The Tie That Binds

by Kent Haruf

  But the worst part of milking was always that constant stinging foul tail. Now a shit-filled tail is bad enough. Struck across your eyes or snapped into your mouth, a shit-filled tail will do for starters, and it happens all the time. But you don’t know what bad is, you haven’t experienced the full benefit of stink and outrage, until you’ve had a fresh cow (especially an old raw-boned bitch of a one that you hate anyway) come in to be milked for the first time after having a calf, and when she gets in she has a three-day-old afterbirth hanging down out of her because she hasn’t cleaned out right. So there it is, that damned stuff is hanging down out of her, swinging there between her back legs; it’s shit-soaked, juicy, buzzing with flies, and the rottenness of it is so putrid, so God-awful, that it’s all you can do to keep from throwing your guts up. But you’ve got to milk her, don’t you? That’s what she’s there for. So you set the bucket down, perch your butt on the milkstool, and you pray or hope or cross your fingers, you make all kinds of impossible promises: if only you can just get her milked without having to taste any of that putrid foulness. And by God, yes, it looks like you’re going to make it. Yes, that’s right, you’re going to make it. So easy now, easy Mama, easy. That’s right. And Jesus, yes, you’ve almost got her milked out enough to call it good—when bang, oh holy shit, oh Christ on a crutch, she hits you with it all, all of that blood and shit and juice and unbelievable outrage, right across your face. It covers your eyes, your nose, your mouth. You can even feel some of it dripping down the back of your neck. Oh brother, help me. Son of a bitch. Then you can’t hold it any longer: you throw up, all over yourself, all over the damn cow, all over the milk bucket. You throw up until you’re gagging on acid bile, your stomach hurts, and you’re groping for air.

  Well, it happened to me once. Once was enough. It made me want to kill something. But I suppose it happened to Edith Goodnough a number of times. It had to. Edith milked cows twice a day, every day of the week, all those years.

  BUT LYMAN, meanwhile what about Lyman? Because, after all, Lyman was stuck, too. I mean, he sure as hell wasn’t any sixteen-year-old kid from the city. He was just a tall big-boned mop-haired farm kid, with raw wrists and patched overalls and high-topped shoes, and he seemed to stumble about in a kind of daze, like he had lost something and couldn’t remember what it was he had lost, let alone know where to look for it. Lyman was stuck out here on that same sandhill farm, stuck in the same way his sister was. He was caught in the same vise, smothered in the same mud hole with just his chin (weak and pointed like his mother’s) sticking up above it, and I don’t believe Lyman was even able to get his head up enough to look around him, to see that there wasn’t a thing in the world out there but more of the same.

  Roy saw to that. Roy, with his destroyed hands and his hard eyes, kept Lyman’s nose buried in it. It was like Lyman was just some ass-whipped mongrel dog that Roy kept at heel on a short chain, and any time Lyman got any notion otherwise, then his father would give him a sharp jerk to make him remember and pay attention. Because that’s the way it was for a long time: Roy kept Lyman’s nose buried right there at home. He made damn sure that Lyman never had time enough to hatch up any escape plans; he saw to it that Lyman spent all his brain and all his muscle and all his sweat right there planting those quarter sections of corn and wheat, planting the same corn rows year after year and then cultivating that corn and handpicking it, planting the same wheat fields and disking and harvesting, and in between times when he wasn’t working corn or working wheat, then he was exhausting himself with raking the same hayfields and stacking the same haystacks.

  So, for a long time, Lyman stayed there working. And it wasn’t that there was anything particularly unusual about that—everyone in the country worked, worked hard too— but what made it worse for Lyman, the thing that must have made it seem like he had one of those barbed goat heads, one of these poisonous sandburs, buried forever in the back of his neck was the fact that all the time, every day, he was being ordered around. There was never any letup. It was Roy who decided everything. Roy ruled it all. If Lyman had had any say-so, if he had had any choice in when to plant the corn or where to stack the hay or how many acres of wheat he was going to plant, then it might have been all right. But he didn’t. He might just as well have pissed against the wind as to suggest anything to Roy.

