The Tie That Binds

by Kent Haruf

  “Goddamn it,” he yelled, loud and fierce. “Goddamn it, to hell.”

  And that’s what did it. It was that, his hot angry insane yelling, that did it for him. And I suppose it’s only right too: the voice that he hardly ever used at all except to tell somebody what to do with or to curse you with, to damn you, the voice he just didn’t seem to know how to use in any way that was kind at all—his own angry insane voice fixed him. Because, you understand, the horses were hot. The horses were high-strung, nervous, jittery now with his yelling at them and with his sawing at the lines. Besides, they were used to being started by his yelling, and they couldn’t anyway distinguish his giddup from his goddamn.

  And it was goddamn, he yelled. Goddamn it, to hell.

  So the horses lunged forward. The six workhorses threw themselves hard into the harness, and the header moved, jolted forward. It was free of wire now. The long bat of the reel came around, hit him hard, a blow across the nape of the neck. It dropped him onto his hands and knees. He braced his fall, but his fingers caught in the sharp blades of the sections. He had honed them that morning himself on the grindstone; they were knife sharp. Now his fingers were in them, between the bright blades, and his fingers were being mangled, torn to bone and bits, broken, cut, sliced. And he was yelling. All the time he was yelling, cursing, screaming, his feet kicking out wild behind him, the header was still moving forward, jolting in the rough field, with Edith and Lyman running alongside, yelling at the horses, the horses wild with the noise and still lunging forward in the harness, shoving the header at him, carrying him forward with it, cutting wheat with his fingers. It was insane, insanity, it was hell. The bats of the reel were cracking him down again and again, and still the wheat was being cut all around him, and his fingers were in the blades, being cut, sliced, hacked, and then it was over. It was done. That fast. He was torn free from his fingers and carried off to the side by the canvas belt.

  They got the horses stopped. John Roscoe had seen what was happening. He had jumped down from the stack and had come running across the field, and he and Lyman had stopped the horses finally. Now Edith was helping her father crawl out of the header. It was bad. He had a long open cut above his eyes, another in the hair at the back of his head; one of his pants legs was ripped from cuff to thigh and showed deep bruises and cuts all along his leg; he was covered all over with blood and wheat chaff. But it was his hands that frightened you. He held them in front of him, out away from his body, as if they were exhibits. His hands were gore now, raw meat, hamburger. All the fingers and the thumb on his right hand were gone, chopped off. The thumb and the first three fingers on his left hand were gone too, just ragged meat and splintered bone, leaving his little finger alone on that hand, alone of all his fingers, uncut. It was ridiculous. His little finger on his left hand didn’t have a scratch on it. It was a mockery. He held his hands out in front of him, staring at them, as if he had finally gone insane entirely, while his ruined hands throbbed blood, dripping the blood off the jagged stumps of his fingers, down into the wheat stubble and sand at his feet.

  “Oh Daddy,” Edith cried. “Oh God, Daddy. Come on, we’ve got to get to the doctor. Can you walk? Oh God, come on, though.”

  Roy seemed almost to wake up then. He seemed almost to come out of his wild fascinated daze. “I ain’t leaving,”

  he said. He wasn’t yelling anything now; he was just talking, high, in a kind of old man’s shocked whine. His fingers were gone. “I ain’t leaving,” he said. “They’re mine.”

  “What? No, come on. What are you talking about? We’ve got to hurry. Help me.”

  “I ain’t leaving them here. They’re mine. They ain’t yours, are they? They ain’t yours.”

  “No, please. Oh God. Help me, John.”

  John Roscoe took Roy’s arm and tried to lead him away, tried to get him to walk towards the road. But he pulled his bloody arm free.

  “They’re mine, goddamn it. I tell you, they ain’t yours. I told you, didn’t I?”

  “Yes, you told us,” John Roscoe said.

  “They ain’t yours.”

  “No.”

  “They’re mine. I told you already.”

  “Yes, all right. We’ll find them.”

