The Tie That Binds (9 page)

T
HEY WENT HOME THEN
, out of the sandhills where, for a while, they had been alone in the sage and the blue light, then north on the highway to the corner and east almost a mile, before they got to the Goodnoughs’, to find Lyman. They didn’t find him, though, not right away. They had to stop the car and look for him along the roadside in the tall grass, and they didn’t find him until they turned the headlights of the car on again. Even then they didn’t find him immediately. He was lying on his side, rolled into himself like a kid, asleep with spit dribbled onto his chin. He was a good fifteen feet off the road. Edith brushed him off.

“Are you awake now?” she said.

“Where’s Pa?”

“In the house. Come on. Can you get in the car?”

My dad drove them into the yard and squeezed Edith’s
hand before she got out. Then he drove the half mile home, and Edith and Lyman walked into the house together. Roy was waiting for them in the kitchen. He was sitting at the kitchen table in his work pants and long underwear, with his raw hands and one good finger resting on the white enameled wood in front of him. Some things weren’t any simpler then than they are now.

“Get upstairs,” he told Lyman.

Lyman looked at Edith. He was fully awake now and aware, but he went upstairs anyway. The barn door had just banged shut again for him.

“You’re done with that,” Roy said to Edith. “That’s enough of Roscoe.”

Edith stood on the other side of the table, waiting, watching her father feel his little finger over the bad nubs of his right hand. His finger looked like a claw raking dead meat.

“I seen him stop the car,” Roy said. “I seen the lights on the road go off and come on again. But that’s done with.”

“I’m twenty-five,” Edith said.

“That don’t mean a diddle.”

“John’s thirty-two.”

“That don’t mean a goddamn, either. He’s a half-breed bastard, and you’re done with him.”

“He’s not either.”

“He is if I say he is, goddamn it. And you’re his whore. Now get to bed. You must be all wore out after tonight.”

“Shut up, Daddy. You don’t know what you’re saying.”

Roy stood up then; the chair banged down behind him onto the wooden floor. He reached across the table at her with his finger, but she stepped back.

“You don’t tell me to shut up,” he yelled. “I’m your father. I’ll say any goddamn thing I please. I told you to go to bed. Now get.”

“I will go to bed,” Edith said. “But I won’t listen to you say that.”

“This is my house. I built it. I’ll say anything I want in these rooms. Do you understand me?”

“It’s my house too. And Lyman’s. And it was mother’s before she died.”

“I wish she could see you now. She’d hate the damn sight of you.”

“No, she wouldn’t,” Edith said. “She would not.”

“By God, don’t tell me, you goddamn—”

But Edith walked past him then—he was insane, wild-eyed, stump waving—and went into the living room and up the stairs to the bedroom. He was still yelling at her: “You’re done with him, you hear me? Goddamn sow to a Roscoe, you’re done now. You’re through. You whore. You hear me?”

T
HE NEXT DAY
Roy used more than just his voice. In the afternoon while Edith was snapping beans in the kitchen and Lyman was mowing hay in the field, Roy Goodnough kicked the chopping block over with his boot and pushed it rolling with the heels of his hands across the yard into the barn. There he righted it again under a crossbeam in the center alley of the barn. The chopping block was a sawed-off stump of an elm tree, with deep ax marks and dark dried blood on it where the slack heads of chickens had been chopped off. Over the crossbeam above him Roy looped a hemp rope and tied a full-handled ax to the rope so that the ax would fall and cut deep into the block.

He experimented with it twice, pulling the ax up almost to the crossbeam to give it enough weight to do what he wanted it to do when it fell. Then he pulled it up one more time and clamped the rope tight between his right
elbow and his ribcage. The ax hung ready above him in the dusty horse-shit air. He waited until it was still, no longer swinging. A speckled pigeon watched it all from a high perch in the barn rafters, and then he laid his one finger down on the block and released the rope. The pigeon blinked a pink eye when the ax fell, thunking through his finger into the block.

Only it didn’t just cut his finger off. Maybe he moved a little when he released his elbow-hold on the rope and then saw the ax falling and falling, taking too long to fall. Or maybe he hadn’t experimented enough. Whatever went wrong, the ax chopped through the top knuckle of his hand, splintering it bad as it smashed through bone and joint and gristle. But it must have still been satisfactory.

