The Tie That Binds (13 page)

Lyman was still standing in the front hallway. The strings of his earflaps were tied tight in a double knot under his chin pulling the bill of his cap down low on his forehead like he was expecting heavy weather, and he was standing there holding his suitcase.

“You coming along too?” he said. “For the send-off?”

“Yes, sir.”

I put my coat and stocking cap on, and we stood facing
one another, waiting for my dad. We examined the rug and each other’s feet.

“At least,” Lyman said after a while, “at least it don’t look like it wants to snow.”

“No, sir.”

“I hope it don’t,” he said. “Not anyhow.”

The rug was an oval braided one made of bright rags, and Lyman’s shoes were his best, those black polished shoes he must have worn to the Holt Tavern a year earlier. They had sand on them now from his walking the half mile to our house. The sand was getting on my mother’s rug.

“Well,” Lyman said. “How’s the sixth grade?”

“What?”

“The sixth grade. At your school in town.”

“I’m in the eighth grade,” I said.

“Eighth,” he said. “Well, don’t never quit.”

“No, sir.”

“Take me,” he said. “You never know when you might need all your education.”

“Yes, sir.”

“That’s right,” he said. Then like he’d been pondering this question for a good long time, he said, “What’s the capital of California?”

“San Francisco.”

“That’s right,” he said. “You see?—that’s what I’m talking about.”

My dad came down the stairs then and put his coat on, and we went outside to the pickup. It was cloudy and just flat dark, but it wasn’t going to snow; it was too cold to snow, and there wasn’t that heaviness in the air that comes before snowfall. I sat between my dad and Lyman in the pickup with the gearshift between my knees and the light from the speedometer showing yellow on my dad’s face.
Nobody said anything for a while. The gravel on the dirt road kicked up underneath the fenders, and then we were on the highway, where there was the sound of the snow tires on the blacktop. Outside the window the headlights picked up the brush and tumbleweeds caught along the fence line beside the highway, and beyond the fence line the country was all dark, with the few trees standing up leafless and showing even darker against Owens’s white house on the right when we passed it and again two miles later against Wheelers’s yellow house on the left as we passed it too, driving north towards town. There were no yard lights on anywhere in the country.

Then, before we made town, my dad said to Lyman, “I don’t suppose you thought to tell Edith you’re leaving.”

“Why sure,” Lyman said. “She knows.” He patted his coat pocket. “She packed me some sandwiches. I got them right here with me.”

“What does she say about it?”

“Well, I’ll tell you,” Lyman said. He leaned forward to look past me at my dad. “She says for at least one of us to get away. That’s what she told me last night.”

“Jesus Christ,” my dad said. “When’s she going to quit?”

“And I’m going to write her about it,” Lyman said. “Edith says for me to see all the sights I can and taste pleasure.”

“Well, see that you do it.”

“I will. You can bet on that.”

“I’m talking about writing her,” my dad said.

“Oh,” he said, and sat back again to look ahead down the road. He brought one of his big red winter-chafed hands up to play with the belt strapped around the metal suitcase on his lap.

When we drove into Holt all the houses were dark and the big globes suspended above the corners on Main Street were off. I didn’t see anything moving. No one was at the
depot either; Lyman was going to have to buy his ticket once he got on the train. My dad stopped the pickup beside the cobblestone platform, and though we were almost an hour early, Lyman got out with his suitcase under his arm and stood to face east up the tracks. My dad and I stayed in the pickup with the motor and heater running and watched him wait. Once while we watched him, my dad said, “Well, this is a piece of history that won’t appear in no history books.” But he was talking more to himself than he was to me.

Finally when the train got there, waving its beam light back and forth above the tracks and making the ground vibrate, we got out to say good-bye. In the light of the conductor’s lantern I could see that Lyman’s eyes were bleary from the cold and that there was a drip of watery mucus at the tip of his nose. Lyman looked cold and scared. My dad shook his hand, and Lyman patted me on the shoulder, and then in his long overcoat and his best shoes and with his corduroy earflaps tied tight under his chin, he mounted the steps to the train, and that was the last we saw of him. That was the last anyone in Holt County saw of him for almost twenty years. Including Edith.

