The Tie That Binds

by Kent Haruf

  On a late-winter afternoon if I went in to bring Rena home for supper I’d find her with Lyman, the two of them sitting at that loaded mahogany desk in that west room, the light from the overhead lamp reflecting off his bald visored head and her shiny black hair, her hair fallen forward around her face. The maps would be tacked up on the walls. Around them on the floor the whole room would be full of stuff, cluttered so you couldn’t walk, overflowing: all those damn brochures and pamphlets and flyers; schedules for the whole country creased five times and looking used up; all of it spilling out of cardboard boxes; a hell of a mess. If Edith wanted to clean in there she had to dust around them; they knew where they wanted things. They allowed her to store the extra piles of stuff on the steps leading up to the unused bedrooms, but she had to ask first. And that was all right because Rena was keeping Lyman occupied; he was almost happy when she was there. So, while Edith folded clothes or cooked supper, the two travelers were busy, engrossed in serious play, both of them sitting bent over that desk where Rena colored train tickets and Lyman studied the numbers in his train schedule and tried to figure how to get them to Detroit if they boarded in Denver. It was solemn business. And Rena would be saying something like:

  “I’m just sick of this orange. I’m going to make them red.”

  “Red what?” Lyman would say.

  “Our train tickets. Don’t you know we got to buy train tickets? Did you forget that again?”

  “I ain’t forgetting nothing. Tickets is your business.” And a little later:

  “But look here. We got us that same damn layover in Chicago. Three hours’ worth.”

  “How much minutes is that?”

  “I just told you. Ain’t you listening?”

  “You said hours. And you’re not suppose to say ‘ain’t.’”

  “Mind your own business.”

  “Well, you’re not suppose to.”

  And a little later still:

  “There. I’m done with all these tickets. Now hurry up with that schedule thing.”

  So, in time, they would take up red tickets and board the train and pretend to see all that country between Denver and Detroit, with a three-hour layover in Chicago, where Rena would say she was shopping for presents for her school friends and Lyman would say he was drinking himself a bottle of cold beer.

  At Christmas Edith gave my daughter a green visor like the one her traveling partner wore. It was Rena’s favorite present. She hung it on a nail beside the maps in the travel bureau.

  THEN, about a year ago in March, the Goodnoughs acquired an old milky-eyed dog by default, and at about the same time we learned that there was reason for us to worry about Rena’s going over there by herself to play travel with Lyman. Lyman had finally reached that edge of his. In fact, he seemed at times to have passed it. For days his mind would be about as good as it had been; he might still manage to function in the parlor, more or less, but then for no reason that anybody could detect he’d be gone for half a day, turn blank and vacant, his mind as empty of sense as a dead stick is of sap. He’d go silent in some corner or he’d babble from his bed in the living room about nothing, about railroad ballast, or car keys and fence wire. I remember he spent one entire afternoon talking about nettles. I also remember how Edith reported that he pissed on the clothes in the makeshift closet in the pantry one time; apparently Lyman thought he had discovered the toilet among his sister’s dresses. But that was later in the fall. In the meantime he was still trying to travel. And when things didn’t connect right he could turn violent. He used those canes of his.

  Now whether the dog had anything to do with Lyman’s final collapse, I don’t know. Probably not. Probably it was just coincidence. If it hadn’t been a dog, it would have been something else just as trivial. However you look at it, it doesn’t make any sense. Anyway, the dog wandered into the yard one night. Edith found it the next morning when she went out to feed the chickens and to break ice in the water pan.

  It was an old black-and-brown dog with mottled white on its belly, a mixture of border collie and spaniel and whatever else had been available and interested at the time. There were clots of matted hair on its back legs, and its eyes were milky with cataracts. It slept a lot and whimpered when it wasn’t sleeping. There was a leather collar buckled around its neck when Edith found it, so we figured some town folks had dropped it off—they will do that; ask any farmer who lives within a ten-mile radius of any town what he has discovered in the ditch in front of his house and he’ll tell you—just shoved the old dog out onto the road in front of the Goodnoughs’ mailbox with the mistaken notion that such a thing would be kinder than a ten-minute trip to the vet and a quick injection. Anyway, being the kind of woman she is, Edith kept the dog. She fed it and brought it into the house.

