No one, however, made me angrier than Philip. As if he had always been part of the farm, as if Gloria had never walked the earth, as if the universe existed to favor him, he took up the role of best right-hand man, the new star orchard worker. May Hill wasn’t squiring him around anymore, Philip no longer strictly in the role of her houseboy. Sherwood talked to him and enlisted him in projects and so did my father, Philip on everyone’s side. Which, admittedly, was not an easy position, being both a Velta and a Volta man. What else was supposedly good about him? He was strong. There was no doubt about that. He could throw bales and tackle a running sheep, and stack apple boxes, each one fifty pounds, eight-high in the cooler, one after the next, the top one over his head, unloading the whole wagon single-handedly. That was something my father could no longer accomplish—or anyway that’s what he said to my mother. But I knew if Jim Lombard had to he could still lift whatever he wished in order to get a job done.
Generally speaking Philip was gung-ho. He acquired a pair of denim coveralls so he could look the part, Philip coming along the path wearing a red baseball cap that said on the front, in black letters, WICKED. Farming had been his dream from his earliest memory, he’d done the whole WWOOF experience in his Gap Year, the work exchange on a farm, his in Italy, and to further his scheme he’d studied global environmental policy in college. Very likely now that he’d graduated he was going for world domination. At college it was he who had started the organic garden, growing produce for the cafeteria, Philip a Slow Food, locavoring, hipper-than-Alice-Waters pioneer. It was in Portland, Oregon, where he’d performed this awesome tilling of the earth. As if any effort was required to foment the revolution in that city.
So technically there was nothing to dislike about him, our cousin. He made friends with Gideon Hup, my fiancé, and they sometimes had beers together at the bar in town, sharing knowledge. My mother issued him a library card and although she was breaking the privacy law she freely told us what he was reading. Middlemarch, for one, Philip no slouch. He planted not just a standard vegetable garden in Gloria’s yard, but perennials such as asparagus, and he made a strawberry bed. That behavior, that long-term putting down roots, was unbelievable. The cheek of it. His furniture was from local yard sales, great finds, apparently, rugs on the floors, art on his walls, too, tasteful block prints, my mother said. Somehow or other I was never available when he invited us to dinner, off to rehearsal or busy with Coral. As if assisting May Hill wasn’t enough for him he was helpful to the ladies who had plots in the community garden. Everything about him, clearly, was intolerable.
Furthermore: Old Seattle friends occasionally turned up to marvel at his new life, which he was proud to show off, the extensive tour for childhood friends with names like Billy and Shaver. He called our place, our land, his home. I actually heard him say that.
What was going on? When I asked how long he was staying my parents would say extremely vague nothings such as “We’ll see,” or “He’s trying it out,” or “He’s very young.” Of course someone so smart and energetic would naturally have a girlfriend. He felt himself at liberty to visit her on weekends in Chicago, the two of them flitting around the Art Institute and eating artisanal cheeses and going to microbreweries. But that was one of the most critical identifying factors—the letting loose of the mouse to see who in the lineup of so-called princesses would actually faint. He didn’t even know that real farmers do not have weekends off!
I did my best not to speak to him when he was at our house for dinner or be in the same room with him alone not only because of my inborn dislike of him, but because of the kiss I had planted in his composition notebook. He may have come to understand that those were my lips, something I hated more than almost anything to remember, that kiss I would’ve so liked to have been able to erase.
He was always trying to draw me out at the supper table, which was unnecessary since there were plenty of conversational topics. My mother was ridiculously enthusiastic in his presence, and he and my father had a great deal of shop talk, and for William he often had specific questions about hardware and software, updates and crashes. For me, though, the ruby-lipped kisser, it seemed worth his while, for some reason, to struggle.
“You’re in Our Town, I heard,” he said.
I nodded, buttering my bread.
“The stage manager? It’s great they gave that part to a girl.”
There was no law that said the stage manager had to be a male.
“A lot of lines to learn.”
So what. Learning lines was not difficult.
“It’s one of my favorite plays.”
What do you want, a medal? And also, what really are you doing here?
My mother at that point would bust in with a smattering of questions about Philip’s experience with high school drama, Mrs. Lombard coming to the rescue. I’d eat and excuse myself because after all I had a lot of lines to learn.
