The Tie That Binds

by Kent Haruf

  “I feel all right,” Lyman said.

  “He needs a drink.”

  “That’s what I’m here for. I try to do all I can with what I have.” She tossed her head back, the muscles of her neck bulging as she laughed.

  We gave her our orders. When she was gone back to the bar to bring the drinks, Mavis poked me sharp in the ribs. “What’s that for?” I said.

  “Don’t ask,” she said.

  “You mean her? Why hell, I was just trying to buy some insurance.”

  “You don’t need any insurance. I paid it last month.”

  “I’m talking about Marvella.”

  “So am I.”

  “No, I mean if you pay her a little attention she’ll bring us our drinks without having to call her.”

  “You’re paying too much attention.”

  Marvella came back with our drinks on her tray and bent over to set the glasses on napkins on the table.

  “Miss Packwood, you do look fine tonight,” I said.

  She popped her gum, I paid her, and she left. Mavis poked me in the ribs again. I was beginning to believe that I would have to change sides with my wife so she could damage both sides equally, but it didn’t come to that, because pretty soon Shorty started playing, and after a few fast numbers to establish the band and to warm up the crowd he began a slow danceable version of “Release Me.”

  “Come on,” I said to Lyman. “Show us country hicks how you learned to do the box step in Rochester.”

  With enough prodding from Edith and Mavis, Lyman finally agreed to stand up and dance. The floor was crowded with farm couples and town folks, the women in bright dresses and matching heels and the men beginning to sweat a little under the arms as they pumped their ladies’ hands in big swings across the floor. Everybody was enjoying himself. Across the room I could see Vince Higgims, Jr., trying to sweet-talk the latest target of his affections, a big solid black-haired girl who didn’t appear overly impressed, and at the bar the middle-aged Wellright boys were in earnest conversation with the mayor. The mayor was squeezed onto a stool between them. He was nodding his head, and Buster was saying, “Am I right?”

  And Barry was saying, “You damn right he’s right.”

  The mayor kept nodding his head like he knew all too well that Buster was always right.

  Things weren’t right on the dance floor, though. Shorty had finished “Release Me” to whistles and applause and had started another slow one, but I couldn’t see Edith and Lyman. I had been watching out for them too, noticing how they slid slow in their customary two-step around the outside edges of the dancing couples so as to avoid being crowded or bumped by the active younger set, and from what I saw they seemed all right. Lyman had looked a little stiff maybe, but then he always did. He had a way of holding his bald head tilted on his neck above that white shirt and bow tie like he was listening for something, or like he was hard of hearing, and Edith as usual had a light hand on his shoulder, the two of them dancing quiet and slow and very serious, as if it required concentration to get the steps right. But they weren’t dancing anymore. They weren’t in the corner booth either; our drinks were still there half finished on the table.

  “Maybe they went to the restroom,” Mavis said.

  They hadn’t. We checked both restrooms, which were crowded with people who were joking and visiting while they waited their turn at the toilets. We didn’t find them so we went outside thinking they might have stepped out to get the air after being downstairs in the heat and thick smoke. Under a streetlight my car was parked in the graveled lot. That’s where we found them. Lyman was in the back seat crowded far over into the dark corner. Edith was talking to him but Lyman wasn’t talking, at least not while we were there.

  “Anything wrong?” I said.

  “Lyman wants to go home.”

  “Is he sick? Lyman, what is it? I thought you were enjoying yourself.”

  He wouldn’t look at me, wouldn’t talk. He was in some kind of childish pout.

  “He isn’t sick,” Edith said. “He just wants to go home now.”

  I looked at Mavis for help. “That’s fine with me,” Mavis said. “Actually, it sounds like a good idea. This husband of mine’s notion about insurance was about to get him in trouble.”

  “Sure,” I said. “It’ll save wear and tear on my ribs.”