  That’s when the trouble started seriously with Lyman. I suppose you’d have to say he was jealous of the damn thing. It was like he felt his sister was spending too much of herself caring for something that wasn’t him. Like a kid, he wanted her total concentration and concern to himself. If she wasn’t looking, he’d give the dog a boot, hit it with his cane. Things got worse. Then my daughter had to be there when it all went to hell.

  It was one of those late-winter, early-spring afternoons in March, that in-between time when a gray sky can’t decide what to do, drop snow or spit rain, so it does a little of both. Rena had come home as usual on the bus after school, and I had taken her with me to the Goodnoughs’ to play in the house while I worked on a tractor I kept stored out of the weather in the machine shed. It was getting along towards five, darkening already, and I had turned on the drop-light over the tractor. Then Edith was calling me from the steps of the back porch.

  “What?” I yelled back at her. “I’m out here.”

  “You better come to the house.”

  “I’ll be there in a minute.”

  “What?”

  “In a minute.”

  “You better come now.”

  She turned and went back in. What in the hell? I thought. I walked across the wet graveled yard and inside the house, in the kitchen, I found Rena on Edith’s lap. Rena was crying, her face close against Edith’s shoulder. Rena didn’t cry much, but she was crying hard now. Through the kitchen door I could see Lyman glaring at me from across the length of the house. He was standing in the parlor doorway as if he would fight anybody who tried to get past him. He looked wild. That travel clerk’s visor of his was tilted lopsided on his head, and his eyes looked flat crazy, insane, bughouse.

  “What’s going on?” I said.

  Rena was crying something into Edith’s shoulder; it came out muffled and wet.

  “What? Honey, I can’t understand you.”

  “Never mind now, sweetheart,” Edith said. “It’ll be all right now. Your daddy’s here. Don’t you know it’ll be all right? It always is, isn’t it?”

  Rena looked up into Edith’s pale wrinkled face. “But Lyman hit you,” she said. “I saw him hit you with that cane.”

  “I know. But never mind now. It’s all over.”

  “And he hit Nancy too. I tried to make him stop but he wouldn’t.”

  “Nancy will be all right too. You’ll see. Look, she’s over there in the corner on her rug. See how she likes it there where it’s warm. Why, she’s asleep already, so don’t you worry about Nancy—no, now don’t cry anymore. Just lean your head back. There, that’s my girl.”

  “Edith,” I said, “what happened here?”

  Edith didn’t say anything for a while. She was caressing, calming my daughter. Finally she said, “I don’t know really. I think it’s just too much for him sometimes. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, and then something happens and—”

  “And he hurts you.”

  “Not very much. I’m all right. It’s just that I don’t know right now what I’m going to do with him. I’ve got to think.”

  “Will you tell me what happened?”

  She was still holding Rena on her lap, petting her
hair and smoothing the collar on her school dress. After a while, when Rena stopped crying, when the hiccups too had stopped, Edith told me. From her account and from what Rena was later able to say, I’ve pieced this much together:

  They were traveling in the parlor together as usual. The boxes of travel stuff were spread around them; the maps of the country were on the wall. In front of them on the desk they had their work papers and charts and Crayolas and pencils, the two of them sitting there in the travel bureau in their matching green visors, that old man and my daughter, getting up another trip for themselves. They had decided, it still being late winter in Colorado, that now would be a good time to take the sun in Phoenix because it would be full spring there, and Rena said she was getting tired of this snow and rain dripping all the time so they had to stay in the gym for recess, and Lyman said: “Phoenix.” Well, that turned out to be a mistake: the train connections were too difficult. They would have to get on in Denver, go north to Cheyenne, cross over to Salt Lake, track west to San Francisco, change trains for Los Angeles, and then come back eastward into Arizona. Something like that, anyway. And Lyman couldn’t manage it. It called for more sense, more figuring, and more understanding of time changes and layovers than he was capable of. He had to call Edith in from the kitchen three or four times to help him. So he was getting hot. It set him off.

