The Tie That Binds

by Kent Haruf

“Yes. And not the way you mean it, either.”

  So they were alone now. It was one of the few times, and the car was stopped on the country road. On both sides of them, since it was a piece of sandhill country and too steep for plows, they had all those sunflowers and all that sage and soapweed and blue grama grass, and I don’t know whether or not they had the moon. But I hope they did, a full moon, because Edith Goodnough deserved to be seen in that pale blue light at least once in her life, and anyway I know they had the high stars snapping clean for them, and all that country was quiet too. So my dad must have held her then, and kissed her—and not one of those first nose-positioning, chin-bumping kisses, but where you’ve gone past that part already and you’ve learned to make a good mixture of your mouth with hers, and it tastes good and you both want more, and then you have more. So he must have kissed her, and been kissed in return, and I’m going to hope they got out of the car then. I’m going to believe they did that, believe they stood out into that pale blue quiet and then together walked away from the car, up the hillside, until they found a hollow in the grass and lay down on his coat and talked quietly, almost in a whisper, though there was no need for whispering, while he unbuttoned her soft blouse and she watched his eyes, and his eyes showed that he knew he was being given a gift, and the only thing he was afraid of was that his hard work-calloused hands might somehow harm such smooth blue whiteness, and all the time on her part she wasn’t afraid of anything, but was just waiting and watching him still, his dark eyes, and then she had one hand warm on his neck and the other alive in his black hair. And I’m going to believe that it was as beautiful as sometimes it can be, when you’re right with one another, when together it’s good for you both, because Edith deserved that too.

  AFTERWARDS they must have talked a little, still quietly, in a sad whisper now. Edith must have said, “What’s going to happen to us, John? What am I going to do now?”

  “Why, we’re going to get married.”

  “But I don’t know that.”

  “We’re going to get married. We’ll have a fine time.”

  “I don’t know that at all.”

  “I’m asking you, though. Right now. Is that what you’re waiting for? I’m too comfortable and easy to get up on my knees, but you know I want us to be married.”

  “That’s not what I mean. I mean how can I?”

  “Why hell, girl, you just say yes now, and a little later you say ‘I do.’ What else is there?”

  Edith must have sat up then, moving up off his arm where she had been lying while he made circles in her brown hair with his fingers. She must have begun to put her blouse and skirt on again.

  “I mean,” she said, “there’s Lyman.”

  “Well, damn Lyman,” my dad said. “He’s old enough. What is he—twenty-four, twenty-five? He’s old enough to manage by hisself, ain’t he?”

  “Lyman was twenty-three,” Edith said, “June sixth. But it’s not a matter of age, you know it isn’t. It’s him, it’s the way he is, and it’s me too. I’ve always had to be there for him—against Daddy.”

  “All right, yes, I know that. I’ve seen it all often enough. But Jesus, Edith, you’d only be a half mile apart even so.”

  “It’s not a matter of miles either.”

  “Well, what then? Hell.”

  “It’s Daddy too. Don’t you see that? Think about him, the way he is. His hands.”

  “I don’t want to think about him. He’s a dried up son of a bitch. Even before his hands, he was.”

  “That’s not fair.”

  “It’s a fact, Edith. He’s no good to anybody, let alone to hisself.”

  “But that doesn’t seem to matter,” she said. “Does it? I can’t help that. All I can help is . . . I can help about mother.”

  “But for godsake, Edith. Your mother is dead.”

  “I know that. That’s what I mean. When mother died I had to take things up into my own hands. And you know it doesn’t matter if I wanted to or not: sometimes now I don’t even know what it was I might have wanted once. I can’t recall. It’s been too long; it will be eight years in August since mother died. But anyway, these things and these people here are mine now. I’ve taken them up. That’s all there is. And besides, what would Lyman do?”

  So what was my dad going to say to any of that? He was lying there in sandhill grass, watching her while she talked and while the light shone pale on her fine face, and I suppose he must have known that he couldn’t win any fight against the memory of any frail little woman, even if that woman was just skinny and tiny and homesick and even if she had been dead for close to eight years. But perhaps he still had reason to hope—I suppose he did— so perhaps he changed targets and aimed instead at Edith’s obligation to Lyman, because maybe he still thought he could at least win a fight against a twenty-three-year-old shuffling, shambling brother. With humor then my dad must have said something like:

  “All right, hell then. If he has to, Lyman can come live with us. I’ll cut him another hole in the outhouse.”

