The Tie That Binds (4 page)

But at least with both a boy and a girl on hand now to help, Roy could believe enough in tomorrow to begin adding on to his original quarter section, and he did. God only knows he was frugal enough. In fact, he was about so tight as to be able actually to squeeze blood from the turnips Ada grew in the family garden. As for his farming, he would do things like go on tying his machinery together with baling wire and patching it up however he could, rather than do anything as rash as to buy something new. Before he would do a thing that crazy he had to be dead certain that baling wire and goddamns wouldn’t work anymore. He never spent five cents on himself or his wife or his kids, and what he made he saved, and then about once every eight or nine years he would suck in his belt, spit, and then finally buy another quarter section of nearby Holt County sand for Lyman to help him sweat over. So in time, Roy acquired quite a lot of land. He had some Hereford cows with calves on grass, and a few Shorthorns to milk, besides the wheat and cornfields to till and plant and harvest.

Meanwhile, Edith and Lyman were growing up out here seven miles from Holt, and they were about all each other
had. As kids, Edith says, they slept together in a double straw-tick bed in one of the upstairs bedrooms, and wrapping their legs around one another to keep warm they told themselves stories about what they were going to do when they were big enough and free enough of the farm and their father to do those great things. Well, they never did them. But during the days when they were kids, in the few hours left when they weren’t hoeing beans or milking cows or churning butter or shoveling shit out the milk-barn window, they played those games farm kids play behind haystacks and deep in tall cornfields. In the winter they went to school a little bit.

When Edith started school in 1903, when she started riding the three miles farther south to the converted chicken house with the foul two-hole privy behind it, riding on one of the played-out workhorses her father still kept and whose back was so broad that riding him her legs stuck straight out sideways, the boy who lived down the road from her was already in his seventh and next-to-last year of school. I believe he was a help to her—John Roscoe was—and I believe he took care of her. I know they rode to school together, the thirteen-year-old boy with stiff black hair and the six-year-old girl in high-topped shoes that had been her mother’s, and I know every school day for two years they rode home together. He also protected her during lunch hour and recess, never mind what the other kids said about
Johnny has a girl friend, ain’t she sweet, when she takes her boots off, he tickles her feet
, because I believe that’s when and how what later happened—nineteen years later—started. With just that much.

Then that ended. The two years were up; he had finished the eighth grade, so for quite a while John Roscoe and Edith Goodnough didn’t see a lot of each other except during harvest, even if they lived just a half mile apart.

Neighboring families don’t visit much when one of the neighbors is Roy Goodnough.

Anyway, Lyman was old enough to start school then, so Edith rode double on the broken-down workhorse to school with him. But that didn’t last very long, either. Lyman only went to school for four or five years, and Edith herself never finished the eighth grade. That has always bothered her, too. I believe she thinks things might have ended different than they did if she had finished the eighth grade.

“But what was I going to do?” she says. “He wouldn’t allow it. It was a waste of time.”

By “he” she means, of course, Roy.

W
ILL
, then, what more do I need to tell you about those fifteen years that passed between the last two times Ada wanted the woman down the road to come? Just this, I suppose: in the pictures taken of Edith and Lyman between 1899 and 1914, Edith is a beautiful girl, with her mother’s big eyes and brown hair and enough of her father in her to make her stand up straight and face the camera full on. Also, in one of the pictures I’ve seen in the Goodnough family album, Edith has her arm around Lyman. He is standing there almost as if he’s been tucked into the folds of her long skirt, like he’s some kind of wet-combed cocker spaniel. Lyman looks scared and half protected at the same time. I don’t think he felt that way just when somebody was taking his picture.

But it was about Ada that
I
wanted to tell you now. I’ve already said how this country was a shock to her, how she had to live under a tarp for three or four months after already living in a wagon for three or four weeks, and how as thin as she was she still had to carry water in yoked
pails for a half mile every day until her husband found time to dig their own well. She wasn’t made for that kind of life. And even if she had been, she was still married to a man like Roy Goodnough. She was bound by law to a hickory stick.

