Kent Haruf - The Tie That Binds

For a long time then, while Lyman worked that sandhill farm, about all he could manage to do was to wait and to hope too, I suppose, hope in his dog-eyed dazed fashion, hope that someday somehow some kind of barn door or pasture gate would get left open just enough to let him squeeze through it, so that once he made it through and got his overalls unstuck, then he could take off and start running. And by God, never look back. Not even long enough to see if something was gaining on him.

Well, Lyman didn’t need much, you understand, but he sure as hell did need something.

THINGS went on the same for about seven years, and then it was Edith who made the first attempt to get out. Or at least for one summer she seemed to encourage the possibility of it. And if you’ve understood what I’ve said about her — or more to the point, if I’ve managed to make it plain enough — then it shouldn’t surprise you that it was Edith who made the first attempt to break free. Of the two of them, she was the one who had the sand. Besides, by 1922, when Edith was twenty-five, she must have been just about as beautiful as any woman can be. And I believe she still is, in her own clear-eyed way, and no more so than now, when in four days she will be eighty years old and still lying there in the damn hospital bed, waiting to get well.

But in the summer of 1922 she must have been just about perfect. She was slim and quick, with brown eyes and brown curly hair. She was woman breasted. She had strong hands. She was uncomplaining with plenty to com plain about. She was. . but hell, I don’t know how to describe women. Only look here, this is more what I mean: she was quiet and focused and there for you in a way that didn’t make you feel awkward or clumsy even when you were worse than both of those things, as failing on your feet as a newborn colt, as drunk as a just-dropped calf. She made you want to hold her there in the front seat of that car on that country road, hold her, put your arm around her, kiss her, breathe her hair, talk to her, tell her all those things you hadn’t told anyone else before, all those things beyond the jokes and the surface facts of yourself, things you yourself didn’t know for sure you felt or thought until you heard yourself telling them to her in the dark in the stopped car with your arm around her, because somehow it would be all right if she heard them and they would be true then. Edith Goodnough must have been something that summer.

But, Christ, what a waste of life. It makes you sick to your stomach. It makes you want to do anything else in the world but think about her.

YOU SEE, Edith and my dad, John Roscoe, went out together that summer. And if you think about that for a minute you’ll understand at least one of the reasons why I feel about Edith the way I do. For six or seven weeks that summer, Edith and my dad went spooning or sparking or whatever it was people called it then when two people drive out together in an old Ford car with the windows rolled down and the dark air blows in on them, carrying that green smell of sage in with it. Driving in the car, they turn towards one another now and then, and then more and more often as the evening fades; they laugh a little bit about something that may seem funny to them only, while the stars have begun to snap overhead, and behind them there’s only that dust billowing up in the road after the car has passed.

So Edith and my dad went to a few dances together. They went into town to a movie or two. They ate supper once in Norka, the next town west of Holt. But mainly they drove along the country roads in the sandhills in my dad’s old Ford, talking and laughing a little bit. It must have seemed enough to be together and to be moving, and almost always they had Lyman with them in the back seat.

Maybe that’s the reason why Roy let them go. With Lyman along to stick his head up between them from the back seat, it may have seemed all right to let Edith go out driving with my dad. I suppose he thought Lyman would put a halt to any funny stuff. Not that Lyman would say anything to anybody — Lyman didn’t do much talking in his life, except maybe to Edith — but he did always seem to be there. You’d be working on something in the machine shed or visiting with someone on Main Street, and then you’d look up and there Lyman would be, standing off a little ways, cleaning the dirt from under his fingernails with a jackknife, and you couldn’t be sure how long he’d been standing there or how much he’d seen or heard, but there he was all right, waiting like a stray dog to see what developed. So maybe that’s the reason why Roy allowed that six- or seven-week vacation, that brief lessening of his hold on the vise that summer, but that’s only a guess. It sure as hell wasn’t like him. Maybe he just wanted to see how far it would go, to kind of test the water. Or maybe he already had in mind what he was going to do next.

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.”