The Tie That Binds

by Kent Haruf

  But at least I got away from home. For a while I managed to get shut of Holt County. It didn’t mean anything, though; none of it did. It was just college. I didn’t even graduate. There was this little matter of chemistry: they required people studying animal husbandry to pass chemistry, and I never did. I tried it twice too. But somehow the theory of chemical formulas, even the logic of chemical elements, escaped me. How could anybody be so damn sure that if you added two parts of hydrogen to one part of oxygen it always came out water? The combination of things never seemed that certain to me; things weren’t that simple, not even with elements as basic as water. So I never passed chemistry, and after four years I still failed to do the one thing that might have satisfied at least my mother. Her son didn’t receive a college diploma.

  You understand, though, that I was still about half willing to return for a fifth year and a third try at chemistry; I hadn’t quite finished playing the jackass in Fort Collins; and then while I was making my mind up to it the bottom fell out. Matters caught up with me in the summer of 1950. I began to learn those things that my years of college couldn’t teach me, hadn’t in fact even touched. I was home again.

  I got my first solid lesson on June eleventh, I remember exactly. My dad and I were on horseback in native sandhill grass, driving cattle—maybe you noticed the tops of the hills in that pasture southeast when you drove in here. At any rate it’s a big pasture, an entire section, all grass and sagebrush and soapweed with two windmills pumping cold water into fifty-foot stock tanks. That section’s never been worked or turned under by any plow. It was part of the land my dad accumulated during those three years he was drinking hard and working harder in the middle 1920s, after Edith Goodnough decided she couldn’t leave home, that she wasn’t free enough to move even a half mile west. You ought to ride out into that grass before you leave; it might give you some idea of what this country looked like before it was chopped up and fenced into titled lots. On the other hand you may feel the way Edith’s mother felt about it. I think I told you Ada died without ever appreciating it. She didn’t like it; she still wanted Iowa. Well, she didn’t understand what she saw out here.

  Because it’s damned fine if you know how to look at it. And no more so than in June after a wet spring. The spring of 1950 was wet, too. The grass my dad and I were riding through that day was thick, green, tall, spotted with wild-flowers, rich. The cattle were starting to slick up with it, to smooth and fill out again after the winter months and after dropping their calves in March, and the calves, those damn little white-faced bailies, kicking and galloping along beside their mamas, their tails riding straight up into the air like white flags, were full of frisk, for all the world innocent yet of what was waiting for them. We were driving them down to a holding pen and a work corral beside one of the water tanks. There was a good squeeze chute at one end of the corral, and we were going to run them into the chute, squeeze them immobile, and then vaccinate and brand each one and castrate the bull calves.

  So I was riding one part of the pasture and Dad was riding another, both of us driving cows and calves, and the range bulls mixed in with them, the bulls tailing the cows slow and hardheaded the way they do, thick necked, their balls swinging, down toward the holding pen. It felt good to be in the sun, to sweat in the open on horseback after nine months of school, and Hammer was working the cattle all right now. He hadn’t believed at first that it was his day to work, until I had to boot him around some, ride the morning’s green out of him to set his mind right. So it was all going smooth enough, and I was trailing cattle, pushing them down easy toward the corrals, turning the calves back when they tried to run off, popping the butts of the bulls with the knot at the end of my rope. At the water tank I got them shut up behind a back gate where they would stay milling in the heavy dust, bawling and plopping shit, until we were ready to work them. But Dad wasn’t in yet, so I rode back out to help him.

  My dad was beyond help.

  I found his horse out there in the pasture stamping flies away and chewing bluestem grass. He trotted off when I rode up to him. Dad was fifty feet away. He was lying on his face in the sand beside a clump of soapweed. I got down and turned him over and saw his face. It wasn’t a pretty thing to see. It was all bluish, mad, shocked, his eyes were wide open. I didn’t know what to do. He was already dead, though, and I could see it hadn’t been easy. His hands were gnarled hard at his chest; clutching at his shirt, he had torn some buttons off; and there were deep wet ruts in the sand where it looked as if he had been trying to kick something away from him with his boots, like it was a snake or a rabid dog. One of his legs was still cocked to kick again.