  For a long time then, while Lyman worked that sandhill farm, about all he could manage to do was to wait and to hope too, I suppose, hope in his dog-eyed dazed fashion, hope that someday somehow some kind of barn door or pasture gate would get left open just enough to let him squeeze through it, so that once he made it through and got his overalls unstuck, then he could take off and start running. And by God, never look back. Not even long enough to see if something was gaining on him.

  Well, Lyman didn’t need much, you understand, but he sure as hell did need something.

  THINGS went on the same for about seven years, and then it was Edith who made the first attempt to get out. Or at least for one summer she seemed to encourage the possibility of it. And if you’ve understood what I’ve said about her—or more to the point, if I’ve managed to make it plain enough—then it shouldn’t surprise you that it was Edith who made the first attempt to break free. Of the two of them, she was the one who had the sand. Besides, by 1922, when Edith was twenty-five, she must have been just about as beautiful as any woman can be. And I believe she still is, in her own clear-eyed way, and no more so than now, when in four days she will be eighty years old and still lying there in the damn hospital bed, waiting to get well.

  But in the summer of 1922 she must have been just about perfect. She was slim and quick, with brown eyes and brown curly hair. She was woman breasted. She had strong hands. She was uncomplaining with plenty to com plain about. She was . . . but hell, I don’t know how to describe women. Only look here, this is more what I mean: she was quiet and focused and there for you in a way that didn’t make you feel awkward or clumsy even when you were worse than both of those things, as failing on your feet as a newborn colt, as drunk as a just-dropped calf. She made you want to hold her there in the front seat of that car on that country road, hold her, put your arm around her, kiss her, breathe her hair, talk to her, tell her all those things you hadn’t told anyone else before, all those things beyond the jokes and the surface facts of yourself, things you yourself didn’t know for sure you felt or thought until you heard yourself telling them to her in the dark in the stopped car with your arm around her, because somehow it would be all right if she heard them and they would be true then. Edith Goodnough must have been something that summer.

  But, Christ, what a waste of life. It makes you sick to your stomach. It makes you want to do anything else in the world but think about her.

  YOU SEE, Edith and my dad, John Roscoe, went out together that summer. And if you think about that for a minute you’ll understand at least one of the reasons why I feel about Edith the way I do. For six or seven weeks that summer, Edith and my dad went spooning or sparking or whatever it was people called it then when two people drive out together in an old Ford car with the windows rolled down and the dark air blows in on them, carrying that green smell of sage in with it. Driving in the car, they turn towards one another now and then, and then more and more often as the evening fades; they laugh a little bit about something that may seem funny to them only, while the stars have begun to snap overhead, and behind them there’s only that dust billowing up in the road after the car has passed.

  So Edith and my dad went to a few dances together. They went into town to a movie or two. They ate supper once in Norka, the next town west of Holt. But mainly they drove along the country roads in the sandhills in my dad’s old Ford, talking and laughing a little bit. It must have seemed enough to be together and to be moving, and almost always they had Lyman with them in the back seat.

  Maybe that’s the reason why Roy let them go. With Lyman along to stick his head up between them from the back seat, it may have seemed all r
ight to let Edith go out driving with my dad. I suppose he thought Lyman would put a halt to any funny stuff. Not that Lyman would say anything to anybody—Lyman didn’t do much talking in his life, except maybe to Edith—but he did always seem to be there. You’d be working on something in the machine shed or visiting with someone on Main Street, and then you’d look up and there Lyman would be, standing off a little ways, cleaning the dirt from under his fingernails with a jackknife, and you couldn’t be sure how long he’d been standing there or how much he’d seen or heard, but there he was all right, waiting like a stray dog to see what developed. So maybe that’s the reason why Roy allowed that six- or seven-week vacation, that brief lessening of his hold on the vise that summer, but that’s only a guess. It sure as hell wasn’t like him. Maybe he just wanted to see how far it would go, to kind of test the water. Or maybe he already had in mind what he was going to do next.

