The Tie That Binds (26 page)

When it went on for more than a year, Edith asked me to help her move the furniture. She wanted to know if I didn’t think it would be better to move the bedroom furniture downstairs, to set it up in the living room next to the parlor where she could be closer to him when he called in the night. It sounded like a good idea to me. They could shut off the upstairs altogether; there wouldn’t be any reason to climb those steps again. So I went over in the afternoon to help her accomplish that. That was when I understood for the first time that there was only one bed in use up there. She wasn’t trying to hide it. It was a double bed in the west bedroom, with an old-fashioned quilt spread.

“This what you want moved?” I said.

“Just the dressers out of this room, Sandy,” she said.

“What beds do you want?”

“They’re out in the garage. In storage.”

“Oh?”

“We stored them out there when Lyman came back— to make space for his things.”

She was looking at me steadily from where she stood in front of the window, the country open and flat and dry behind her. She looked tired, a thin aging woman with her mouth pursed. She had begun to fashion her gray hair into a kind of knot. We stood there facing one another in the room where she had been born, where Lyman was born two years later, both of them with my grandmother’s help, and where Ada had died holding my grandmother’s hand, the room where the old man finally died in his time with his mouth locked open like box iron. It was a lot of history to be worrying about a double bed.

“Well,” I said, “why don’t I start with these dressers?”

I started pulling out the drawers and carrying them downstairs. Then I banged the dressers themselves down the steps and went outside to bring the beds in from the garage. The beds Edith wanted were old cast-iron single beds, stored overhead on the rafters. I dusted them off and set them up like she wanted, one on either side of the living room against the walls. She was making a day room out of it. When we were finished it looked all right too. Comfortable and clean, with matching spreads on the two beds, and the dressers set up in the corners with a clothes closet moved into the pantry. Lyman stayed busy in the parlor the whole time. He was studying a road map.

“Where you headed today?” I asked him. “New York City?”

“Salt Lake,” he said.

“Hell of a place,” I said.

Then I went home to feed corn to castrated bulls and to fork hay to fat cattle. And you can make of the Goodnoughs’ bedroom arrangement whatever you want to. Stir it according to your own lights. Myself, I don’t make anything of it. If they wanted to sleep in the same bed, warm their feet under the same old-fashioned patchwork quilt like they had when they were kids before this century
ever began—well, that was their business, because when you know people all your life you try to understand how it is for them. What you can’t understand you just accept. That’s how I felt about Edith. At the time I could still remember like it was yesterday how she fed me chewing gum while we cleaned chicken squirt from brown eggs at the kitchen sink and how one summer she brought me ice tea and lemonade when I was driving tractor in a hayfield and an old man was waving stumps past my head and screaming nonsense in my ears. I intended to help her however I could. It was not my business to ask fool questions that didn’t concern me. That’s where Rena Pickett came in. To help Edith, I mean. Only help isn’t the right word.

From the time Rena was born in 1969 Edith enjoyed her. I already told you how she was a compensation, but she was more than that. I suppose it had something to do with having a little kid dancing around in the house where otherwise there were only old folks, something to do with a little girl’s noise and giggles breaking up all that daily silence, that ongoing concentrated crotchetiness filling the parlor and the entire downstairs. Why hell, Rena put some fun into that yellow house, and Mavis and I encouraged it. Whenever there was occasion to be out at night or excuse to go to the National Western Stock Show in Denver, Rena went to Edith’s. She went there a lot, not just when we were gone but often for a whole day when we were home during the summer and also for an hour or two during the week after school. By the time she was six she was going there by herself. She’d throw a halter on Echo and trot down to the Goodnoughs’. We didn’t worry about her when she was there; it was obvious that she and Edith got along together like two beads on the same string. Besides, it was educational. I’ll bet Rena is the only seven-year-old kid in all of Holt County who not only knows
how to scald a chicken and pluck tail feathers but also how to get from Dallas to St. Paul by train and bus. Because she was a help with Lyman too, you understand. My daughter could bring that old man out. She treated him as an equal. Together they played travel in the parlor for hours.