L
YMAN WAS
forty-two when he left on that west-bound train, and as I recall his plan involved joining the U.S. Army. The train stopped in Denver, but he didn’t get off there and he didn’t get off in Cheyenne either, nor in Salt Lake, nor in any other place, until the train had finally stopped for good in Los Angeles to turn around and come back east. I suppose he wanted to be sure there were enough mountain ranges and enough Mormons and mesquite between him and that old stump-armed man to prevent himself from being dragged back and put to work again. Because once he had actually managed to escape he
sure as hell wasn’t going to take any chances; he wasn’t ever going to sweat his overalls plowing sand again, not if he could help it, not if it was just a matter of putting enough miles between himself and that sand. And in the confusion of December 1941, he had that ready excuse: he was going to join the army to fight the Nips and the Huns—never mind that he had never fought a thing before in his life.

I gather, though, that it didn’t take him long to discover that, as much as everybody was watching the sky for Hirohito to come drifting down out of some imperial orange-and-red cloud, still, the army recruiters were not about ready to sign on any middle-aged farm boy from Holt, Colorado, even if he was as eager as a mongrel bitch in heat. The army recruiters weren’t that desperate yet. So I guess he tried the navy next, and being a little smarter now he no doubt lied about his age, but he wasn’t the fuzzy-cheeked piece of dough the navy was looking for, either; not that he wasn’t used to being treated like a dog, you understand, they just couldn’t be sure he could learn their new tricks. So after the navy I don’t guess he even tried the marines, because I know for certain that he hired on instead to work in a Los Angeles airplane factory. And he stayed there in the factory until the war was over, working his daily shift, pulling levers or grinding gears or running rivets and not talking to anybody much but just doing the work they gave him to do. During lunch break he sat off at the edges of the mechanics and welders where he could watch them and listen to their talk, but he never complained, like they did, because he figured he knew of at least one thing that was worse than this. All the time, anyway, he was saving his money so that when MacArthur returned to take that cob pipe out of his mouth and to sign those surrender papers on board that boat in the Pacific,
Lyman already had more than enough money saved up to buy his first new Pontiac automobile.

Then he took off again. His new Pontiac had a full tank of gas; he had seen to the air in the spare tire, and he spent the next sixteen years doing what he said his sister had told him to do: he saw the sights and tasted pleasure. For a half a year to as much as a year and a half he stayed in one city after another. He paid his rent on time for a succession of cheap rooms upstairs over some pawnshop or dentist’s office. He worked at a minimum wage pushing cement up construction ramps or pumped gas or shoveled ballast under railroad ties. Afterwards in the evenings he drank beer in dark bars that had booths along one wall and ranks of bottles in front of chipped mirrors on the other. And about twice a month he would follow the big hips of an aging barmaid up the stairs to his own rented room, where he would release her from her girdle and then sweat on her while she watched past his moving shoulder to see how soon the cracked plaster on the ceiling was going to fall and smother them. Meanwhile, of course, he bought more Pontiacs and he kept moving. Whenever the color of his last car didn’t just suit him anymore, he would buy another new one, and whenever it seemed that he had seen what there was of Boise or Omaha worth seeing, he would take off and drive to Dubuque or Oklahoma City or Memphis. But he never came home again.

Nobody out here, not even Edith, saw him all that time. I know that for a fact. But I also know, since I’ve seen every damned one of them, that he did send Edith at least one picture postcard each year with a color likeness on it of the biggest skyscraper there was in whatever city he happened to be stopped in right then. I also know, because I’ve seen them too—good Christ, yes—that every year come Christmas he sent her a package of twenty-dollar
bills tied up with a red bow. But, like I say, he never sent himself home.

He didn’t even come home when Roy finally died and stopped fouling good air in 1952. Maybe Lyman didn’t know the old man was dead, not in time anyway to come back for the funeral, even assuming he had wanted to. He wouldn’t have been easy to locate. Edith would have had to send word to the last address scribbled on the last picture postcard and hope he was still there, since apparently he never left any forwarding address when he moved on, and besides, the only return address he ever used at any time was just general delivery, and that without bothering to pick up his mail very often, because why should he?