  So what was I going to do now? What in hell was I supposed to do? We were out there in that native pasture, and it was all finished by the time I found him. Finally I put his arms down at his sides and straightened his leg and brushed the sand from that white scar that Frank Lutz had given him. There was grit in his eyes too from lying on his face with his eyes open. I wiped the sand out of those brown staring eyes and then closed his eyelids. There wasn’t anything to do after that; I wanted there to be something more but there wasn’t. So I sat beside the length of his body and just cried. I didn’t even know how to cry for him; my chest and throat felt like somebody was kicking me. Then the flies found him under that June sun and I was almost glad they did. It gave me something more to do: I could fan his quiet face with my hat. And I did that for a long time, sat there and fanned him, waiting for the moment when I knew I would have enough force to move again, to gather him up and ride him home. I suppose it took a couple of hours before I felt ready.

  When I got him home Doc Schmidt confirmed for me what I knew I had seen when I turned him over. My dad died of a heart attack.

  It also turned out that I was right to have delayed taking him home, because in the next forty-eight hours my mother and I had some bad fights. The fights closed everything down, shut it all off. She was going to bury my dad in the town cemetery.

  “No, you’re not,” I said.

  “I’ve already purchased two plots from the city. You should have told me sooner.”

  “I’m telling you now. You use them. Dad’s not going to.”

  “He is, though.”

  “No, he’s not. You don’t have the right to do that.”

  “I’m his wife. That gives me the right. I put up with him for twenty-five years, Sanders.”

  “Shut up,” I said. “Can’t you shut up about that?”

  Her eyes went flat then. Her hands were shaking. “You think that was easy?” she said. “You do, don’t you? You think it was all my fault that I wasn’t enough for him. Well, you don’t have even the first idea what it was like. You’ve always taken his side against me, even from the very beginning you did. It was always you and your father together, and somewhere—don’t ask me how—but somewhere I was supposed to fit in.”

  “You had your dresses,” I said. “Your goddamn church meetings.”

  “Church?” she said. “My God, you’re stupid. You think I would have cared about the church if there was anything else?”

  “Well, it’s too late now. Dad’s staying here.”

  “We’ll see about that.”

  “No, we won’t. It’s already decided.”

  So I played the bastard with her. I admit I was a real son of a bitch about it. But I was not going to let her take him into town to that damned cramped little cemetery so that one of the boys who worked summers for the city could water and mow the grass over him and so they could mount plastic tulips beside his grave on Memorial Day. And in the end I had my way about it. I told John Baker, the mortician, to prepare my dad for a funeral out here in the country. He could shave him and dress him up in a suit if that would please my mother, but I didn’t want any powder or rouge smeared on his face to make him look alive. He was dead. Let him be dead. He wasn’t to go out looking like some wax manikin.

  The funeral was on June fourteenth, in the heat of a clear morni
ng. The whole country showed up—people like Charlie Best and Frank Lutz and Agnes Wilson and Wenzel Gerdts and Ellis Burns and Leon Shields and even old Ludi Pfeister from Kansas with his canes, who were all my dad’s friends, and others too, my mother’s friends from church. Edith Goodnough was also there. We walked up to that rise, past the corrals and beyond the horse barn, to the just-dug hole beside the old grave that was sunk past ground level, my grandmother’s grave. When we were assembled the minister spoke to us, told us about a man he himself didn’t know much about, while my dad’s friends who did know him stood unhatted in the sun and wiped away the sweat that trickled down their white foreheads. Up close to the grave we were in the shade of that big cottonwood and it was cooler.

