The Tie That Binds

by Kent Haruf

  “No, you wasn’t, “ Leon would say. “I’m saving you money.”

  “Hell, too. Turn them lights back on.”

  “Nope. I’m going upstairs to play with the kids’ Mama.”

  “Turn them lights on. I’m about to fill a straight.”

  “Listen, you sawed-off little pecker shit,” Leon would say. “You never seen a straight in your life. Now get out of here ’fore I knock your nose off.”

  “By God,” Ellis would say, and he’d be standing up now in a wobbly crouch. “By God, you better pack a lunch. It ain’t going to be no five-minute job.”

  But Leon would just laugh then, and my dad would say, “Give us another beer, Leon, and we’ll go home.”

  “All right, John. See you tomorrow.”

  “No doubt.”

  So they would go home then, west and then south on the highway. Before they got more than a mile down the road Ellis would be asleep, just like Lyman had done those few times, only Ellis was sleeping in the front seat now where, before, Edith had sat beside my dad. The almost-full beer bottle would be standing up between Ellis’s legs at his crotch, sloshing beer onto his pants zipper. It didn’t wake him. He slept on with his slack stubbled chin rocking on his chest bone.

  But my dad wouldn’t be asleep. Even after those hard nights at Leon Shields’s and all the beer, he wouldn’t be able to sleep very long once he was home again and in bed. He was up every morning before daybreak, kicking Ellis awake, frying eggs in the just-rinsed frying pan, ready to begin branding cattle or stacking hay or shoeing horses. Anything as long as it kept him from thinking. He didn’t want to think.

  Then, towards the end of that three-year period of fierce work and hard drinking, my dad began to get into fights. There wouldn’t be any reason for the fights; he would just be at Leon’s, drinking and still too sober, and he would start a fight. It wouldn’t be about anything. He would hit somebody and wait to get hit back, hardly bothering to fend off whatever blows were thrown at him. He had a bad scar from one of those fights, a white break in the black line of his left eyebrow, which I used to admire when I was still of an age where fist fights seemed to prove something. My dad straightened me out about that too.

  “All this does is,” he told me, running his thick finger over the wide jagged spot above his eye, “it reminds me how I was a damn fool. It don’t mean a thing else. And don’t you think it does.”

  “What was it about, though?” I said. “The fight.”

  “Nothing. It wasn’t about nothing. I hit Frank Lutz because he happened to be there and because I wasn’t drunk and because I knew Frank would hit me back. And he did.”

  “Did you hurt him?”

  “Yes. And I went over to apologize to him the next day. I liked Frank. Had nothing against him.”

  “Did he hurt you?”

  “Not much. Not enough.”

  “Because you were tougher,” I said. “Because you beat him.”

  “No,” he said. “And I told you I don’t want you thinking like that, Sanders. I said, not enough, because a month later I hit Frank again. For the same no reason. And he hit me again. That’s why I got this scar, to remind me to stop being such a damn fool—at least that form of a fool anyway. Now do you understand?”

  “No.”

  “You will.”

  But I didn’t understand, not then, not for a few years more. I only really understood it when later I found out what he hadn’t told me about that period of his life—that he and Ellis Burns stopped going out drinking. I was also able to put another set of two and two together and then I understood that instead of drinking beer to keep himself from thinking, my dad married my mother. And I want to think that being married to Leona Turner Newcomb was at least somewhat better than being hit in the face by Frank Lutz. I want to believe that much about it if for no other reason than the fact that pretty soon I came along, I came out of that marriage, and that’s what I meant a while ago when I said I was forgetting myself, take it for a joke.

  WELL, I was a surprise to them. Not a shotgun surprise, but a surprise just the same, because Leona Turner Newcomb wasn’t supposed to be able to have babies. She had been married for ten years—from 1910 until 1920— to Jason Newcomb, who worked in the Holt Bank, with red garters on his sleeves and who sported a clean little moustache under his fine nose. Together they hadn’t had any children in a decade. But I don’t know that children would have made any difference to them. Children would just have made things stickier, I suppose, because one morning in August of 1920 Jason Newcomb put on a black bowtie and combed his hair wet and then went down to the cellar and hanged himself with a cotton rope. My mother thought he had gone to work, and the bank thought he was taking a sick day. So he wasn’t discovered until late that afternoon when my mother went down to the cellar to get some potatoes to peel for supper. I guess by then that his face had stopped being blue but that he had begun to be pretty much bothered by spiders. My mother, Jason Newcomb’s wife, didn’t like talking about it. She was twenty-seven at the time.

