Kent Haruf - The Tie That Binds

Then in 1914, in August, in the hottest month of the year in Holt County, she got sick. They say it was the flu, and people did die of the flu then. But I believe, and Edith says, that it was more than just a virus bug that killed her. It was all those years of looking east; it was almost two decades of being married to Roy. Once, when her own mother died, she had gone back home to Johnson County on the train, and she had stayed so long after the funeral that Roy had had to go out and bring her back. She never went a second time. Now, on the High Plains of Colorado, she lay up there in the second-story bedroom, with the windows open to catch any breeze there was, sweating and burning up with what maybe only one of her family still believed was just flu fever. So it was almost the same story again. It was almost like the two times she had delivered babies there in that same bedroom. Only it was August this time, and instead of her arms and legs going rigid as sticks, she seemed as weak as water now. She didn’t make much of a bump under the sweat-soaked sheets. She didn’t move.

On the second or third day of this, she told Roy, “I want her now.”

“What?” he said.

“I want her to come. I think it’s time.”

“Now, damn it, Ada. .”

“Please,” she said.

Maybe Roy thought she was talking out of her head, that it was just fever talk, but when she seemed worse by the middle of the afternoon when the sun was the hottest, he drove the half mile west to get the pipe-smoking half-Indian woman. She was an old woman now, though her eyes were still clear and black, and her hair was still the same straight brown; her hair never did get very gray. But she had some trouble mounting the stairs, so that Edith had to help her. When she was led into the room where Lyman and Roy stood against the wall, she first pulled the blinds on the windows and then sat down on the wood chair beside the bed.

After a while Ada opened her eyes. She fumbled her hand out from under the bedsheet towards the older woman. “I thank you,” she said.

“Do you want anything?”

“I thank you for coming.”

They stayed that way the rest of the afternoon. Later, Roy went out to feed and milk the cows, while Edith continued to smooth the bone-thin yellowing forehead with a cool washcloth and Lyman went on staring at his mother from his place against the wall, like he was rooted there, like he didn’t dare do anything else but stand and stare at his dying mother. Ada slept for several hours that way, with her loose hand held by the other woman, who also managed to sleep some, sitting up in the chair beside the bed. The old woman’s head rocked back above the top of the chair, and her dark mouth dropped open a little.

At six Roy said they should eat. So he and Edith and Lyman went downstairs to the kitchen where Edith warmed some potatoes and green beans, sliced some bread, and made a fresh pot of coffee. When the food was on the table in front of him, Roy said grace and began to eat.

Between mouthfuls he said, “You didn’t tell me that red-faced cow was going dry.”

“What?” Lyman said. He was pushing his beans around on his plate.

“She’s damn near dry. You never told me.”

“I forgot.”

“What else have you forgot?”

“Nothing. I don’t know.”

“Never mind, Daddy,” Edith said. “Not now.”

“We need the milk,” Roy said.

After supper, Edith put the dishes to soak and took a plate of food and a cup of coffee upstairs to the old woman. They found that she was awake now, smoking one of her scarred briar pipes. She had raised the blinds again, and the blue pipe smoke drifted out the opened east window. She didn’t want the food. Beside her, Ada still lay silent in the bed, like a thin wax child.

“Did mother say anything?” Edith asked.

“No.”

“Did she wake again?”

“No. She’s resting. She’s getting ready.”

“I believe she does feel cooler now, don’t you think? Maybe the fever’s broken.”

“It hasn’t.”

The old woman put her pipe away in her apron pocket and they went on waiting. Gradually it grew darker in the room, but Edith says she remembers there wasn’t much of a sunset that evening. She had hoped there would be; she thought her mother might like to see one, that it might make her feel better. There wasn’t, though. There weren’t any clouds to make a sunset. It was just hot.

When it was completely dark in the room, so dark they could barely distinguish the yellow face from the white pillow, Roy fumbled over to the chest of drawers in the corner and lit a lamp on top of it. The lamplight cast wavering shadows, and then the millers, those small dusty moths this country has more millions of than it needs, came out from the cracks in the wall and fluttered around the lamp, bumping against the hot globe and singeing themselves. One of the millers landed on Ada’s forehead and left its smudge of dust there, so it must have been that, when Edith brushed it off, that woke her again.

Ada seemed to rouse for a minute then and to look dimly around her. When she seemed to have each person in place, her thin lips moved.

“You make him. Tell him.”

“What?” Edith said. “Would you like some water?” “I want him to take me to Johnson County. I want to sleep beside my mother.”

“Yes. All right.”

“You make him.”

“Yes.”

She didn’t say anything more. She went back to sleep, as if she hadn’t said anything at all, or as if she had said all there was to say. Sometime before midnight she died. Edith says they didn’t know for sure what time it was she died; they couldn’t set the exact minute. They weren’t able to tell when she stopped breathing, because her breath was so soft at the last anyway. They just knew for certain that she was dead when Hannah Roscoe put Ada’s hand under the sheet again and then went downstairs and walked home by herself.

By the lamplight, Edith washed the child-sized body, combed the hair into place, and put on the Sunday dress. The next day Roy buried her in the Holt County Cemetery northeast of town.

“You know what mother wanted,” Edith said. “You were there.”

“No,” he said. “She was sick then.”

“You heard her say so.”

“I want her here.”

“But mother didn’t like it here. She hated it. This wasn’t her home.”

“Your mother’s dead. You’re the mother now.”

“What do you mean? I can’t replace mother.”

“You will.”

Ada’s was the first of the three Goodnough graves that have been dug so far, over there in the brown grass beside the fence line that separates the cemetery and Otis Murray’s cornfield. Ada lived to be forty-two.

EDITH was seventeen when her mother died. Lyman was fifteen. They were a year older when the next thing happened that fixed it for them. It wasn’t enough that their father was Roy Goodnough or that their mother died early; there had to be at least one more thing to clinch matters, to fix them forever, to make Edith and Lyman end up the way they did — two old people, a sister and a brother, living alone out here in a yellow house surrounded by weeds.

It was an accident that did it. It was during harvest, and Roy Goodnough must have hated harvesttime.

No — that’s not quite right. Like the rest of us, he must have loved it too, because it meant the end; it meant the accomplishment of what had been started months before with plowed sand and bags of seed. Also, he must have worried about it, like we all did and still do, stewed in his juice over it, stepped out the first thing in the morning, even before he had his pants buttoned good, to search the sky for clouds in the hope now that it wouldn’t rain, or worse, that if there were clouds, then he would detect no sickly green, because that kind of green in clouds meant hail.