe that was her birth canal dangling from her behind. We did not allow my father to ship her even though she was a liability, and anyway we knew he loved her, too, and wouldn’t have done such a thing. William straddled her and I held her head. Amanda’s job was to hand my father the tools while he tackled the back end. It took him a while to tenderly tuck the gigantic bubble in, and quickly he then inserted a beer bottle up into that delicate place—a technique that often worked and kept the real vet out of the picture. My father was concluding the procedure when a person wearing a red stocking cap, green Wellingtons, and a red-and-white-checked flannel shirt appeared in the doorway. First of all, his clothes seemed like a costume, attire you’d imagine you should wear for The Farm. The gigantic Christmas elf blocked out the sun. “Hey there,” he said.