  So she was the young Widow Newcomb then, for about five years. She was good-looking enough, too, in a churchy women’s society sort of way, with pins tucked neat into her dark blond hair to keep it trim, and she wore high-necked collars with lace and kept her shoes polished. She still keeps herself up, even today out there in that new brick house at the edge of town where she lives with that faint red on her cheeks, which she expects me to kiss, and that blue on her eyes, and maybe that’s because she fears that she will outlive Wilbur Cox too and will need to be ready to do it all over again, even in her eighties. I don’t know why she bothers; she’s in two or three different wills by now, but I know she didn’t have Mr. Cox then and she didn’t have my father yet either. During those five years that she was still the Widow Newcomb (and he apparently didn’t leave her anything but a little gimcrack house in town), my mother kept her nose clean, brushed her blond hair the required one hundred strokes, applied cream to her face, went to the Methodist Episcopal Church, smiled, and during working hours she sold hats to the Holt ladies in Mrs. Kerst’s Millinery Shop on Main Street, next door to the Gem Theater, opposite Doc Packer’s storefront office. She was probably good at that too—selling hats, I mean. She certainly knew how to say what she thought you wanted to hear. She could even make it sound like something you yourself had thought of. My mother, at that time, must have been one of those women that other women call poor brave dears and then sigh and say My goodness.

  Well, she should have been a gambler. She had the nerves for it and the face too. My mother should have been a poker player—or a politician. She might have done even better for herself at the card tables in Las Vegas or in the smoke-filled parlors of Denver. A town the size of Holt, with no more than a mere thousand rural types living here in 1925, had to be a waste of her particular talents, because my mother also knew how to get what she wanted. Behind that polished, perfumed surface, she was all ice and frozen stuff, which she would allow to melt a little bit if and when she saw something she wanted. That was true even if it meant she had to allow someone like my dad, John Roscoe, with his recent reputation for drinking and fighting and his thick rancher’s hands, to muss her trim hair and to lift her widow’s skirts. She knew he had all those cattle and she suspected that he was not the sort of man to hang himself with any cotton rope in any cellar that had spiders. So I don’t believe she even cried afterwards or whimpered anything about respect. No, she would have just allowed the ice to melt in her a little bit, enough so that she could at least pretend that it was wonderful and then make him promise there would be a fall wedding—with the implication of course that there would be a lot more of the same where that came from. My mother was not stupid.

  About my dad I can only guess—and he was not stupid either; you can’t achieve what he did and then hold on to it too, even during the depression, when just about everything else around him was turning to dust and foreclosed mortgages, you can’t do that and not ha
ve something more than just gas and sawdust separating your ears—I guess my dad must have been at the point where melted ice seemed preferable to warm beer and a fist in the face. Anyway, they got married in the fall of 1925, which would make Widow Newcomb thirty-two and my dad thirty-five, and then three years later, on March 9, 1928, I came along.

  And like I say, I was a surprise to them. So it must have been Jason Newcomb who couldn’t have babies that other time. Or at least together with my mother, he hadn’t been able to make any. And I don’t believe that was the reason why he hanged himself, either. Knowing my mother, I believe there must have been a few other reasons.

  SO ALMOST twenty years passed.

  Prohibition came and went. The Great Depression came—and then lasted so long that people began to think of it as a normal condition. There was a civil war in Spain, a Roosevelt in the White House, a madman loose in Germany, and nothing happened to the Goodnoughs down the road from us. It was all the same slow gray there. Edith and Lyman went on doing all they had to do, and Roy continued waving his grim stumps.

  My dad and Edith didn’t see each other very much during those years, though I believe they still thought about one another a great deal. My dad had stopped helping with the harvest; Roy wouldn’t have him on the place; Roy had begun to trade Lyman’s sweat for someone else’s help when it came time to cut wheat. So, whenever it happened that both my dad and Edith were in town and then by chance ran into one another on Main Street—and that was rare—they would stop and talk for a minute about nothing important. Only once or twice my dad asked her, “Are you all right?”

  And she said, “Yes. Are you?”

  And my dad said yes, he guessed he was.

  Or—and this happened more often—if he was working within sight of the road and heard a car coming, he would straighten up, and if it was the Goodnoughs he would watch the car pass and notice Edith looking out the window, before the car and the three people in it got shut off from view by the boiling dust. Then my dad would go back to work and not say anything, but you could see that he had his mouth set hard like a horse will do with a curb bit.

  Of course my mother didn’t notice the Goodnoughs at all. She never visited them nor encouraged them to visit us. My mother had her own car and she always had the Methodist Church. So I was the only one of us who saw very much of the Goodnoughs then. When I was six or seven I started walking that half mile down to the Goodnoughs’ house about once a week. I would help Edith hoe the garden or gather eggs or wipe dishes—things I hated to do at home and fought my mother about and wouldn’t do until my dad made it plain to me on the seat of my pants. But Edith and I would talk a little bit.

  “How’s your mother, Sandy?” Edith would say.

  “She’s buying another dress.”

  “Your mother looks lovely in dresses.”

  “But she makes me go to church with her.”

  “Don’t you like church?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “They make you put your gum in a napkin.”

  “Well,” Edith would say, “you can chew gum here. We’re not in church now.”

  “But I don’t have any gum.”

  “Don’t you, Sandy?”

  “I chewed it all already. That’s why.”

  “Well, I guess we’ll have to see about that.”

