The Tie That Binds (8 page)

Another thing I can only guess at, concerning that summer, was why it took my dad so long. He was already thirty-two. He was still young, of course, still in his prime— strong, tough, black haired, the kind of man dogs and horses will come up to for a scratch and a pat without his
ever having to whistle or snap his fingers. But for at least ten years there hadn’t been any reason to doubt that he would make a good go of ranching. He had been well established for quite a while; he had things in control. So maybe he was just waiting. He was a country boy too, after all, and every fall during harvest he was still there helping the Goodnoughs, watching Edith, talking to her some and joking with Lyman, while he himself drove the header now that Roy couldn’t.

Then his mother, my grandmother, died. That was in the spring of 1922. When he came in for supper one evening, he found her dead in the rocking chair with tobacco ashes spilled out onto her black dress, and he buried her up on that little rise north of the barn. He stuck her briar pipe under her hands on her chest. Edith was the only other person there. Together they shoveled the sand in onto the wood box.

“There ought to be a tree or bush, though,” Edith said. “Even if it’s just the thought of it, she ought to have some shade.”

The box was covered now. My dad was mounding the sand on top and packing it with the flat of his shovel.

“I mean in July and August,” Edith said. “I don’t like thinking of her up here then.”

“Be a awful long way to carry water.”

“A bucket or two every other day,” she said. “We could take turns.”

“What kind of tree?”

“A cottonwood. They grow fast, and if there’s any wind you can hear the leaves washing and turning in it. Unless you’d rather it was something else.”

“I believe she liked cottonwoods. She never said.”

“You could get one from along the Arikaree.”

“I’ll get one this afternoon,” he said. “I guess we’re done here now.”

They stood on the rise looking at the mound of damp sand, with the -switch grass and brome and sagebrush around it. They could see the house south of where they stood.

“Do you want me to leave now?” Edith said. “I will.”

“No. Why would I want that?”

“Maybe you want to be alone.”

“I’ll have that as soon as I go down to the house,” he said. “No. No, you look okay there. You might even look pretty if you didn’t have all that wet sand on your shoes.”

“Go on,” she said.

“And your big nose wasn’t peeling.”

“Go on, you,” she said. “But John, she was a good woman, wasn’t she? My mother thought so. She made a difference for my mother.”

“Sure, she made all the difference. But I’ll never forget how that son of a bitch left her.”

“Nor you either. He left you too.”

“Never mind me. I always had her. But she never had anything—just a six-year-old kid and a homestead he hadn’t even got started good yet. The son of a bitch. I don’t know how she stood it.”

“Some people can’t,” Edith said. “She did though. She was as strong as anything.”

“She shouldn’t of had to be that strong. That’s what I mean. He just left her out here—with me and a milk cow and one horse. Can you believe that? Hell, he even took the other horse.”

“I’ll help you water the tree tomorrow,” Edith said.

So maybe that’s what he was waiting for: his mother to die and Edith Goodnough to suggest some shade for her. Anyway, he planted a cottonwood and they took turns watering it—or watered it together, more like—each of them carrying a bucketful up to the rise in the evenings,
and later he built a fence around it, and then they began going out together in his Ford car with Lyman along in the back seat for the ride.

I
T WAS CALLED
the Gem Theater then. It was on the other side of the street and north a block and a half from the theater we have now, the Holt Theater. There is a marquee out front above the double-door entrance to the Holt Theater now, so people can see what Blaine Fisher is showing for their enjoyment on the weekend, but you can only read what is showing if you are driving south on Main Street, because Blaine only changes the words on the north side of his marquee. I suppose he figures that’s enough ladder climbing for him, with his big stomach and his skinny legs and high blood pressure. Blaine leaves the other side of the marquee always the same:
ENJOY FRESH HOT POPCORN
. It makes you wonder now how fresh it is and how hot, considering how many years he’s been advertising it that way.

