There were many dwellings that we would someday own part of if the strict lineage wasn’t interrupted. The manor house, the size of a ship, of a destroyer, was made of granite and cedar shakes, and had been built for our great-grandfather, the lawyer, the state senator, the gentleman farmer. Sherwood, Dolly, Amanda, and Adam lived in the downstairs, although my parents owned three-eighths of the entire house. We always wondered, Which part?—hoping one of the four bathrooms was in our share. Also, we would need a slice of either the upstairs or downstairs kitchen. Aunt May Hill, one-fourth owner, was someone we didn’t want to think about for any number of reasons.
For instance, when May Hill was a young person her father, a relative of ours, had accidentally suffocated in a silo on his farm in Indiana, and shortly after that her mother found a rope and hanged herself from a barn rafter. May Hill’s brother was in college but she, a high school girl, had to be adopted by Sherwood’s parents. One day she was a teenager at home and soon after she arrived at the Lombard farm in Wisconsin to take her place among a two-, three-, five-, and six-year-old—that was Sherwood—and a baby on the way. If she had been in a book we probably would have loved that downtrodden orphan. She was brilliant, everyone said. A solid girl, a girl with a large frame. When she grew older, instead of going to college or finding a job she stayed upstairs in her room reading, she tinkered in the tool house, she chopped wood, she studied auto mechanics on her own, and she invested in the stock market. It was common knowledge that she’d become rich. No woman we’d ever seen had such thick rectangular eyebrows. Not that we saw her very often. We understood that she did not like anyone, that she did not wish to see you on the path. The fact we knew most certainly was that, no matter her solitary habits, May Hill was the farm’s pure gold. Because breakdown was daily and went according to the seasons: the Ford tractor and market truck sputtering in fall, the sprayer clogged in spring, the baler and mower fizzing in summer, the snowplow intractable in winter. Each piece of equipment poised to quit in the time of its urgent need.
Aside from May Hill’s holdings everything else was split fifty–fifty between Sherwood and my father. Down the drive past the manor house was the apple barn where the customers came, where the cider was made, the apples sorted and stored, and behind that was the sheep yard for the flock of thirty ewes. Also, there in the yard, the museum of cars and other implements from as far back as 1917, plus rusted stanchions mostly buried, stacks of bicycles, wagon wheels, refrigerators, lawn mowers, barrels of used twine, chipped crocks—nothing of particular use but each item in a casual pose, caught as if in the middle of a task, as if trapped in time by lava or ice. You might think, studying the jumble, that the ancestors had done very little but ride bikes and churn butter. We sometimes worried that if Sherwood and my father had a real war we wouldn’t be able to get to the apple barn to do business, to feed the sheep, to rattle around in the junk, to play with Amanda and Adam. We’d be prisoners cut off from the supply.
The war would start because of the ancient argument, and one irrevocable thing would be said, something bitter and true. Sherwood and my father would then fall silent not for a few minutes but for years. It would be a war with no punches and certainly no shooting, no physical injury of any kind because that’s not how the Lombards behaved. The problem for Sherwood was my father, Jim Lombard, his cousin who hadn’t grown up on the farm. Jim had only spent his summers on the orchard, working alongside his maiden aunt, Aunt Florence. Whereas Sherwood was raised full-time in the manor house, the boy who had always known he was the rightful and only heir. After college my father came to help out, to rescue the operation while Sherwood was in the army. To Jim Lombard’s own surprise and joy, he never left. Sherwood came back from his posting, he and my father were made partners, one by one the older generation died, my parents got married around the same time Dolly and Sherwood tied the knot, Adam and Amanda were born, we were born, everything beginning all over again. But the tickler, the fundamental question lurked: Was my father, the city person, the interloper—did he belong? Did his pedigree and his summer roots constitute a claim?