  Another thing I can only guess at, concerning that summer, was why it took my dad so long. He was already thirty-two. He was still young, of course, still in his prime— strong, tough, black haired, the kind of man dogs and horses will come up to for a scratch and a pat without his ever having to whistle or snap his fingers. But for at least ten years there hadn’t been any reason to doubt that he would make a good go of ranching. He had been well established for quite a while; he had things in control. So maybe he was just waiting. He was a country boy too, after all, and every fall during harvest he was still there helping the Goodnoughs, watching Edith, talking to her some and joking with Lyman, while he himself drove the header now that Roy couldn’t.

  Then his mother, my grandmother, died. That was in the spring of 1922. When he came in for supper one evening, he found her dead in the rocking chair with tobacco ashes spilled out onto her black dress, and he buried her up on that little rise north of the barn. He stuck her briar pipe under her hands on her chest. Edith was the only other person there. Together they shoveled the sand in onto the wood box.

  “There ought to be a tree or bush, though,” Edith said. “Even if it’s just the thought of it, she ought to have some shade.”

  The box was covered now. My dad was mounding the sand on top and packing it with the flat of his shovel.

  “I mean in July and August,” Edith said. “I don’t like thinking of her up here then.”

  “Be a awful long way to carry water.”

  “A bucket or two every other day,” she said. “We could take turns.”

  “What kind of tree?”

  “A cottonwood. They grow fast, and if there’s any wind you can hear the leaves washing and turning in it. Unless you’d rather it was something else.”

  “I believe she liked cottonwoods. She never said.”

  “You could get one from along the Arikaree.”

  “I’ll get one this afternoon,” he said. “I guess we’re done here now.”

  They stood on the rise looking at the mound of damp sand, with the -switch grass and brome and sagebrush around it. They could see the house south of where they stood.

  “Do you want me to leave now?” Edith said. “I will.”

  “No. Why would I want that?”

  “Maybe you want to be alone.”

  “I’ll have that as soon as I go down to the house,” he said. “No. No, you look okay there. You might even look pretty if you didn’t have all that wet sand on your shoes.”

  “Go on,” she said.

  “And your big nose wasn’t peeling.”

  “Go on, you,” she said. “But John, she was a good woman, wasn’t she? My mother thought so. She made a difference for my mother.”

  “Sure, she made all the difference. But I’ll never forget how that son of a bitch left her.”

  “Nor you either. He left you too.”

  “Never mind me. I always had her. But she never had anything—just a six-year-old kid and a homestead he hadn’t even got started good yet. The son of a bitch. I don’t know how she stood it.”

  “Some people can’t,” Edith said. “She did though. She was as strong as anything.”

  “She shouldn’t of had to be that strong. That’s what I mean. He just left her out here—with me and a milk cow and one horse. Can you believe that? Hell, he even took the other horse.”

  “I’ll help you water the tree tomorrow,” Edith said.

  So maybe that’s what he was waiting for: his mother to die and Edith Goodnough to suggest some shade for her. Anyway, he planted a cottonwood and they took turns watering it—or watered it together, more like—each of them carrying a bucketful up to the rise in the evenings, and later he built a fence around it, and then they began going out together in his Ford car with Lyman along in the back seat for the ride.

  IT WAS CALLED the Gem Theater then. It was on the other side of the street and north a block and a half from the theater we have now, the Holt Theater. There is a marquee out front above the double-door entrance to the Holt Theater now, so people can see what Blaine Fisher is showing for their enjoyment on the weekend, but you can only read what is showing if you are driving south on Main Street, because Blaine only changes the words on the north side of his marquee. I suppose he figures that’s enough ladder climbing for him, with his big stomach and his skinny legs and high blood pressure. Blaine leaves the other side of the marquee always the same: ENJOY FRESH HOT POPCORN. It makes you wonder now how fresh it is and how hot, considering how many years he’s been advertising it that way.

