The Tie That Binds

by Kent Haruf

  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.

  But at the same time he was loving it and worrying about it, he must have hated it too, because at harvesttime Roy had to ask someone for help. He couldn’t do it alone. He could operate the header himself, but even with Edith driving the team of horses polling the header barge and Lyman leveling the wheat off in the back of the barge, he still needed one more person to stack the wheat once the barge was full and ready to be unloaded. So he had to ask John Roscoe, down the road a self mile, to do that.

  John Roscoe was twenty-five in 1915. I’ve already said about him that he lasted. But he was able to last not so much by farming himself, like Roy did, as by adding more grassland to the original claim his mongrel father had filed ten years before he ever went to town that Saturday morning and disappeared. Calving time was the worst: you had to get up at three o’clock in the morning in a March blizzard to pull a calf that was trying to come breech; but usually one man could manage a small cattle operation. He also farmed some, though, in a small way. His mother cooked dinner and washed clothes, smoked her pipe and rocked herself to sleep in the afternoons beside the stove in the living room. Anyway, it was John Roscoe that was helping the Goodnoughs harvest their wheat that July in 1915.

  I don’t suppose it was as hot then as it had been the previous year, when Ada died in the upstairs bedroom, but it was hot enough. The sky stayed clear, bright, high, and the heads of the wheat had filled and turned tan, ready to be cut. They had already cut most of it in the preceding five or six days, and Roy believed he could finish today, or at the latest, tomorrow.

  So on this Thursday morning late in July, while Lyman milked and fed the six or seven Shorthorns they kept for milk cows—because they gave more milk than their Here-fords—Roy slid the sickle bar out the end of the header to sharpen the blades. Edith had to help him after she had cooked breakfast and washed dishes; she had to hold the end of the long sickle bar while he sat on the narrow iron seat, pumping the foot pedals of the grindstone like he was some overgrown kid racing to hell on a tricycle. He ground and honed both cutting edges of each blade, those triangular-shaped serrated blades called sections that were riveted along the length of the sickle bar. A few of the sections had been nicked by rocks, but he didn’t bother replacing them. That would take more time; he wanted to finish while the weather held. He ground the nicked serrated edges down smooth so that they shone like just-honed knife blades.

  Lyman came over and watched as his father sat pumping on the grindstone.

  “You turn the cows out?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you put a cloth over the milk cans?”

  “Yes.”

  “There was a gob of flies dunking in it yesterday.”

  “I know. I couldn’t find the cover cloth.”

  “We wouldn’t need no cloth if you hadn’t lost the goddamn lids. But you never looked for the cloth either, did you? It was hanging on a nail in the kitchen.”

  Lyman looked quick above his father’s bowed head at Edith. Lyman made a face.

  “But go on now,” Roy said. “Get the horses in and harnessed. We’re late already.”

  Lyman looked once more at Edith and ambled off in his hard high-topped shoes and loose overalls towards the horse pasture. Then Roy was finished with the sickle bar. Edith went in to prepare something for lunch for the four of them; they would eat at noon in the shade of the wheat stack. It saved having to go to the house.

  When Roy had the sickle bar slid into the front of the header and bolted in place so that the sharp section blades, set between iron spikes called guards, would move back and forth, slicing the wheat off close to the ground, Lyman walked six horses up to the back of the header, where Roy harnessed them, three at each side, alongside a heavy iron pole. Then Edith hitched two more horses to the wagon, to the header barge, and they drove rattling out of the yard towards the wheat field. When they entered the field they could see John Roscoe standing on the stack far over there in the corner, waiting for the first load. They stopped the horses so that the header would be ready to begin cutting where they had left off the night before at the near end of the field.

  “I suppose Roscoe’s been waiting there for a hour,” Roy said, “without a goddamn thing in the world to do except wait on us.”

  “He doesn’t have his shirt off yet,” Edith said.

  “It ain’t hot enough. He wants to get burned. He thinks fried skin looks pretty.”

  “I don’t think he’ll burn,” Edith said. “He’s too brown.”

  “That’s the Indian in him.”

  “Daddy,” Edith said.

  “What?” he said. “You know it well as anybody.” “Just the same, I don’t care—”

  “You damn God better learn to,” Roy said. “Get the barge in place.”

  Roy engaged the gears and chains on the bull wheel, and then he climbed up into the seat at the back of the header, between his two teams of horses.

  “Giddup,” he said. “Go on now.”