He pinched up the twitching finger from the block like it was just a chicken’s head, pinched it up between his two hand stumps and carried it bloody into the house to the kitchen and dropped it into the bowl of snapped beans on the table in front of Edith. At first she didn’t move, didn’t speak. It bled a little among the beans. Then she looked up from the bowl at her father.

“You might have saved yourself the trouble,” she said. “I already decided last night I couldn’t leave this house.”

She got up and went to the bandage box she kept in a kitchen drawer and poured alcohol over his hand and wrapped it to stop the bleeding.

“You’ll probably get infection,” she said. “I suppose you should see Doc Packer again, but I’m not going with you. I’ve been there once. And I might have married John Roscoe. I might have married him. I don’t care what you say. He wanted me to and I might have. Oh yes, God in mercy, I might have. Oh damn you.”

But she was crying then. There wasn’t any sound to it. It was past the point where the puny sound of a human
voice can make any difference. She walked out of the house away from her father towards the hayfield to tell Lyman, with the unregarded tears falling onto the breast of her blouse. After that, I know of only two other times in her life that Edith Goodnough allowed herself to cry. Neither was at the death of her father.

•5•

W
HAT’S
365 times 20? Something over 7,000, isn’t it? Well, that’s how long it was. That’s how many days.

For over 7,000 days, for almost 20 years, nothing happened to the Goodnoughs. After Roy chopped his last finger off with the ax, nothing happened to the Goodnoughs—or
for
them either—until almost two decades of slow days had passed. Days that must have seemed as cruel as stillbirth; the pointlessness of them, the sameness, one slow day grinding slow into the next, with no letup and no relief, nothing to look forward to and even less to look back on. Not even those small things the rest of us use to mark the passing of time—what we mean when we say “But you remember, don’t you?”—because Edith and Lyman didn’t have even that much that was worth recalling about last Christmas, never mind the day before yesterday. I believe even the Great Depression, when it came in the thirties, must have seemed like just more of the same to them, or if it was different then it was only slightly worse, because then they stopped going into town once a week to sell eggs and sour cream during the depression, to make a little money.

So it only surprises me that Roy didn’t start in on his toes the same way, chop his ten toes off, nine all at once in the header or hay mower or corn picker and then the last one by itself in the barn with an ax—just for a little
variety, I mean. To keep the knack of it fresh. Hell, the old bastard could have yelled Lyman in from the hayfield and made Lyman take the damn things into the house and dump them into the bean bowl or the kitchen sink. Chopped his own ears off, too, for all I know or care. Except I guess even Roy knew he had done enough that one afternoon.

Because Edith never went out riding with my father again. She and Lyman went on working like they had before. Of course, when those six or seven weeks of that summer ended for Edith, she wasn’t the same. It was as if the reason for her to have female hips and soft breasts was gone. She got so she was more what you really mean is thin when you say a woman has a good body, that she’s slim. She didn’t laugh as easy. Something bright went out of her brown eyes. Her quick gestures became deliberate movements, like there was nothing now to hurry about, and it was at that time that she and Roy stopped talking to one another any more than they had to. Oh, she took care of him—I don’t mean that. She buttoned his shirt for him now that he no longer had even one finger to use to poke a button through a hole, and she mashed his potatoes and cut his meat into bites so he could still eat his food by lifting a fork to his mouth between his clenched stumps, and she tied his shoes. But she didn’t have much to say to him and she paid less attention to whatever he said. So there must have been a lot of quiet around that kitchen table for all those years, with about all the talk being just Roy’s orders and farm questions and Lyman’s mumbled grunts of obedience and short answers and pass the pepper and ain’t there any more gravy; and then in December of 1941 it must have got to be almost dead silence.

B
UT I’M GETTING AHEAD
of myself. Or if you want it for a joke, I’m forgetting myself.

Because in fact there were a few things happening in the house down the road a half mile west, in this house here where you and I are sitting away a Sunday afternoon.