So in the same family album, while Edith and Lyman are growing up, their mother, Ada, seems to be sinking down. In one picture after another, she looks smaller, shorter, thinner. Her cheeks suck into bone, her thin brown hair turns to sparse gray. By 1913, in what must be the last picture taken of her, she stands barely as tall as Roy’s shoulder, and he was no more than five feet eight himself. In the picture I’m talking about, Ada looks like she might be her husband’s mother. About all you can make out of her face in the grainy photograph is her big eyes, staring not at whoever it was that held the camera, but away, off towards something in the distance.

Then in 1914, in August, in the hottest month of the year in Holt County, she got sick. They say it was the flu, and people did die of the flu then. But I believe, and Edith says, that it was more than just a virus bug that killed her. It was all those years of looking east; it was almost two decades of being married to Roy. Once, when her own mother died, she had gone back home to Johnson County on the train, and she had stayed so long after the funeral that Roy had had to go out and bring her back. She never went a second time. Now, on the High Plains of Colorado, she lay up there in the second-story bedroom, with the windows open to catch any breeze there was, sweating and burning up with what maybe only one of her family still believed was just flu fever. So it was almost the same story again. It was almost like the two times she had delivered babies there in that same bedroom. Only it was August this time, and instead of her arms and legs
going rigid as sticks, she seemed as weak as water now. She didn’t make much of a bump under the sweat-soaked sheets. She didn’t move.

On the second or third day of this, she told Roy, “I want her now.”

“What?” he said.

“I want her to come. I think it’s time.”

“Now, damn it, Ada . . .”

“Please,” she said.

Maybe Roy thought she was talking out of her head, that it was just fever talk, but when she seemed worse by the middle of the afternoon when the sun was the hottest, he drove the half mile west to get the pipe-smoking half-Indian woman. She was an old woman now, though her eyes were still clear and black, and her hair was still the same straight brown; her hair never did get very gray. But she had some trouble mounting the stairs, so that Edith had to help her. When she was led into the room where Lyman and Roy stood against the wall, she first pulled the blinds on the windows and then sat down on the wood chair beside the bed.

After a while Ada opened her eyes. She fumbled her hand out from under the bedsheet towards the older woman. “I thank you,” she said.

“Do you want anything?”

“I thank you for coming.”

They stayed that way the rest of the afternoon. Later, Roy went out to feed and milk the cows, while Edith continued to smooth the bone-thin yellowing forehead with a cool washcloth and Lyman went on staring at his mother from his place against the wall, like he was rooted there, like he didn’t dare do anything else but stand and stare at his dying mother. Ada slept for several hours that way, with her loose hand held by the other woman, who also
managed to sleep some, sitting up in the chair beside the bed. The old woman’s head rocked back above the top of the chair, and her dark mouth dropped open a little.

At six Roy said they should eat. So he and Edith and Lyman went downstairs to the kitchen where Edith warmed some potatoes and green beans, sliced some bread, and made a fresh pot of coffee. When the food was on the table in front of him, Roy said grace and began to eat.

Between mouthfuls he said, “You didn’t tell me that red-faced cow was going dry.”

“What?” Lyman said. He was pushing his beans around on his plate.

“She’s damn near dry. You never told me.”

“I forgot.”

“What else have you forgot?”

“Nothing. I don’t know.”

“Never mind, Daddy,” Edith said. “Not now.”

“We need the milk,” Roy said.

After supper, Edith put the dishes to soak and took a plate of food and a cup of coffee upstairs to the old woman. They found that she was awake now, smoking one of her scarred briar pipes. She had raised the blinds again, and the blue pipe smoke drifted out the opened east window. She didn’t want the food. Beside her, Ada still lay silent in the bed, like a thin wax child.

“Did mother say anything?” Edith asked.

“No.”

“Did she wake again?”

“No. She’s resting. She’s getting ready.”

“I believe she does feel cooler now, don’t you think? Maybe the fever’s broken.”

“It hasn’t.”

The old woman put her pipe away in her apron pocket and they went on waiting. Gradually it grew darker in the room, but Edith says she remembers there wasn’t much
of a sunset that evening. She had hoped there would be; she thought her mother might like to see one, that it might make her feel better. There wasn’t, though. There weren’t any clouds to make a sunset. It was just hot.

