Kent Haruf - The Tie That Binds

Roy sat grimly between them, watching straight ahead, the tiller-wheel lever stuck up between his legs. In the header barge Lyman was covered all over with sweat-stuck chaff and wheat hulls; his cheeks and neck and arms were covered with it, and he had almost stopped cussing. He was too tired, too hot. Only Edith, in her thin work dress and flat-brimmed straw hat, clucking to her horses from her seat at the front of the barge, seemed at all comfortable in the morning heat and dust. Occasionally, she looked up at John Roscoe across the field on the wheat stack. She could see that his bare back shone wet in the sun, then she would turn back again to be sure that she had the barge in position to catch the falling wheat. She shredded several heads of wheat and chewed the hard kernels to make wheat gum while she sat rocking on the wood seat, watching the rise and fall of the horses’ rumps ahead of her.

At noon they finished a swath at the end of the field nearest the stack and stopped. They unhitched the horses, then at Roy’s command Lyman mounted one of the horses and led the others along the fence line and then across the road to the tank at the Roscoe place, since they were working in the west field that day, which was closer to the Roscoes’ than it was to their own place. At the tank beside the corral, the eight horses pushed in beside one another, snorted into the water and drank. Lyman climbed down then and held his head under the pipe that ran water from the windmill, the same pipe and windmill you see there now, the one his mother had walked a half mile to with her yoked pails three years before he was born. I don’t suppose Lyman thought about that, though, or remembered it if he knew it at all. He held his head under the running water, which was so cold it numbed his face, and wished he could take his overalls off and climb into the horse tank like a little kid, his father be damned.

When the horses had stopped drinking and had begun to sniff at the water or to raise their heads to look around them with dark eyes, sighing and shuddering a little like horses do when they’ve been worked hard and seem to look off away towards something you yourself do not see, cannot see, then Lyman mounted again, dripping water from his head and shoulders down into his pants, and led the big horses back across the road to the stack. On the north side of the stack Roy and Edith and John Roscoe sat in the shade, eating.

“Feed ’em,” Roy said.

Lyman tied the horses to the header and along the side of the barge. John Roscoe came over and helped him fit the nose bags onto the horses’ heads and slip the straps behind their ears to hold the bags with barley in place, while the horses swung their heads suddenly and stamped their feet to ward off flies.

“You fall in the tank?” John Roscoe said. “Head first?”

“I wish I did,” Lyman said. “Ain’t it hot?”

“Going to get warts on your dinkus that way, boy. There’s toads in that horse tank.”

“Hell, too,” Lyman said.

They went back and sat down in the shade then, and ate the fresh peas and beans Edith brought, and the salt pork and thick slices of bread and cold boiled potatoes and Dutch apple pie, and drank buttermilk in tin cups. When they were finished Edith put the things away and Roy got up to oil the gears and chains on the machinery and to examine the section blades. Then Edith and Lyman and John Roscoe lay down with their straw hats over their faces and talked to one another up through the sweaty crowns of their hats.

“Ludi Pfeister and his crew going to thresh for you again this year?”

“I don’t know,” Lyman said. “Pa don’t tell us nothing one way or another.”

“He is,” Edith said. “I wrote the letter to him in Kansas.”

“I thought him and Ludi had a little argument last fall.”

“They did,” Lyman said. “Ludi thought the wheat hadn’t sweat enough. Too wet to thresh,’ he said. Pa said, Thresh it anyhow.’”

“Ludi’s all right. He’s got to think of his thresher, though.”

“Daddy’s right, too, sometimes,” Edith said.

“I’m just talking, Edith. I never meant nothing.”

“I know,” she said.

The sun speckled through the straw weave of their hats, and they could hear the horses stamping and rattling their harness. Lyman lay between Edith and John Roscoe; the wet back of his shirt and overalls was caked now with sand. They could smell the cut wheat, dusty and heavy in the air, and the sharp green smell of the sagebrush across the fence line in the native pasture that belonged then to the Roscoes and still does. Lyman went to sleep in a little while, breathing slow, regularly, like a small boy, but I believe his sister and my father must have stayed awake together, thinking about one another across Lyman’s overalls, with the sun speckling down onto their faces. I know I would have.

“Get up,” Roy said. “Come on.”

Because the horses had finished eating, you understand. The horses had rested enough, and all the gears and chains were oiled, and he wanted to get back into the wheat field. So they began to work again like they had all morning, only it was hotter now.

Roy was up on his seat between the horses, sitting up there ramrod stiff in the sun, with the reel ahead of him turning and the sharp section blades along the sickle bar cutting the wheat off close to the ground, and then the canvas belts carrying the wheat off and up through the chute to drop into the header barge Edith drove alongside so Lyman could level it off in the back. My father stayed on the stack, forking the wheat level and even all around him, and I believe they would have finished too. I believe, if what I remember about that afternoon is everything that I was told about it, that they would have finished cutting that field of wheat before dark, and then all Roy Goodnough would have had to do was to let it stay there in the stack sweating for a couple of months until it was dry enough for Ludi Pfeister to come along with his crew and threshing machine and thresh it for him.

But late in the afternoon, along about five o’clock, the header stopped working. It jolted hard, lurched, and then passed over several rods of wheat without cutting them off.

“Goddamn it, back up,” Roy shouted. He sawed at the lines to the horses, pulling them back. “Now stand still,” he said.

The horses stood there, nervous, high-strung, hot, bothered by flies, while Roy climbed down to see what had happened. They had just made one of the square turns at the end of the field next to the barbwire fence separating Roy’s wheat from the native pasture across from it. So maybe that’s where they picked up the wire. Or maybe a piece of the heavy wire Roy always tied his machinery together with finally broke and fell into the teeth of the section blades. But I don’t suppose it matters where it came from, because he had it, all right. He had wire stuck hard between two blades and another piece running across the top of the sickle bar and then down where it was stuck between two more blades, so that the whole business was stopped dead from cutting wheat. He blamed Lyman. He blamed my father.

“You, Lyman,” he yelled. “Goddamn you.”

And the horses lunged forward then, thinking he wanted them to start up again. They pushed the header towards him where he stood in front of it, cursing.

“Whoa. Goddamn it. Stop now.”

“Pa,” Lyman called. “Do you want me to hold them? Pa, do you want I should—”

“No. Stay in the barge. You and that Roscoe have done enough. Can’t even fix a goddamn fence without you have to spread wire all over goddamn hell.”

“But you told me—”

“I know what I told you. I told you to help him fix his fence, for him helping me last year. But that don’t mean you have to spread it all over a man’s wheat field, does it? Does it? Answer me.”