Kent Haruf - The Tie That Binds

“What magazines?” he said. “I already looked at magazines.”

“No, these are different. You’ve never seen these before.”

“I did too,” Lyman said. He pushed himself up from the table and shuffled into the living room. Edith followed him.

“Wait,” she said. “Lyman.”

“What?”

“You can look at your postcards.”

“I don’t have no postcards.”

“Of course you do. Why, the ones you sent me when you were gone all those years.”

She went over to the wall above her bed and untacked the first postcard he had sent her, the one from California, during that other December, that December in 1941 after they had bombed Pearl Harbor. She brought it back and showed him the picture he had chosen.

“See what it says up here in the corner? Los Angeles, California. And on the other side this is what you wrote me:

“Dear Sis,

Well, I made it out here. Now they all say I’m not right for soldiers. So I’m working a job in a airplane factory. It beats farming anyhow.

Love, your brother,

Lyman.”

“I wrote that,” Lyman said.

“That’s right. You do remember, don’t you?”

“Give it to me,” he said. “It’s mine.”

She gave him the postcard to hold in his own old farm boy’s hands, to peer at and turn over, to remember even if it was only dimly; and so he was perked up again for a while. He sat down once more in the stuffed chair in the parlor under the lamp, while his sister removed the remaining postcards from the walls in the other room. But Edith didn’t know how long that semi-alert condition would last; she said she realized then that she would have to move her plans ahead by at least an hour. But that would be all right too; afterwards such things as time and tiredness wouldn’t matter. There would be something like rest, afterwards.

So she began immediately to clean and stuff the chicken. A month ago she had thought of having turkey for supper, but in the past week she had decided against it because there would be too much left over, and besides, chicken was turkey to Lyman. So she made that one compromise, and when the chicken was ready, stuffed with its legs secured, she put it to bake in the oven in time for an early supper. Then she peeled potatoes and got out a jar of canned beans to have ready. Chicken and potatoes and green beans and, afterwards, pumpkin pie — it would make a satisfactory meal.

That’s exactly what she said, a satisfactory meal. You see what lengths that old lady was going to. If you don’t it’s my fault; I sure as hell mean for you to see it. Because she had thought about it for a long time — I don’t know for how long exactly, but for long enough anyhow — for God only knows how many nights, lying there in that dark room in that yellow house, listening to her brother snore and whistle and mumble nonsense in his old man’s sleep, while all the time she was trying to think, trying to know what to do with him, until finally after enough nights and enough troubled hours there seemed to be only one option that might work. An option, of course, that concluded with a satisfactory meal. Only she didn’t tell us that. Not at the time, she didn’t. Over here, we were still just hoping that he would die, that he would go to sleep and not wake up. It didn’t happen, though. You know that. It just got worse and worse, without ever quite becoming impossible. And all the time she was tired.

She said she was so tired in fact that she permitted herself a short nap that afternoon. She folded her arms on the table and put her head down. It wasn’t a long nap she intended to take, but she didn’t wake until almost an hour later when she heard the car on the gravel outside the house. It was Mavis and Rena, bringing the cream. She stood up and met them at the door. Rena, my green-eyed, black-haired daughter who loves that old lady, was full of a little girl’s news.

“You know what?” she said.

“What, sweetheart?”

“I’m staying overnight with Sheila Garfield. At her house.”

“Are you?”

“But you probably don’t know Sheila Garfield, do you?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Because she lives in town and goes to the second grade with me. Well, we’re going to stay up past midnight and have a party and everything. On account of it’s New Year’s. That’s tomorrow.”

“I know. And it sounds like a wonderful idea.”

“Oh, it is,” Mavis said. “It’s strictly a big deal. Definitely groovy.”

“Mom,” Rena said. “We don’t say groovy anymore. We say stud.”

So Edith hugged my daughter close to her that afternoon, and then she whipped up the new cream from the store and the three of them sat down and ate at least a third of Lyman’s pumpkin pie. They had a fine time for a while, visiting and chatting, talking about nothing as if there was nothing particular to talk about — and all that time, you understand, Edith still had in mind what she was going to do later. When they left, having wished the season’s greetings to Lyman and listened in turn to his mumbled confusion about postcards, Edith thought it was for the last time. According to her plan she wouldn’t see them again. But, in the iron manner in which she had done everything else in her life, she pushed that thought away from her — or accepted it — and just put her coat on.

Now I think I told you when I first started talking, telling you this story, I believe I mentioned that business about the chicken feed and the tied-up dog. Well, I haven’t forgotten. And not just because it was after my wife and daughter left her that Friday afternoon that those things happened, but because they seemed to clinch the matter, to finish it. What I’m saying is, she took the dog outside again. It didn’t want to go; she had to force it, to take the dog by the collar and lead it, its back legs dragging in weak objection while she talked to it, coaxingly, out to the garage. There she tied it to the latch in the open doorway with a length of rope, with enough food and water to last it a day or two. Then, ignoring that pitiful whimpering and complaint behind her, she went on to the chicken house, to leave food for the half-dozen red chickens. I mean she lifted or dragged — don’t ask me how — a fifty-pound bag of chicken feed into the center of the dirt floor and cut it open so that they too would survive until somebody happened to remember them afterwards. And that clinched it. It was then, while walking back to the house under that late purpling sky, that she understood for the first time that what she was doing was a real thing, a certainty. Up to that point it hadn’t been real, even to herself.

“But I knew it then,” she said. “Nancy was crying at me from the end of the rope. I kept hearing her all evening — or thought I did. And I wanted to release her, I wanted to let her go, Sandy. But I didn’t. I went back to the house and shut the door.”

So there was really only one thing more for Edith Goodnough to do before she put supper on the table. She wanted to iron Lyman’s shirt. And she did that then, while the potatoes and green beans boiled, pressed his best white shirt out neat and clean on the ironing board so that he would appear gentlemanly. When she was satisfied she took it in to him where he still sat in the parlor, fumbling with faded pictures of Memphis and Mobile, New York and Boise, and somehow persuaded him to not only put on a different shirt than the one he’d been wearing all day but to also get into a blue suit jacket that matched his dark pants. He didn’t know why. It didn’t matter. I suppose all he understood was that it was an imposition, a damn bother, but like I’ve already said, she managed that too, somehow. And afterwards, when he was dressed to her satisfaction, she herself changed clothes, put on a fine dark skirt and pink blouse and brushed her hair. So they were ready for supper now. They sat down in the kitchen across the table from one another, looking, I fully believe, as if they were contented, even happy.