  So that was the end of dancing, and the end too of any other late-night forays to town for the Goodnoughs. Edith told us later what had caused it. It didn’t amount to much but it didn’t have to: Lyman had already begun his approach towards the edge. What happened was they were dancing slow and serious, like I told you, and at the end of Shorty Stovall’s version of “Release Me,” while deciding whether to dance the next one or to return to the booth, one of Happenheimer’s salesmen slapped Lyman on the back. It was Larry Parks, a guy with bangs combed down over his forehead. Parks had apparently drunk enough to believe that it would be a good idea to mix business with Holt Legion, Saturday-night pleasure. Sort of snatch Lyman while he was ripe, you understand, while he was oiled. Only Lyman wasn’t oiled.

  Parks said something like, “When you coming in to check out our new cars? We got in a good-looking shipment of Pontiacs last week.”

  And that was all. I suppose it was innocent enough, but it was stupid. Happenheimer knew what the score was with Lyman, because I had emphasized it to him myself, in private, the day we test-drove that two-door Bonneville, so you might have thought he would have leaked it to his salesmen. And maybe he had. Maybe Parks was just trying a little dance-floor free-lance in order to improve his commission. I don’t know.

  I don’t suppose the details matter. It’s just that his back-slapping attempt at salesmanship didn’t leave the Goodnoughs much. They had been finished with driving, and now any thought of night life was out too. About all they had left for themselves was a trip every six months to Doc Schmidt and a weekly drive to the grocery store. But that didn’t last long either. About a year later, when old Doc Schmidt retired after more than forty years of service to the community, closed his practice and moved himself and his wife to Tucson, Lyman decided he was through with doctors; he wasn’t ever going to another one. That left only the grocery store. You understand what I’m saying?—the goddamn grocery store. Here he had traveled all over this country by himself for twenty years; afterwards with Edith he had seen more of this Rocky Mountain region in six years than I’ll see in a lifetime; and now, in no time, he was satisfied with a seven-mile excursion into town—after cabbage and macaroni and beans.

  Well, it didn’t take long for even that to be too much for him. He shuffled a little closer to the edge. That’s right, he refused to step outside for any reason. He wouldn’t leave the house. He was too busy traveling in the parlor.

  About four years after his last Pontiac was wrecked, Lyman began to retrace his transcontinental trip. He sent off to Los Angeles and Boise and Omaha and Mobile and Cleveland for brochures, for chamber of commerce pamphlets, for bus schedules and train routes. Without once leaving the house, he was seeing the country again. He was traveling. He had his own old man’s travel bureau established with boxes and maps and a desk in the parlor. He could tell you what train to take from Boston to Chicago, what connections you had to make, what there was to see in the Windy City once you got there, where to stay—do all of that even if he was never going to take that train, make those connections, or see the Sears building himself. He didn’t want to. It was out of the question. If you had offered to pay his way and to sink him in luxury on a chartered jet, he would not have gone. He had limited his world to a space twenty feet square at the west end of the house. There he sat every day beside a lamp, poring like a travel clerk over road maps and glossy city flyers. To protect his eyes, Edith finally bought him a green visor, which he wore loose on his bald head, propped on his old man’s, hair-filled ears. It still about makes me sick to think about it. Not just for him—for her too, I mean.

  I BELIEVE Edith’s one compen
sation during those last awful years was Rena Pickett. Edith loved that little girl, still loves her, and so do we. Why hell, Rena fills us all up, ornery as she is, bullheaded and independent as she is.

  She favors my dad. She has his straight black shiny hair, his way of standing with one leg cocked and a hand on one hip, his manner of listening to you while you talk. And when you’ve finished talking, come finally to the end of your adult speech, when you’ve run down at last, believing for once that you’ve persuaded her to see your side of sound reason, she jumps up and goes ahead and does whatever it was she intended to do in the first place, before you started filling the air above her with words, before you ever got it into your head that you might make progress this once towards some form of mutual agreement, or at least obedience, or anyhow the willingness to wait long enough for you to turn your back and get out of the way before she disregards everything you’ve just said and runs off to do what she was going to do anyway. She’s always been like that.

