There was comfort of a kind, waking up to the groaning sprayer engine, even as my father in his orange waterproofs and his gas mask and goggles might have looked menacing to a stranger, driving up and down the aisles of the orchard, at the painstaking, critical task of mass genocide on pests that could destroy the crop.
But also I wasn’t comforted when my father sprayed, and I did have the habit now and again of not going to school when it was his turn in the saddle, or if it was vacation I’d stay in bed. It was essential to hold tight to my bunk while he drove through the orchard, important to keep track of him. That is, it was my vigilance that maybe protected him. The especially murderous point was mixing the materials in the sprayer tank, because if even a drop of insecticide in concentrated form made contact with your skin, it would burn a hole through you. From my bed I chanted, Careful, careful, careful, careful, careful. If the sprayer was up and running everything was fine, but sometimes it would stop, an abrupt quiet. Are you hurt? Did you break down? Are you DEAD? I’d have to wait for the sound of his galoshes, the jangly tread as he came through the orchard, his mask resting on his head. “Screwdriver’s not in the tractor toolbox,” he’d call up to my window. Implicating either himself or Sherwood for not returning it to its proper place, but probably Sherwood had been the careless one. William and I had not once, not ever, considering going into the locked spray room where the barrels and bags of poison were stored, that shut door a barrier we had no wish to go beyond. No one in his right mind would go in there, which was why the disaster with the Muellenbach boys wasn’t exactly a surprise.
The second time we saw Philip just happened to be on that afternoon when Dolly’s nephews were hanging around—so many ragtag cousins at large at once. The short history of the Muellenbach boys: Dolly had somehow snagged Sherwood and married him but her sisters had not been so lucky. Melody, for instance, was a mother of four who could not keep a husband for more than a few years at most. She’d had the children, each with a different man, each father gruffer and larger than the last, and also, she chain-smoked, she herself was obese, and there was some problem about her taking prescription painkillers, another hazard we’d learned about in D.A.R.E. Her oldest daughter had had a couple of babies before she was seventeen, again different dads for each. The two mothers and the five boys, ages three through thirteen, lived together in an apartment forty miles away. And some or all of those boys used to come to the orchard now and again for a day with Uncle Sherwood. It was funny that he couldn’t convince his own children to perform much farm labor but the Muellenbach boys were always running after Sherwood, dedicating themselves to him, hanging on his arms, climbing him as if he were a pole. William and I worried about the sheer number of those boys—like an entire nation of Chinese males in that two-bedroom apartment. Because of their romantic association with the farm surely they’d want to be part of the operation when they got older.
It was three or four days after Philip had arrived for his visit that my father was in the back barn trying to get the space ready for the shearer. We were aware of Dolly calling the Muellenbach boys in for lunch, for us the promise of quiet while they gobbled up their food. My father was slapping together pens that would be holding areas for the ewes, and clearing a corner to store the fleeces. Sherwood was there, too, working on a contraption that would lift hay bales off their stack in the barn, set them on a roller, and slide them down into the feeder, one of the many rattling things he’d been messing with for years. He had a leather carpenter’s apron around his waist, a level in hand, and a pencil above his ear, as if in his heart of hearts he thought he was a builder. It’s possible he hadn’t realized that the Muellenbach boys had arrived. My father made the mistake of wondering out loud, in passing, if Philip would like to help with the grafting of apple trees, a springtime task.
Sherwood set his socket wrench down. “What business is it of yours?” he said to my father.
“Business?” my father innocently wondered.
“You think Philip is your worker?”
“I—don’t think he’s anyone’s worker. I was only asking if you thought—”
“Always trying to run everyone’s lives. That’s what you do.”
My father wasn’t prepared for the biannual argument. It was still early in the spring. For a few seconds he did nothing but stand, holding the wooden gate he’d been about to tie to the makeshift fence. “I run no one’s life,” he said. “That I’m aware of. It would be convenient if I could. It would be great to run a life or two.”