When it was completely dark in the room, so dark they could barely distinguish the yellow face from the white pillow, Roy fumbled over to the chest of drawers in the corner and lit a lamp on top of it. The lamplight cast wavering shadows, and then the millers, those small dusty moths this country has more millions of than it needs, came out from the cracks in the wall and fluttered around the lamp, bumping against the hot globe and singeing themselves. One of the millers landed on Ada’s forehead and left its smudge of dust there, so it must have been that, when Edith brushed it off, that woke her again.

Ada seemed to rouse for a minute then and to look dimly around her. When she seemed to have each person in place, her thin lips moved.

“You make him. Tell him.”

“What?” Edith said. “Would you like some water?” “I want him to take me to Johnson County. I want to sleep beside my mother.”

“Yes. All right.”

“You make him.”

“Yes.”

She didn’t say anything more. She went back to sleep, as if she hadn’t said anything at all, or as if she had said all there was to say. Sometime before midnight she died. Edith says they didn’t know for sure what time it was she died; they couldn’t set the exact minute. They weren’t able to tell when she stopped breathing, because her breath was so soft at the last anyway. They just knew for certain that she was dead when Hannah Roscoe put Ada’s hand under the sheet again and then went downstairs and walked home by herself.

By the lamplight, Edith washed the child-sized body, combed the hair into place, and put on the Sunday dress. The next day Roy buried her in the Holt County Cemetery northeast of town.

“You know what mother wanted,” Edith said. “You were there.”

“No,” he said. “She was sick then.”

“You heard her say so.”

“I want her here.”

“But mother didn’t like it here. She hated it. This wasn’t her home.”

“Your mother’s dead. You’re the mother now.”

“What do you mean? I can’t replace mother.”

“You will.”

Ada’s was the first of the three Goodnough graves that have been dug so far, over there in the brown grass beside the fence line that separates the cemetery and Otis Murray’s cornfield. Ada lived to be forty-two.

•3•

E
DITH
was seventeen when her mother died. Lyman was fifteen. They were a year older when the next thing happened that fixed it for them. It wasn’t enough that their father was Roy Goodnough or that their mother died early; there had to be at least one more thing to clinch matters, to fix them forever, to make Edith and Lyman end up the way they did—two old people, a sister and a brother, living alone out here in a yellow house surrounded by weeds.

It was an accident that did it. It was during harvest, and Roy Goodnough must have hated harvesttime.

No—that’s not quite right. Like the rest of us, he must have loved it too, because it meant the end; it meant the accomplishment of what had been started months before with plowed sand and bags of seed. Also, he must have worried about it, like we all did and still do, stewed in his juice over it, stepped out the first thing in the morning, even before he had his pants buttoned good, to search the sky for clouds in the hope now that it wouldn’t rain, or worse, that if there were clouds, then he would detect no sickly green, because that kind of green in clouds meant hail.

But at the same time he was loving it and worrying about it, he must have hated it too, because at harvesttime Roy had to ask someone for help. He couldn’t do it alone.
He could operate the header himself, but even with Edith driving the team of horses polling the header barge and Lyman leveling the wheat off in the back of the barge, he still needed one more person to stack the wheat once the barge was full and ready to be unloaded. So he had to ask John Roscoe, down the road a self mile, to do that.

John Roscoe was twenty-five in 1915. I’ve already said about him that he lasted. But he was able to last not so much by farming himself, like Roy did, as by adding more grassland to the original claim his mongrel father had filed ten years before he ever went to town that Saturday morning and disappeared. Calving time was the worst: you had to get up at three o’clock in the morning in a March blizzard to pull a calf that was trying to come breech; but usually one man could manage a small cattle operation. He also farmed some, though, in a small way. His mother cooked dinner and washed clothes, smoked her pipe and rocked herself to sleep in the afternoons beside the stove in the living room. Anyway, it was John Roscoe that was helping the Goodnoughs harvest their wheat that July in 1915.