The Tie That Binds

by Kent Haruf

  “I know,” I said. “Take care of yourself. And tell Clevis . . . Just tell him hello for me.”

  Then Twyla, in a good blue dress with white trim, walked up the ramp onto the plane. About a year later I got a postcard from her saying the baby was a boy. She didn’t say what he looked like. But she did sign the card Twyla T. Stouffer, so I had to assume she found Clevis and that they were together again the way they belonged. She failed to include a return address though, and I’ve never seen nor heard from either one of them since. Still, I permit myself to believe they remain together, growing fat in the same house somewhere in Portland, Oregon, where they raise a big brood of fat red-cheeked babies. They would have good babies.

  DURING all that period of brainless pell-mell drift, the only solid base I had was Edith Goodnough. She was still there in that house down the road. Despite everything— and she could see what was happening all right, don’t think she couldn’t; there was never any lacy veil or donkey’s blind covering her brown eyes—she was nevertheless willing to talk and visit with me in the evening, though what we talked about now while rocking in the porch swing was nothing, not even recollections of my dad. I just stopped by to be there for an hour, and that happened usually whenever for some reason I had not been able to stop thinking, whenever even for a minute I had recognized the true crux of the matter here at home. Then sometime soon afterwards, that same evening or the next day, I would drive down to see Edith. I wouldn’t tell her anything about it. I didn’t have to. She seemed to know. She would link our arms and for a while we would rock and listen to the locusts in the trees in the nearby dark. But if I at least had her, she had nothing for herself. At that time she was trying to live solely on Lyman’s postcards and his packages of twenty-dollar bills mailed each Christmas in brown wrapping paper and a clumsy red bow.

  She was completely alone. My dad had died; her father was finally dead, and Lyman was still back east somewhere, seeing cities. So it was not just for an afternoon or a month that she was alone, but for one year after another, on and on, with no particular reason for believing it would ever be one jot different. If you have had that happen to you, then you know that living like that—alone, making yourself cook three meals every day for one person, playing the radio all the time so there will be some human noise in the house even if it’s just the tinny counterfeit sound of some actor wetting his pants over Pepto-Bismol, because if it’s not that then it’s getting up to silence and going to bed in silence, since chicken cackle and bird twitter will go only so far—that can do something to you: make you brittle or dull, cause you to go slightly touched, drive you slowly a little crazy. You forget how to string words together. You can’t recall the true weight of words. It’s as if they all come out in a gush, like a cow pissing, or they don’t come out at all. Well, something along those lines happened to Edith Goodnough.

  For one thing, there got to be stories about her. People in town and high school kids began to edify one another with tales of Edith: how she was turning crazy all alone for nothing; how she was starving to death on tea and toast; how it was skunk cabbage and water she was starving on; how she slept in the barn. She was partial to Elvis Presley, they said, and likely to disappear. The only story, though, that might have any truth to it was the one Bill Kwasik told me one night in the tavern.

  It was in that last year that Clevis and Twyla were still here. They were dancing to jukebox music, and I was drinking beer at the bar, watching them in the mirror. Then Bill Kwasik, who lives with his wife and kids four miles east of the Goodnough place, came up to me and said:

  “Well, I see our neighbor is taken with the stars now.”

  “Which neighbor is that?” I said.

  “That Goodnough woman. What’s her name—Edith.”

  “Oh? What makes you say that?”

  “ ’Cause,” he said. “I come home the other night from Lions and I top that rise west of our place, and there she stands in my headlights. I damn near hit her.”

  “What was she doing?”

  “Nothing. Stargazing. Hell, I thought she was hurt. So I back up beside her and ask her if she’s all right. ‘Yes, I’m all right,’ she says. ‘Well, can I give you a lift home?’ ‘No,’ she says, ‘thank you.’ ‘But Miss Goodnough,’ I say, ‘I mean, what in hell are you doing out here? It’s way past midnight.’ And she says: ‘Never mind, Billy. You can just tell people I was taking a walk. A walk,’ she says. ‘Never mind,’ she says. She don’t even have a coat on.”

  “Let her be,” I said. “Forget it.”

