Kent Haruf - The Tie That Binds

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.

WHAT’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.

BUT 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.