The Tie That Binds (3 page)

Even now there are not many trees here, although people in towns like Holt have full-grown trees that were planted by early residents sixty and seventy years ago in backyards and along the streets—elm and evergreen and cottonwood and ash, and every once in a while a stunted maple that somebody stuck in the ground with more hope for it than real experience of this area would ever have allowed. In the country we have a few trees now, too, of course, standing up around our houses, and you can tell where somebody lives, or used to live, because of those trees, but we are more interested in windbreaks. The 1930s taught us windbreaks, and the government wants to encourage it.

Every spring now the soil-conservation office tries to sell us red cedar, blue spruce, ponderosa pine, Russian olive, Nanking cherry, cottonwood, lilac, sumac, plum, and honeysuckle—thin saplings at nine dollars for a bundle of thirty or fifteen dollars for a bundle of fifty. For another twenty cents per tree the government will send out somebody to plant them for us. Last spring it was an old man on a tractor plowing a furrow so that a young woman riding a tree planter behind the tractor, with a bundle of saplings in a box beside her and her feet raised onto stirrups to be out of the way, could poke the saplings down between her thighs into the plowed furrow almost like she thought she was giving birth. This particular young woman enjoyed getting as much sun as she could all over her body, and the folks down at the soil-conservation office are still trying to figure out how much to charge us for watching her do that.

But then I was talking about what it was like in this country in 1896 when Roy and Ada rode here in a wagon from Iowa to homestead, and I said there were almost no trees here then, and that’s true. The only trees in this country at that time stood along the rivers and the creeks, and there were only two each of those. To the north was the South Fork of the Platte River and about one hundred and fifty miles to the south was the Arkansas River; in between were the two creeks, the Republican and the Arikaree.

What they found when they got here then—and I don’t believe Ada ever got over the shock of it—was a flat, treeless, dry place that had once belonged to Indians.

It was a hell of a big piece of sandy country, with a horizon that in every direction must have seemed then— to someone who didn’t know how to look at this country and before Henry Ford and paved highways diminished it just a little—to reach forever away under a sky in summer that didn’t give much of a good goddamn whether or not the bags of corn seed Roy was going to plant in some of that sand ever amounted to a piddling thing, and a sky in winter that, even if it was as blue as picture books said it should be and as high and bright as anybody could hope for, still didn’t care whether or not the frame house Roy was going to build ever managed to keep the snow from blowing in on Ada’s sewing machine. There just wasn’t a thing in the world concerned enough to care whether Roy’s corn did anything more than shrivel, and there wasn’t a thing tall enough or wide enough anywhere between Canada and Mexico to stop the snow from blowing.

No, Ada never got over the shock of this country. There was too much of it, and none of it looked like Iowa.

But Ada wouldn’t have left Iowa at all if this had still been Indian country. She wasn’t the kind of woman to dare that much. Somehow she would have blocked Roy’s
homestead plans, and she would either have found a way to endure Roy’s cold feet or she would have gone home to her mother, like I’ve already suggested. But whatever, she would have stayed in Iowa, which was established country by that time, and feeling at home she would have gone on attending church circles and making little forays to town to buy thread for doilies and gimcracks for the house, and if that had happened, if she had stayed in Iowa, that dark lost look, which pictures of her show, might never have taken root in her eyes. But the Indians were gone. She didn’t have that ready excuse nor good reason not to come. She had to follow her husband, if what he proposed to do seemed even remotely reasonable, and after all, by the beginning of the last decade of the last century, this country was already starting to fill up with homesteaders; there wasn’t much homestead land left. So Ada came.

But Roy now, I suppose Roy would have come anyway, even if Indians were still here. He was about enough of a fox terrier to trot into a territory that belonged to somebody else, and once he got there, raise his hind leg to it, claim it for his own, without thinking twice about prior claims or possible consequences. But Roy never got the chance to prove that either. Colorado had already been a state for twenty years by the time he got here; the Indians had been gone for at least that long; and the little piece of land he claimed was signed over to him in a local government office.