  “Sure,” Bill Kwasik said. “I wasn’t going to do nothing to her. I thought she was hurt.”

  “I know. But just leave her alone.”

  “Well, she’s going to get herself run over if she don’t watch out.”

  But no one ran Edith over, and she went on walking out at night alone along the road. She also busied herself with those damn picture postcards. She had them straight-pinned in rows on the walls of the living room so that if you cared to—and I didn’t—you could trace Lyman’s progress yearly for almost twenty years across the country, starting in the West, then the Middle West and the Deep South, and finally the East, like he had some feeble notion of reversing the tide of pioneer migration so as to end up at the beginning, where, for him, the first wrong step had been taken, where his old man’s old man had been carried in his great-great-grandmother’s arms down the plank off some boat in shit-filled diapers. The pictures on the cards, arranged like that, displayed in neat long rows like bathroom tiles, were bright circusy things: glass skyscrapers, blue fountains, statues, city parks with pruned trees and green park benches. They made you think of cheap carnival notices, of circus posters cut up in pieces. And always, on the backs of the cards, was that brief, childish, infuriating scribble of his, which told you next to nothing.

  Dear Sis,

  How are you? I am in Cleveland. Boy, it’s hot.

  Love, your brother,

  Lyman

  That’s the sort of nonsense he wrote to her, and how she managed to live on just that much, I have no idea. If it had been me I’d have torn the damn things up and thrown them out with the chicken scraps and the hog slop—and then goddamned him again for not coming home yet, the slow son of a bitch. But Edith didn’t feel that way at all. I think she was convinced that he at least was having himself a good time seeing this country’s sights, traveling, broadening himself, so that when he eventually did come home—and she never doubted that he would return finally—things would be better again for her too, that some of his recent experience of the world would rub off on her and add something bright to her life. It was all a vague dream to her. I don’t understand it completely, but I suppose her loneliness fed it, made dreaming possible while the years passed and she went on adding to her postcard collection and taking walks at night under these high white stars.

  Of course the rest of us thought he would never come back. He’d been gone so long what difference would it make anyway? Besides, what we remembered of him hadn’t been something you would pin much hope on—a tall, lank bachelor with thinning hair and loose red hands that played vacantly with jackknives and straps on metal suitcases. No, I figured the only way he’d ever return would be in a wood box shoved in amongst piles of crated fruit on a railroad refrigerator car. Someday, I figured, the manager of some cheap boardinghouse in Buffalo, New York, or Trenton, New Jersey, would happen to remember that he hadn’t seen Lyman lately, that the rent was overdue, or that there seemed to be some rank, foul stench oozing out of that room upstairs; so he would mount those dark stairs, knock, get no answer, then try his master key and discover Lyman dead as fish on the sagging bed, and then after looking in his wallet and removing rent money and a little extra for the trouble, he would ship his cold stiff body home to a rural address in Holt County, Colorado. But Edith knew better than the rest of us.

  She was certain that he would come back. I remember spending a long evening sitting next to her on the couch, w
ith the postcards pinned neat on the walls around us, during that first winter after Clevis and Twyla had gone. It must have been soon after Christmas because she had a new package of twenty-dollar bills.

  “Did I tell you Lyman’s in Pittsburgh?”

  “Is he?” I said.

  “Yes. He sent me another card and this packet of money.”

  She handed me the money to admire. I turned it over a couple of times and gave it back. “What’s he doing in Pittsburgh?”

  “I believe he’s doing very well.”

  Then she stood up from the couch and brought a shoe box from the bureau and set it on my lap. “Open it,” she said.

  “Now, Edith,” I said.

  “It’s all right. There’s no secret between us, Sandy.”

  So I opened it. Not that it was any surprise to me; I knew what I’d find inside—all those packets of unused, unspent dollar bills, all of them twenties, all still wrapped like a seven-year-old kid might wrap them in red bows. It was obvious which packets had been sent first, too. The bows tied around the earliest bills looked frayed and ragged, as if they had been handled too often in the long silence of evening, as if they had been fussed over—not for themselves, though, because I don’t think for a minute that the actual fact or worth of the money meant a piddling thing to her. I doubt that she even counted it. It wasn’t money she needed; she had all the farm profits. Instead, those damn bungled packets of green stuff seemed to represent something else to her, something more, and just because they had been tied, stamped, and mailed by Lyman’s hand. I suppose she thought they were proof of something.