On a late-winter afternoon if I went in to bring Rena home for supper I’d find her with Lyman, the two of them sitting at that loaded mahogany desk in that west room, the light from the overhead lamp reflecting off his bald visored head and her shiny black hair, her hair fallen forward around her face. The maps would be tacked up on the walls. Around them on the floor the whole room would be full of stuff, cluttered so you couldn’t walk, overflowing: all those damn brochures and pamphlets and flyers; schedules for the whole country creased five times and looking used up; all of it spilling out of cardboard boxes; a hell of a mess. If Edith wanted to clean in there she had to dust around them; they knew where they wanted things. They allowed her to store the extra piles of stuff on the steps leading up to the unused bedrooms, but she had to ask first. And that was all right because Rena was keeping Lyman occupied; he was almost happy when she was there. So, while Edith folded clothes or cooked supper, the two travelers were busy, engrossed in serious play, both of them sitting bent over that desk where Rena colored train tickets and Lyman studied the numbers in his train schedule and tried to figure how to get them to Detroit if they boarded in Denver. It was solemn business. And Rena would be saying something like:

“I’m just sick of this orange. I’m going to make them red.”

“Red what?” Lyman would say.

“Our train tickets. Don’t you know we got to buy train tickets? Did you forget that again?”

“I ain’t forgetting nothing. Tickets is your business.” And a little later:

“But look here. We got us that same damn layover in Chicago. Three hours’ worth.”

“How much minutes is that?”

“I just told you. Ain’t you listening?”

“You said hours. And you’re not suppose to say ‘ain’t.’”

“Mind your own business.”

“Well, you’re not suppose to.”

And a little later still:

“There. I’m done with all these tickets. Now hurry up with that schedule thing.”

So, in time, they would take up red tickets and board the train and pretend to see all that country between Denver and Detroit, with a three-hour layover in Chicago, where Rena would say she was shopping for presents for her school friends and Lyman would say he was drinking himself a bottle of cold beer.

At Christmas Edith gave my daughter a green visor like the one her traveling partner wore. It was Rena’s favorite present. She hung it on a nail beside the maps in the travel bureau.

T
HEN
, about a year ago in March, the Goodnoughs acquired an old milky-eyed dog by default, and at about the same time we learned that there was reason for us to worry about Rena’s going over there by herself to play travel with Lyman. Lyman had finally reached that edge of his. In fact, he seemed at times to have passed it. For days his mind would be about as good as it had been; he might still manage to function in the parlor, more or less, but then for no reason that anybody could detect he’d be gone for half a day, turn blank and vacant, his mind as empty of sense as a dead stick is of sap. He’d go silent in
some corner or he’d babble from his bed in the living room about nothing, about railroad ballast, or car keys and fence wire. I remember he spent one entire afternoon talking about nettles. I also remember how Edith reported that he pissed on the clothes in the makeshift closet in the pantry one time; apparently Lyman thought he had discovered the toilet among his sister’s dresses. But that was later in the fall. In the meantime he was still trying to travel. And when things didn’t connect right he could turn violent. He used those canes of his.

Now whether the dog had anything to do with Lyman’s final collapse, I don’t know. Probably not. Probably it was just coincidence. If it hadn’t been a dog, it would have been something else just as trivial. However you look at it, it doesn’t make any sense. Anyway, the dog wandered into the yard one night. Edith found it the next morning when she went out to feed the chickens and to break ice in the water pan.

It was an old black-and-brown dog with mottled white on its belly, a mixture of border collie and spaniel and whatever else had been available and interested at the time. There were clots of matted hair on its back legs, and its eyes were milky with cataracts. It slept a lot and whimpered when it wasn’t sleeping. There was a leather collar buckled around its neck when Edith found it, so we figured some town folks had dropped it off—they will do that; ask any farmer who lives within a ten-mile radius of any town what he has discovered in the ditch in front of his house and he’ll tell you—just shoved the old dog out onto the road in front of the Goodnoughs’ mailbox with the mistaken notion that such a thing would be kinder than a ten-minute trip to the vet and a quick injection. Anyway, being the kind of woman she is, Edith kept the dog. She fed it and brought it into the house.