  For example, when she was about two, we tried pretty seriously to impress upon her how she had to stay in the yard. We told her that she was not to cross the gravel road in front of the house. But that same afternoon when we missed her and looked up, there she was in the native pasture across the road, high-stepping down the hill. In one hand she was carrying her soggy diaper like it was something of herself that she was not about to leave behind; she had an elm stick in her other hand. She was following her little pot belly through the tall grass and sagebrush. There were cows and calves in the pasture, too, the cows all bunched up on stiff legs, watching her pass. But the dog was with her. She and Jack had been hunting prairie dogs on the hill. It was the reason for her stick.

  Or another time: when she was older, about six, I was trying to make her see the correct side of things, giving her the benefit of considerable wisdom and experience— until she interrupted me.

  “Oh, Dad,” she said. “Dad, you don’t know anything and you know it.”

  Then, having straightened me out, she flounced off to play dolls or to discover kittens in the hayloft. And how was I supposed to argue with what she said? I was wrong on both accounts.

  In that way she favors her mother. While she may have a band of round orange freckles pocked across her nose like I did when I was a kid, she still has her mother’s and her Grandpa Pickett’s eyes. Those green eyes that look past you or through you like you weren’t there, as if you didn’t amount to anything more than smoke—a minor obstruction, say, a kind of highway mirage, between her and the thing she intends to see. She will see the thing, take it in, accomplish it, no matter. The girl has backbone, and I’m damn grateful she does.

  She was born on August 3, 1969, with no trouble. After burying what should have been her older brother in a box above the barn, Mavis and I saw to that. We took precautions, did nothing rash, curbed any thought of Ferris-wheel rides or drives home afterwards that would have been too late. We believed we were being given another chance and were not about to lose it. Of course it made for a long, slow nine months of housebound waiting, but it was worth it, because if Rena Pickett was compensation to Edith these last seven years, she has been more than that to us. She’s our daily satisfaction.

  She’s also meant a good deal to her grandmother, that eighty-four-year-old woman who still lives in brittle comfort with a retired life-insurance salesman in that brick house at the northeast edge of town. Leona Turner Newcomb Roscoe Cox likes having a granddaughter to buy pink dresses and white kneesocks for; she seems to believe that such things close the gap, that they put all the grasping and all the arguments behind her, that the past is past. Well, the truth is, we’ve all grown older. She said the other day that she and Wilbur were thinking of taking a boat tour of the Bahamas. I told her I thought that would be a good idea. I said, “As far as I know the boat won’t stop at Havana.”

  But this is not Leona Cox’s story. I’m talking about Edith Goodnough.

  IT WAS ABOUT A YEAR after Lyman began to spread himself in the parlor that Edith decided to vacate the upstairs. Edith was finally getting tired. It began to show even on her. Her brown hair was turning gray fast now, losing its curl. There were purse lines at her mouth. She seemed to have to catch her breath after any kind of movement, whether it was to sweep the floor, feed the chickens, or just to stand up from the kitchen table to crack eggs. Also, every day it was growing more difficult for her to climb the stairs ten times, to be everywhere at once, to do all she’d been doing for seventy-some years and still believed she had to go on doing. She wouldn’t let herself do less; it wasn’t her way. Well, it was wearing her thin as water.

  And meanwhile, Lyman was getting sorrier all the time. His mind was closing down hard. There seemed to be about one thought only in that old head of his under that green visor—parlor travel. He hung on to that daily business like it was a drive chain in a Model T, like it was a cotter pin on a bull wheel, and he demanded Edith’s help to make the thing go. Often there were times when he couldn’t make his travel connections come out right and she had to leave the dishes to soak or let the peas burn while she helped him. He was as demanding as a child— she had to come now; not a minute later—and the worst hell of it was, he was still strong physically. Sometimes in those last years I caught myself thinking, What if he died? Or, what if a stroke put him away for good in the hospital? Wouldn’t that be better after all, some relief for her? But none of that happened. Lyman stayed as tough and stringy as a roping steer, even if he did end up using two canes. He was still capable of leverage. If Edith somehow managed to persuade him to take a nap in the afternoon on the couch, he would spend half the night demanding her help with his travel charts. All the time he was sending himself on imaginary trips to Memphis or Mobile. He was working up little jaunts to Los Angeles for himself. It went on for hours.