  “What? Don’t be silly.”

  “He can have his own Sears, Roebuck catalog too. We won’t bother it none. We won’t even notice if he uses all the pages except the ones with corsets and women’s socks on them. He can spend all the time he wants to out there— we won’t care.”

  “You are good for me,” Edith said.

  “Why sure. Old Lyman will be as happy as a dead sow in clover.”

  Edith felt about in her hair to see if she had all of the grass combed out. “Give me another kiss,” she said. “And stop all this talking about outhouses and dead sows.”

  THEY WENT HOME THEN, out of the sandhills where, for a while, they had been alone in the sage and the blue light, then north on the highway to the corner and east almost a mile, before they got to the Goodnoughs’, to find Lyman. They didn’t find him, though, not right away. They had to stop the car and look for him along the roadside in the tall grass, and they didn’t find him until they turned the headlights of the car on again. Even then they didn’t find him immediately. He was lying on his side, rolled into himself like a kid, asleep with spit dribbled onto his chin. He was a good fifteen feet off the road. Edith brushed him off.

  “Are you awake now?” she said.

  “Where’s Pa?”

  “In the house. Come on. Can you get in the car?”

  My dad drove them into the yard and squeezed Edith’s hand before she got out. Then he drove the half mile home, and Edith and Lyman walked into the house together. Roy was waiting for them in the kitchen. He was sitting at the kitchen table in his work pants and long underwear, with his raw hands and one good finger resting on the white enameled wood in front of him. Some things weren’t any simpler then than they are now.

  “Get upstairs,” he told Lyman.

  Lyman looked at Edith. He was fully awake now and aware, but he went upstairs anyway. The barn door had just banged shut again for him.

  “You’re done with that,” Roy said to Edith. “That’s enough of Roscoe.”

  Edith stood on the other side of the table, waiting, watching her father feel his little finger over the bad nubs of his right hand. His finger looked like a claw raking dead meat.

  “I seen him stop the car,” Roy said. “I seen the lights on the road go off and come on again. But that’s done with.”

  “I’m twenty-five,” Edith said.

  “That don’t mean a diddle.”

  “John’s thirty-two.”

  “That don’t mean a goddamn, either. He’s a half-breed bastard, and you’re done with him.”

  “He’s not either.”

  “He is if I say he is, goddamn it. And you’re his whore. Now get to bed. You must be all wore out after tonight.”

  “Shut up, Daddy. You don’t know what you’re saying.”

  Roy stood up then; the chair banged down behind him onto the wooden floor. He reached across the table at her with his finger, but she stepped back.

  “You
don’t tell me to shut up,” he yelled. “I’m your father. I’ll say any goddamn thing I please. I told you to go to bed. Now get.”

  “I will go to bed,” Edith said. “But I won’t listen to you say that.”

  “This is my house. I built it. I’ll say anything I want in these rooms. Do you understand me?”

  “It’s my house too. And Lyman’s. And it was mother’s before she died.”

  “I wish she could see you now. She’d hate the damn sight of you.”

  “No, she wouldn’t,” Edith said. “She would not.”

  “By God, don’t tell me, you goddamn—”

  But Edith walked past him then—he was insane, wild-eyed, stump waving—and went into the living room and up the stairs to the bedroom. He was still yelling at her: “You’re done with him, you hear me? Goddamn sow to a Roscoe, you’re done now. You’re through. You whore. You hear me?”

  THE NEXT DAY Roy used more than just his voice. In the afternoon while Edith was snapping beans in the kitchen and Lyman was mowing hay in the field, Roy Goodnough kicked the chopping block over with his boot and pushed it rolling with the heels of his hands across the yard into the barn. There he righted it again under a crossbeam in the center alley of the barn. The chopping block was a sawed-off stump of an elm tree, with deep ax marks and dark dried blood on it where the slack heads of chickens had been chopped off. Over the crossbeam above him Roy looped a hemp rope and tied a full-handled ax to the rope so that the ax would fall and cut deep into the block.

