The Tie That Binds

by Kent Haruf

  Or consider this: maybe Lyman was afraid to come back even then. Maybe he thought until the old man was a good nine years dead with the ground heavy sunk and filled over him and the grass growing thick on it, that it still wasn’t safe, that somehow the old bastard’s ghost or spirit or voice, whatever, might still be active enough to call him back, lecture him about Saturday-night diddling, and then make him stay there to rake hay and plow sand. And if that was the reason, then you could say Lyman was right to stay away even then, because you couldn’t be real sure the old son of a bitch was dead even when you were actually standing there in front of his coffin and saw him lying there like a slab of mean yellow granite. With his head on a satin pillow he still didn’t look any thinner or stiffer or any less like a ramrod than he did when he was supposed to be alive. His eyes were closed; that was all. That and the fact that those red stumps of his sticking out beneath his white shirt cuffs had finally quit twitching and waving.

  Anyway, whatever the reason, Lyman stayed away for nine years more after the old man was dead and buried deep inside that little cemetery, making it two Goodnough headstones so far there beside Otis Murray’s cornfield two miles east of Holt, and then he did come back. He was a little bit tired; his eyes were a little dazed from the sights he had seen, and I suppose there were other parts of him that were a little jaded too from the pleasure he had tasted, but he was still all right, more or less. He was still of some use to his sister. For a while.

  ONLY, MEANWHILE, there were those twenty years for her to wait through and to endure. And how did she manage that? What was she doing all that time Lyman stayed away and bought Pontiacs and sent her picture postcards? Nothing.

  Well, no, not nothing exactly. She didn’t just do nothing all that time. But she sure God didn’t go traveling off across the North American continent, either. She didn’t even go those seven miles into Holt very often. She stayed home. Jesus, that’s about all you can say: Edith Goodnough stayed home. And if you figure it up, if you do your arithmetic from those chiseled dates in the cemetery, then you know Edith was seventeen when her mother died in 1914; she was fifty-five when the old man died in 1952; and she was sixty-four when Lyman finally returned in 1961. It amounts to a lifetime of staying home.

  When Lyman left for L. A. and for what he thought was going to be at least a good hitch in the army, it got worse almost immediately. Edith was still doing all the work at home she always did: she was still milking cows, separating milk, cooking meals, washing dishes, and—everyday, don’t forget—still cutting Roy’s meat into bites and filling the buttonholes of his shirt with buttons once he had pushed his stumps through the sleeves. But in the following spring, at a time when Lyman was already beginning to save that airplane-factory money of his and to contemplate Pontiacs, Edith got more to do.

  My dad and I first saw it one morning from the gravel road beside the Goodnough cornfield on our way to check cattle. I was driving, I remember, and feeling full of myself because I was actually behind the wheel and out on the road itself, not just turning circles in the barnyard or cutting eights in the horse pasture. So I suppose I had already ground through first and second gear and was abusing high—yes, I was flat pounding along the country road, imagining myself to be Holt County’s special gift to Ford transmissions—when my dad said:

  “Goddamn it, slow down. Stop this son of a bitch.”

  I thought, Now what have I done? Have I busted something? I stopped the pickup but it wasn’t me. My dad was looking out the window at the Goodnoughs’ cornfield.

  “Now what do you call that?” he said. “What in the goddamn hell’s he think he’s doing?”

  Because there was a tractor out there in the field with a one-way disk behind it. The tractor was coming toward us from across the corn stubble, and as it got closer I could see what my dad meant. There were two heads sticking up behind the body of the tractor, one just visible above it and the other quite a lot higher.

  “Goddamn him,” my dad said. “Now maybe he’ll manage to fall off and get more than just his fingers mangled. Which I don’t care, but I suppose she still does. Jesus Christ.”

  The tractor came on toward us, grew larger, louder, and then it was obvious that it was Edith driving it. She had her straw gardening hat on and she was sitting there on the tractor seat behind the exhaust stack looking no bigger than a ten-year-old girl. She had both hands clenched tight on the steering wheel, and the disk furrows behind her were as straight as she could make them. And of course it was the old man standing up beside her. We could see him waving his arms, pointing those damn blunt stumps past her head like he was some kind of live Halloween scarecrow and her straw hat was just some yellow corn shock. It made you sick.