Nonetheless, against my will I was learning a few details about him, facts a person couldn’t help hearing and thinking about. For instance, his mother had been in the grip of breast cancer for years. She’d died when he was sixteen. Which was why he and his father hadn’t visited the farm in all the time he was growing up; because that mother had been sick for nearly Philip’s entire life, the father and son tending to her, and if they traveled it was to exotic places to try out a treatment that was not available in America. But there was something else I learned, something I could hardly stand to consider. When Philip was in fifth grade he’d had to do a family history project. An assignment for a teacher who was perhaps close to his heart, his own Mrs. Kraselnik. And so what did he do? What must all children do who have a resource such as we Lombards had at our disposal? He wrote a letter to May Hill requesting information, May Hill after all his true aunt. He was her only younger kin, the only nephew and there were no nieces. Apparently she’d written him back a very long letter that included a hand-drawn family tree. Also precious photographs. And then what happened? They began to correspond. They had what my mother called an epistolary relationship, a courtship, you might even say. They became pen pals, not just temporarily, not only for the first flush of interesting stamps and news from foreign lands, but for years.
He was a very special, unusual person, my mother often said.
So that of an evening when I sometimes saw the young man and the hermit walking together, or if they were down in front of the manor house, digging around in May Hill’s garden plot, it was clear that they were behaving like old friends. He’d kneel in a mulchy aisle nodding as she talked, as they picked beans, and they’d put their heads together to examine a bug of some kind, and then she might hand him a sweet little tomato, which he’d pop into his mouth. It was a tableau I’d spy on if I happened to be at a distance and yet it was a miserable sight that always made me feel as if somehow all along I had understood nothing.
In our house, when Philip wasn’t around, there were conversations taking place that William and I were not a part of, our parents often talking long after we’d left the table. We’d come upon their discussions and they’d abruptly scoot their chairs back and again make bright little remarks that signified something but gave nothing away. Okay! So, ah, well, that’s that! My father was nearing sixty but everyone said he looked like a hale and hearty forty-nine. Sherwood had broken his arm the year before and it hung in a slightly crooked way from his shoulder, which didn’t mean that he had lost his strength or that he still wasn’t a superb apple picker. They were fine, the men, they were lean and magnificent.
One Saturday morning in the first fall Philip was with us I came late to pick in the Jonathan row, late because I was playing Penelope Sycamore in You Can’t Take It with You. Philip was in charge of the weekend crew, two older women from town and a retired science teacher. I’d slipped on my picking bag and was up a ladder before he saw me. “Mary Frances!” he called out. “Welcome! Glad you’re here.”
I had never flipped anyone the bird but right then I could completely understand the impulse. He then had the gall to say, “Great performance last night.”
Philip had come to my play? As if he was an uncle or teacher or friend? My parents and William had seen it the previous weekend, no one saying the Seattle visitor would be in the audience.
He said, “You played her with just the right edge of daffiness. Not crazy, not over the top, but sweetly daffy.” He apparently was an authority on everything. “Congrats.”
How could I not say Thank you? I had to thank him. He’d forced me to.
Even though I had a natural dislike for him, as I said, it was sometimes, however, hard to maintain an unequivocal feeling about him. It seemed that you could assume one thing about his character but two seconds later consider the exact opposite, and adding to the puzzlement, you might be correct on both counts. One time, for example, my father was trying to corral the lambs in order to castrate them. He went dashing toward a big fellow but missed his mark and was falling, falling, possibly going to smash his head on the shed wall if Philip wasn’t by his side, the annoying presence, who before my father cracked his brow somehow righted him and also at the same time scooped up the lamb.
“Philip!” my father exclaimed. “Whew! Thanks!”
The superhero said, “No problem, man!”