  “Give them to me. I want them all.”

  “We’ll find them,” John Roscoe said. “Lyman, go get my car started. Bring it here.”

  “Oh Jesus,” Lyman said.

  “Hurry up, goddamn it. Run.”

  Lyman turned and ran stumbling across the wheat stubble to get the car. He fell down, jumped up again, and ran on. Edith and my father stood with Roy Goodnough beside the header. His hands and arms were twitching uncontrollably now, dripping blood all the time. He held them out in front of him. His face was bloody from the wound above his eyes, and there was more blood running down the back of his neck.

  “I told you,” he said. “I already told you so.”

  “He’s going to die,” Edith said.

  “No, he isn’t. Not yet.”

  “I’m afraid he’s going to die, though.”

  “Stay with him. I’ll look if I can find any of his fingers. Jesus Christ Almighty.”

  “Give them to me. They’re mine. They ain’t yours.”

  “Yes, Daddy. Hush now.”

  “I want them.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “They’re mine, I told you.”

  “Oh, please be quiet. Please, Daddy.”

  “They ain’t yours. They’re mine.”

  JOHN ROSCOE found two of the fingers and one of the thumbs. The thumb was still stuck in the section blades. The two fingers he found in the sand and stubble behind the header, but he couldn’t find any more. Edith held them in her lap on the way to town, sitting in the back seat of the old Model T Ford behind her father. They looked like thick bloody sausages in the handkerchief on her lap, except that they had black hair on them between what would have been knuckles and they had fingernails on the ends. There was still dirt under the nails. Edith brushed the sand and wheat chaff off them: the fingers were very stiff. Roy sat in front of her with his head fallen on his chest. He was mumbling to himself, and his bloody hands dripped blood steadily onto the floorboards of the car.

  “I’m afraid he’s going to bleed to death,” Edith said.

  “I don’t know,” John Roscoe said. “He’s getting weak.”

  “Daddy,” Edith said. “Daddy, can you hear me?”

  “I told you,” Roy was saying. “I told you, didn’t I? I told you.”

  “God in heaven,” Edith said. “At least he’s still alive.” “Yes. We’ll be there soon.”

  Lyman sat beside his sister, staring forward at the back of his father’s head, without saying a word. They drove as fast as they could in the Ford on the dirt road going north to town.

  Holt didn’t have a hospital yet; there wouldn’t be one for another fifteen years. They stopped the car on Main Street at the storefront that was the doctor’s office, next to the harness and general store that has since become a Coast to Coast store. They got Roy Goodnough out of the car, and my father and Edith supported him under the arms and walked him inside. Doc Packer wasn’t there.

  “Go find him. Quick.”

  “I can’t,” Lyman said. “What if I can’t find him?”

  “Just look for him. Hurry up. Goddamn it, ask somebody.”

  “But Jesus,” Lyman said. Then he ran out onto the sidewalk.

  I don’t know whether or not Marcellus Packer was the first doctor in Holt, but he was one of the first. He was a short man, and fat, with a walrus moustache like you see in pictures of Teddy Roosevelt. His moustache was always discolored from tobacco juice, even as an old man, when I was taken to him as a kid with mumps. He parted what hair he had in the middle. Lyman found him in the dark beer saloon on the corner, talking to some of the men at a table.

  “You got to come,” Lyman said.

  “What’s wrong, boy?”

  “It’s Pa.”


  “What’s wrong with him? Slow down. Stand still a minute, can’t you?”

  “It’s Pa.”

  “Where is he?”

  Lyman ran back onto the sidewalk in the sun and up the block to the office. Packer followed him, taking short quick steps under his big stomach, on up the sidewalk and into the back room of the office, where Edith and my father had Roy seated on a chair with a bucket on the floor between his feet to catch the blood.

  “Good God, man,” Packer said. “What happened to you?”

  “They ain’t yours,” Roy said. “They ain’t yours neither.”

  “What’s he talking about?”

