The Tie That Binds(29)

“Darned if I know,” Agnes said. “All I know is, after that last song he asks me what the time is, and I tell him, ‘Honey, it’s early yet. Only a quarter of eleven.’ And then he says to me, ‘What time do you lock up?’ And I say, ‘Not till midnight, honey. We got lots of time left.’ And then he says something strange, he says, ‘No, we don’t. I can’t wait no longer.’”

“And that’s when he took off?” Harry said.

“That’s it,” Agnes said. “Right then he left, without so much as good-bye or thank you, kindly.”

“Well,” Harry said. “I wouldn’t take it too personal. You was doing everything you could.”

“I know it,” Agnes said. “But wasn’t he cute?”

Then Wenzel Gerdts stopped talking. He removed the tobacco from his cheek and examined it as if there was something there that might explain Lyman’s leaving. The wad of Red Man was white and stringy looking, used up. He tossed it into the gutter, where it sopped up the brown puddle like a sponge. Across the street I could see my mother come out of a store with a hatbox under her arm.

“So you don’t know why he left so sudden,” my dad said.

“No, sir,” Wenzel said. “We never found out. I guess he just had to take himself a pee and he couldn’t hold it no longer.”

WELL, I don’t know that Lyman Goodnough was ever in his life what you might call cute. At least by 1940 he was not. By then, he was a gaunt middle-aged farmer, a little stooped over, and his hair was going. But of course it wasn’t his physical appearance that Agnes Wilson was talking about, and as for Wenzel Gerdts’s explanation of his sudden exit from the tavern that night, I don’t believe either that it was just a matter of Lyman’s having to relieve a full bladder. I think it was more that Lyman knew— and was able to remember despite the beer (he had certainly lived enough years in that house with his father to know very well and to remember too)—that when he got home there was going to be hell to pay, and the longer he stayed out the more of it there was going to be.

So he must have paid for it. Maybe not that night when he drove their old car into the yard and parked it in front of the picket fence, but at least the next morning during breakfast, since even Roy must have felt differently about waiting for a forty-one-year-old boy to come home from the tavern than he did about waiting for a twenty-five-year-old girl to return from a night at the movies. It wasn’t quite so urgent; he could wait till morning to give Lyman hell. But in the morning, then, Lyman must have had to sit there with his head pounding and his mouth tasting something that resembled pig slop, while the old man, his father, drank and in between drinks said something mean and crazy like, “So you ain’t learned yet.”

“Learned what?”

“That if you’re ever going to mount to a goddamn, you can’t stay out all Saturday night diddling.”





?6?

BUT AT LEAST Lyman had accomplished that first trial run. He had sampled beer and women and he had had his first real taste of escape. It must have been heady stuff to him. In the tavern that night he had actually done those things himself that before he had only heard about other men doing. Even his father’s ridiculous breakfast sermon the next morning must have been satisfying to him: it tied the knot; it closed the circle; it made everything seem bigger and better. To have to endure a lecture about diddling away a Saturday night at a time when his head was still pounding from the beer he had drunk the night before and while the fried eggs he had just managed to get down were threatening to come back up again—it made it all worth it; it was how you paid for having a good time. At forty-one Lyman was like a middle-aged teenager savoring his first hangover. But he didn’t make another attempt to escape right away. Instead he went for more than a year on the memory of that first time. He went on working.

Then in the following year on a Sunday morning in December another outside event occurred that made it possible for Lyman to take off and not come back at all. Thousands of miles away something happened that was so explosive that it not only sank ships and killed men in the Pacific, it blew the door off the hinges of the Goodnough barn in Holt County, Colorado. I’m talking of course about Pearl Harbor.

Pearl Harbor was hell and tragedy for most Americans, but it was what Lyman Goodnough was waiting for. Now I don’t mean that he would ever have hoped for something that murderous—he was desperate, damned desperate, but he wasn’t bloodthirsty—and I’m not saying that he had any idea in the world that the thing he was waiting for, the thing he hoped would happen, would ever take the form it did, because he sure as hell wasn’t any prophet either. Still it is true that he seemed to recognize almost immediately that Pearl Harbor was his ticket out, his open barn door. It was like the explosion in the waters of Hawaii was the pop of a starter’s gun in a track meet. Lyman heard it, he was ready, and he took off running. He began a race that he wouldn’t stop running until almost twenty years had passed and until he had seen half the cities in this country. My dad helped him.

In the middle of the night my dad put him on a train that was headed west. But that was later. That December Sunday in 1941, after morning chores, my dad and I sat at this same kitchen table and listened to the radio. It was exciting and it was awful. My dad said it was hell. But my mother went to church as usual. She put on a navy-blue dress and drove off in her new car to sing hymns and Christmas carols and to put her folded offering into the felt-muted plate that a gray usher passed among the pews. She prayed and afterwards she returned home to cook us a Sunday dinner of fried chicken and mashed potatoes as if nothing was wrong. I believe she spent the afternoon reading in the living room in a stuffed chair.