And another instance. We were well into high school the night William and I attended a crucial town board meeting, where, to our surprise, the cousin turned up, too. At that point he’d been living in the stone cottage for about a year. We were along with my father because we had some idea what was at stake not only for him but for us, too. My mother had ironed his shirt and demanded he wash his hair. We were proud of Jim Lombard for being the chairman of the Farmland Preservation Committee, the chairman, which, when we’d been small, we’d thought of as a kind of king. For seven years he and the committee had been working on a draft of a land-use document that would restrict developers in order to preserve farmland in the township, a township that through the decades was becoming more and more suburbanized. My father, with a handful of faithfuls, wanted to prevent future piano key subdivisions, no more quarter-acre lots, the farm fields jammed with house after house, driveway aprons, basketball hoops, lawn mower sheds made to look like little barns. The plan was also to prevent the development of the highway corridor, presently corn and beans and woodland, into the usual one long stretch of Walmart/Home Depot/Walgreens/Taco Bell/Menards/Dollar Depot/Aldi/Ford Dealership/Mattress World/US Cellular/Wendy’s/Best Buy/Staples/Burger King/Dollar World/CVS/Long John Silver’s/Verizon.
The meeting that night was the last in a series of informational sessions and was supposed to conclude in a vote. The board would decide to adopt the Plan or they’d reject the committee’s work and permanently shelve the idea of preservation. We’d long known that if my father didn’t get his way then by the time we were ready for the farm it might be an island, houses like the Plumlys’ surrounding us. The taxes through the roof. But even if we could pay up it would be difficult to spray and raise noisy, smelly livestock, the new neighbors thick upon us, no room for the foxes, the cranes, the field mice, no space, it sometimes seemed, for the stars. My father didn’t say that it was so, but we knew that without a Plan, without his vision, there might not be a place for us.
The meeting room was a low dark hall with no windows, the hanging panel of fluorescent lights doing us no favors, the fifty metal chairs set up on the linoleum a respectable distance from the dais, chairs for fifty persons, the clerk’s generous estimation of attendance. Four of the town board members were men, their stubby fingers stained with oil, men who worked in machine shops or owned farms, men, my mother said, who would not have been orators in ancient Rome or in any other civilization. The fifth member, Pam Getchkey, was a woman with prickly short hair who bred Dobermans. My father didn’t usually imitate people but when he performed Pam snapping her gum we always suddenly realized that he was the funny one.
We took our seats in the meeting room, our blood hot, our hearts pounding. Many of us already hated everyone on the wrong side. We put our heads down and studied the agenda. Sherwood and Dolly sat in front of us and, with five minutes to go before curtain, in comes Philip, washed and brushed, clattering into a seat next to Mr. and Mrs. Sherwood Lombard. What’s he doing here? I radiated to William, a beam he chose not to receive. There was a scattering of hobby farmers and the old-timers who had the habit of civic involvement, and the local developers were there, too, Marv and Susan Peterson. My father had praise and damnation for them, saying it was better to have residents doing the developing rather than gold diggers swooping in, men who didn’t have to live among the atrocities they’d built.
First, again, as he’d done at many other meetings on the subject, Jim Lombard, who’d been given a place on the dais, rose to explain the Plan. His pants would have fallen to his knees without his suspenders, a man with no hips, no rear end, a man who was one thick knot across his shoulders, so muscle-bound he couldn’t fully extend his arms over his head. His tufty hair had been tamped down, tidy and strange, but probably land-usey and respectable. In the hall our notable specimen outlined for us the history of the committee. He had his hand-drawn charts and graphs, and he talked about the surveys taken—the proof that informed consideration had gone into the comprehensive Plan. Yes, there had been opposition, and the committee had responded. The goal, he reminded the assembly, was to provide a framework for responsible growth, growth that the township could afford and support, and growth that suited the character of the area and its people. He sounded a little bit like a social studies teacher but we were sure he wasn’t dull.
In the middle of the presentation Mr. Reed, an old grouse, called out, “Sounds like socialism, Lombard. We can’t subdivide our farm how we want, is what you’re saying. By order of the law we got to have open space? A green corridor? Like the Chinks and the Russians do to their peoples? Commie-stuff, just like all your other presentations. How many times we have to hear this?”
“It’s not your turn to speak,” Mrs. Bushberger cried.
“How many times?” Mr. Reed asked again.
William had brought along a book to read but he hadn’t cracked it yet.
Mrs. Tillet, the tax accountant’s wife, was the first person in the citizens’ portion of the meeting to say her piece. She had to remind us how much she loved living in the country, and how, on their two hundred acres, they were fortunate enough to have orchids and trillium, gray foxes and great horned owls, the pileated woodpecker and other animals that should be respected.