  “But why don’t you spend some of this?” I said. “Buy something. You could take a trip yourself. Get away for a while.”

  “Oh, I will,” she said. “When he comes back.”

  “But that might not happen, Edith.”

  “Of course it will.” She looked at me like I was a little slower than usual. “Of course he’ll come back.”

  “Okay,” I said. “He will then.”

  She took the shoe box from me and put the lid on it. “There wouldn’t be any point if he doesn’t,” she said. “Would there?”

  So it was then that I put my arm around her. I felt so damn sorry for her. It seemed to me she had lost so much of her life to waiting, and she was still waiting even now. And for what? For nothing, I thought. For a wandering bum, a damn mush-minded permanent escapee, her brother. So I pulled her close; she rested her head against my shoulder. She was thin and small. Under the cotton of her dress I could feel the points of her shoulders and the clean edges of her shoulder blades. Her hair had grown a little gray at the temples but it was still curly and still primarily dark, and her eyes were still clear brown, though behind them there was a kind of pained, distant look. The skin of her cheeks, with threading wrinkles beside her eyes, was smooth. So we sat together for a moment on the couch, and I ran my hand over her hair, cupping her head, and out of affectionate concern for her I kissed the top of her head, and then—smelling her hair—I began to kiss the side of her face, her smooth soft cheek, and then it was not just concern that I was feeling, and suddenly I was pressing against her mouth and she was not resisting or stopping me but allowing it to continue and maybe even returning some of it. I slipped my hand into the back of her dress and felt the silk there, the points of bone along her spine and her bra strap, and then it stopped. I stood up.

  I walked over to the doorway and stood with my back to her. “I didn’t intend for this—”

  “Sandy,” she said. “Look at me.”

  I turned to face her. She was still seated on the couch with the shoe box of Lyman’s money beside her. Her dress was low on one shoulder.

  “You didn’t mean any harm,” she said.

  “Maybe not,” I said. “But I’d better go.”

  “Yes, but only if you promise you’ll come back. We’ve been more than friends for a long time; I couldn’t stand it if that ended too.”

  “I’ll stop by tomorrow. Or the next day.”

  “Don’t make it too long,” she said.

  Then I left and went outside and damned myself for a fool, while the stars winked overhead like so many clowns’ eyes. What in Christ’s name did I think I was doing? Sure she was good-looking. Of course she was a fine woman, a person you just naturally felt good being near and wanted to help if you could. But what help was any of what I’d been doing on the couch? That was a lot of help, wasn’t it? She was thirty-one years older than I was, after all, and more to the point, she might have been closer to me than just a good neighbor woman down the road if in 1922 my dad had been able to persuade her to give up her iron sense of duty. Sometimes, hell, it seems to me that I’ll always have more of balls than I ever will of brains. Sometimes I’m flat a goddamn fool.

  Anyway, after that night I didn’t go back the next day, or the next. It was almost two weeks before I returned to see Edith, and then when I entered that postcard living room again I made a point of sitting on a straight chair. I stayed away from the couch. Edith, though, was no different than she had been before. She was still pleasant, a little vacant maybe, like she was still caught inside that fog dream of hers, but pleasant nonetheless, as if nothing new had happened between us. So it was comfortable with her again, and I went on stopping by the house in the evening to see her, to visit and pass the time between old friends. I did that at least once a week as the winter turned spring and the pattern returned.

  THEN TOWARD the end of July—this would still be 1961—she called me one evening early. “Good, you’re home,” she said.

  “I just came in.”

  “I have a surprise for you. Will you come for supper?”

  So I cleaned up, combed my hair and shaved, and drove down to the Goodnough place. And there, parked in front of the house at the picket gate, was a new green Pontiac with out-of-state plates, and inside the house, sitting with his elbows on the kitchen table and that foolish lap-dog’s grin on his face, was Lyman Goodnough.

  “Well,” I said. “I’ll be go to hell.”

