The Tie That Binds

by Kent Haruf

  So I tried to keep them away. That’s true—I tried to prevent them from entering that burning house. Not that I blamed them; it was their job. But I fought them anyway on the porch in that flickering, waltzing light with the roar of burning timber above us, and they thought I was crazy when I hit Irv Jacobs as hard as I could in the face when he ran up onto the porch. He stumbled back off the steps.

  “Goddamn it, Sandy. What the hell you doing?”

  “Get out of here,” I yelled. “All you sons a bitches.”

  “What’s wrong with you?”

  “Get out of here.”

  “We’re coming in.”

  “Like hell you are. You miserable—”

  They rushed me. I was hitting anything I could, Bob Williams in the throat and Tom Crossland over his eye, somebody at the side of his head, then they had me lifted off my feet and my boots up in the air, kicking somebody in the chest before they slammed me against the wall of the house and then carried me off the porch in a rush with my arms twisted behind my back, and somebody was hitting my ear to stop me kicking anymore, and I was shoved hard into the back seat of the county cop car, where Bud Sealy watched that I didn’t get any other wild notions while I sat there sweating with the doors locked and that protective grille between Bud and me. The weight of that badge of his was tugging at his shirt pocket.

  “By God, Roscoe,” Bud said. “You just about done it this time. I ought to take you in for obstruction.”

  “Go to hell,” I said.

  “Sure,” he said. “That’s right.”

  He was turned around in the front seat talking to me through all that iron grillwork. His heavy gut was squashed against the steering wheel.

  “That’s the ticket,” he said. “But you keep it up and I’m not going to give a good goddamn how long we’ve been knowing one another—I’ll take you in.”

  “You can take and fuck yourself too,” I said.

  “Just keep it up,” Bud said.

  So he went on talking, saying something official to me from the front seat, but I couldn’t hear much of it for the ringing in my ears where somebody had hit me, and any way I was more interested in what they were doing to the oak door with axes, making the oak kindling fly, and now they had it smashed open and the smoke was boiling out, and they went in through the smoke and brought Edith and Lyman out of the house in blankets, carrying them down the steps and across the yard to the ambulance. They were both unconscious, their arms dangling loose like rags. The ambulance roared away towards town.

  The rest of us stayed there until the house was gone. They couldn’t save it. In the end they managed to contain the fire by soaking the well house and the outbuildings and the nearby trees with their hoses, but the house burned down to the old square limestone-block foundation. When the roof caved in, the sparks exploded into the sky like fireworks and then were shot away in the updraft into the dark. After that they unlocked the cop car and let me out.

  AND SOMETIME that same night Lyman died. He never regained consciousness. After his sister fed him pumpkin pie with a dollop of whipped cream on top and after she laid him down on his bed in the living room for the last time, Lyman went off to sleep and never woke again. The next day, at the hospital, they told me it was due to severe smoke inhalation. They said it was not possible to save him. For my part, I believe there must be worse ways to die.

  Two days later, on January third, a Monday, I helped bury him. I was one of the pallbearers. He was still dressed in his good dark suit, and we lowered him in his silver coffin into the frozen ground beside his mother. I had instructed John Baker to dig the hole in that place. It seemed fitting to me. There would be at least that much distance—the width of his mother’s grave—between him and the old stump-armed man that Lyman had spent a good fourth of his life running away from. I figured Lyman would appreciate the head start, in case he ever had to run again.

  Edith didn’t attend the funeral or the graveside rites, though. She was still too sick. In fact, she almost died. They had her in an I.C. unit with machines attached to her everywhere they could think to attach them, monitoring her round the clock, and I admit to you that there were times, particularly in that first week or two afterwards, when she was lying there with that damn tube shoved up her nose, when she was still unconscious and coughing, her thin throat wracked with the awful effort and the yellow spit brought up and bubbling on her cracked mouth—there were plenty of times when I wished she would die. I wished that she would just give up. But she didn’t. Edith hung on and hung on, like she didn’t know how to let go or stop even yet.

  And now I’m afraid she’s getting better. I’m afraid Bud Sealy and these imported lawyers will be able to drive her over to the courthouse after all and make her endure a trial for something they insist is murder. There is not one son of a bitch amongst them that understands a goddamn thing.

  SO, IN THE PAST three and a half months, I have gone up to see her almost every day. Of course, Mavis and Rena have gone with me. We went up there last night. Because of that front page Denver Post newspaper article a week ago, they have begun to position a deputy sheriff outside her room in the hallway. And the hell of it is, I don’t for a minute believe that anything would have come of it if it hadn’t been for that damn newspaper kid poking around. Bud Sealy had forgotten any notion he had of charging me with obstruction, and folks were calling the fire itself just an accident. At least in public, for the record, that’s what people were calling it. But then, somehow—I still don’t know how—those Denver people got wind of the thing, discovered a wild hair up their ass, and sent their kid out here to sniff around. He talked to enough of the wrong people, and now it’s all gone to hell. Last night they even had a new guy stationed at the hospital, somebody I never saw before. He had a cop’s revolver on his hip, and the son of a bitch wanted to frisk us before we went in. I told him to keep his damn hands off us.