  He experimented with it twice, pulling the ax up almost to the crossbeam to give it enough weight to do what he wanted it to do when it fell. Then he pulled it up one more time and clamped the rope tight between his right elbow and his ribcage. The ax hung ready above him in the dusty horse-shit air. He waited until it was still, no longer swinging. A speckled pigeon watched it all from a high perch in the barn rafters, and then he laid his one finger down on the block and released the rope. The pigeon blinked a pink eye when the ax fell, thunking through his finger into the block.

  Only it didn’t just cut his finger off. Maybe he moved a little when he released his elbow-hold on the rope and then saw the ax falling and falling, taking too long to fall. Or maybe he hadn’t experimented enough. Whatever went wrong, the ax chopped through the top knuckle of his hand, splintering it bad as it smashed through bone and joint and gristle. But it must have still been satisfactory.

  He pinched up the twitching finger from the block like it was just a chicken’s head, pinched it up between his two hand stumps and carried it bloody into the house to the kitchen and dropped it into the bowl of snapped beans on the table in front of Edith. At first she didn’t move, didn’t speak. It bled a little among the beans. Then she looked up from the bowl at her father.

  “You might have saved yourself the trouble,” she said. “I already decided last night I couldn’t leave this house.”

  She got up and went to the bandage box she kept in a kitchen drawer and poured alcohol over his hand and wrapped it to stop the bleeding.

  “You’ll probably get infection,” she said. “I suppose you should see Doc Packer again, but I’m not going with you. I’ve been there once. And I might have married John Roscoe. I might have married him. I don’t care what you say. He wanted me to and I might have. Oh yes, God in mercy, I might have. Oh damn you.”

  But she was crying then. There wasn’t any sound to it. It was past the point where the puny sound of a human voice can make any difference. She walked out of the house away from her father towards the hayfield to tell Lyman, with the unregarded tears falling onto the breast of her blouse. After that, I know of only two other times in her life that Edith Goodnough allowed herself to cry. Neither was at the death of her father.

  •5•

  WHAT’S 365 times 20? Something over 7,000, isn’t it? Well, that’s how long it was. That’s how many days.

  For over 7,000 days, for almost 20 years, nothing happened to the Goodnoughs. After Roy chopped his last finger off with the ax, nothing happened to the Goodnoughs—or for them either—until almost two decades of slow days had passed. Days that must have seemed as cruel as stillbirth; the pointlessness of them, the sameness, one slow day grinding slow into the next, with no letup and no relief, nothing to look forward to and even less to look back on. Not even those small things the rest of us use to mark the passing of time—what we mean when we say “But you remember, don’t you?”—because Edith and Lyman didn’t have even that much that was worth recalling about last Christmas, never mind the day before yesterday. I believe even the Great Depression, when it came in the thirties, must have seemed like just more of the same to them, or if it was different then it was only slightly worse, because then they stopped going into town once a week to sell eggs and sour cream during the depression, to make a little money.

  So it only surprises me that Roy didn’t start in on his toes the same way, chop his ten toes off, nine all at once in the header or hay mower or corn picker and then the last one by itself in the barn with an ax—just for a little variety, I mean. To keep the knack of it fresh. Hell, the old bastard could have yelled Lyman in from the hayfield and made Lyman take the damn things into the house and dump them into the bean bowl or the kitchen sink. Chopped his own ears off, too, for all I know or care. Except I guess even Roy knew he had done enough that one afternoon.

  Because Edith never went out riding with my father again. She and Lyman went on working like they had before. Of course, when those six or seven weeks of that summer ended for Edith, she wasn’t the same. It was as if the reason for her to have female hips and soft breasts was gone. She got so she was more what you really mean is thin when you say a woman has a good body, that she’s slim. She didn’t laugh as easy. Something bright went out of her brown eyes. Her quick gestures became deliberate movements, like there was nothing now to hurry about, and it was at that time that she and Roy stopped talking to one another any more than they had to. Oh, she took care of him—I don’t mean that. She buttoned his shirt for him now that he no longer had even one finger to use to poke a button through a hole, and she mashed his potatoes and cut his meat into bites so he could still eat his food by lifting a fork to his mouth between his clenched stumps, and she tied his shoes. But she didn’t have much to say to him and she paid less attention to whatever he said. So there must have been a lot of quiet around that kitchen table for all those years, with about all the talk being just Roy’s orders and farm questions and Lyman’s mumbled grunts of obedience and short answers and pass the pepper and ain’t there any more gravy; and then in December of 1941 it must have got to be almost dead silence.