  He stood up to shake my hand. “Long time no see.”

  He sat down again and grinned some more, as if he expected me to make some appropriate formal remarks upon his safe return to the house. Edith stood beside him with a hand on his shoulder. She was beaming; her face shone like a fresh pink poppy. I admit they made a picture, the two of them smiling at me from across the kitchen table, but I wasn’t up to it. I wasn’t so forgiving as Edith was.

  In the almost twenty years that he had been gone, renting rooms in this country’s cities and sending penny postcards home to prove he had, Lyman had gone bald, turned shiny as glass on top; he was still tall and spare as a rail, only now instead of wearing farm-boy overalls and sand-caked shoes he was draped fancy in a new houndstooth suit that was too hot and too heavy for July; on his feet he sported black-and-white wing tips that any Las Vegas gambler or East Colfax pimp in Denver would have thought twice about wearing in public. He was a sight.

  Edith herself was dressed as for a party. She had gotten out a silky summer dress that must have been fashionable in the 1920s and had combed her hair back from her face in a way I’d never seen before. It was obvious that she was pink with pleasure at having him home. During dinner, I remember, there didn’t seem to be enough that she could do for him; she kept popping up and down like a girl who was having a boyfriend over for dinner and family approval. She was positively solicitous and festive at the same time, worrying cheerfully whether Lyman had enough roast beef and sweet potatoes to eat and concerning herself happily as to the hotness of his coffee. Meanwhile, Lyman masticated and talked with his mouth full; he sat there picking his teeth like a landlord and regaled us with news of his wide travels. Los Angeles, California, was bigger than we could believe. Mobile, Alabama, on the other hand, wasn’t so big, but it was hot. Over dessert, he allowed that we could keep New York City. He’d had all he wanted of New York City, New York.

  That’s the way di
nner went that evening: Lyman gave us travelogue while Edith fed us roast beef and cherry pie. Afterwards, after we had finished eating and Lyman had talked himself full circle home again, Edith put on an apron and began to sing to herself over the dishes in the sink. Then her brother coaxed me outside to get the benefit of his Pontiac. It stood purple-green under the yard light, one of those long heavy boats they made in the early sixties, with chrome. He opened the driver’s door. “Try her out,” he said.

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “Just sit in her then.”

  “No thanks.”

  “Well, she drives like a wet dream. Already put eleven thousand miles on her.”

  “Sure,” I said. “All right. But what in goddamn hell took you so long? It’s been almost twenty years. Didn’t you know she was waiting all this time?”

  “Who?”

  “Edith. For christsake. Your sister.”

  “Oh. Well,” he said. He shut the car door. “There is a lot of cities, Sandy. You just don’t have a idea till you start looking.”

  “And you had to see every damn one of them, is that it?”

  “No, sir,” he said. “Nope, I skipped a few. I found out they was much alike.”

  So that was Lyman Goodnough. What in hell were you going to do with him? Well, of course Edith knew very well what to do with him. She took him in and fed him supper—because after all, despite everything, despite almost two decades of waiting, he was home again now like only she knew he would be. And she was glad that he was.

  Outside under the yard light Lyman stood in front of his car flicking dead grasshoppers and dead millers off the chrome of the grill. “You suppose she has some more cherry pie?” he said. “That’s one thing I missed.”

  “Don’t tell me,” I said. “Tell her.”

  •9•

  NOW I DON’T pretend to think that a mere stretch of six years is anywhere near enough time. But I suppose if that’s all you’re given and no more, then six years will have to do. In the end that’s what Edith Goodnough had: she had six years of what you may call fun. Or good times. Or better, just the day-in, day-out mean rich goodness of being alive, when at night you lie down in the warm dark pleased with your corner of the world, and then you wake the next morning still pleased with it, and you know that, too, while you lie there for a time listening in peace to the mourning doves calling from the elm trees and telephone lines, until finally the thought of black coffee moves you up out of bed and down the stairs to the kitchen stove, so that once again you can begin it all afresh, with pleasure, with eagerness even. Because yes, Edith had that for a while. During that period it was written all over her face. Her brown eyes shone and snapped for six years.