For one thing my dad just about quit. He damn near quit on himself, quit giving a good goddamn about anything. When he and Edith ran into each other on Main Street—it was a couple of days later, on Saturday afternoon—when Edith told him what had happened that other afternoon and that she wouldn’t leave the house ever, my dad wanted to kill Roy Goodnough.

In front of Nexey’s Lumberyard, across the street from Bishop’s Creamery, my dad said, “I’ll kill him.”

“It’ll be all right,” Edith said. “It has to.”

“I’ll chop his head off.”

There were people on the sidewalk, men in overalls and caps, women in silk stockings, kids sucking horehound candy and bouncing sticks on sidewalk cracks, all walking past and then stopping ten yards away to watch with their mouths held shut and their eyes wide open. They didn’t want to miss anything; they would want to talk about it later.

And my dad was saying, “I’ll kill him.”

And Edith was still saying how it would be all right.

Well, it wasn’t all right, and I believe he could have too—could have killed him. If somehow he could have gotten away with it, it might have been the best thing. Does that surprise you? To think that murdering an old stump-handed man might be an answer? But of course it wasn’t, and he didn’t. That sort of thing only happens on TV. Nobody I know has killed anybody, and you can never mind what they say this approaching trial is about. Whatever the lawyers in their ignorance say about it, I know it isn’t murder.

So instead of anything similar to that, my dad, John Roscoe, who’s been dead now for nearly twenty-seven
years, and I still can’t stop thinking about him at least once every day while dehorning a calf or mashing my thumb purple with a claw hammer (still it’s his voice saying, “Smarts pretty good, don’t it?”—it’s still his voice I hear in my head, measuring things, setting standards, his voice and way of looking at things: “But life
ain’t
fair, Sanders,” he told me once)—my dad, for about three years after he and Edith stopped going out together, went a little crazy.

He began to work like an immigrant during the day and to drink at night like there was no tomorrow. He was going on anger and disbelief and about four hours of sleep. He bought more cattle. He went in debt for another section of grass. He hired one of his cronies to help him. The crony was a short, squat, blocky character named Ellis Burns, who looked like a fireplug with a two-day-old beard, or, when they were working cattle in the pasture, like a fat monkey on a circus horse. He moved Ellis into the house with him and did nothing fancy. They fried meat and opened cans, mixed it together in a black frying pan, and boiled coffee. They rinsed last night’s supper off the two plates and the two forks and sat down to eat. And Ellis Burns never did lose weight.

“Damned if I know why,” my dad said. “I worked his ass off too. Maybe it was the beer.”

They went out drinking four or five times every week. They couldn’t go to town to the dark saloon on the corner of Main and First streets, since this was in the time of Prohibition: the saloon was boarded up for a while and then somebody opened it again as a café. They had to drive instead to Leon Shields’s place, a run-down farmhouse east of town, set back a mile off the highway amongst some trees. Some rough characters showed up there, so I’ve been told, but as far as I know it never got busted. Apparently Leon Shields had the sheriff, one of Bud Sealy’s
predecessors, gripped hard by the short and curlies, or at least Leon had him tucked deep into his back pocket. I believe Leon knew something about the sheriff and another man’s wife that wasn’t public knowledge and that the wife’s husband didn’t even know about. Besides, I suppose there must have been the usual exchange of quiet-money, to sweeten it all. Anyway, it was that unpainted farmhouse surrounded by trees that my dad and Ellis Burns would drive to, during those three years. They stayed there drinking homemade beer and playing cards all those nights, until finally along about two o’clock Leon would say, “That’s all, boys—Mama’s waiting on me,” and then start turning the lights off so that at the card table in the back Ellis Burns couldn’t tell now whether it was a jack of clubs or a ten of spades that he still had hopes of drawing. Ellis would say, “Now, damn it all, Leon. I was just about to win a hand.”

“No, you wasn’t, “ Leon would say. “I’m saving you money.”

“Hell, too. Turn them lights back on.”

“Nope. I’m going upstairs to play with the kids’ Mama.”

“Turn them lights on. I’m about to fill a straight.”

“Listen, you sawed-off little pecker shit,” Leon would say. “You never seen a straight in your life. Now get out of here ’fore I knock your nose off.”