The Tie That Binds(18)

So Edith and my dad went to a few dances together. They went into town to a movie or two. They ate supper once in Norka, the next town west of Holt. But mainly they drove along the country roads in the sandhills in my dad’s old Ford, talking and laughing a little bit. It must have seemed enough to be together and to be moving, and almost always they had Lyman with them in the back seat.

Maybe that’s the reason why Roy let them go. With Lyman along to stick his head up between them from the back seat, it may have seemed all right to let Edith go out driving with my dad. I suppose he thought Lyman would put a halt to any funny stuff. Not that Lyman would say anything to anybody—Lyman didn’t do much talking in his life, except maybe to Edith—but he did always seem to be there. You’d be working on something in the machine shed or visiting with someone on Main Street, and then you’d look up and there Lyman would be, standing off a little ways, cleaning the dirt from under his fingernails with a jackknife, and you couldn’t be sure how long he’d been standing there or how much he’d seen or heard, but there he was all right, waiting like a stray dog to see what developed. So maybe that’s the reason why Roy allowed that six-or seven-week vacation, that brief lessening of his hold on the vise that summer, but that’s only a guess. It sure as hell wasn’t like him. Maybe he just wanted to see how far it would go, to kind of test the water. Or maybe he already had in mind what he was going to do next.

Another thing I can only guess at, concerning that summer, was why it took my dad so long. He was already thirty-two. He was still young, of course, still in his prime— strong, tough, black haired, the kind of man dogs and horses will come up to for a scratch and a pat without his ever having to whistle or snap his fingers. But for at least ten years there hadn’t been any reason to doubt that he would make a good go of ranching. He had been well established for quite a while; he had things in control. So maybe he was just waiting. He was a country boy too, after all, and every fall during harvest he was still there helping the Goodnoughs, watching Edith, talking to her some and joking with Lyman, while he himself drove the header now that Roy couldn’t.

Then his mother, my grandmother, died. That was in the spring of 1922. When he came in for supper one evening, he found her dead in the rocking chair with tobacco ashes spilled out onto her black dress, and he buried her up on that little rise north of the barn. He stuck her briar pipe under her hands on her chest. Edith was the only other person there. Together they shoveled the sand in onto the wood box.

“There ought to be a tree or bush, though,” Edith said. “Even if it’s just the thought of it, she ought to have some shade.”

The box was covered now. My dad was mounding the sand on top and packing it with the flat of his shovel.

“I mean in July and August,” Edith said. “I don’t like thinking of her up here then.”

“Be a awful long way to carry water.”

“A bucket or two every other day,” she said. “We could take turns.”

“What kind of tree?”

“A cottonwood. They grow fast, and if there’s any wind you can hear the leaves washing and turning in it. Unless you’d rather it was something else.”

“I believe she liked cottonwoods. She never said.”

“You could get one from along the Arikaree.”

“I’ll get one this afternoon,” he said. “I guess we’re done here now.”

They stood on the rise looking at the mound of damp sand, with the -switch grass and brome and sagebrush around it. They could see the house south of where they stood.

“Do you want me to leave now?” Edith said. “I will.”

“No. Why would I want that?”

“Maybe you want to be alone.”

“I’ll have that as soon as I go down to the house,” he said. “No. No, you look okay there. You might even look pretty if you didn’t have all that wet sand on your shoes.”

“Go on,” she said.

“And your big nose wasn’t peeling.”

“Go on, you,” she said. “But John, she was a good woman, wasn’t she? My mother thought so. She made a difference for my mother.”

“Sure, she made all the difference. But I’ll never forget how that son of a bitch left her.”

“Nor you either. He left you too.”

“Never mind me. I always had her. But she never had anything—just a six-year-old kid and a homestead he hadn’t even got started good yet. The son of a bitch. I don’t know how she stood it.”

“Some people can’t,” Edith said. “She did though. She was as strong as anything.”

“She shouldn’t of had to be that strong. That’s what I mean. He just left her out here—with me and a milk cow and one horse. Can you believe that? Hell, he even took the other horse.”

“I’ll help you water the tree tomorrow,” Edith said.

So maybe that’s what he was waiting for: his mother to die and Edith Goodnough to suggest some shade for her. Anyway, he planted a cottonwood and they took turns watering it—or watered it together, more like—each of them carrying a bucketful up to the rise in the evenings, and later he built a fence around it, and then they began going out together in his Ford car with Lyman along in the back seat for the ride.