But all right, by late spring in 1896 the Goodnoughs got here in their wagon from Iowa, and if they were disappointed, if what they found wasn’t what they expected to find, having read those flyers and government brochures, still they stayed; they didn’t go back. They unhitched the wagon, and then, no doubt, Roy stuck Ada in the ramshackle boardinghouse in town to bide her time,
to wash the dirt out of her hair and write another long miserable letter home, while he rode out on one of the workhorses to look this country over. I don’t suppose that took him very long. He was in too much of a hurry; he was too muleheaded; he wanted to get some seed in the ground; and he might even have known that if he didn’t do something quick, then Ada might somehow wake from her dream and daze, sit up and look around her, and then just take off, walking if she had to, with her small chin and her big eyes pointed east. So, in a hurry, he looked this country over, finding the expanses of bluestem and buffalo and sand love and switch grass and prairie sand reed, which still stood belly high on his Belgium, locating those areas that still remained after other, earlier homesteaders had staked their claims and done their chopping and busting.

He found what he thought he wanted seven miles south of town. There was already a house and a shed or two and a couple of pens, just a half mile west of the corner of the quarter section Roy intended to claim for himself, but in the house there was only a six-year-old boy living alone with a black-eyed silent woman. And I believe Roy picked that place because he thought that boy and that half-Indian woman who lived there, a half mile up along what wasn’t even a wagon track yet, would never last, in fact, could never last. With time then, and not very much time at that, he believed he would be able to take over that other place that was already started, because there wasn’t any man around. The man who should have been there had disappeared three years earlier. On a Saturday morning he had gone to town—to the three stores, the boardinghouse, the saloon and graveyard and fifteen or twenty wood houses that meant Holt then—and he never came back, and never wrote either, since the six-year-old boy couldn’t read yet and because the pipe-smoking woman
he left behind never would be able to read. It would just be a waste of pen and paper and a two-cent stamp to do something like compose a letter and tell why.

Anyway, you understand, because it was that particular quarter section of grass a half mile east of that other house that Roy picked for his own, decided in all the world was his, that’s the reason why I know what I do about him, and also about Ada and Edith and Lyman, because, of course, the six-year-old boy living in the house was John Roscoe, and John Roscoe lasted.

Well, the Goodnoughs lasted, too. And things—at least at first—went along about like you would have expected them to. Roy filed his claim, put his horses to pulling a sod-busting plow, planted his bag of Iowa seed as best he could in the rough ground, bought a cow or two to stake out on the nearby grass, and then turned finally to throwing together a frame house for Ada. She’d been living under a tarp till then, which was tied to the side of the wagon and which had to be untied any time Roy decided he needed to haul something, living almost like she was some kind of nomad Arab but without even that much permanence or experience at it. She had to cook over an open fire and try to coax a few beans and peas and maybe a couple of zinnia plants to grow in the corner of the plowed sod Roy allowed her to call a garden. It wasn’t easy. To water her little garden and even to have something to drink but never to have enough left over to take a bath in, Ada had to walk a half mile one way with two yoked pails across her thin shoulders and fetch water from that other place where the boy and the woman lived and owned a windmill that pumped water.

But that other woman apparently took some interest in her. Or maybe she felt something like pity towards her— like maybe you would towards some dog that had been dropped off out in the country and not some strong mongrel
dog that would manage to live anyhow, but a to poodle, say, or a Pekinese, that belonged in the parlor— because I know for a fact that at least once the woman walked out to Ada, where Ada was stooping beside her two pails at the windmill and horse tank, splashing water onto her wrists and face, and said:

“Don’t you want to take a bath?”

Ada looked at her. She did something with her mouth that was meant to be a smile and then quick looked east to where she could just make out Roy walking behind his horses in the field, and turned back.

“If it wouldn’t be any bother.”

“Come into the house.”

So I know that Ada took at least one more bath that summer besides the one she had taken in the boarding-house in town. When she was dressed again, she said:

“But don’t tell him. He won’t want to know I took a bath in somebody else’s house.”