  As for the old Gem Theater, I can’t remember whether it had one of those things above its doors or not—probably not—and it wouldn’t have had sound by 1922, either. But my dad and Edith and Lyman must have had some fun there just the same, with the lights in the auditorium darkened and the heads on the screen flickering bigger than any human head could be, and then before they were ready for it, that guy with the pencil moustache was tying the little blond to the railroad tracks, or strapping her down good to a buzz saw, and she was looking Help me right at Lyman chewing his popcorn and right at my dad and Edith holding hands on Edith’s lap, and all over that pretty lipstick mouth she had that big scream screaming “Help.” Some things were simpler then.

  But it was late in the summer, after one of those two or three nights in town at the picture show and after a dish of ice cream at Lexton’s Confectionery, that what started right, ended wrong, and it stopped whatever else might have happened later. They were in the car going south towards home. Lyman was asleep in the back seat with his head shoved up against the side. When they got to the corner where they had to turn east to come the mile off the highway to the Goodnoughs’, they woke Lyman up and Edith asked him if he would walk the rest of the way, not quite home, she told him, but wait for her before he got home so they could go into the house together.

  “For a favor to me,” she said. “Will you?”

  “Don’t forget John,” he said.

  “Yes. For him too. What’s wrong, though?”

  “Nothing,” Lyman said. “What if Pa finds out?”

  “He won’t. Here, you can take my coat to lie on in the grass.”

  “But what if he does?”

  “I don’t know. Will you do it?”

  Lyman got out of the car then and spoke in through the window to Edith, so close that his breath moved her hair. “Don’t forget to pick me up,” he said.

  “We won’t. And thank you, Lyman. But don’t you want my coat?”

  “No. Lay on it yourself.”

  “Don’t say that. Why would you say that? What’s wrong with you?”

  “Nothing’s wrong with me.”

  “What’s wrong, though? Something is.”

  “It better not take very long,” Lyman said. “That’s all I know.”

  Then he turned to walk alongside the road in the dark, away from the car. My dad and Edith drove a mile or two farther south on the highway and then turned west into the sandhills.

  “He’s tired all the time,” Edith said. “Did you see him back there? He’s going to h
ave a stiff neck tomorrow.”

  “Lyman’s all right,” my dad said. “He needs to get out more. Needs a girl himself to go riding with. Even if she has to eat as much ice cream as you do. Chocolate and nuts all over it, like she wasn’t never going to have another chance at it. Just howdy, mister, and forget the napkins; I ain’t got time to be fancy.”

  “Oh, be quiet, you,” Edith said. “I only had one dish of it.”

  “Yeah, just a little old triple decker.”

  “But I like ice cream. And it was strawberries, not nuts.”

  “Good. I’ll have Lexton bring you a gallon of both next time. Make him stack them on top his head like a trained monkey. He’s got that nice flat bald spot, just right for juggling things on it.”

  “He doesn’t either. And it’s not flat like you say it is— it’s ridged.”

  “Why, it is too. Flat as a pancake. It’s where his ma hit him with the shovel.”

  “She didn’t do any such thing.”

  “Well, she did. Banged on the head with a shovel. ‘Now behave yourself,’ she said, ‘and quit picking them britches, or I’ll bang you again.’”

  “I’ll bang you on the head with a shovel,” Edith said, “if you don’t be quiet. Now hush, and see if you can keep this car out of the ditch.”

  “I’m just trying to get you some ice cream, Edith. I don’t want you to go home hungry.”

  “I’m sick of ice cream. And I don’t want to go home yet.”

  “Good,” my dad said. “I don’t either.”

  “But I can’t imagine any of this for him,” Edith said. “Can you?”

  “Who? Bernie Lexton?”

  “No. Lyman. I think I’m the only woman he’s ever talked to. Besides mother, I mean.”

  “Poor bugger.”