  When they closed on the end of the field near us, we could hear him yelling at her too: “Brake it. Brake it. Now turn it. Can’t you turn this thing?”

  My dad opened the pickup door. I thought he was going to get out. “I ought to killed him when I had the chance,” he said. “By God, I will yet. The dirty son of a bitch.”

  But somehow Edith got the tractor turned and got the disk headed back out across the field. As she was making the turn she had looked up once, quick, toward my dad in the pickup, not for help, I don’t think, but like she was still saying, Yes, I know. But it’s okay; it’s all right, and then she was past us, going away from us, with the disk rolling up dirt and dust behind her and the noise of the tractor decreasing in the widening distance between her and us.

  We watched them out into the middle of the field. Then my dad finally spoke again. “Did you see the belt?” he said.

  “What belt?”

  “That belt contraption he had buckled across behind him. Between the fenders.” “What for?”

  “So he wouldn’t fall off. So he could stand there and work his arms. So he could at least protect hisself even if he didn’t give a good piss in hell about her.”

  “I didn’t see it,” I said.

  “Never mind. You saw enough. Start this pickup.”

  So I jerked the pickup into gear again and drove away toward the cow pasture. My dad wasn’t paying any attention to how I was driving anymore; he didn’t watch the speedometer. He was watching out the window, and every once in a while I noticed him sort of shake his head as if he was coming out of a hard sleep, as if he was trying to change what he had seen.

  But it didn’t change. It went on like that all spring. Edith and the old man finished the disking, and then the drilling too. At our place my dad got more and more silent; at the dinner table my mother would tell him what was happening in town, serve him the latest Holt County gossip with our new garden peas, or she would detail for him her complaints about the scandalous manner in which Mrs. Vince Higgims was leading Rebecca Circle at the Methodist Church, but he wouldn’t respond. He wouldn’t even make his familiar joke about what he called her church gang, her heifer herd for Jesus. I doubt that he was listening to her at all; there was something else, something more important, and it was playing nonstop in his head, and he was concentrated on that.

  Then in the long days of July, in that dry heat, he woke up. He discovered that now Roy had begun to have Edith cut hay too. The sun rose at five and set at nine, and most of that time she had been out there under it while he stood over her on the tractor and told her where to turn one minute and when to turn the next and in between times told her how fast. That evening my dad called me over to him, held me hard by the front of my overalls.

  “Listen to me,” he said. “Are you listening? I want that stopped.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I want you to go over there in the morning and drive that tractor yourself. Can you do that?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Just a minute; I never said it was going to be easy. But you do it. I’d do it myself, only I’d have to kill him first. Understand?”

  “All right,” I said. “Yes.”

  His eyes were looking hard at me; I couldn’t see anything else. The
re was something awful in his eyes, hurt and anger, I suppose, but something more too, something further back.

  “And, son, if he says one word to you . . . if that miserable cock says just one word—”

  “I know,” I said.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll tell your mom to pack you a good lunch.”

  He let go of my overalls and I went in to bed.

  Early the next morning I was waiting beside the Goodnoughs’ tractor when Edith and Roy came out to start work. Edith smiled at me. “Why, here’s Sandy,” she said.

  But the old man wasn’t smiling. He was looking at me like I was a form of cutworm or a new strain of corn blight.

  “What do you want?” he said.

  “Nothing. I came over to help out.”

  “Oh? And who asked you to help out?”

  “Nobody.”

  “That’s right: nobody. So you better just hightail it back to home.”

  “I can drive the tractor,” I said.

  “You can talk manure too,” he said.

  “I can, though. I do at home.”

  “Hah,” he said. “Straddled on somebody’s pants leg. Or diddling the wheel out in the machine shed.”

  “No. In the field. By myself.”

  “Sandy doesn’t mean any harm,” Edith said. “Leave him alone.”

