Kent Haruf - The Tie That Binds

“I’m afraid he’s going to bleed to death,” Edith said.

“I don’t know,” John Roscoe said. “He’s getting weak.”

“Daddy,” Edith said. “Daddy, can you hear me?”

“I told you,” Roy was saying. “I told you, didn’t I? I told you.”

“God in heaven,” Edith said. “At least he’s still alive.” “Yes. We’ll be there soon.”

Lyman sat beside his sister, staring forward at the back of his father’s head, without saying a word. They drove as fast as they could in the Ford on the dirt road going north to town.

Holt didn’t have a hospital yet; there wouldn’t be one for another fifteen years. They stopped the car on Main Street at the storefront that was the doctor’s office, next to the harness and general store that has since become a Coast to Coast store. They got Roy Goodnough out of the car, and my father and Edith supported him under the arms and walked him inside. Doc Packer wasn’t there.

“Go find him. Quick.”

“I can’t,” Lyman said. “What if I can’t find him?”

“Just look for him. Hurry up. Goddamn it, ask somebody.”

“But Jesus,” Lyman said. Then he ran out onto the sidewalk.

I don’t know whether or not Marcellus Packer was the first doctor in Holt, but he was one of the first. He was a short man, and fat, with a walrus moustache like you see in pictures of Teddy Roosevelt. His moustache was always discolored from tobacco juice, even as an old man, when I was taken to him as a kid with mumps. He parted what hair he had in the middle. Lyman found him in the dark beer saloon on the corner, talking to some of the men at a table.

“You got to come,” Lyman said.

“What’s wrong, boy?”

“It’s Pa.”

“What’s wrong with him? Slow down. Stand still a minute, can’t you?”

“It’s Pa.”

“Where is he?”

Lyman ran back onto the sidewalk in the sun and up the block to the office. Packer followed him, taking short quick steps under his big stomach, on up the sidewalk and into the back room of the office, where Edith and my father had Roy seated on a chair with a bucket on the floor between his feet to catch the blood.

“Good God, man,” Packer said. “What happened to you?”

“They ain’t yours,” Roy said. “They ain’t yours neither.”

“What’s he talking about?”

“He got caught in a header,” my dad said. “He was trying to pull some wire out. The horses spooked.”

“He’s so weak now,” Edith said. “He’s been bleeding all the time.”

“I can see that. Help me get his shirt off him. That cut over his eyes ain’t so bad, but them hands of his. . good God.”

They cut his shirt and long underwear off along the sleeves so they wouldn’t have to touch his hands yet. He sat there in his ripped pants dripping blood into the bucket. Then they moved him over to a table.

“Pick up his feet,” Packer said. “There now, there. Lay him down. Hold his arms for him. Get another bucket, boy, if you ain’t going to help lift him, so he don’t bleed all over my floor. Over there in the corner. There now, that’s better. Hold him still now while I try to wash some of this blood off him. Jesus God, he’s lucky he don’t feel nothing.”

“They ain’t yours,” Roy said.

He was lying back on a table with his arms held out to the side, and Doctor Marcellus Packer was washing one of the stumps of his hands with alcohol. “I told you they’re mine,” he said. “I told you so.”

“What’s he talking about? Hold him still.”

“You might as well give them to him, Edith. Do you still have them?”

“Yes.”

Edith reached into the pocket of her dress and handed the handkerchief to Doc Packer.

“What’s this?” he said. He looked at the two fingers and the thumb in the bloody handkerchief. “What do you expect me to do with them things?”

“He had to have them,” Edith said. “But we couldn’t find the others, and John looked all over. He wouldn’t leave without them.”

“You wasted your time,” Packer said.

He shook them off the handkerchief into one of the buckets. They looked like they might be blunt fish nosing one another in the bucket.

“I ain’t no Jesus Christ,” he said. “Hold him still now. This is going to hurt. Maybe you think I’m some damn circus magician?”

IN THE END about all Doc Packer could do was to trim the stumps of Roy’s fingers and thumbs a little bit so they wouldn’t be so sharp, then he stretched the ragged flaps of skin over the ends and stitched them up into hard welts. Roy still had the one uncut, unscratched little finger on his left hand, and he damn near died. He probably should have died, too, but he didn’t die. He lived for another thirty-seven years with those cruel, raw-looking hands. He could crook his arms under a bucket and hold a fence post while you tamped in around it, and he learned to push a button through its hole so he could get his shirt on by using that one little finger, but he couldn’t milk a cow or work a fence pliers or drive a tractor. He couldn’t do any of those things that mattered. So he was snookered all right. He was fixed. Now he was dependent on other people, and he hated it.

But if their father was fixed, Edith and Lyman were fixed even worse. They were stuck now on that sandhill farm. How were they going to leave him, the way he was? They couldn’t leave him. Not that way, they couldn’t. It was hell for all of them. They were all fixed.

BUT if Edith and Lyman had been city kids, things might have been different. City kids, even in 1915, had some opportunities to escape which farm kids didn’t have. City kids could take off and walk ten or fifteen blocks or jump on a trolley car going across town and end up as far away from home as if they were in another state entirely, another country even. Then they could make their mark, or not make it, and start their life over or end it, but whatever happened, at least the ties would have been cut, the limits of home would have been broken.

Or if Edith and Lyman had been country kids living now, alive and howling in the 1970s, things might have been different too. It’s TV and movie shows and high school and 3.2 beer and loud music and paved highways and fast cars (and what goes on and comes off too in the back seats of those cars, until maybe Bud Sealy shines his flashlight in through the side windows) — it’s all those things and more that country kids have now, and you can’t tell a farm kid from a town kid, even with a program. They’re just about all the same, all alike in their cars, driving up and down Main Street every Saturday night, honking and howling, in Holt, Colorado.

But Edith and Lyman didn’t have those things, those chances and opportunities to escape. They were farm kids in the second decade of this violent century, and they were stuck. Their mother died early, like I’ve already said; their father was Roy Goodnough, and even if he was a raging madman sometimes, even if he yelled too much at them, he was still their father. And then — to clinch matters, to turn that heavy vise a few more turns to the right — they had to see him get his hands ruined. They had to be right there when it happened; they had to witness it all, watch his hands being ground to hamburger; they had to run for help, get him to town, carry what was left of his fingers wrapped up in a damn handkerchief, and then one of them had to hold an arm in place, and they both had to watch while Packer did what little he could to rectify the bloody mess of his hands — and all the time he was still talking about I told you so, I told you, didn’t I?

So when I say they were stuck, I don’t mean they were stuck just a little bit. I don’t mean they were just sort of stuck the way you might be if you stepped into some mud and you were able to get out of it if you made the effort, and once you were out of it about all the loss you’d have to show was that you might have to leave a pair of good new shoes behind you in the mud. No, I mean they were deep stuck. I mean it was like they were stuck clear up to their chins, almost up to eye level, and no real effort was even possible. They might manage to wiggle their arms a little bit now and then, they might turn their heads a few degrees, but they couldn’t get out no matter what, and about all they could see in any direction around them, when they did manage to turn their heads a little bit, was just more mud. More of the same. Or, in their case, more sand and more work and duty and obligation.