by Kent Haruf
So Edith put on her winter coat and scarf and went outside. She took the old mongrel dog with her. The dog waddled around the corner of the house to its usual place and scratched feebly at the frozen ground to cover its dump. Edith went on under the bare elm trees, through the picket gate, and out across the gravel to the chicken house, where she poured chicken feed into a trough. There were no eggs to gather, not now in December, so she merely stood there for a few minutes in the dim close air of the chicken house watching the six or seven chickens scratching in the hard dirt, pecking at old frozen food scraps, their loose tomato-colored combs jangling and tossing. When she went back to the house the dog was whimpering on the porch steps. It was a cold day, dry and cold and bright.
Inside the house again, she sat down to catch her breath. Lyman was still bent in satisfaction over his National Geographies. When she felt rested she took him a cup of strong coffee. She asked him if he liked the magazines.
“Huh?” he said.
“The magazines, Lyman. Are you enjoying the pictures?”
He looked up at her out of his faded eyes as if he was coming out of some fog, as if she had interrupted some deep thought of his. His spotted head shone like water.
“They got a lot of pictures.”
“Yes,” she said. “I saved them for you. But maybe you should go to the bathroom now.”
“What for?”
“All right, later then. Remember to drink your coffee before it gets cold.”
So the morning passed quietly for them. Later she made a pie, rolled the thin crust out onto the counter in the way her dead mother had taught her seventy-odd years ago, and filled the crust with pumpkin batter. She was well pleased, she said, with the result. Pumpkin was Lyman’s favorite—not that it mattered much to him what he ate now, or if he ate at all; I suppose it all tasted like oatmeal mush to him by this time. But she was pleased nevertheless. She wanted things done right.
Then the phone rang, and that turned out to be a good thing too. It was Mavis calling from town. Mavis said that she and Rena were at the grocery store and they wanted to know if there was something Edith needed. “They’ll be closed tomorrow,” Mavis said.
“That’s right, they will.”
“So Rena said we had to check with Edith.”
“Wasn’t that nice of her?” Edith said. “Well. Let me think. Let’s see—yes, if they have some fresh cream. I forgot that.”
“Anything else?”
“If there is, I can’t think of it right now. I guess not.”
They talked for a minute more and hung up. Edith said later she didn’t mind lying about the cream. It was a lie, though. In the refrigerator on the top shelf she knew very well that there was already a full, unopened half-pint of cream, more than enough to whip for Lyman’s pie. But now she was glad she had lied. She said she was even a little bit proud of herself for having thought so fast on the phone. It meant that she would be allowed to see Rena and Mavis once more. That had been the one thing she hadn’t been sure of accomplishing—and she wanted very much to see Rena again. Now that too was going to happen. So she went directly from the phone to the refrigerator and took the half-pint of cream and poured it into the sink. Then she made lunch.
Lyman was not at all hungry, she said. Stooped over his bowl of tomato soup, he played with his spoon, stirring the red stuff around in the bowl, and ate only a bite or two of his cheese sandwich. He was tired, wilted, glassy eyed; the early morning had exhausted him, she knew that, and he was ready now to lie down on his bed in the living room. But she just couldn’t permit it. Not yet, she couldn’t. She told him she had two more magazines for him to see.
“What magazines?” he said. “I already looked at magazines.”
“No, these are different. You’ve never seen these before.”
“I did too,” Lyman said. He pushed himself up from the table and shuffled into the living room. Edith followed him.
“Wait,” she said. “Lyman.”
“What?”
“You can look at your postcards.”
“I don’t have no postcards.”
“Of course you do. Why, the ones you sent me when you were gone all those years.”
She went over to the wall above her bed and untacked the first postcard he had sent her, the one from California, during that other December, that December in 1941 after they had bombed Pearl Harbor. She brought it back and showed him the picture he had chosen.
“See what it says up here in the corner? Los Angeles, California. And on the other side this is what you wrote me:
“Dear Sis,
Well, I made it out here. Now they all say I’m not right for soldiers. So I’m working a job in a airplane factory. It beats farming anyhow.
Love, your brother,
Lyman.”
“I wrote that,” Lyman said.
“That’s right. You do remember, don’t you?”
“Give it to me,” he said. “It’s mine.”
She gave him the postcard to hold in his own old farm boy’s hands, to peer at and turn over, to remember even if it was only dimly; and so he was perked up again for a while. He sat down once more in the stuffed chair in the parlor under the lamp, while his sister removed the remaining postcards from the walls in the other room. But Edith didn’t know how long that semi-alert condition would last; she said she realized then that she would have to move her plans ahead by at least an hour. But that would be all right too; afterwards such things as time and tiredness wouldn’t matter. There would be something like rest, afterwards.
So she began immediately to clean and stuff the chicken. A month ago she had thought of having turkey for supper, but in the past week she had decided against it because there would be too much left over, and besides, chicken was turkey to Lyman. So she made that one compromise, and when the chicken was ready, stuffed with its legs secured, she put it to bake in the oven in time for an early supper. Then she peeled potatoes and got out a jar of canned beans to have ready. Chicken and potatoes and green beans and, afterwards, pumpkin pie—it would make a satisfactory meal.