  After the service several people shook my hand and one or two tried to tell me that at least he had died doing something he enjoyed. But I didn’t listen to that. My dad should have lived for another twenty years. Then my mother took her friends down to the house to drink ice tea and to visit and commiserate while the box was being lowered into the hole, and I told John Baker to go on, that I would fill it in myself. That left only Edith there with me.

  It didn’t take long to fill in the grave. The sand was loose and moist, making it easy to shovel. When I had finished packing it into a long mound behind the plain stone that reads JOHN ROSCOE FEB. 24, 1890—JUNE 11, 1950, I stood back with Edith to look at it.

  Edith had been crying. She was wearing a new dress and she had done something to her hair, but she hadn’t been able to do anything about her face. Her face had gone to pieces. I put my arm around her.

  “He asked me to marry him,” Edith said. “Did you know that?”

  “Yes. He told me.”

  “But I couldn’t. You understand, don’t you, Sandy?”

  There was a little bit of wind in the cottonwood over us. The leaves were turning and washing in the wind. Below us on the road, cars were starting back toward town.

  “Yes,” I said. “But understanding it and liking it aren’t the same things.”

  “No,” she said. “No, they are not the same things.”

  Then she was crying again, for the last time that I have known her to cry. There wasn’t much sound to it. I held her hand and felt like hell.

  •8•

  SO I WAS HOME again for good now. At twenty-two I took up the responsibility of managing the ranch my dad had made, the big cattle operation and the quarters of farmland. It was almost entirely clear of any debt when I took it over. There was plenty to do, though, and in short time I began to discover what it meant to be my dad in Holt County, to make decisions which afterwards you had to live with. Meanwhile my mother and I struck an edgy quiet kind of truce. We talked to one another when it was necessary. I took her out to eat about twice a month and sometimes to an acceptable movie in town when there was one, kept her car in tune and changed the snow tires, and on her part she held her tongue when I didn’t come home on Saturday nights. We avoided any topic that would take us back to that other June. That lasted about two years.

  Then in the spring of 1952 we had another fight. It was one evening during supper, after steak and potatoes but before the dessert, that my mother dropped some news on me, an announcement she wanted to make. She said she preferred that I hear it from her before someone else had the chance to tell me and get it all wrong.

  “I’m thinking of marrying again,” she said.

  I took a drink of coffee and lit a cigarette. “Okay,” I said. “Do whatever you want.”

  “I intend to. But I wanted to discuss it with you first. It will mean some changes in both our lives.”

  “Not in mine,” I said. “I’m not marrying him.”

  “Now that’s precisely what I was afraid of. Must you always be so pigheaded? You make me tired.”

  “I said for you to do what you wanted. Isn’t that enough?”

  She got up and cut two wedges of hot apple pie and scooped ice cream onto them and brought them to the table. I started to eat mine.

  “You haven’t asked me who he is. Don’t you care who I marry?”

  “I figured you would tell me.”

  “All right,” she said. “It’s Wilbur Cox.” She was good and angry now, shoving Wilbur’s name across the table at me like it was a court summons, a sharp slap in the face.

  “Congratulations,” I said. “I hope you’ll be happy with him.”

  “As if you cared.”

  “Sure, I do. But you can’t live out here with him. I don’t want Wilbur Cox messing about.”

  “Don’t concern yourself. We intend to build a new home in town.”

  “Your ice cream’s melting,” I said.

  I got up then from the table and put my hat and coat on. The ice cream was melting on her pie, running down the sides and puddling in the dish.

  “I’m not finished talking to you,” she said.

  “I’ll be at the tavern.”

  “But it’s not Saturday night.”

  “No, it’s Wednesday. And don’t wait up: the tavern doesn’t close till midnight.”

