In the evenings we leaned against the sink and for dinner had menus such as chocolate malts and saltines with melted cheese. No big production necessary.
Back during the four–five split I sometimes used to imagine my mother not dead exactly but removed, so that Mrs. Kraselnik could adopt me. During the Posse Convention I recalled the pleasure of my mother being gone, the idea of it. I wasn’t wife of course to my father but I didn’t feel like daughter, either. He asked me questions as if he valued my expertise, as if all along on a different track I’d always been his partner, and only now had surfaced in this old but new dimension. “Where should we spread this load, Marlene?” he’d ask me as he was heading off to fertilize a field or part of the orchard. At the sink he’d say, “What varieties do you think we should graft this spring? What should we have more of? What do you like best?”
We did now and again bring up the convention, nine hundred boys in the hotel ballroom, boys and their pizzas, boys electrified by Mountain Dew. My father said, “No more hip bone connected to the hip bone in the electronic age. No more thighbone connected to the thighbone. Homo sapiens, good-bye. A new race is coming.” He trolled around in his glass for the last dregs of his malt. “The ennobling future, I guess.”
We thought of my mother in the hotel on her king-size bed, lying around reading, maybe ordering room service, the only Lombard who didn’t work on the farm. I said to my father, “If Mama was a Posse player what would her name be?”
“Savage Librarian,” he said without having to think.
We had to hold our stomachs to laugh. Next we sat at the table and talked about all the work we would get done the next day, on Sunday, and we reviewed the good works we’d done that day, too. We talked until the candle burned down. It was as if talking at the table and sleeping were one and the same, and by and by we climbed the stairs trailing words and went to bed.
16.
A Possible Marriage Match
Another spring turning to summer, my seventh-grade year over and done, my friend Coral LeClaire bleeding, I knew, even though she hadn’t told me. I’d seen the telltale sign, the supplies in her backpack. Also, she had breasts that appeared to be getting more enormous by the second. My mother seemed to think I was not going to need pads for some time or even a serious brassiere, that I was going to be a slow bloomer.
Already at age thirteen, though, I had plenty of accomplishments, the walls of my room completely covered with ribbons from the fair, blue ribbons for my cat drawings, my grapevine wreaths, my hand-spun, hand-knitted scarves, and my zucchinis. Certainly that summer there would be more prizes. In addition to preparing for the fair I would work as always with my father. And just as he sometimes watched a ball game there would now and again be a small holiday for me, a little rest, Mary Frances briefly parking in the hammock, the mosquitoes at bay, the butterflies fluttering in their warped flight patterns, the sound of the tractor in the distance, the mower going in the orchard, all the labor happening around me while I read lowbrow historical novels, books my mother said were trash, books she wanted to yank from my hands and incinerate.
Soon after our vacation began I went along with my father to visit the neighboring orchard, ten miles away, the Sykes Orchard our main competition. William no longer came with us on our jaunts, the job of keeping my father now falling solely on my shoulders. “Well, Marlene,” he said, “it looks like a nice day for a drive to the great Sykes plantation.” He meant it was a good day to point out to each other which fields were wheat, which rye, to admire the growing corn, and at one intersection there was always a tired old Appaloosa standing still in her yard, Our Friend The Horse, we called her. Our Friend The Horse now and again used to show up in my father’s stories, in the tales of Kind Old Badger. It was on that drive to the Sykes Orchard that I realized I couldn’t remember when the last one had been told, or if we’d known it was the last as it was happening. Or even what the story was, if there’d been a conclusion. I wanted to ask my father about Kind Old but I couldn’t; I couldn’t think what the real question was, and also I had the feeling whatever the question he wouldn’t be able to answer it.
Tommy Sykes’s estate was a showcase farm, tulips blooming, lawns tended, the houses and buildings in good repair, every apple tree wide open, kept short and flat-topped by a crew of itinerant Hispanic men. “Those trees are hideous,” I said at the entrance, “like poor dogs who’ve been shaved.”