That’s exactly what she said, a satisfactory meal. You see what lengths that old lady was going to. If you don’t it’s my fault; I sure as hell mean for you to see it. Because she had thought about it for a long time—I don’t know for how long exactly, but for long enough anyhow—for God only knows how many nights, lying there in that dark room in that yellow house, listening to her brother snore and whistle and mumble nonsense in his old man’s sleep, while all the time she was trying to think, trying to know what to do with him, until finally after enough nights and enough troubled hours there seemed to be only one option that might work. An option, of course, that concluded with a satisfactory meal. Only she didn’t tell us that. Not at the time, she didn’t. Over here, we were still just hoping that he would die, that he would go to sleep and not wake up. It didn’t happen, though. You know that. It just got worse and worse, without ever quite becoming impossible. And all the time she was tired.
She said she was so tired in fact that she permitted herself a short nap that afternoon. She folded her arms on the table and put her head down. It wasn’t a long nap she intended to take, but she didn’t wake until almost an hour later when she heard the car on the gravel outside the house. It was Mavis and Rena, bringing the cream. She stood up and met them at the door. Rena, my green-eyed, black-haired daughter who loves that old lady, was full of a little girl’s news.
“You know what?” she said.
“What, sweetheart?”
“I’m staying overnight with Sheila Garfield. At her house.”
“Are you?”
“But you probably don’t know Sheila Garfield, do you?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Because she lives in town and goes to the second grade with me. Well, we’re going to stay up past midnight and have a party and everything. On account of it’s New Year’s. That’s tomorrow.”
“I know. And it
sounds like a wonderful idea.”
“Oh, it is,” Mavis said. “It’s strictly a big deal. Definitely groovy.”
“Mom,” Rena said. “We don’t say groovy anymore. We say stud.”
So Edith hugged my daughter close to her that afternoon, and then she whipped up the new cream from the store and the three of them sat down and ate at least a third of Lyman’s pumpkin pie. They had a fine time for a while, visiting and chatting, talking about nothing as if there was nothing particular to talk about—and all that time, you understand, Edith still had in mind what she was going to do later. When they left, having wished the season’s greetings to Lyman and listened in turn to his mumbled confusion about postcards, Edith thought it was for the last time. According to her plan she wouldn’t see them again. But, in the iron manner in which she had done everything else in her life, she pushed that thought away from her—or accepted it—and just put her coat on.
Now I think I told you when I first started talking, telling you this story, I believe I mentioned that business about the chicken feed and the tied-up dog. Well, I haven’t forgotten. And not just because it was after my wife and daughter left her that Friday afternoon that those things happened, but because they seemed to clinch the matter, to finish it. What I’m saying is, she took the dog outside again. It didn’t want to go; she had to force it, to take the dog by the collar and lead it, its back legs dragging in weak objection while she talked to it, coaxingly, out to the garage. There she tied it to the latch in the open doorway with a length of rope, with enough food and water to last it a day or two. Then, ignoring that pitiful whimpering and complaint behind her, she went on to the chicken house, to leave food for the half-dozen red chickens. I mean she lifted or dragged—don’t ask me how—a fifty-pound bag of chicken feed into the center of the dirt floor and cut it open so that they too would survive until somebody happened to remember them afterwards. And that clinched it. It was then, while walking back to the house under that late purpling sky, that she understood for the first time that what she was doing was a real thing, a certainty. Up to that point it hadn’t been real, even to herself.
“But I knew it then,” she said. “Nancy was crying at me from the end of the rope. I kept hearing her all evening—or thought I did. And I wanted to release her, I wanted to let her go, Sandy. But I didn’t. I went back to the house and shut the door.”
So there was really only one thing more for Edith Goodnough to do before she put supper on the table. She wanted to iron Lyman’s shirt. And she did that then, while the potatoes and green beans boiled, pressed his best white shirt out neat and clean on the ironing board so that he would appear gentlemanly. When she was satisfied she took it in to him where he still sat in the parlor, fumbling with faded pictures of Memphis and Mobile, New York and Boise, and somehow persuaded him to not only put on a different shirt than the one he’d been wearing all day but to also get into a blue suit jacket that matched his dark pants. He didn’t know why. It didn’t matter. I suppose all he understood was that it was an imposition, a damn bother, but like I’ve already said, she managed that too, somehow. And afterwards, when he was dressed to her satisfaction, she herself changed clothes, put on a fine dark skirt and pink blouse and brushed her hair. So they were ready for supper now. They sat down in the kitchen across the table from one another, looking, I fully believe, as if they were contented, even happy.
They didn’t talk much. Edith said she hadn’t expected that they would. It was enough to be dressed up, to be seated at a table with red candles flickering, to be eating a satisfactory supper of baked chicken and pumpkin pie. The only thing she remembers saying was, “I’m still glad you came home, Lyman.”
Lyman was nodding in his chair, almost asleep.