As for the old Gem Theater, I can’t remember whether it had one of those things above its doors or not—probably not—and it wouldn’t have had sound by 1922, either. But my dad and Edith and Lyman must have had some fun there just the same, with the lights in the auditorium darkened and the heads on the screen flickering bigger than any human head could be, and then before they were ready for it, that guy with the pencil moustache was tying the little blond to the railroad tracks, or strapping her down good to a buzz saw, and she was looking Help me right at Lyman chewing his popcorn and right at my dad and Edith holding hands on Edith’s lap, and all over that pretty lipstick mouth she had that big scream screaming “Help.” Some things were simpler then.

But it was late in the summer, after one of those two or three nights in town at the picture show and after a dish of ice cream at Lexton’s Confectionery, that what started right, ended wrong, and it stopped whatever else might have happened later. They were in the car going south towards home. Lyman was asleep in the back seat with his head shoved up against the side. When they got to the corner where they had to turn east to come the mile off the highway to the Goodnoughs’, they woke Lyman up and Edith asked him if he would walk the rest of the way, not quite home, she told him, but wait for her before he got home so they could go into the house together.

“For a favor to me,” she said. “Will you?”

“Don’t forget John,” he said.

“Yes. For him too. What’s wrong, though?”

“Nothing,” Lyman said. “What if Pa finds out?”

“He won’t. Here, you can take my coat to lie on in the grass.”

“But what if he does?”

“I don’t know. Will you do it?”

Lyman got out of the car then and spoke in through the window to Edith, so close that his breath moved her hair. “Don’t forget to pick me up,” he said.

“We won’t. And thank you, Lyman. But don’t you want my coat?”

“No. Lay on it yourself.”

“Don’t say that. Why would you say that? What’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing’s wrong with me.”

“What’s wrong, though? Something is.”

“It better not take very long,” Lyman said. “That’s all I know.”

Then he turned to walk alongside the road in the dark, away from the car. My dad and Edith drove a mile or two
farther south on the highway and then turned west into the sandhills.

“He’s tired all the time,” Edith said. “Did you see him back there? He’s going to have a stiff neck tomorrow.”

“Lyman’s all right,” my dad said. “He needs to get out more. Needs a girl himself to go riding with. Even if she has to eat as much ice cream as you do. Chocolate and nuts all over it, like she wasn’t never going to have another chance at it. Just howdy, mister, and forget the napkins; I ain’t got time to be fancy.”

“Oh, be quiet, you,” Edith said. “I only had one dish of it.”

“Yeah, just a little old triple decker.”

“But I like ice cream. And it was strawberries, not nuts.”

“Good. I’ll have Lexton bring you a gallon of both next time. Make him stack them on top his head like a trained monkey. He’s got that nice flat bald spot, just right for juggling things on it.”

“He doesn’t either. And it’s not flat like you say it is— it’s ridged.”

“Why, it is too. Flat as a pancake. It’s where his ma hit him with the shovel.”

“She didn’t do any such thing.”

“Well, she did. Banged on the head with a shovel. ‘Now behave yourself,’ she said, ‘and quit picking them britches, or I’ll bang you again.’”

“I’ll bang you on the head with a shovel,” Edith said, “if you don’t be quiet. Now hush, and see if you can keep this car out of the ditch.”

“I’m just trying to get you some ice cream, Edith. I don’t want you to go home hungry.”

“I’m sick of ice cream. And I don’t want to go home yet.”

“Good,” my dad said. “I don’t either.”

“But I can’t imagine any of this for him,” Edith said. “Can you?”

“Who? Bernie Lexton?”

“No. Lyman. I think I’m the only woman he’s ever talked to. Besides mother, I mean.”

“Poor bugger.”

“Yes. And not the way you mean it, either.”