  So the next time I would walk down to see Edith, she would have a pack of chewing gum in her apron pocket, and she would offer me a stick and take one herself. While we gathered eggs in the chicken coop, with the fierce-looking red chickens jerking their heads about and pecking another smaller chicken behind its head until there was a bare raw spot and all of them squirting that shiny green chicken squirt neat in a dollop onto the dirt, Edith and I would both chew our gum and see if we could make bubbles. Edith would be gathering eggs and I would try to help her, but I couldn’t trust some of those red chickens until I had their heads pinned against the back of the roost box with a corncob. Most of the time, I would just hold the bucket for Edith.

  “But look at this big brown egg,” she would say.

  “Is it heavy?”

  “Yes, but notice these dark specks along here. They’re almost the color of lavender.”

  “They look like a face,” I’d say.

  “Yes. And you’re a funny old Sanders Roscoe. Aren’t you?”

  A little later, while we were in the kitchen, cleaning the bits of straw and the chicken squirt off the eggs, I’d say, “There. I did it.”

  “Did what?”

  “Blew a bubble. Look.” And I’d have a gum bubble about the size of a withered pea, perched on my mouth.

  “Good for you,” Edith would say then. “How’s your daddy?”

  So I saw quite a lot of Edith Goodnough during that time, and she always treated me in a way that made me want to keep going back there. My mother didn’t think much of it, though. My mother wanted to know what I did down there all that time, what we talked about. She said they weren’t our kind of people. But my dad told her that as long as I did my chores at home to let me be. He said I might learn something at the Goodnoughs’.

  So about once a week I walked over to see Edith. I didn’t see Lyman very often, though. He was always out in the field, disking or stacking hay. And I tried to avoid seeing Roy at all. I had his hands in some of my dreams during those years, and I would wake up in the dark in my room with those raw stumps still there, just behind my eyes. I could see them whenever I closed my eyes, so sometimes I didn’t go back to sleep right away. His hands were all mixed up in that time for me. I didn’t enjoy the sight of them.

  BUT OUTSIDE events finally caught up with the Goodnoughs too. By the close of the 1930s the madman loose in Germany had infected enough millions of other people with his madness that things over there had gone absolutely flat insane. When the butchery and betrayal carried over into the start of the 1940s people here in this country began to wonder what their part in it was going to have to be. There got to be a lot of talk about going to war, talk about taking action, and I suppose all that talk about doing something is what made it possible for Lyman.

  The barn door that Lyman was waiting all that time to have left open for him, so he could squeeze through and take off running and never look back, did open then—not much; it was just a crack at first, but enough just the same for him to drive into town by himself one Saturday night, late in the summer of 1940, to drink beer in the Holt Tavern. He had his black suit on and a white shirt. He had a yellow tie knotted under his just-shaved chin. He opened the heavy door and stood there looking at all the people enjoying themselves in the smoky near-darkness.

  “It was like he’d took the wrong turn somewheres,” Wenzel Gerdts said. “Like he’d come up unexpected inside the women’s outhouse. I mean he looked scared and interested at the same time.”

  Wenzel Gerdts was telling this story to my dad the following Saturday afternoon. I was there too with my dad, standing on Main Street in front of Wandorf’s Hardware Store while my mother went across the street to shop for a hat. There were other groups of men standing all along the four blocks of stores on either side of the street. The men stood with one foot cocked up behind them against the brick storefronts or sat on the fenders of the cars parked at the curb, all of them talking in groups of three or four about the weather and corn and Roosevelt and war. Their wives were inside the stores, buying bits of elastic and brown cloth and a week’s worth of groceries. They were talking too, of course, above the canned beans and the macaroni, beside the yard goods and the cash register, while here and there a little girl tugged at a skirt and a little boy peeked out like a shy country rabbit. The women went on talking in the stores and they were not in any hurry, because they were in town now and it was a Saturday afternoon in Holt in 1940.

  But my dad and I were outside on the sidewalk listening to Wenzel Gerdts talk about Lyman Goodnough. Wenzel was a tall, stringy farmer dressed for the trip to town in clean overalls and he had a
fresh cheekful of Red Man chewing tobacco at work in his jaw. As a kid of twelve I was almost as fascinated with the way Wenzel worked tobacco as I was with what he was saying about Lyman. It was an art the way Wenzel could shoot that long brown spurt of his from where he stood leaning up against Wandorf’s storefront, shoot it clean too, over across the sidewalk down tidy into the gutter, and shoot it every time into the same brown puddle, like he was not just showing off (like if I was doing it, like even if I could do it) but was actually trying to be kind to the folks who might have reason to step there. He would chew awhile and talk and then quick, shoot a neat brown spurt into the gutter, and afterwards lick a drop off his bottom lip, and then go on talking and chewing and not miss a beat.

  And Wenzel was saying, “Why sure, the poor dumb geezer looked scared and interested at the same time. And don’t you know I felt kind of sorry for him? Here’s Lyman Goodnough that’s been out there on that farm all them years with the hot sweat running down into his pants, and now he’s somehow turned up inside the Holt Tavern on a Saturday night and he don’t know what to do with hisself.”