“I know you don’t understand. But I am glad you came home when you did. It was worth the wait. Can you remember all we’ve done?”
“I’m too tired,” he said.
“You want to lie down now, don’t you?”
“I want to sleep.”
“Yes, it’s been a long day. Come on then, I’ll help you.”
She lifted under his arm to help him rise from the chair, and together they walked into the living room. She laid him down on his bed in his suit clothes, took his slippers off. When she pulled a blanket up over his long quiet body she saw that he was already asleep, the blue veins and age spots at his temple showing dimly in the fading light, his chin fallen onto his bow tie. She ran her hand over his forehead once and bent to kiss him, then she went back to the kitchen and put the candles out with moistened fingers and locked the back-porch door. She had thought she would clear the table, put things away, but that seemed excessive now, and so she returned to the living room, where she locked that door too, that outside door that opened formally into the house but was never used, and finally she sat down in the rocking chair between the two beds. Rocking a little, she watched the dark collect in the room while she waited for the moment when she knew she would rise again and strike a match to the old dust coated travel papers on the stairway, which her brother and my daughter had allowed her to store there on the steps in the past years. But that moment hadn’t arrived yet. For a time, for a while longer, she was content to sit and rock quietly, with the matches in her lap. She looked past her brother and out through that south window toward the elm trees that stood in the yard, bare and clean and dark, against a sky that was lighter only by comparison to the dark trees. Still she waited, thinking: In a minute now. Soon, soon I’ll stand up.
IT WAS a dog’s barking, something as simple and ordinary and yet as unpredictable as that—that’s all it was— just the loud and persistent barking of a neighbor’s dog that prevented Edith Goodnough’s plans.
“What the hell’s got into Jack?” I said.
Mavis and I were upstairs in our bedroom getting ready to go out for the night and Rena was already downstairs with her coat on, waiting by the front door for us to take her to Sheila Garfield’s house. Then Jack, our blue heeler, started barking. His nose was raised into the night, and he was howling.
“There must be something in the yard,” Mavis said.
She looked out the east window.
“Come here,” she said.
“What? Is it another skunk?”
“No.”
“It better not be a calf out, not tonight.”
“Will you just come here and look?”
So I looked.
“Good Christ,” I said. “Call town. I’m going over there.”
I ran downstairs and on outside and jumped into the pickup, spraying gravel out hard behind me entering the road. As I raced on toward the Goodnough place, I began to see bright flames through the second-story windows, where fire was already burning the old dry wallpaper in the empty bedrooms. Above the house there was yellow smoke rising in the updraft, and the whole place was lit up in that strange flicker of light so that the trees and the picket fence seemed to waltz on the brown grass. I braked the pickup beside the gate and ran up onto the back porch. Only of course the door was locked. Except I didn’t know that. They never lock their doors. What in Christ’s going on here? I ran off the porch around to the side to try that other door that opened onto the living room and found it locked too, solid and brick hard, one of those old-fashioned oak doors made before anyone heard of constructing doors with hollow cores. What in hell is this? So I was going to break the window, that south window in the living room, smash it in, and enter that way. And then I saw Edith.
Beyond the window Edith was sitting in the rocking chair. She was looking at me, sitting bolt upright and staring at me as if I had startled her, as if she thought I meant to cause her harm. I could see her eyes, her white face, and white hair. And then, while I stood there peering through the window, she did something that I will never forget, something that stopped me from kicking that window in and that—if you think about it—has altered everything else: she raised one hand from the arm of the rocking chair. That’s all she did. But d
o you understand what I’m saying? She lifted one pale blue-veined hand up from the rocking-chair arm, not to motion at me for help or even to show that I should hurry, but to warn me, to stop me. It was as if by that one open-faced hand, lifted so I could see it, that she was telling me to stay away. She didn’t want my help. She desired that I do . . . nothing.
And just then I understood that. I understood too, all at once, why the doors were locked when in eighty years they had no doubt never been locked before. It all came together for me as I stood there on that side porch watching her through the window. Gradually she relaxed back into the rocking chair; she lowered her hand and shut her eyes. Then I saw that Lyman was asleep on the bed just below me, his face turned toward the window, pale and speckled, and his bow tie dark against the white of his best shirt. So I stood there. I stood listening to my neighbors begin to cough while their living room filled with the smoke that was curling in past the closed stairway door and while the rooms over their heads burned on. And you can think what you will. Perhaps you would have been able to break that window and to drag those two people out into the yard, but I couldn’t. I didn’t. I had seen Edith Goodnough raise her hand. That’s all.
ONLY THEN, the fire department and the ambulance got there. With Bud Sealy, Holt County sheriff, in tow. Because the fire department and the ambulance and the sheriff all pride themselves on speed and dispatch. Besides, it is only a short seven-mile drive from town, and Mavis called them at my instruction almost as soon as we understood why the dog was howling. Call town, I said. And she did. So it was within fifteen minutes—no more than that—after Mavis made that hurried call from our house that the local boys in the red trucks arrived. Long before they raced into the yard I could hear the trucks out on the blacktop, the sirens in full alarm.