The Tie That Binds(10)
“Your mother’s dead. You’re the mother now.”
“What do you mean? I can’t replace mother.”
“You will.”
Ada’s was the first of the three Goodnough graves that have been dug so far, over there in the brown grass beside the fence line that separates the cemetery and Otis Murray’s cornfield. Ada lived to be forty-two.
?3?
EDITH was seventeen when her mother died. Lyman was fifteen. They were a year older when the next thing happened that fixed it for them. It wasn’t enough that their father was Roy Goodnough or that their mother died early; there had to be at least one more thing to clinch matters, to fix them forever, to make Edith and Lyman end up the way they did—two old people, a sister and a brother, living alone out here in a yellow house surrounded by weeds.
It was an accident that did it. It was during harvest, and Roy Goodnough must have hated harvesttime.
No—that’s not quite right. Like the rest of us, he must have loved it too, because it meant the end; it meant the accomplishment of what had been started months before with plowed sand and bags of seed. Also, he must have worried about it, like we all did and still do, stewed in his juice over it, stepped out the first thing in the morning, even before he had his pants buttoned good, to search the sky for clouds in the hope now that it wouldn’t rain, or worse, that if there were clouds, then he would detect no sickly green, because that kind of green in clouds meant hail.
But at the same time he was loving it and worrying about it, he must have hated it too, because at harvesttime Roy had to ask someone for help. He couldn’t do it alone. He could operate the header himself, but even with Edith driving the team of horses polling the header barge and Lyman leveling the wheat off in the back of the barge, he still needed one more person to stack the wheat once the barge was full and ready to be unloaded. So he had to ask John Roscoe, down the road a self mile, to do that.
John Roscoe was twenty-five in 1915. I’ve already said about him that he lasted. But he was able to last not so much by farming himself, like Roy did, as by adding more grassland to the original claim his mongrel father had filed ten years before he ever went to town that Saturday morning and disappeared. Calving time was the worst: you had to get up at three o’clock in the morning in a March blizzard to pull a calf that was trying to come breech; but usually one man could manage a small cattle operation. He also farmed some, though, in a small way. His mother cooked dinner and washed clothes, smoked her pipe and rocked herself to sleep in the afternoons beside the stove in the living room. Anyway, it was John Roscoe that was helping the Goodnoughs harvest their wheat that July in 1915.
I don’t suppose it was as hot then as it had been the previous year, when Ada died in the upstairs bedroom, but it was hot enough. The sky stayed clear, bright, high, and the heads of the wheat had filled and turned tan, ready to be cut. They had already cut most of it in the preceding five or six days, and Roy believed he could finish today, or at the latest, tomorrow.
So on this Thursday morning late in July, while Lyman milked and fed the six or seven Shorthorns they kept for milk cows—because they gave more milk than their Here-fords—Roy slid the sickle bar out the end of the header to sharpen the blades. Edith had to help him after she had cooked breakfast and washed dishes; she had to hold the end of the long sickle bar while he sat on the narrow iron seat, pumping the foot pedals of the grindstone like he was some overgrown kid racing to hell on a tricycle. He ground and honed both cutting edges of each blade, those triangular-shaped serrated blades called sections that were riveted along the length of the sickle bar. A few of the sections had been nicked by rocks, but he didn’t bother replacing them. That would take more time; he wanted to finish while the weather held. He ground the nicked serrated edges down smooth so that they shone like just-honed knife blades.
Lyman came over and watched as his father sat pumping on the grindstone.
“You turn the cows out?”
“Yes.”
“Did you put a cloth over the milk cans?”
“Yes.”
“There was a gob of flies dunking in it yesterday.”
“I know. I couldn’t find the cover cloth.”
“We wouldn’t need no cloth if you hadn’t lost the goddamn lids. But you never looked for the cloth either, did you? It was hanging on a nail in the kitchen.”
Lyman looked quick above his father’s bowed head at Edith. Lyman made a face.
“But go on now,” Roy said. “Get the horses in and harnessed. We’re late already.”
Lyman looked once more at Edith and ambled off in his hard high-topped shoes and loose overalls towards the horse pasture. Then Roy was finished with the sickle bar. Edith went in to prepare something for lunch for the four of them; they would eat at noon in the shade of the wheat stack. It saved having to go to the house.
When Roy had the sickle bar slid into the front of the header and bolted in place so that the sharp section blades, set between iron spikes called guards, would move back and forth, slicing the wheat off close to the ground, Lyman walked six horses up to the back of the header, where Roy harnessed them, three at each side, alongside a heavy iron pole. Then Edith hitched two more horses to the wagon, to the header barge, and they drove rattling out of the yard towards the wheat field. When they entered the field they could see John Roscoe standing on the stack far over there in the corner, waiting for the first load. They stopped the horses so that the header would be ready to begin cutting where they had left off the night before at the near end of the field.