That’s when the trouble started seriously with Lyman.
I suppose you’d have to say he was jealous of the damn thing. It was like he felt his sister was spending too much of herself caring for something that wasn’t him. Like a kid, he wanted her total concentration and concern to himself. If she wasn’t looking, he’d give the dog a boot, hit it with his cane. Things got worse. Then my daughter had to be there when it all went to hell.

It was one of those late-winter, early-spring afternoons in March, that in-between time when a gray sky can’t decide what to do, drop snow or spit rain, so it does a little of both. Rena had come home as usual on the bus after school, and I had taken her with me to the Goodnoughs’ to play in the house while I worked on a tractor I kept stored out of the weather in the machine shed. It was getting along towards five, darkening already, and I had turned on the drop-light over the tractor. Then Edith was calling me from the steps of the back porch.

“What?” I yelled back at her. “I’m out here.”

“You better come to the house.”

“I’ll be there in a minute.”

“What?”

“In a minute.”

“You better come now.”

She turned and went back in. What in the hell? I thought. I walked across the wet graveled yard and inside the house, in the kitchen, I found Rena on Edith’s lap. Rena was crying, her face close against Edith’s shoulder. Rena didn’t cry much, but she was crying hard now. Through the kitchen door I could see Lyman glaring at me from across the length of the house. He was standing in the parlor doorway as if he would fight anybody who tried to get past him. He looked wild. That travel clerk’s visor of his was tilted lopsided on his head, and his eyes looked flat crazy, insane, bughouse.

“What’s going on?” I said.

Rena was crying something into Edith’s shoulder; it came out muffled and wet.

“What? Honey, I can’t understand you.”

“Never mind now, sweetheart,” Edith said. “It’ll be all right now. Your daddy’s here. Don’t you know it’ll be all right? It always is, isn’t it?”

Rena looked up into Edith’s pale wrinkled face. “But Lyman hit you,” she said. “I saw him hit you with that cane.”

“I know. But never mind now. It’s all over.”

“And he hit Nancy too. I tried to make him stop but he wouldn’t.”

“Nancy will be all right too. You’ll see. Look, she’s over there in the corner on her rug. See how she likes it there where it’s warm. Why, she’s asleep already, so don’t you worry about Nancy—no, now don’t cry anymore. Just lean your head back. There, that’s my girl.”

“Edith,” I said, “what happened here?”

Edith didn’t say anything for a while. She was caressing, calming my daughter. Finally she said, “I don’t know really. I think it’s just too much for him sometimes. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, and then something happens and—”

“And he hurts you.”

“Not very much. I’m all right. It’s just that I don’t know right now what I’m going to do with him. I’ve got to think.”

“Will you tell me what happened?”

She was still holding Rena on her lap, petting her hair and smoothing the collar on her school dress. After a while, when Rena stopped crying, when the hiccups too had stopped, Edith told me. From her account and from what Rena was later able to say, I’ve pieced this much together:

They were traveling in the parlor together as usual. The boxes of travel stuff were spread around them; the maps
of the country were on the wall. In front of them on the desk they had their work papers and charts and Crayolas and pencils, the two of them sitting there in the travel bureau in their matching green visors, that old man and my daughter, getting up another trip for themselves. They had decided, it still being late winter in Colorado, that now would be a good time to take the sun in Phoenix because it would be full spring there, and Rena said she was getting tired of this snow and rain dripping all the time so they had to stay in the gym for recess, and Lyman said: “Phoenix.” Well, that turned out to be a mistake: the train connections were too difficult. They would have to get on in Denver, go north to Cheyenne, cross over to Salt Lake, track west to San Francisco, change trains for Los Angeles, and then come back eastward into Arizona. Something like that, anyway. And Lyman couldn’t manage it. It called for more sense, more figuring, and more understanding of time changes and layovers than he was capable of. He had to call Edith in from the kitchen three or four times to help him. So he was getting hot. It set him off.