  “He got caught in a header,” my dad said. “He was trying to pull some wire out. The horses spooked.”

  “He’s so weak now,” Edith said. “He’s been bleeding all the time.”

  “I can see that. Help me get his shirt off him. That cut over his eyes ain’t so bad, but them hands of his . . . good God.”

  They cut his shirt and long underwear off along the sleeves so they wouldn’t have to touch his hands yet. He sat there in his ripped pants dripping blood into the bucket. Then they moved him over to a table.

  “Pick up his feet,” Packer said. “There now, there. Lay him down. Hold his arms for him. Get another bucket, boy, if you ain’t going to help lift him, so he don’t bleed all over my floor. Over there in the corner. There now, that’s better. Hold him still now while I try to wash some of this blood off him. Jesus God, he’s lucky he don’t feel nothing.”

  “They ain’t yours,” Roy said.

  He was lying back on a table with his arms held out to the side, and Doctor Marcellus Packer was washing one of the stumps of his hands with alcohol. “I told you they’re mine,” he said. “I told you so.”

  “What’s he talking about? Hold him still.”

  “You might as well give them to him, Edith. Do you still have them?”

  “Yes.”

  Edith reached into the pocket of her dress and handed the handkerchief to Doc Packer.

  “What’s this?” he said. He looked at the two fingers and the thumb in the bloody handkerchief. “What do you expect me to do with them things?”

  “He had to have them,” Edith said. “But we couldn’t find the others, and John looked all over. He wouldn’t leave without them.”

  “You wasted your time,” Packer said.

  He shook them off the handkerchief into one of the buckets. They looked like they might be blunt fish nosing one another in the bucket.

  “I ain’t no Jesus Christ,” he said. “Hold him still now. This is going to hurt. Maybe you think I’m some damn circus magician?”

  IN THE END about all Doc Packer could do was to trim the stumps of Roy’s fingers and thumbs a little bit so they wouldn’t be so sharp, then he stretched the ragged flaps of skin over the ends and stitched them up into hard welts. Roy still had the one uncut, unscratched little finger on his left hand, and he damn near died. He probably should have died, too, but he didn’t die. He lived for another thirty-seven years with those cruel, raw-looking hands. He could crook his arms under a bucket and hold a fence post while you tamped in around it, and he learned to push a button through its hole so he could get his shirt on by using that one little finger, but he couldn’t milk a cow or work a fence pliers or drive a tractor. He couldn’t do any of those things that mattered. So he was snookered all right. He was fixed. Now he was dependent on other people, and he hated it.

  But if their father was fixed, Edith and Lyman were fixed even worse. They were stuck now on that sandhill farm. How were they going to leave him, the way he was? They couldn’t leave him. Not that way, they couldn’t. It was hell for all of them. They were all fixed.

  •4•

  BUT if Edith and Lyman had been city kids, things might have been different. City kids, even in 1915, had some opportunities to escape which farm kids didn’t have. City kids could take off and walk ten or fifteen blocks or jump on a trolley car going across town and end up as far away from home as if they were in another state entirely, another country even. Then they could make their mark, or not make it, and start their life over or end it, but whatever happened, at least the ties would have been cut, the limits of home would have been broken.

  Or if Edith and Lyman had been country kids living now, alive and howling in the 1970s, things might have been different too. It’s TV and movie shows and high school and 3.2 beer and loud music and paved highways and fast cars (and what goes on and comes off too in the back seats of those cars, until maybe Bud Sealy shines his flashlight in through the side windows)—it’s all those things and more that country kids have now, and you can’t tell a farm kid from a town kid, even with a program. They’re just about all the same, all alike in their cars, driving up and down Main Street every Saturday night, honking and howling, in Holt, Colorado.

