Kent Haruf - The Tie That Binds

“What’s going on?” I said.

Rena was crying something into Edith’s shoulder; it came out muffled and wet.

“What? Honey, I can’t understand you.”

“Never mind now, sweetheart,” Edith said. “It’ll be all right now. Your daddy’s here. Don’t you know it’ll be all right? It always is, isn’t it?”

Rena looked up into Edith’s pale wrinkled face. “But Lyman hit you,” she said. “I saw him hit you with that cane.”

“I know. But never mind now. It’s all over.”

“And he hit Nancy too. I tried to make him stop but he wouldn’t.”

“Nancy will be all right too. You’ll see. Look, she’s over there in the corner on her rug. See how she likes it there where it’s warm. Why, she’s asleep already, so don’t you worry about Nancy — no, now don’t cry anymore. Just lean your head back. There, that’s my girl.”

“Edith,” I said, “what happened here?”

Edith didn’t say anything for a while. She was caressing, calming my daughter. Finally she said, “I don’t know really. I think it’s just too much for him sometimes. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, and then something happens and—”

“And he hurts you.”

“Not very much. I’m all right. It’s just that I don’t know right now what I’m going to do with him. I’ve got to think.”

“Will you tell me what happened?”

She was still holding Rena on her lap, petting her hair and smoothing the collar on her school dress. After a while, when Rena stopped crying, when the hiccups too had stopped, Edith told me. From her account and from what Rena was later able to say, I’ve pieced this much together:

They were traveling in the parlor together as usual. The boxes of travel stuff were spread around them; the maps of the country were on the wall. In front of them on the desk they had their work papers and charts and Crayolas and pencils, the two of them sitting there in the travel bureau in their matching green visors, that old man and my daughter, getting up another trip for themselves. They had decided, it still being late winter in Colorado, that now would be a good time to take the sun in Phoenix because it would be full spring there, and Rena said she was getting tired of this snow and rain dripping all the time so they had to stay in the gym for recess, and Lyman said: “Phoenix.” Well, that turned out to be a mistake: the train connections were too difficult. They would have to get on in Denver, go north to Cheyenne, cross over to Salt Lake, track west to San Francisco, change trains for Los Angeles, and then come back eastward into Arizona. Something like that, anyway. And Lyman couldn’t manage it. It called for more sense, more figuring, and more understanding of time changes and layovers than he was capable of. He had to call Edith in from the kitchen three or four times to help him. So he was getting hot. It set him off.

But he wouldn’t change his mind either. Not that he had a lot of mind left to change, you understand, but it had to be Phoenix, so leave him alone.

Of course it didn’t matter much to Rena where they went; she didn’t care; she had only said that about the snow and rain because she preferred slides and playground swings to a constant ration of dodge ball in the gym. Parlor travel was a game to her, a good reason to draw more and more elaborate figures on yellow paper and afterwards to cut them out, a chance to wear a green visor and pretend. But it was never any game to Lyman. He took it as hard as if his life depended on it, and I suppose in some ways it did. So he was beginning to fume now. He was mixed up, mad, losing control. He didn’t know where the hell he was.

Meanwhile my daughter had finished coloring their train tickets. She wanted to start. She was ready for the pretense of seeing the country. But Lyman wasn’t ready yet. Far from it. So finally, out of boredom I suppose, Rena called Nancy — that’s what they called the dog — into the mess of the travel bureau to play with her while she waited. And that was too much for him. He thought he had reason to dislike the dog anyway. He came unhinged. He started shouting.

“Get that damn thing out of here! She don’t belong here with us.”

You understand he was like a frantic kid now, screaming and shouting. And Rena was saying, “Well, Nancy can stay in here if she wants to.”

“No, she can’t. She stinks, damn her. Get her out.”

“Nancy doesn’t either stink.”

“She does too. Don’t tell me, by God. .”

“Do you, Nancy? Nooo, her doesn’t stink. Her’s a good old poochy.”

Rena was kneeling in front of the dog, talking baby talk into its grizzled face, patting its old head while the dog shut its eyes, shivering in pleasure, and then Lyman hit Nancy on the spine with his cane. There was a sharp crack, a yelp.

“By Jesus!” he yelled. “I bet that’ll move her.”

The dog did move too. It even managed a kind of waddling gallop; it ended up in the kitchen cringing and whimpering beside the stove. Rena, I gather, was just shocked at first. She had never seen an animal mistreated before; it was something new to her. Then she was mad, as outraged as any six-and-a-half-year-old girl can be. She began to shout back at him, crying up into his face that he was mean and old, that he was the one who stinked; she was not going to play travel with him ever again. She took off her green visor and threw it at him.

Then Edith was there too, in that crowded box-filled room at the west end of the house. But it was too late. Lyman was gone now, the poor old bastard; he was crazy with frustration, his eyes like new copper, red and insane, out-sized; he was flailing his cane around in the room, hitting anything, the desk, the boxes, the lamp, and before Edith could get Rena and herself out of the way he hit his sister sharp blows on the arms and back. “Get out!” he was screaming. “Get out of here.” They retreated to the kitchen. That’s when she called me in from the machine shed. You know the rest.

After that much had been told, when it was all accounted for, even if it didn’t make sense, because it wasn’t a question of that, we sat there on kitchen chairs staring at nothing for a while. The radio was playing the top forty from Denver, and there was the slow drip of rain outside. Finally Rena got up off Edith’s lap. She came over and stood between my knees. “Dad, I want to go home now,” she said.

“Yes,” I said. “Mom will be waiting supper for us.”

Rena went into the other room, put her coat on, and we could hear her saying good-bye to Lyman. Lyman was still standing fierce guard in the far doorway. He didn’t say anything. Rena came back into the kitchen and gave Edith a long hug.

“Go on out to the pickup now,” I told her. “I’ll be right out.”

“I want you to come too.”

“I am. Go ahead now.”

“Good-bye, Edith,” she said.

“Good-bye, sweetheart. Lyman didn’t mean to scare you. He loves you too, you know. We both do.”

“I guess he’s just sick,” Rena said. “Probably he’ll feel better tomorrow.”

Then she went outside. Edith was staring at the closed door; she looked small and defeated. Her face was white, colorless, pained; her gray hair had become dislodged from its knot. I felt as bad for her then as I ever have for anyone in my life.

“He just can’t help what he does,” she said.

“I know it,” I said. “But that’s the point, isn’t it?”

“Yes, but it’s not that simple. What am I going to do with him, Sandy? I won’t have him strapped down to a hospital bed. Or whatever they do now — sedate them with pills and shots to make them sleep all the time. I couldn’t stand that. And he’s mine to take care of.”

“There aren’t a lot of options,” I said.