Philip was nodding, in firm agreement.
No one, Mrs. Tillet said, wanted to live in suburbia—that’s why, after all, everyone in the room had moved out to our town, to get away from the subdivisions.
“You move out here, lady, you become the subdivisions.” A truth-speaking grumbler.
“You want the gates to close but only after you’ve moved in,” Susan Peterson heckled.
Don Tribby, the chairman of the board, pounded the table with his gavel, his big fun in any meeting.
Mrs. Tillet with her silky layered blond hair that she drove to Chicago to have styled, and her toned arms, and her diamond rings up to her knuckles, was not good for the cause. My father, we knew, in a perfect world, would have had her muzzled.
Mr. Carter stood next, the old farmer with a fat lower lip and squinty eyes, and he had maybe three hairs right at his crown, and everywhere else moles, large, medium, small, an array, an assortment. Connect the dots. He was big enough to bellow. “I’ve given my life to my farm, see,” he said, with surprising quietness. “Don’t tell me I don’t love it the way I’m supposed to. Don’t tell me I can’t give my wife her dream. She’s been a good wife, my Betty. She don’t want to be cold in the winter anymore. Don’t tell me I got to put half my land in some kind of plan. I need to take her to Florida. She’s a good wife.”
My father pulled out statistics about how farmers should be able to sell at market value with the proposed Plan but everyone probably suspected this was not absolute. We were suddenly not sure about the Plan, either, curiously sad for Betty and old Mr. Carter.
There followed a stretch of talkers on both sides, people either praising the rural character of the town and supporting thoughtful growth, or protesting that the Plan was government yet again limiting the freedoms of its citizens. We weren’t paying close attention until Philip himself stood up, stating his name and the address of the stone cottage.
“You don’t know me,” he said, “but I’d like to introduce myself. I’m a Lombard relation. I’ve been here for a year or so and my hope is to be involved with the orchard, the Lombard operation, long-term—” He smiled at my father, and turned to Dolly and Sherwood to acknowledge their potential goodwill.
Long-term? I turned to William. Is that what he wants?
Philip had shaved, no sign of any farmhand scruffiness, and his clean hair was loose and golden. He’d even tucked in his chambray shirt, a shirt that brought out the notable blueness of his eyes. “So, I don’t know,” he said. “I get that it’s difficult to try to legislate morality, that one person’s moral views shouldn’t be imposed on the community. I mean, I agree with that, and yet I think we need to recognize that laws most always have moral aims? Moral aims, and that in many circumstances those aims concern justice.”
It’s possible I had never felt so embarrassed. I wanted to scream, He’s not from here!
He scratched his cheek, his lips screwed to one side of his face, a gesture an actor would make on stage, a further mortification. “I guess,” he said, “I think that in this situation tonight the committee has tried to be both moral, you know? In terms of stewardship of the land and future generations, and also practical, serving the needs of the citizens in the here and now. I mean, it goes back as far as Plato, right? Philosophers making a close connection between true justice and human well-being. When companies pollute the air and the river, this is unjust because it disturbs every person’s well-being. It prevents individuals from flourishing. So then the Environmental Protection Agency is born.”
“My achin’ back,” someone behind us said.
My father was nodding, as if he was not at all ashamed of our relative. My mother was smiling encouragingly. William was paying close attention. Dolly, however, had been rummaging around in a bag and was pulling out her knitting.
“It seems like, from what I’ve heard and read, that the committee through the years has grappled with issues of justice at every governmental level—”
“Is there any Lombard that isn’t full of it?” Marv Johnson called out. Marv was a monumental man, his power in his brisket, that barrel in a red shirt, and there was no ignoring his drooping face with the pitted nose, his skin tending to purple.
Philip turned to him. “Excuse me, sir? I—”
My father said, “You don’t have the floor, Marv.”
Tribby banged his gavel—“Since when are you the chairman, Lombard? You don’t have the authority! That’s your whole problem, you people, as far as I’m concerned. You come in here with your college degrees, your whatever elite documents, and you think you can tell us, the real working farmers, the real citizens, how to run the government. You think if you just explain it for us one more time, we’ll let you snow us. No one wants this Plan. Hardly anyone at all. I’m in touch with the community. I’m telling you, the people, the real farmers, hate this Plan.”