  “I’ll have to call Bud Sealy,” he said.

  “Call him then, goddamn it,” I said. “But you ain’t touching us.”

  We walked past him on into that white room. Inside, as usual, there was nothing but quiet and pulled blinds and some flowers on a bedstand. Edith was asleep. One arm was outside the covers with that steady flow of liquid still pumping sugar water through a needle into her hand. She woke up when she heard us enter. Rena went over and sat down on the edge of her bed and cocked her feet on the bed rail.

  “How do you feel now?” Rena said.

  “I’ve been asleep, sweetheart. I can’t tell yet.”

  “Do you think you feel any better?”

  “Why yes, seeing you always makes me feel better.”

  She took Rena’s hand, and Mavis and I pulled up chairs beside her bed. We talked together for about an hour. A nurse came in once to take her temperature and her pulse and to check the drop chamber, while we waited for her to leave so we could go on talking. Then at eight-thirty another nurse stuck her head in the door to tell us visiting hours were over. We stood up to leave.

  “Is it nice outside?” Edith said.

  “Not bad,” I said. “Looks like another clear night.”

  “I can’t always tell,” she said. “They won’t let me open any windows.”

  “Why not?”

  “They say the bugs will fly in.”

  “There aren’t any bugs in April. Do you want me to open it?”

  “If you would,” Edith said. “I was thinking maybe I could smell something.”

  So I pulled the blinds and cranked the window open for her. Then Mavis and Rena hugged her and we left, with the promise that we would come back today, this Sunday evening. Outside her room the new deputy was still on guard in the hallway. Somebody had brought him a cup of coffee. We pushed past him and walked outside to the car. When we looked back at Edith’s room we saw that a nurse was there, shutting her window again. They weren’t going to let her breathe.

  I’M DONE talking now. I’ve told all I know.

  Only, bef
ore you leave, before it gets full dark, you have time to drive over there a half mile east and see what remains of that yellow house. Poking around, you might find some charred travel brochures and some heat-twisted forks and a cracked plate or two, and then, depending upon how long you stay there, you might still have time to go on into town and notice Lyman’s last green Pontiac rusting in the Holt junkyard with the weeds growing up around it, before you drive on to the cemetery, where you will find the three Goodnough headstones over there at the far edge across the fence from Otis Murray’s cornfield.

  You go ahead and do all that. But I can’t go with you. I’ve promised to collect my wife and my daughter in town, and then we’re going back to the hospital to visit an old white-haired woman who, though she will be eighty years old on Thursday, is still in the ways that matter just as fine and beautiful as she must have been in 1922 when she was twenty-five and went riding out in the sandhills in a Model T with my dad and the windows were rolled down and the night air was blowing fresh in on them—all of that and it almost fifty-five years ago now without her ever understanding how to say anything like a continuous yes to herself.

  ALSO BY KENT HARUF

  Coming Soon from Vintage Contemporaries . . .

  EVENTIDE

  When the McPheron brothers see Victoria Roubideaux, the single mother they’d taken in, move from their ranch to begin college, an emptiness opens before them—and for many other townspeople it also promises to be a long, hard winter. A young boy living with his grandfather helps out a neighbor whose husband, off in Alaska, suddenly isn’t coming home, leaving her to raise their two daughters. At school the children of a disabled couple suffer indignities that their parents know all too well, with only a social worker to look after them and a violent relative who endangers them. But in a small town people encounter one another frequently, often surprisingly, and their destinies soon become entwined—for good and for ill—as they confront events that sorely test the limits of their resilience and means, with no refuge available except what their own characters afford them.

  Fiction/Literature/0-375-72576-8

  PLAINSONG

  “Ambitious, but never seeming so, Kent Haruf reveals a whole community as he interweaves the stories of a pregnant high school girl, a lonely teacher, a pair of boys abandoned by their mother, and a couple of crusty bachelor farmers. From simple elements, Haruf achieves a novel of wisdom and grace—a narrative that builds in strength and feeling until, as in a choral chant, the voices in the book surround, transport, and lift the reader off the ground.” —From the citation from the National Book Award

  Fiction/Literature/0-375-70585-6

  ALSO AVAILABLE:

  Where You Once Belonged,0-375-70870-7

  VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES

  Available at your local bokstore, or call toll-free to order:

  1-800-793-2665 (credit cards only)

  FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, MAY 2000

  Copyright © 1984 by Kent Haruf

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Contemporaries and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-56064-3

  Author photo © Cathy Haruf

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