The Tie That Binds(17)

Well, it happened to me once. Once was enough. It made me want to kill something. But I suppose it happened to Edith Goodnough a number of times. It had to. Edith milked cows twice a day, every day of the week, all those years.

BUT LYMAN, meanwhile what about Lyman? Because, after all, Lyman was stuck, too. I mean, he sure as hell wasn’t any sixteen-year-old kid from the city. He was just a tall big-boned mop-haired farm kid, with raw wrists and patched overalls and high-topped shoes, and he seemed to stumble about in a kind of daze, like he had lost something and couldn’t remember what it was he had lost, let alone know where to look for it. Lyman was stuck out here on that same sandhill farm, stuck in the same way his sister was. He was caught in the same vise, smothered in the same mud hole with just his chin (weak and pointed like his mother’s) sticking up above it, and I don’t believe Lyman was even able to get his head up enough to look around him, to see that there wasn’t a thing in the world out there but more of the same.

Roy saw to that. Roy, with his destroyed hands and his hard eyes, kept Lyman’s nose buried in it. It was like Lyman was just some ass-whipped mongrel dog that Roy kept at heel on a short chain, and any time Lyman got any notion otherwise, then his father would give him a sharp jerk to make him remember and pay attention. Because that’s the way it was for a long time: Roy kept Lyman’s nose buried right there at home. He made damn sure that Lyman never had time enough to hatch up any escape plans; he saw to it that Lyman spent all his brain and all his muscle and all his sweat right there planting those quarter sections of corn and wheat, planting the same corn rows year after year and then cultivating that corn and handpicking it, planting the same wheat fields and disking and harvesting, and in between times when he wasn’t working corn or working wheat, then he was exhausting himself with raking the same hayfields and stacking the same haystacks.

So, for a long time, Lyman stayed there working. And it wasn’t that there was anything particularly unusual about that—everyone in the country worked, worked hard too— but what made it worse for Lyman, the thing that must have made it seem like he had one of those barbed goat heads, one of these poisonous sandburs, buried forever in the back of his neck was the fact that all the time, every day, he was being ordered around. There was never any letup. It was Roy who decided everything. Roy ruled it all. If Lyman had had any say-so, if he had had any choice in when to plant the corn or where to stack the hay or how many acres of wheat he was going to plant, then it might have been all right. But he didn’t. He might just as well have pissed against the wind as to suggest anything to Roy.

For a long time then, while Lyman worked that sandhill farm, about all he could manage to do was to wait and to hope too, I suppose, hope in his dog-eyed dazed fashion, hope that someday somehow some kind of barn door or pasture gate would get left open just enough to let him squeeze through it, so that once he made it through and got his overalls unstuck, then he could take off and start running. And by God, never look back. Not even long enough to see if something was gaining on him.

Well, Lyman didn’t need much, you understand, but he sure as hell did need something.

THINGS went on the same for about seven years, and then it was Edith who made the first attempt to get out. Or at least for one summer she seemed to encourage the possibility of it. And if you’ve understood what I’ve said about her—or more to the point, if I’ve managed to make it plain enough—then it shouldn’t surprise you that it was Edith who made the first attempt to break free. Of the two of them, she was the one who had the sand. Besides, by 1922, when Edith was twenty-five, she must have been just about as beautiful as any woman can be. And I believe she still is, in her own clear-eyed way, and no more so than now, when in four days she will be eighty years old and still lying there in the damn hospital bed, waiting to get well.

But in the summer of 1922 she must have been just about perfect. She was slim and quick, with brown eyes and brown curly hair. She was woman breasted. She had strong hands. She was uncomplaining with plenty to com plain about. She was . . . but hell, I don’t know how to describe women. Only look here, this is more what I mean: she was quiet and focused and there for you in a way that didn’t make you feel awkward or clumsy even when you were worse than both of those things, as failing on your feet as a newborn colt, as drunk as a just-dropped calf. She made you want to hold her there in the front seat of that car on that country road, hold her, put your arm around her, kiss her, breathe her hair, talk to her, tell her all those things you hadn’t told anyone else before, all those things beyond the jokes and the surface facts of yourself, things you yourself didn’t know for sure you felt or thought until you heard yourself telling them to her in the dark in the stopped car with your arm around her, because somehow it would be all right if she heard them and they would be true then. Edith Goodnough must have been something that summer.

But, Christ, what a waste of life. It makes you sick to your stomach. It makes you want to do anything else in the world but think about her.

YOU SEE, Edith and my dad, John Roscoe, went out together that summer. And if you think about that for a minute you’ll understand at least one of the reasons why I feel about Edith the way I do. For six or seven weeks that summer, Edith and my dad went spooning or sparking or whatever it was people called it then when two people drive out together in an old Ford car with the windows rolled down and the dark air blows in on them, carrying that green smell of sage in with it. Driving in the car, they turn towards one another now and then, and then more and more often as the evening fades; they laugh a little bit about something that may seem funny to them only, while the stars have begun to snap overhead, and behind them there’s only that dust billowing up in the road after the car has passed.