  But he wouldn’t change his mind either. Not that he had a lot of mind left to change, you understand, but it had to be Phoenix, so leave him alone.

  Of course it didn’t matter much to Rena where they went; she didn’t care; she had only said that about the snow and rain because she preferred slides and playground swings to a constant ration of dodge ball in the gym. Parlor travel was a game to her, a good reason to draw more and more elaborate figures on yellow paper and afterwards to cut them out, a chance to wear a green visor and pretend. But it was never any game to Lyman. He took it as hard as if his life depended on it, and I suppose in some ways it did. So he was beginning to fume now. He was mixed up, mad, losing control. He didn’t know where the hell he was.

  Meanwhile my daughter had finished coloring their train tickets. She wanted to start. She was ready for the pretense of seeing the country. But Lyman wasn’t ready yet. Far from it. So finally, out of boredom I suppose, Rena called Nancy—that’s what they called the dog—into the mess of the travel bureau to play with her while she waited. And that was too much for him. He thought he had reason to dislike the dog anyway. He came unhinged. He started shouting.

  “Get that damn thing out of here! She don’t belong here with us.”

  You understand he was like a frantic kid now, screaming and shouting. And Rena was saying, “Well, Nancy can stay in here if she wants to.”

  “No, she can’t. She stinks, damn her. Get her out.”

  “Nancy doesn’t either stink.”

  “She does too. Don’t tell me, by God . . .”

  “Do you, Nancy? Nooo, her doesn’t stink. Her’s a good old poochy.”

  Rena was kneeling in front of the dog, talking baby talk into its grizzled face, patting its old head while the dog shut its eyes, shivering in pleasure, and then Lyman hit Nancy on the spine with his cane. There was a sharp crack, a yelp.

  “By Jesus!” he yelled. “I bet that’ll move her.”

  The dog did move too. It even managed a kind of waddling gallop; it ended up in the kitchen cringing and whimpering beside the stove. Rena, I gather, was just shocked at first. She had never seen an animal mistreated before; it was something new to her. Then she was mad, as outraged as any six-and-a-half-year-old girl can be. She began to shout back at him, crying up into his face that he was mean and old, that he was the one who stinked; she was not going to play travel with him ever again. She took off her green visor and threw it at him.

  Then Edith was there too, in that crowded box-filled room at the west end of the house. But it was too late. Lyman was gone now, the poor old bastard; he was crazy with frustration, his eyes like new copper, red and insane, out-sized; he was flailing his cane around in the room, hitting anything, the desk, the boxes, the lamp, and before Edith could get Rena and herself out of the way he hit his sister sharp blows on the arms and back. “Get out!” he was screaming. “Get out of here.” They retreated to the kitchen. That’s when she called me in from the machine shed. You know the rest.

  After that much had been told, when it was all accounted for, even if it didn’t make sense, because it wasn’t a question of that, we sat there on kitchen chairs staring at nothing for a while. The radio was playing the top forty from Denver, and there was the slow drip of rain outside. Finally Rena got up off Edith’s lap. She came over and stood between my knees. “Dad, I want to go home now,” she said.

  “Yes,” I said. “Mom will be waiting supper for us.”

  Rena went into the other room, put her coat on, and we could hear her saying good-bye to Lyman. Lyman was still standing fierce guard in the far doorway. He didn’t say anything. Rena came back into the kitchen and gave Edith a long hug.

  “Go on out to the pickup now,” I told her. “I’ll be right out.”

  “I want you to come too.”

  “I am. Go ahead now.”

  “Good-bye, Edith,” she said.

  “Good-bye, sweetheart. Lyman didn’t mean to scare you. He loves you too, you know. We both do.”

  “I guess he’s just sick,” Rena said. “Probably he’ll feel better tomorrow.”