  “He’s a runt,” the old man said. “His ears is still wet.”

  “At least let him try. He walked all the way over here.”

  “It would speed things up,” I said. “Maybe it would free Edith to do something else. Miss Goodnough.”

  I gave her a look and she winked at me. “I am way behind on the canning,” she said.

  The old man looked at her and then looked over at the garden behind the wire fence. The beans and peas were beginning to wrinkle on the vines; the radishes had gone to seed, and the whole garden needed hoeing.

  “Go ahead, Sandy,” Edith said. “Climb up.”

  “Not so damn fast. I ain’t said so yet.” He studied me for a minute while he rubbed a stump along the bristle on his jaw. “How do I know you can cut hay?” he said. “I never seen you.”

  “I cut some of ours last year.”

  “Don’t lie to me.”

  “I’m not. Ask anybody.”

  “Hah.”

  But he studied me some more, examining me now as if I was maybe a little less dangerous than corn blight; more like I was a pissing yellow dog or a talking jackrabbit. He spat between his feet and covered it with one of his shoes. “Drive around this yard once,” he said.

  I got up on the tractor, an old John Deere, started it, and made a slow circle in the yard in front of the house and then stopped again beside them.

  “So,” he said, “let’s see if you can find reverse.”

  So I backed up and came forward to the same spot.

  “It still don’t make enough of a show,” he said. “See them cheat weeds over there east of the barn?”

  “Yes.”

  “See can you cut them weeds without chopping no hole in my barn.”

  So I drove over to the barn, lowered the sickle bar, and mowed the weeds beside the foundation, the section blades cutting them off low to the ground. There was a snarl of rusty fence wire in the weeds, but I managed to see it in time. Then I came back to Edith and Roy.

  “Found the wire, did you?”

  “Yes, but I missed it,” I said.

  He looked at the sickle bar for tangled wire or new nicks. “Well, ain’t you the big britches,” he said.

  “Stop it,” Edith said. “He’s already proved that he can drive a tractor better than I ever will. And probably as good as you could when you were his age.”

  “I drove horses,” Roy said, and made a coughing sound that was his idea of a laugh. “That’s what you know about it.”

  “Still,” she said, “you know what I mean. I’m going to start picking peas.”

  She turned and walked away from him. She could be firm with him, even harsh with him occasionally, when she had to—over the little things. But she wouldn’t ever leave him; she just would not allow herself that much freedom. He watched her walk away, a small fine woman in a clean work dress that was still filled out in the right places, even if those places were never going to receive the full attention or the appreciation they deserved. At the picket gate she turned and called to me: “Sandy, you can eat lunch with me.”

  Then she closed the gate and went up the steps into the house. The old man stood staring at the back door. He didn’t seem to be able to grasp that she had gone, disappeared, refused him. The door was shut. Finally, as if he expected some sudden help to descend out of the clear blue, he looked at the sky, then he looked at the tractor where I was, then at his hands, where there sure as hell was not any help. “Women,” he said. “That’s what I got left to me—a woman and a smart-ass neighbor kid.” He spat into the gravel again. “Hot damn.”

  But the old buzzard had no other recourse. He climbed onto the tractor with me and I buckled the belt behind him. “Boy,” he said, “what the hell you waiting on? Drive me to the field.”

  We drove out of the yard down the wagon track to the hay field. The old man stood spread legged and swaying behind me, leaning against the belt when the tractor jolted in the rut. When we came to the gate into the field he said, “Turn in here.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “Sure,” he said. “Just a goddamn big britches.”

  That was my name all that day and most of the summer. I began cutting his hay that morning, circling in the field, making my rounds toward the center while the sickle bar rode wet and shining beside the tractor and laid the green grass down in rings. All the time too the old man rode behind me, waving his stumps past my ears to give me directions I didn’t want or need and yelling at me above the fire and crash of the tractor engine to turn, Britches, turn, goddamn, even though I was already turning the damn thing. So I must have determined at least a hundred times that if he shoved those raw nubs past my face again or called me Britches just once more I was going to buck the front of the tractor up, so help me Jesus, and pitch the old bastard off, sail him over his lousy belt contraption and, with any luck, if there was any justice under that sun, snap the strings in his scrawny neck. Of course just as often I decided not to. Instead I tried to go blind to his hands and deaf to his fool yelling. But it was a real test, and the only time I recall his being satisfied with anything I did was when the mower chanced to cut through the back of a five-foot rattlesnake. “Sliced him, by damn,” he shouted. “Hah.”