  When it went on for more than a year, Edith asked me to help her move the furniture. She wanted to know if I didn’t think it would be better to move the bedroom furniture downstairs, to set it up in the living room next to the parlor where she could be closer to him when he called in the night. It sounded like a good idea to me. They could shut off the upstairs altogether; there wouldn’t be any reason to climb those steps again. So I went over in the afternoon to help her accomplish that. That was when I understood for the first time that there was only one bed in use up there. She wasn’t trying to hide it. It was a double bed in the west bedroom, with an old-fashioned quilt spread.

  “This what you want moved?” I said.

  “Just the dressers out of this room, Sandy,” she said.

  “What beds do you want?”

  “They’re out in the garage. In storage.”

  “Oh?”

  “We stored them out there when Lyman came back— to make space for his things.”

  She was looking at me steadily from where she stood in front of the window, the country open and flat and dry behind her. She looked tired, a thin aging woman with her mouth pursed. She had begun to fashion her gray hair into a kind of knot. We stood there facing one another in the room where she had been born, where Lyman was born two years later, both of them with my grandmother’s help, and where Ada had died holding my grandmother’s hand, the room where the old man finally died in his time with his mouth locked open like box iron. It was a lot of history to be worrying about a double bed.

  “Well,” I said, “why don’t I start with these dressers?”

  I started pulling out the drawers and carrying them downstairs. Then I banged the dressers themselves down the steps and went outside to bring the beds in from the garage. The beds Edith wanted were old cast-iron single beds, stored overhead on the rafters. I dusted them off and set them up like she wanted, one on either side of the living room against the walls. She was making a day room out of it. When we were finished it looked all right too. Comfortable and clean, with matching spreads on the two beds, and the dressers set up in the corners with a clothes closet moved into the pantry. Lyman stayed bus
y in the parlor the whole time. He was studying a road map.

  “Where you headed today?” I asked him. “New York City?”

  “Salt Lake,” he said.

  “Hell of a place,” I said.

  Then I went home to feed corn to castrated bulls and to fork hay to fat cattle. And you can make of the Goodnoughs’ bedroom arrangement whatever you want to. Stir it according to your own lights. Myself, I don’t make anything of it. If they wanted to sleep in the same bed, warm their feet under the same old-fashioned patchwork quilt like they had when they were kids before this century ever began—well, that was their business, because when you know people all your life you try to understand how it is for them. What you can’t understand you just accept. That’s how I felt about Edith. At the time I could still remember like it was yesterday how she fed me chewing gum while we cleaned chicken squirt from brown eggs at the kitchen sink and how one summer she brought me ice tea and lemonade when I was driving tractor in a hayfield and an old man was waving stumps past my head and screaming nonsense in my ears. I intended to help her however I could. It was not my business to ask fool questions that didn’t concern me. That’s where Rena Pickett came in. To help Edith, I mean. Only help isn’t the right word.

  From the time Rena was born in 1969 Edith enjoyed her. I already told you how she was a compensation, but she was more than that. I suppose it had something to do with having a little kid dancing around in the house where otherwise there were only old folks, something to do with a little girl’s noise and giggles breaking up all that daily silence, that ongoing concentrated crotchetiness filling the parlor and the entire downstairs. Why hell, Rena put some fun into that yellow house, and Mavis and I encouraged it. Whenever there was occasion to be out at night or excuse to go to the National Western Stock Show in Denver, Rena went to Edith’s. She went there a lot, not just when we were gone but often for a whole day when we were home during the summer and also for an hour or two during the week after school. By the time she was six she was going there by herself. She’d throw a halter on Echo and trot down to the Goodnoughs’. We didn’t worry about her when she was there; it was obvious that she and Edith got along together like two beads on the same string. Besides, it was educational. I’ll bet Rena is the only seven-year-old kid in all of Holt County who not only knows how to scald a chicken and pluck tail feathers but also how to get from Dallas to St. Paul by train and bus. Because she was a help with Lyman too, you understand. My daughter could bring that old man out. She treated him as an equal. Together they played travel in the parlor for hours.