Kent Haruf - The Tie That Binds

Well, she should have been a gambler. She had the nerves for it and the face too. My mother should have been a poker player — or a politician. She might have done even better for herself at the card tables in Las Vegas or in the smoke-filled parlors of Denver. A town the size of Holt, with no more than a mere thousand rural types living here in 1925, had to be a waste of her particular talents, because my mother also knew how to get what she wanted. Behind that polished, perfumed surface, she was all ice and frozen stuff, which she would allow to melt a little bit if and when she saw something she wanted. That was true even if it meant she had to allow someone like my dad, John Roscoe, with his recent reputation for drinking and fighting and his thick rancher’s hands, to muss her trim hair and to lift her widow’s skirts. She knew he had all those cattle and she suspected that he was not the sort of man to hang himself with any cotton rope in any cellar that had spiders. So I don’t believe she even cried afterwards or whimpered anything about respect. No, she would have just allowed the ice to melt in her a little bit, enough so that she could at least pretend that it was wonderful and then make him promise there would be a fall wedding — with the implication of course that there would be a lot more of the same where that came from. My mother was not stupid.

About my dad I can only guess — and he was not stupid either; you can’t achieve what he did and then hold on to it too, even during the depression, when just about everything else around him was turning to dust and foreclosed mortgages, you can’t do that and not have something more than just gas and sawdust separating your ears — I guess my dad must have been at the point where melted ice seemed preferable to warm beer and a fist in the face. Anyway, they got married in the fall of 1925, which would make Widow Newcomb thirty-two and my dad thirty-five, and then three years later, on March 9, 1928, I came along.

And like I say, I was a surprise to them. So it must have been Jason Newcomb who couldn’t have babies that other time. Or at least together with my mother, he hadn’t been able to make any. And I don’t believe that was the reason why he hanged himself, either. Knowing my mother, I believe there must have been a few other reasons.

SO ALMOST twenty years passed.

Prohibition came and went. The Great Depression came — and then lasted so long that people began to think of it as a normal condition. There was a civil war in Spain, a Roosevelt in the White House, a madman loose in Germany, and nothing happened to the Goodnoughs down the road from us. It was all the same slow gray there. Edith and Lyman went on doing all they had to do, and Roy continued waving his grim stumps.

My dad and Edith didn’t see each other very much during those years, though I believe they still thought about one another a great deal. My dad had stopped helping with the harvest; Roy wouldn’t have him on the place; Roy had begun to trade Lyman’s sweat for someone else’s help when it came time to cut wheat. So, whenever it happened that both my dad and Edith were in town and then by chance ran into one another on Main Street — and that was rare — they would stop and talk for a minute about nothing important. Only once or twice my dad asked her, “Are you all right?”

And she said, “Yes. Are you?”

And my dad said yes, he guessed he was.

Or — and this happened more often — if he was working within sight of the road and heard a car coming, he would straighten up, and if it was the Goodnoughs he would watch the car pass and notice Edith looking out the window, before the car and the three people in it got shut off from view by the boiling dust. Then my dad would go back to work and not say anything, but you could see that he had his mouth set hard like a horse will do with a curb bit.

Of course my mother didn’t notice the Goodnoughs at all. She never visited them nor encouraged them to visit us. My mother had her own car and she always had the Methodist Church. So I was the only one of us who saw very much of the Goodnoughs then. When I was six or seven I started walking that half mile down to the Goodnoughs’ house about once a week. I would help Edith hoe the garden or gather eggs or wipe dishes — things I hated to do at home and fought my mother about and wouldn’t do until my dad made it plain to me on the seat of my pants. But Edith and I would talk a little bit.

“How’s your mother, Sandy?” Edith would say.

“She’s buying another dress.”

“Your mother looks lovely in dresses.”

“But she makes me go to church with her.”

“Don’t you like church?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“They make you put your gum in a napkin.”

“Well,” Edith would say, “you can chew gum here. We’re not in church now.”

“But I don’t have any gum.”

“Don’t you, Sandy?”

“I chewed it all already. That’s why.”

“Well, I guess we’ll have to see about that.”

So the next time I would walk down to see Edith, she would have a pack of chewing gum in her apron pocket, and she would offer me a stick and take one herself. While we gathered eggs in the chicken coop, with the fierce-looking red chickens jerking their heads about and pecking another smaller chicken behind its head until there was a bare raw spot and all of them squirting that shiny green chicken squirt neat in a dollop onto the dirt, Edith and I would both chew our gum and see if we could make bubbles. Edith would be gathering eggs and I would try to help her, but I couldn’t trust some of those red chickens until I had their heads pinned against the back of the roost box with a corncob. Most of the time, I would just hold the bucket for Edith.

“But look at this big brown egg,” she would say.

“Is it heavy?”

“Yes, but notice these dark specks along here. They’re almost the color of lavender.”

“They look like a face,” I’d say.

“Yes. And you’re a funny old Sanders Roscoe. Aren’t you?”

A little later, while we were in the kitchen, cleaning the bits of straw and the chicken squirt off the eggs, I’d say, “There. I did it.”

“Did what?”

“Blew a bubble. Look.” And I’d have a gum bubble about the size of a withered pea, perched on my mouth.

“Good for you,” Edith would say then. “How’s your daddy?”

So I saw quite a lot of Edith Goodnough during that time, and she always treated me in a way that made me want to keep going back there. My mother didn’t think much of it, though. My mother wanted to know what I did down there all that time, what we talked about. She said they weren’t our kind of people. But my dad told her that as long as I did my chores at home to let me be. He said I might learn something at the Goodnoughs’.

So about once a week I walked over to see Edith. I didn’t see Lyman very often, though. He was always out in the field, disking or stacking hay. And I tried to avoid seeing Roy at all. I had his hands in some of my dreams during those years, and I would wake up in the dark in my room with those raw stumps still there, just behind my eyes. I could see them whenever I closed my eyes, so sometimes I didn’t go back to sleep right away. His hands were all mixed up in that time for me. I didn’t enjoy the sight of them.

BUT OUTSIDE events finally caught up with the Goodnoughs too. By the close of the 1930s the madman loose in Germany had infected enough millions of other people with his madness that things over there had gone absolutely flat insane. When the butchery and betrayal carried over into the start of the 1940s people here in this country began to wonder what their part in it was going to have to be. There got to be a lot of talk about going to war, talk about taking action, and I suppose all that talk about doing something is what made it possible for Lyman.