  But Edith and Lyman didn’t have those things, those chances and opportunities to escape. They were farm kids in the second decade of this violent century, and they were stuck. Their mother died early, like I’ve already said; their father was Roy Goodnough, and even if he was a raging madman sometimes, even if he yelled too much at them, he was still their father. And then—to clinch matters, to turn that heavy vise a few more turns to the right—they had to see him get his hands ruined. They had to be right there when it happened; they had to witness it all, watch his hands being ground to hamburger; they had to run for help, get him to town, carry what was left of his fingers wrapped up in a damn handkerchief, and then one of them had to hold an arm in place, and they both had to watch while Packer did what little he could to rectify the bloody mess of his hands—and all the time he was still talking about I told you so, I told you, didn’t I?

  So when I say they were stuck, I don’t mean they were stuck just a little bit. I don’t mean they were just sort of stuck the way you might be if you stepped into some mud and you were able to get out of it if you made the effort, and once you were out of it about all the loss you’d have to show was that you might have to leave a pair of good new shoes behind you in the mud. No, I mean they were deep stuck. I mean it was like they were stuck clear up to their chins, almost up to eye level, and no real effort was even possible. They might manage to wiggle their arms a little bit now and then, they might turn their heads a few degrees, but they couldn’t get out no matter what, and about all they could see in any direction around them, when they did manage to turn their heads a little bit, was just more mud. More of the same. Or, in their case, more sand and more work and duty and obligation.

  So Edith went on, of course, cooking and cleaning and mending and washing clothes and ironing. Also, she still had the garden to manage: to plant, hoe, water, can, and pickle. Also, she had the wood to cut and carry in, the stove to stoke, the chickens to feed, the eggs to gather and clean. Also now, every morning and every night, on top of all those other duties she had to do the milking.

  Have you ever milked cows? No, I suppose not. Well, milking cows is all right if there isn’t any way you can get out of it, but it’s not quite the fun times old pictures make it out to be, with some bare-armed milkmaid sitting down beside some nice brown and white Guernsey cow under an oak tree and over there not far away is a blue stream bubbling and everything looks lazy and fine and somehow it’s always summer. No, you get up—Edith got up—every morning in the dark, never mind if it was blizzarding out, never mind if she was still exhausted. She got up, threw on a dress and a coat and went outside to find the five or six Shorthorns in the cow pasture. She walked them through the gate and into the barn, set the head catch to hold them there, hitched up her skirt and coat to climb up the ladder to the loft, threw down some hay into the manger, climbed down again, set the T-shaped milk stool in place, sat down with her head close to the cow’s flank to keep from getting hit in the face too much by the stinging shit-filled, eye-blinding tail, washed the tits off with a wet rag, pulled some first squirts of milk from each tit to further clean them and to
check for mastitis, squeezed the bucket between her knees, and then, finally, milked the cow out enough to still leave some for a calf to suck and survive on. And then she did the same with the next cow, and the next, and the next. And all the time she was talking quietly to them to keep them calm enough that they would let the milk down and not kick the bucket away from her.

  When she was finished milking, she turned the cows out to pasture again, and then carried the buckets of milk into the house to the back porch, where she ran the milk through the separator, turning the crank by hand. Afterwards, sometime during the day, she had to find time to make butter and to get the sour cream ready to take to town to sell. I believe they did that once a week, took the cream and eggs they didn’t need into town to Bishop’s Creamery opposite the railroad tracks.

  But you understand, don’t you, that what I’ve told you so far was just the morning milking. Because she had to do it all over again late in the afternoon before she cooked supper; twice a day she had to do it, every day in the week. You also understand that what I’ve said about milking cows is based on the shaky assumption that everything would go right. I mean, that’s how it was supposed to be. But, of course, it didn’t always go that way. There were many days when whatever could go wrong, did go wrong. A cow stepped on her foot. Another one kicked the bucket over. One of them turned up sick and had to be doctored. Or maybe they just didn’t want to come in from the pasture in the first place. Who knows what an old speckle-faced cow is thinking? Or if she’s thinking anything at all? Well, some people claim pigs are smart, and maybe they are, but nobody I know has ever said that about cows.