“Actually, my father is a real farmer!” That cry was a hot streak through my mind but also it seemed to have come from my mouth. William grabbed my arm and Tribby banged his gavel; he banged his gavel at me, Mary Frances Lombard. My own words in the air were burning my ears, the clue, besides William’s grip, that I had spoken out loud.
I put my head down. What had just happened? Philip had maybe said something important; I wasn’t sure. My father had thought so but bringing up Plato? You did not bring up Plato at a town meeting. That was a rule anyone should instantly apprehend, crossing the threshold of the room. And yet Philip must have been right if people like the chairman and Marv Johnson were lambasting him. Think, think: I couldn’t very well be on Tribby’s side. He had practically beaten me with that mallet. I had shouted without even realizing it, which might mean I was out of my mind. Or very ill. I was hot and shivering, both. Trying to keep my body still, afraid the chair would start rattling. I could feel William not paying the slightest attention to me.
After some time I became aware that Sherwood was standing. Then I had to look up and take note; I had to abandon my own suffering. We held our breath since you could never quite know what Sherwood was going to say. His craggy face, that block of a forehead, was imposing, his curls were still red and made a fanciful halo, his best feature, and even though he wasn’t on the dais he had a pressed shirt and his good shoes. There was no need for him to be shy but he was hesitating. For what seemed like a few minutes he looked up at the ceiling, trying to collect his ideas, everyone, even the Lombard-haters, pulling for him. You just had to, no matter what, that man with visible effort intending to speak thoughtfully.
Finally he began. “Consider how much arable land was here twenty years ago, ten years ago, and now.” He spoke softly, dreamily.
Philip was nodding at Sherwood, nodding without pause, as if he were saying, That’s right, man, again and again.
“There are four or five farmers who among them work about twenty-three hundred acres,” Sherwood went on. There was a small cry, an uhhhh from Mrs. Tillet. All the good land gone, a fresh sorrow to her. “We can say that the shrinkage is due to an individual’s right, and his choice to sell, but what if we had a land-use plan that rewards stewardship, rather than cashing in, a land-use plan that has built into it conservation easements and tax policy, so that we are not only assisting the individual but working for the communal good?” There was spittle on his lips, his hands making larger circles, Sherwood revving up. Philip was still nodding, as if he alone understood the points being made. He had no right to think he knew anything and yet he continued his outrageous agreement while Sherwood gently educated us about the Dust Bowl, about the possibility of hunger, about the richness of our land resource, about our obligation to preserve it. Sherwood was spirited and tender, quiet in his knowledge, proving Tribby wrong, proving to the assembly that the Lombards’ intelligence was mannerly, that it was not unseemly or puffed up in any way.
“Those of you,” Sherwood was saying, “who want out can sell your property for a good price. There’s no reason to fear you wouldn’t get a good price. Those of us who want to continue farming will feel secure that we’re still in a community that values us, that supports us. We are together in this, more than we realize. If we understand that we’re together so much of this Plan makes sense.”
We almost clapped. Being together was after all what the Lombard Orchard was about, too, and he knew it, he believed in it; he no longer thought he alone should run the farm. This was how we’d always loved Sherwood, suddenly, the joyousness knocking us over the head. It would fade away, the feeling, we’d forget about it, we wouldn’t see him for a time, we’d be in earshot of our parents’ complaints but then, then he’d appear before us again, unusual and pure.
When he was done he sat down. Even so Philip continued nodding. “Why is he nodding?” I whispered to William.
“Shush,” he said.
At last the citizens’ portion was concluded. Tribby informed the audience that the board would vote on the Plan at their next meeting.
It was Mrs. Tillet who yelled, “You can’t do that! TONIGHT. It said in the paper you’d vote tonight.”
A rumble rose from the crowd. “You’ve made up your minds so just do the vote.” Someone on the other side shouted, “Vote when you feel like it, fellas!” Another call, “You vote now, when we’re here to watch you.”
Tribby turned to his board. He said, “You boys ready?”