  BUT I’M GETTING AHEAD of myself. Or if you want it for a joke, I’m forgetting myself.

  Because in fact there were a few things happening in the house down the road a half mile west, in this house here where you and I are sitting away a Sunday afternoon.

  For one thing my dad just about quit. He damn near quit on himself, quit giving a good goddamn about anything. When he and Edith ran into each other on Main Street—it was a couple of days later, on Saturday afternoon—when Edith told him what had happened that other afternoon and that she wouldn’t leave the house ever, my dad wanted to kill Roy Goodnough.

  In front of Nexey’s Lumberyard, across the street from Bishop’s Creamery, my dad said, “I’ll kill him.”

  “It’ll be all right,” Edith said. “It has to.”

  “I’ll chop his head off.”

  There were people on the sidewalk, men in overalls and caps, women in silk stockings, kids sucking horehound candy and bouncing sticks on sidewalk cracks, all walking past and then stopping ten yards away to watch with their mouths held shut and their eyes wide open. They didn’t want to miss anything; they would want to talk about it later.

  And my dad was saying, “I’ll kill him.”

  And Edith was still saying how it would be all right.

  Well, it wasn’t all right, and I believe he could ha
ve too—could have killed him. If somehow he could have gotten away with it, it might have been the best thing. Does that surprise you? To think that murdering an old stump-handed man might be an answer? But of course it wasn’t, and he didn’t. That sort of thing only happens on TV. Nobody I know has killed anybody, and you can never mind what they say this approaching trial is about. Whatever the lawyers in their ignorance say about it, I know it isn’t murder.

  So instead of anything similar to that, my dad, John Roscoe, who’s been dead now for nearly twenty-seven years, and I still can’t stop thinking about him at least once every day while dehorning a calf or mashing my thumb purple with a claw hammer (still it’s his voice saying, “Smarts pretty good, don’t it?”—it’s still his voice I hear in my head, measuring things, setting standards, his voice and way of looking at things: “But life ain’t fair, Sanders,” he told me once)—my dad, for about three years after he and Edith stopped going out together, went a little crazy.

  He began to work like an immigrant during the day and to drink at night like there was no tomorrow. He was going on anger and disbelief and about four hours of sleep. He bought more cattle. He went in debt for another section of grass. He hired one of his cronies to help him. The crony was a short, squat, blocky character named Ellis Burns, who looked like a fireplug with a two-day-old beard, or, when they were working cattle in the pasture, like a fat monkey on a circus horse. He moved Ellis into the house with him and did nothing fancy. They fried meat and opened cans, mixed it together in a black frying pan, and boiled coffee. They rinsed last night’s supper off the two plates and the two forks and sat down to eat. And Ellis Burns never did lose weight.

  “Damned if I know why,” my dad said. “I worked his ass off too. Maybe it was the beer.”

  They went out drinking four or five times every week. They couldn’t go to town to the dark saloon on the corner of Main and First streets, since this was in the time of Prohibition: the saloon was boarded up for a while and then somebody opened it again as a café. They had to drive instead to Leon Shields’s place, a run-down farmhouse east of town, set back a mile off the highway amongst some trees. Some rough characters showed up there, so I’ve been told, but as far as I know it never got busted. Apparently Leon Shields had the sheriff, one of Bud Sealy’s predecessors, gripped hard by the short and curlies, or at least Leon had him tucked deep into his back pocket. I believe Leon knew something about the sheriff and another man’s wife that wasn’t public knowledge and that the wife’s husband didn’t even know about. Besides, I suppose there must have been the usual exchange of quiet-money, to sweeten it all. Anyway, it was that unpainted farmhouse surrounded by trees that my dad and Ellis Burns would drive to, during those three years. They stayed there drinking homemade beer and playing cards all those nights, until finally along about two o’clock Leon would say, “That’s all, boys—Mama’s waiting on me,” and then start turning the lights off so that at the card table in the back Ellis Burns couldn’t tell now whether it was a jack of clubs or a ten of spades that he still had hopes of drawing. Ellis would say, “Now, damn it all, Leon. I was just about to win a hand.”