So they were alone now. It was one of the few times, and the car was stopped on the country road. On both sides of them, since it was a piece of sandhill country and too steep for plows, they had all those sunflowers and all that sage and soapweed and blue grama grass, and I don’t know whether or not they had the moon. But I hope they did, a full moon, because Edith Goodnough deserved to be seen in that pale blue light at least once in her life, and anyway I know they had the high stars snapping clean for them, and all that country was quiet too. So my dad must have held her then, and kissed her—and not one of those first nose-positioning, chin-bumping kisses, but where you’ve gone past that part already and you’ve learned to make a good mixture of your mouth with hers, and it tastes good and you both want more, and then you have more. So he must have kissed her, and been kissed in return, and I’m going to hope they got out of the car then. I’m going to believe they did that, believe they stood out into that pale blue quiet and then together walked away from the car, up the hillside, until they found a hollow in the grass and lay down on his coat and talked quietly, almost in a whisper, though there was no need for whispering, while he unbuttoned her soft blouse and she watched his eyes, and his eyes showed that he knew he was being given a gift, and the only thing he was afraid of was that his hard work-calloused hands might somehow harm such smooth blue whiteness, and all the time on her part she
wasn’t afraid of anything, but was just waiting and watching him still, his dark eyes, and then she had one hand warm on his neck and the other alive in his black hair. And I’m going to believe that it was as beautiful as sometimes it can be, when you’re right with one another, when together it’s good for you both, because Edith deserved that too.

A
FTERWARDS
they must have talked a little, still quietly, in a sad whisper now. Edith must have said, “What’s going to happen to us, John? What am I going to do now?”

“Why, we’re going to get married.”

“But I don’t know that.”

“We’re going to get married. We’ll have a fine time.”

“I don’t know that at all.”

“I’m asking you, though. Right now. Is that what you’re waiting for? I’m too comfortable and easy to get up on my knees, but you know I want us to be married.”

“That’s not what I mean. I mean how can I?”

“Why hell, girl, you just say yes now, and a little later you say ‘I do.’ What else is there?”

Edith must have sat up then, moving up off his arm where she had been lying while he made circles in her brown hair with his fingers. She must have begun to put her blouse and skirt on again.

“I mean,” she said, “there’s Lyman.”

“Well, damn Lyman,” my dad said. “He’s old enough. What is he—twenty-four, twenty-five? He’s old enough to manage by hisself, ain’t he?”

“Lyman was twenty-three,” Edith said, “June sixth. But it’s not a matter of age, you know it isn’t. It’s him, it’s the way he is, and it’s me too. I’ve always had to be there for him—against Daddy.”

“All right, yes, I know that. I’ve seen it all often enough. But Jesus, Edith, you’d only be a half mile apart even so.”

“It’s not a matter of miles either.”

“Well, what then? Hell.”

“It’s Daddy too. Don’t you see that? Think about him, the way he is. His hands.”

“I don’t want to think about him. He’s a dried up son of a bitch. Even before his hands, he was.”

“That’s not fair.”

“It’s a fact, Edith. He’s no good to anybody, let alone to hisself.”

“But that doesn’t seem to matter,” she said. “Does it? I can’t help that. All I can help is . . . I can help about mother.”

“But for godsake, Edith. Your mother is dead.”

“I know that. That’s what I mean. When mother died I had to take things up into my own hands. And you know it doesn’t matter if I wanted to or not: sometimes now I don’t even know what it was I might have wanted once. I can’t recall. It’s been too long; it will be eight years in August since mother died. But anyway, these things and these people here are mine now. I’ve taken them up. That’s all there is. And besides, what would Lyman do?”

So what was my dad going to say to any of that? He was lying there in sandhill grass, watching her while she talked and while the light shone pale on her fine face, and I suppose he must have known that he couldn’t win any fight against the memory of any frail little woman, even if that woman was just skinny and tiny and homesick and even if she had been dead for close to eight years. But perhaps he still had reason to hope—
I
suppose he did— so perhaps he changed targets and aimed instead at Edith’s obligation to Lyman, because maybe he still thought he could at least win a fight against a twenty-three-year-old
shuffling, shambling brother. With humor then my dad must have said something like:

“All right, hell then. If he has to, Lyman can come live with us. I’ll cut him another hole in the outhouse.”

“What? Don’t be silly.”

“He can have his own Sears, Roebuck catalog too. We won’t bother it none. We won’t even notice if he uses all the pages except the ones with corsets and women’s socks on them. He can spend all the time he wants to out there— we won’t care.”

“You are good for me,” Edith said.

“Why sure. Old Lyman will be as happy as a dead sow in clover.”

Edith felt about in her hair to see if she had all of the grass combed out. “Give me another kiss,” she said. “And stop all this talking about outhouses and dead sows.”