“That’s what this meeting is for! You’re supposed to vote—”
Tribby banged his gavel. “What do you say, boys—and Pam?”
One by one each member indicated that he was prepared.
“I’m going to say what I’ve said before.” Tribby raised his papers in a stack, tapping them together on the table, doing his tidying. “You all know I don’t believe in this Plan. Why would we want to approve even more government, bigger government? We’ve got government oversight in every arena of our life. Uncle Sam telling us when to turn around—”
“The government supports you!” Mrs. Tillet was again irrepressible. “You, personally, Chairman, get subsidies. Look it up, people, on the Internet. Learn how many hundreds of thousands—”
“You want a vote tonight?” Tribby’s throat and jaw were a blotchy red, no way to obscure his rage. “We need any discussion, boys, or have we discussed this thing into the dirt? It’s your call.”
There was all at once a motion, Pam Getchkey, the breeder of Dobermans, moving that the Land-Use Plan not be adopted. She moved also that my father’s committee be dissolved.
The committee over and done? Forever? A cry went up from the crowd. The faction that was incensed by Pam, by Tribby, got to their feet, the chairs banging against each other, the clangs ringing through the room. The Lombards stayed put because of course by and large we weren’t public jumper-uppers and yet I did find myself standing. Dolly was so amazed she started to laugh, calling out, “What are you doing, folks!” The townspeople, both sides, were gibbering, a few of them shaking fists, some of them advancing toward the dais. My mother actually looked alarmed. “Jesus Christ,” she muttered, “sit down, Francie.”
“No,” I said, although I somewhat wished I wasn’t on my feet.
The board members held to their positions. My father said afterward that nothing of the sort had happened in that chamber before, a mob of twenty-five or so advancing. Tribby pounded his gavel like a baby at a peg-and-hole toy, leaving it to my father to rise and greet us. He stretched out his long arms, my father. He towered over squat Tribby with the boiling face, my father looming and sallow under the awful light. “Sit down,” he called. “Please. Everyone. Go and sit down.” With his arms out it was as if he could hold us all, as if he could easily contain us.
Tribby continued to strike his gavel. No one looked at anyone else, everyone receding. We had sprung up without thinking in just the way I had shouted out—but now we were ashamed. Because, in truth, no one knew what was going on at the revolution. No one had a plan. Were we going to topple the table? Punch the board members in the nose? The furious cohort went back to their chairs and those of us who had stood without thinking sat back down. William was fiercely reading his book.
“We have to let this process unfold,” my father was saying. “In the next election, you’ll be able to vote for change, if that’s the will of the township. If there’s energy to—”
“Tell us something we don’t know,” Tribby sniped, still banging away.
Dolly turned around to us and said in her normal loud speaking voice, “You kids should understand that where we are right now? It’s the nuthouse. I like to think that everyone will leave this loony bin, that the only people left in the township will be these board members, the cuckoo clocks. I have to say, that makes me happy.”
My mother smiled a little, but she couldn’t agree outwardly because the town board members were the people who funded the library and in public she must always try to be on her best behavior.
When the motion carried Marv slowly clapped his enormous fleshy palms together, one loud clap after the next. My father’s work of seven years, for naught. He got up and we could see all at once that the meeting had drained him of his powers.
“Jim,” my mother murmured, even though he was not anywhere near her.
His chest was sunk in on itself, his back bent, the hump of an old person. That’s what I thought, an old person, my father. He looked like a man who through his life had not slept enough or eaten enough, a man who had no business being in a struggle with our community, or maybe with any community, with people who were coarse and mean, with people who could give up their farms for Florida.
“That was epic,” Philip said on the way out.
“That’s how it is around here,” Dolly said drily.
My father, I didn’t explain to them, would eventually win; he would win. He had to. He would win because he was right in principle. The whole world could not be built upon, the whole earth cement. It might take time but he would prevail. In fact, it wasn’t until the recession of 2008 that no new subdivisions were proposed. In that spring the building of prospective homes on those plats that had been approved was suspended. Every single plan on hold for lack of money. Even though my father had done nothing to cause the recession except privately hold to his convictions about farmland, nonetheless, Jim Lombard’s deepest dream, his dream for zero growth, of course had come true.