In the next few days there was talk of war, of trying to fight the group, the country, whatever it was, that had caught the world’s attention, and it was that idea that frightened me most. At the end of the week, on Friday, I was in the back room of the sheep shed, a place I often went for the purpose of crying. The floor was thick with hay, the room warm and close with dung and rumination. The spring lambs came to see MF with her head down, arms hugging knees, Spinky and Sue bravely approaching, nibbling at human hair. So then I could hold them close, clasping their heads to my cheek, my tears wetting their soft white noses. Sometimes I didn’t even know quite why I was crying but on that day I was scared about retribution, about William having to march off to the Middle East, and I even cried for Stephen Lombard, because maybe he’d be blown up somewhere along the line.
I’d never known May Hill to come around the sheep shed, and afterward I did remember that she had a pail in her hand, and that she was probably going to give her compost to the ewes. She was all at once looking in through the open windows. “What’s the matter with you?” She spoke sternly and yet with curiosity. It was, it seemed, a real question.
I had been distantly in her company in the summers, across the field making hay, and sometimes she walked by the barn when I was working, but I hadn’t been face-to-face with her in years, not since my capture. It was possible in the compound, if you were careful about your route, not to bump into someone like May Hill. And since we never celebrated any holiday with the Volta family there was no danger of seeing her around a Christmas tree. But now she’d come upon me at the peak of my frenzy. What was the matter with me? A good question. Certainly I was crying about how the world in the space of one Tuesday morning had completely changed. Maybe, however, there were also other lurking sorrows that had piggybacked on the big one. For instance, Philip with his springy walk and his blond curls and his good cheer working so ably alongside my father, his infiltration going on year after year. I could hardly remember when he hadn’t been with us. It was if my father had adopted him, as if he were now the first son. Philip, the second coming. And, additionally, there were the college materials, the sheer mass of the mailings in our PO box for William, every day appeals from institutions that wanted him.
“What’s the matter?” May Hill said again.
I sputtered something about war.
“There’s always been war,” she said sharply. “War is nothing new.”
I sniffled and tried to dry my eyes.
“Crying is not going to help.”
“I know that,” I said.
She next made a somewhat funny remark. She said, “I wish I could sit around and cry when there are apples to be picked.”
“Oh,” I said. Although May Hill worked hard and was strong by any standards, but especially for a seventy-or eighty-year-old lady, however old she was, and although she was indispensable, she was also upstairs in her own house for great chunks of time probably sitting around reading. Not that I would point out such a fact to her. There that large face was in the window, once again proof that May Hill had none of the typical Lombard grace. Did an elderly person have the need to cry, or was crying something you probably outgrew? I wished something in words that I’d always wished with a feeling, that old situation, a knot, an ache trying to gather itself into meaning and possible action. That is, I wished May Hill wasn’t a Lombard, and more than that, I wished she’d disappear. I stared back at her, my tears over and done. Go away, I willed. Fall over dead.
Her face persisted in the window, that ogre head swelling because—because she was having the same thought about me, that wish engorging her mind. May Hill hoping to erase me as fervently as I wanted her to vanish, our wishes pitted one against the other. That clear fact frightened me so much I scrambled up in order to make sure she hadn’t paralyzed me, that her wish hadn’t frozen my limbs. I wasn’t too old to be that alarmed by her; a person, no matter how grown up, would always be alert to her powers.
I then remembered something my mother always practiced on her unpleasant patrons at the library. A tack that might possibly work, at least a little, on our fake aunt. Mrs. Lombard said that she killed the wretches with kindness, she became simpering with niceness, that being almost unbearably sweet to people who were itching for a fight caught them off guard and defanged them. Therefore, I mustered my strength and I said to May Hill, “I like your shirt.” Admittedly that was not the most believable compliment for a ratty piece of flannel, but it didn’t deserve a scowl.
She muttered a word that started with an m. Maybe it was mercy. But possibly murder. Or mongrel. Yes, mongrel, that’s what she’d said. She made her pronouncement about me before she turned and went up the sheep path and out the gate.