Well, Roy never knew that about his wife. And I suppose there were a lot of other things he didn’t know or understand about her, but he did build her a house. He had the first part of it completed by fall. Later there were other rooms added on, a new kitchen and a back porch and also what turned out to be a parlor, but the first square two-story part of the house was raised late that summer. And he was a good rough carpenter, I’ll say that for him.

He had to buy the lumber in town, in Holt, and haul it home in his wagon, and then he had to nail it together himself. Ada helped him to lift the wall frames into place and steady them while he tacked them down, but for the most part he did all the work himself, since he had picked a place to live where there wasn’t another full-grown male anywhere near, and anyway he wouldn’t have asked for help if there had been. They bought a few sticks of furniture
to go along with Ada’s sewing machine and moved into the house sometime before time to pick corn.

Roy’s dryland corn didn’t do very well that first year. There wasn’t much to pick. There was too much sagebrush and soapweed and too many grass roots to contend with, and even in his hurry the corn had still been planted late; the corn seed was still in the bags when most of what rain we get here falls in the spring. So his corn didn’t do very well, and I don’t suppose Ada was doing very well, either. By corn harvest I believe she was good and sick, because sometime in August of that summer Roy had found enough sap and energy and time too to get her pregnant, so that on the night of April twenty-first in the following spring, after she had managed somehow to get through that first long High Plains winter, Ada gave birth to a girl she named Edith.

Roy was going to do that by himself, too, of course. He was going to boil the sheets, rotate the head, slap some breath into the baby, and sew Ada up afterwards with needle and thread—without help from anyone. I don’t know, maybe he had read some flyers and government brochures about that too, but things in this case didn’t happen the way he expected them to, either. Because sometime that night, after Ada had been in labor for two or three days with her thin brown hair sweat-stuck to her face and her white thighs gone as rigid as sticks, Roy caught one of his workhorses and galloped that dark half mile west to the other house and woke the half-Indian woman. When her face appeared in one of the upstairs opened windows he yelled up at her:

“Goddamn it, I can do it. But she wants you. She wants you to come over there.”

He was sitting down there on that bareback excited Belgium, yelling up into the dark towards a dark face he could barely see.

“I could do it myself, but now she says she has to have you there. But I’ll make that right too, goddamn it. You wait and see.”

The woman in the upstairs window watched him on his horse in her front yard.

“Don’t you hear me?” he yelled. “Don’t you understand a goddamn thing I’m telling you? She wants you over there.”

But the woman was gone by now, leaving him yelling up into the dark where there wasn’t even a silent face in a window to hear him yell and rage. The woman had gone to wake her boy, who was seven now and had been since February twenty-fourth. She told him to get their saddle horse ready; she was riding over to the Goodnoughs’ to set things right and she would be back in the morning. And I guess Roy understood that he had done enough yelling for one night when he saw the boy go out the back door towards the corral, so he galloped back home again.

The woman got there a few minutes later. I can’t say exactly what she did or how she did it, but I’m certain she got Roy out of the room where he was less than no help, and then I believe she was able to get Ada revived enough to make another effort. Maybe she made some tea or something hot with herbs in it, or maybe it was just her voice and hand, but anyway she delivered the baby girl and Ada got some rest. And afterwards she must have made a couple of things plain enough that even Roy understood them, because two years later in June, when again it was Ada’s time, Roy didn’t wait until his wife had been in labor for two or three days and had turned to frazzle before he decided it was time for him to start howling in the dark. No, he came in broad daylight, knocked at the front door, and asked if the woman would come. So Lyman’s birth went easier, smoother, without the galloping horse and the yelling. This was 1899.

Well, Roy had a girl and a boy now, and I don’t suppose he ever expected much from Edith (more than just constant work, I mean) or ever thought much of hoping something for her either—he wouldn’t have; she was a girl, a potato peeler, an egg gatherer—but he might have expected more from Lyman, so he probably wasn’t real thrilled with the way Lyman turned out. And it wasn’t that Lyman didn’t work hard enough—he did, in his loose, mechanical, dry fashion—and Lyman sure as hell didn’t leave the farm very often until it was almost too late for him to ever leave it at all. But he just didn’t like any of it; he never really got his hand in. Lyman was too much of a lapdog even to suit his father.