In those months I most often played with Amanda, Gloria sometimes taking us to swim in a nearby lake, Gloria also making do without William. She had returned to us in June, right away taking up her Gloria things, gardening and knitting and working and talking about apples so that we soon forgot she’d ever had to go to Colorado. At the end of summer, William did without question come with us when we went to The Hills, we called it, the annual outing of the Lombards, the spree that took place in the briefest pause between the early apples and the beginning of the Macintosh harvest. Amanda and Adam, Frankie and William got in the back of the Ford pickup, Sherwood and my father in the dented cab, and over the path through the woods we shrieked when we bounced, and otherwise Amanda and I sang, bursting our lungs, William and Adam shouting at nothing, at the world passing. The loggers from the Forest Management Program had made a road right through to The Hills, which abutted our land and was owned by a gravel company, the mining far off in the future. Each grassy hill had been formed by the glacier in the last Ice Age, during the Pleistocene, Sherwood explained, the scooped-out valley a natural amphitheater.
Dolly and my mother met us at the highest peak, The Top Of The Earth, with the picnic baskets. Before lunch Sherwood produced his best invention: waxed cardboard boxes pulled apart with a little curl on the end, that was it, the sleds so simple. He always went down the hill a few times in order to pave the way, so that by our turn the trip to the bottom, with a great push, was as slick as a luge run, we were sure of it, holding tight to the lip of our cardboards, screaming our joyful fright. Sherwood and my father went down, too, behaving just as they must have when they were cousins together, when they were the boys of summer. In those hours it was as if the Lombard partnership had not yet occurred. My mother and Dolly watched from under the lone burr oak at The Top Of The Earth, Dolly relaying the antics of her siblings, twelve of them, never a dull moment in the Muellenbach clan. Nellie lay on her side with her elbow crooked to support her head and laughed and laughed.
I was at the bottom of the hill, tumbling off my cardboard, looking up at the mothers when it struck me that they never went to war. We all knew that it was fine for the fathers to blow up, we expected their biannual arguments, but the mothers of course would never speak harshly to one another, never show their true colors. In our kitchen Nellie Lombard might say fond, somewhat disparaging things about Dolly, or make jokes about her endless talking, but Dolly would never know about my mother’s unkindness. I sat down at the bottom of the hill with those thoughts that seemed pleasant, the idea of the mothers all of a sudden baring their fangs and shouting. Such a scene could be enjoyable and not at all frightening because I knew it would never happen. When I climbed back up the hill they were naturally still laughing.
That summer we were coming home along the path in the woods when who should we see but Gloria and a friend she’d made from her knitting club, two women in wide-brimmed straw hats, both in long-sleeved shirts and loose trousers. They looked like old-fashioned ladies, women who might find just the place to set up their easels to glorify the scene. When we stopped for them it was Gloria who told us the news. “The princess,” she said, “has been in a terrible, terrible car accident.”
“Princess Diana,” the friend clarified.
We hung over the side of the truck while Gloria told the story of the princess and her boyfriend tearing around Paris, how the princess had left her children and her country to take her own vacation with the foreigner. We all rode quietly after that, a princess who might die, Gloria so shaken she could not say more after the critical details. When we got back to the farm we learned that May Hill had gotten the tractor stuck in the thick mud by the goat shed, May Hill, who never made mistakes, and not only that, the sheep had found an opening in the fence, the entire flock not ambling but galloping up into the east orchard, lambs and mothers, heading into the great wide open. We couldn’t leave the farm for even three hours without the tractor getting stuck, the sheep escaping their yard, and a princess suffering an accident.
It was the next spring when my mother took Bert and William to a hotel outside Washington, DC, for the First Annual Posse Convention. The boys were unbearably excited to meet the actual players on their teams, which meant they said less than usual in our company, the two of them scraping along the driveway from the bus in their gangbanger pants, bottled up with their great secret life and times.
My father and I thought about them somewhat at first while they were away in Washington but after no more than an hour had passed we became unexpectedly happy on our own. Over the four days we got the garden planted and we did twenty loads of manure, cleaning the lower barn, the sheep dung compacted into sheaves so that instead of digging at them it was an archaeological matter of peeling away the layers with the fork. We bleached the area to cleanse the place of parasites, and afterward we stood in the doorway admiring our work. We hardly had to speak to understand each other.