  Then she went outside. Edith was staring at the closed door; she looked small and defeated. Her face was white, colorless, pained; her gray hair had become dislodged from its knot. I felt as bad for her then as I ever have for anyone in my life.

  “He just can’t help what he does,” she said.

  “I know it,” I said. “But that’s the point, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, but it’s not that simple. What am I going to do with him, Sandy? I won’t have him strapped down to a hospital bed. Or whatever they do now—sedate them with pills and shots to make them sleep all the time. I couldn’t stand that. And he’s mine to take care of.”

  “There aren’t a lot of options,” I said.

  “There must be something,” she said. “I’ve just got to think of it.”

  I sure as hell didn’t have any answers. So I left then and Rena and I went home for supper. Rena didn’t go back to the Goodnoughs’ again by herself. In the next eight or nine months Mavis or I took her often to see Edith, to visit in the kitchen or to do things outside in the yard during the summer, but she didn’t play travel with Lyman anymore. Lyman had almost stopped playing travel himself. He managed, I think, to take a few brief imaginary trips to Denver, but that was about all. Of course all that time Edith was still taking care of him. With patience and kindness, and yes, love, too. Only you’d have to have seen that yourself. I don’t know how to tell you about it.

  •11•

  ALL I KNOW how to tell you is that sometime between March and December Edith Goodnough decided by herself what to do with her brother. She didn’t consult anyone. It isn’t the sort of thing you can discuss with anybody else. What in the hell are you going to say?—look here now, if I do this and this, do you think it’ll turn out all right? No, Edith made up her own mind. It had to be her own private, solitary decision.

  But I can tell you what it was she decided. I was there for the ending. And in these past three and a half months she’s had time to tell me the rest, to tell me how she filled those hours that led up to the end. We’ve talked a lot about it in that hospital room in town since the beginning of this new year. I’ve held her hand, watching that slow drip pushing life back into her through a sterile needle in her other arm, life she didn’t much want or care to continue anymore. I’ve seen her sleeping with her gray, troubled face turned toward me on a white pillow, been there too when she woke and asked, “Are you still here, Sandy?”

  And I’ve said, “Yes. I’m still here. I’ll be here for a while.”

  So I didn’t leave
her and we would talk. She seemed to want to talk about it. Of course I was interested.

  She said she woke that morning later than she wanted to. There was already more than enough light in the living room for her to be able to see Lyman clearly over there against the opposite wall in his cast-iron bed with the yellowing postcards pinned on the walls above him, the wallpaper itself discolored now behind the curled edges of the old postcards. She said she was a little panicky when she realized the hour. She had a lot to do. She got up out of bed in a hurry, dressed in house clothes, and went out to the kitchen to start coffee. When the coffee was going good she returned to the living room and woke her brother. Ordinarily she let him sleep until he woke on his own, and by December it was not unusual for him to sleep until noon when he would rise and shuffle about the house until she fed him and found some task for him to do, but that morning she woke him early so that they could eat breakfast together. Also, she wanted to be certain that he would go to bed promptly after supper. She had it all planned. It should have worked, too.

  They ate a breakfast of poached eggs, buttered toast, and coffee. Afterwards she did the dishes while Lyman shaved himself in the bathroom. When she went in a little later to lay his clothes out she found that he was still in the bathroom studying himself in the mirror. He had cut his neck along the gray folds of loose skin under his chin, and he seemed to be amused by the trickle of blood dripping onto the whiskers and gray lather in the sink. It wasn’t a bad cut, but it was bleeding enough to entertain him. She stanched it with toilet paper. Then she cleaned him up and got him dressed in his customary white shirt, dress pants, and slippers, and sat him down in a chair under a lamp in the parlor so he could look at pictures. She had planned that too. Several months earlier she had taken a subscription to National Geographic magazine with those colored pictures in mind. When the issues had begun to arrive she had kept them for a later date, and that morning she gave him two magazines to look at. Like a bald-headed child, he sat in his stuffed chair with a good light behind him and studied the pictures of Eskimos and marine life and wide-hipped Hawaiian women dancing for him in color on the page in his lap. He was satisfied for a while.