  The six horses moved, lunged forward, pushing the heavy rattling header. The engaged gears and chains turned the reel at the front that came around and laid the wheat down onto the sickle bar, to be cut off by the slicing knife-sharp sections. As the wheat was cut it fell onto a platform beneath the rotating reel, and then it was carried by a canvas belt off to the side and up another canvas belt through a chute and out, falling into the header barge that Edith drove alongside. Lyman was in the back of the barge where the cut wheat on its dusty stalks fell around him and on him, made him itch and sweat and scratch, while he forked the stuff around in the barge to level it off. Edith could hear him cussing miserably, insanely, behind her, but not so loud that Roy would hear.

  “By Jesus,” he was saying. “Oh, you dirty son of a bitch. Get over there. Hog shit in a bucket.”

  They finished that first swath through the length of the field, then Roy disengaged the gears on the bull wheel, pulled the lever to the tiller wheel, and the header made its neat square turn, with three of the horses walking slow, almost backing around, while the other three horses walked out fast at an angle, to point the header back up the field. The gears were engaged again, and the Goodnoughs started another swath.

  When the header barge was full, so that Lyman stood up higher now on top of the cut wheat with his high-topped shoes full of bits of chaff, Roy stopped his six horses.

  “Well,” he said, “go pitch it off. And don’t take all day jabbering.”

  Lyman crawled up onto the front seat of the barge, and he and Edith drove over to the corner to John Roscoe, where the stack was. On the way Lyman took his shoes off and dumped the chaff out. When they stopped at the stack both of them got into the back to pitch the wheat off with their three-tined wheat forks.

  “Shoes bothering you again?” John Roscoe said.

  “Son of a bitch,” Lyman said. “Trade with me. I’ll stack this stuff.”

  “Can’t. Your old man wants you right where he can see you, getting your nose full of it.” “Son of a bitch,” Lyman said.

  “Why don’t you ask Edith? Edith, whyn’t you crawl back there and relieve your little brother? Be good for you to do some real work for a change.”

  “You should have heard him,” Edith said. “My, my.”

  “Needs his mouth washed out with soap.”

  “Lye soap this time,” Edith said.


  “Oh, dirty bastard,” Lyman said. “Oh, horse piss too.”

  Then John Roscoe and Edith laughed and Lyman grinned like a cocker spaniel. They went on working that way throughout the morning, while the July sun rose higher and hotter in the sky and the dust behind the machinery hung in the air like clouds of gnats. Roy sat up there hard on the seat at the back of the header with the horses on either side of him. The horses lunged against the harness to get the header moving again, to push the heavy machine forward to cut another swath of wheat after it had been stopped at the end of a square turn or after stopping to wait for Edith and Lyman to come back with the emptied barge. Then with the header in motion, the six horses walked steadily up the field, pushing the weight and noise of the machine ahead of them. The horses were dark with sweat along their necks and shoulders, where the collars rode, and along their flanks. White foam, like soap lather, worked up between the big muscles on the insides of their back legs. Flies bothered their eyes and underbellies, so that as they walked, straining against the harness, they tossed their heads and switched their long harsh tails.

  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.”

  Lyman didn’t say anything. What was he going to say?

  “Answer me.”

  “It’s not Lyman’s fault,” Edith said. “You know it isn’t.”

  “You shut up,” Roy said.

  “It’s not John’s fault, either.”

  “Stay out of this, I said. Answer me, boy. Does it or not? I want to know.”

  “No, Pa,” Lyman said. “No.”

  “No, by God, it don’t,” Roy said. “But I got it just the same, don’t I? Roscoe’s fence wire stuck in my header. Goddamn it, anyway. Son of a bitching kids.”

  But my father was twenty-five and no kid that summer, and it might just as well have been Roy’s own wire stopping the teeth—wire he used to tie up his damn machinery with instead of ever buying something new or even forking over the two cents that would buy the bolt that would fix it. But that didn’t matter to him: he knew he had fence wire stuck in his header and now he couldn’t cut wheat.

  He bent down in front of the header, under the wood bats of the reel, and began to pull at the wire with both hands, working it back and forth, sawing at it to either break the wire or get it free somehow, and he managed to get one piece out that way. He stood up panting then, glaring at Edith and Lyman, then he bent down again and started on the other piece of heavy wire, bending it back and forth, trying to saw through it with the sharp serrated blades, but it wouldn’t come, and he went a little insane with the heat and the salt sweat running into his eyes, and the wire wasn’t coming. He pulled at it, sawed at it and it wouldn’t come, and he went on bending it, sawing at it viciously—then it came so suddenly, snapped so fast, that he stood up too quick and banged his head hard against a reel bat.