  I suppose I should explain. I don’t expect you to like my response to her little news—she certainly didn’t like it—but you might try to understand my side of it some. It was less than two years after my dad had died—that’s what bitched it all for me. A month less than two years. Hell, she had waited longer than that after her first husband died, Jason Newcomb, that miserable bank teller who hanged himself in the potato cellar. For me, my dad was still as clear and present everywhere about the place as if he had gone just the day before. He was still there for me wherever I was, whatever I was doing, working cattle or fixing fence, and it seemed to me that he should have been enough man for any woman to last a lifetime.

  Now I suppose that’s an illogical, an unsound way to think, but that’s how I felt about it. And I didn’t have the slightest notion that she even knew Wilbur Cox to marry him. Of course I understood that she knew him—everybody knew Wilbur Cox. He sold life insurance. He had that tidy little brick office on Main Street in Holt and drank coffee everyday with the boys in the cafe. He was tall, stringy as a green bean; he oiled his hair. Maybe you will understand what I mean about him if I tell you that he is one of those guys who likes to shake hands a lot, shaking your hand with both of his. But like I’ve said before, my mother was not stupid. She no doubt already had Wilbur Cox picked out. She must have seen very clearly in advance that Wilbur was going to be the form of husband she could manipulate, rule and run, make him stay home and attend to business, and she did all that. He fit into her scheme like an obedient poodle. Well, there was always something grasping about her, still is for that matter. She can’t let go. She has to go on striving at things, refusing to let them be as they are. She can’t abide them until she has changed them to meet her own mold. I don’t believe it makes her happy, though.

  Anyway, I relented a little in December. When the solid brick house at the edge of town was complete with carpet and paint, I stood up for her at the wedding. I gave her away. I even agreed to sell a dryland quarter to pay for the house.

  THERE WAS at least one other thing to happen in 1952 that has some bearing on this story. It must have been October, but you can check his gravestone if it makes a lot of difference to you: old Roy Goodnough died down the road from us. He went in his sleep. Edith went in to his bedroom that morning to dress him for the day in his overalls, and she found that she wasn’t ever going to have to do that again. He was as rigid as stone; his mouth was locked open, like a piece of box iron. So she drew the sheet up over his face and went downstairs to call me.

  “It’s over,” she said.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “He died last night. Will you help me make the arrangements?”

  I wasn’t surprised she called me. Since the death of my own dad I had been checking on her once a week, stopping by the Goodnough house in the early evening before I went home to supper. The old man would already be fed and put to s
leep, and Edith and I would sit in the porch swing, visiting, passing that best hour of any day together while the barn swallows hunted bugs and the locusts sang from the elm trees. She began to keep beer on hand in the refrigerator, too, because she knew I liked it in the evening after work, and I would drink beer while we talked and pushed the swing a little. Occasionally on those evenings she would recall the things she knew about my dad, and it seemed to help us both get over him.

  So now the old man was dead. That much was over. He was buried in town, in the plot west of Ada’s. It was how Edith wanted it arranged. She said the old man had blocked her mother’s view of the east while she lived, he wasn’t going to do that in death. There was still the problem of his mouth, though. I don’t know how John Baker got the old man’s mouth to stay closed for the funeral, but I suppose he had to break the jaws and wire them shut. And that was funny, that the old man died with his mouth locked open after he had spent the last nine years of his life refusing to open it, declining whatever to say yes or no to anything, but just sitting hard in his chair before that south window in the winter or watching from the car during the summer while Ralph Johnson made those slow circles in the field. Well, he sure as hell would not have liked what he saw the next year. It might even have made him mad enough to speak again. Because, like I say, after he died Edith insisted that I begin to lease the land myself, and I did that. I’ve been leasing it ever since.

  THERE FOLLOWED about a ten-year period in my life that I am not particularly proud of. For most of that time I was drifting, falling headlong and heedless as in one of those old grade-school fire escapes that were constructed like covered slides in which you entered at the top and shot down through several loops and twists and then scooted out at the bottom into a mudhole. It was a long wild ride I was on, and for quite a while it seemed like the thing to do.