Or consider this: maybe Lyman was afraid to come back even then. Maybe he thought until the old man was a good nine years dead with the ground heavy sunk and filled over him and the grass growing thick on it, that it still wasn’t safe, that somehow the old bastard’s ghost or spirit or voice, whatever, might still be active enough to call him back, lecture him about Saturday-night diddling, and then make him stay there to rake hay and plow sand. And if that was the reason, then you could say Lyman was right to stay away even then, because you couldn’t be real sure the old son of a bitch was dead even when you were actually standing there in front of his coffin and saw him lying there like a slab of mean yellow granite. With his head on a satin pillow he still didn’t look any thinner or stiffer or any less like a ramrod than he did when he was supposed to be alive. His eyes were closed; that was all. That and the fact that those red stumps of his sticking out beneath his white shirt cuffs had finally quit twitching and waving.

Anyway, whatever the reason, Lyman stayed away for nine years more after the old man was dead and buried deep inside that little cemetery, making it two Goodnough
headstones so far there beside Otis Murray’s cornfield two miles east of Holt, and then he did come back. He was a little bit tired; his eyes were a little dazed from the sights he had seen, and I suppose there were other parts of him that were a little jaded too from the pleasure he had tasted, but he was still all right, more or less. He was still of some use to his sister. For a while.

O
NLY, MEANWHILE
, there were those twenty years for her to wait through and to endure. And how did she manage that? What was she doing all that time Lyman stayed away and bought Pontiacs and sent her picture postcards? Nothing.

Well, no, not nothing exactly. She didn’t just do nothing all that time. But she sure God didn’t go traveling off across the North American continent, either. She didn’t even go those seven miles into Holt very often. She stayed home. Jesus, that’s about all you can say: Edith Goodnough stayed home. And if you figure it up, if you do your arithmetic from those chiseled dates in the cemetery, then you know Edith was seventeen when her mother died in 1914; she was fifty-five when the old man died in 1952; and she was sixty-four when Lyman finally returned in 1961. It amounts to a lifetime of staying home.

When Lyman left for L. A. and for what he thought was going to be at least a good hitch in the army, it got worse almost immediately. Edith was still doing all the work at home she always did: she was still milking cows, separating milk, cooking meals, washing dishes, and—everyday, don’t forget—still cutting Roy’s meat into bites and filling the buttonholes of his shirt with buttons once he had pushed his stumps through the sleeves. But in the following spring, at a time when Lyman was already beginning to save that
airplane-factory money of his and to contemplate Pontiacs, Edith got more to do.

My dad and I first saw it one morning from the gravel road beside the Goodnough cornfield on our way to check cattle. I was driving, I remember, and feeling full of myself because I was actually behind the wheel and out on the road itself, not just turning circles in the barnyard or cutting eights in the horse pasture. So I suppose I had already ground through first and second gear and was abusing high—yes, I was flat pounding along the country road, imagining myself to be Holt County’s special gift to Ford transmissions—when my dad said:

“Goddamn it, slow down. Stop this son of a bitch.”

I thought, Now what have I done? Have I busted something? I stopped the pickup but it wasn’t me. My dad was looking out the window at the Goodnoughs’ cornfield.

“Now what do you call that?” he said. “What in the goddamn hell’s he think he’s doing?”

Because there was a tractor out there in the field with a one-way disk behind it. The tractor was coming toward us from across the corn stubble, and as it got closer I could see what my dad meant. There were two heads sticking up behind the body of the tractor, one just visible above it and the other quite a lot higher.

“Goddamn him,” my dad said. “Now maybe he’ll manage to fall off and get more than just his fingers mangled. Which I don’t care, but I suppose she still does. Jesus Christ.”

The tractor came on toward us, grew larger, louder, and then it was obvious that it was Edith driving it. She had her straw gardening hat on and she was sitting there on the tractor seat behind the exhaust stack looking no bigger than a ten-year-old girl. She had both hands clenched tight on the steering wheel, and the disk furrows behind her were as straight as she could make them. And of course
it was the old man standing up beside her. We could see him waving his arms, pointing those damn blunt stumps past her head like he was some kind of live Halloween scarecrow and her straw hat was just some yellow corn shock. It made you sick.