  At noon we rode the tractor back to the house to eat. I didn’t know if I could take any more; I was hot, tired, itchy, mad. The old man seemed no different, though. He seemed to have only one gear in his makeup—a kind of full-speed-ahead crazy. When we got up to the house Edith was waiting for us. “Your plate is on the table,” she said. “Sandy and I are going to eat in the side yard.”

  She led me around to the east side of the house. It was shady there under an elm tree in the grass.

  “I’ll get him started, then I’ll bring yours.”

  “But I brought my own lunch.”

  “I know that, Sandy,” she said.

  So I sat down in the elm shade while she returned to the house to start the old man, butter his bread, tuck his napkin in. I leaned back against the trunk of the tree. Now what am I going to do? I thought. I’ve got to eat two women’s lunches and I’m not even hungry. I’m too damn hot to be hungry. The shade freckled across the grass up the side of the house. I took my cap off to let the breeze blow my hair.

  Then she came back with a feast on a platter—ice tea, fried chicken, potatoes, peas in butter, fresh bread, homemade ice cream. I wanted to whine and kick my feet, but I ate all she gave me and heard someone with my voice ask for seconds. I suppose it was a cause worth dying of bloat for.

  “You don’t have to do this,” she said, watching me. “Any of this, you know.”

  “You don’t either
.”

  “I want to,” she said.

  “So do I,” I said. I was half in love with her myself.

  “I know, but just the same, Sandy. And you thank your daddy for me, too. Will you?”

  She knew all right. She knew. I was there driving the tractor so she wouldn’t have to and I was stuffing myself stupid while she watched me with those brown grown up-woman’s eyes—because my dad had sent me. I guess it was enough too, because I did all the tractor driving there was to do at the Goodnoughs’ that summer, raked hay, cultivated corn, all of it, and ate my mother’s lunch on the half-mile walk to and from their house, hiding the bucket in the soapweeds between times, because how was I supposed to tell my mother I didn’t want or need her lunch either? She wasn’t wild about my being over there in the first place. She had her suspicions.

  Anyway, I think I grew three inches that summer and began to get hair in places I didn’t have hair before and to gain weight. I was too busy to notice it much, though, and too confused to care.

  WHEN THE SUMMER ended I went back to school where things were a lot less complicated. I began high school that year and played a clumsy halfback on the freshman football team and held sweaty hands at a dance or two with a plump little girl named Doris Sweeter. Doris is married and divorced now in Denver, I hear, and the best our football team could manage was a nothing-to-nothing win over Norka, but none of that matters anymore—didn’t matter much then either—because at least in school I didn’t have to stand still while somebody held me hard by the overalls and asked me to do something he couldn’t do himself without first killing someone in order to do it. And nobody was fanning my face with ruined hands or screaming insanity at me, and nobody was watching me eat while she wished maybe I was somebody else or at least her own boy, and if things had been different I might have been, too. No, school seemed like a positive relief after the summer.

  But it didn’t last long enough. Spring came. So it started all over again. Only this time my dad wouldn’t have it, not any of it; he made it all stop. But at first it was just the same: I was driving the pickup and we were going to check cattle or fix fence, something of the sort, and it was Saturday morning, early, bright, with not enough wind to blow the sand off the tops of the hills, and there, out there in the field, there was that damn John Deere tractor again. Two heads were sticking up beyond the exhaust stack, one somewhat higher than the other, and the tractor was coming toward us from across the corn stubble pulling a disk. My dad didn’t have to tell me to stop. I braked the pickup to the side of the road, and this time he not only opened the door, he got out. “You stay here,” he said.