The Tie That Binds(21)

“You are good for me,” Edith said.

“Why sure. Old Lyman will be as happy as a dead sow in clover.”

Edith felt about in her hair to see if she had all of the grass combed out. “Give me another kiss,” she said. “And stop all this talking about outhouses and dead sows.”

THEY WENT HOME THEN, out of the sandhills where, for a while, they had been alone in the sage and the blue light, then north on the highway to the corner and east almost a mile, before they got to the Goodnoughs’, to find Lyman. They didn’t find him, though, not right away. They had to stop the car and look for him along the roadside in the tall grass, and they didn’t find him until they turned the headlights of the car on again. Even then they didn’t find him immediately. He was lying on his side, rolled into himself like a kid, asleep with spit dribbled onto his chin. He was a good fifteen feet off the road. Edith brushed him off.

“Are you awake now?” she said.

“Where’s Pa?”

“In the house. Come on. Can you get in the car?”

My dad drove them into the yard and squeezed Edith’s hand before she got out. Then he drove the half mile home, and Edith and Lyman walked into the house together. Roy was waiting for them in the kitchen. He was sitting at the kitchen table in his work pants and long underwear, with his raw hands and one good finger resting on the white enameled wood in front of him. Some things weren’t any simpler then than they are now.

“Get upstairs,” he told Lyman.

Lyman looked at Edith. He was fully awake now and aware, but he went upstairs anyway. The barn door had just banged shut again for him.

“You’re done with that,” Roy said to Edith. “That’s enough of Roscoe.”

Edith stood on the other side of the table, waiting, watching her father feel his little finger over the bad nubs of his right hand. His finger looked like a claw raking dead meat.

“I seen him stop the car,” Roy said. “I seen the lights on the road go off and come on again. But that’s done with.”

“I’m twenty-five,” Edith said.

“That don’t mean a diddle.”

“John’s thirty-two.”

“That don’t mean a goddamn, either. He’s a half-breed bastard, and you’re done with him.”

“He’s not either.”

“He is if I say he is, goddamn it. And you’re his whore. Now get to bed. You must be all wore out after tonight.”

“Shut up, Daddy. You don’t know what you’re saying.”

Roy stood up then; the chair banged down behind him onto the wooden floor. He reached across the table at her with his finger, but she stepped back.

“You don’t tell me to shut up,” he yelled. “I’m your father. I’ll say any goddamn thing I please. I told you to go to bed. Now get.”

“I will go to bed,” Edith said. “But I won’t listen to you say that.”

“This is my house. I built it. I’ll say anything I want in these rooms. Do you understand me?”

“It’s my house too. And Lyman’s. And it was mother’s before she died.”

“I wish she could see you now. She’d hate the damn sight of you.”

“No, she wouldn’t,” Edith said. “She would not.”

“By God, don’t tell me, you goddamn—”

But Edith walked past him then—he was insane, wild-eyed, stump waving—and went into the living room and up the stairs to the bedroom. He was still yelling at her: “You’re done with him, you hear me? Goddamn sow to a Roscoe, you’re done now. You’re through. You whore. You hear me?”

THE NEXT DAY Roy used more than just his voice. In the afternoon while Edith was snapping beans in the kitchen and Lyman was mowing hay in the field, Roy Goodnough kicked the chopping block over with his boot and pushed it rolling with the heels of his hands across the yard into the barn. There he righted it again under a crossbeam in the center alley of the barn. The chopping block was a sawed-off stump of an elm tree, with deep ax marks and dark dried blood on it where the slack heads of chickens had been chopped off. Over the crossbeam above him Roy looped a hemp rope and tied a full-handled ax to the rope so that the ax would fall and cut deep into the block.

He experimented with it twice, pulling the ax up almost to the crossbeam to give it enough weight to do what he wanted it to do when it fell. Then he pulled it up one more time and clamped the rope tight between his right elbow and his ribcage. The ax hung ready above him in the dusty horse-shit air. He waited until it was still, no longer swinging. A speckled pigeon watched it all from a high perch in the barn rafters, and then he laid his one finger down on the block and released the rope. The pigeon blinked a pink eye when the ax fell, thunking through his finger into the block.

Only it didn’t just cut his finger off. Maybe he moved a little when he released his elbow-hold on the rope and then saw the ax falling and falling, taking too long to fall. Or maybe he hadn’t experimented enough. Whatever went wrong, the ax chopped through the top knuckle of his hand, splintering it bad as it smashed through bone and joint and gristle. But it must have still been satisfactory.

He pinched up the twitching finger from the block like it was just a chicken’s head, pinched it up between his two hand stumps and carried it bloody into the house to the kitchen and dropped it into the bowl of snapped beans on the table in front of Edith. At first she didn’t move, didn’t speak. It bled a little among the beans. Then she looked up from the bowl at her father.