The Tie That Binds(33)
Nobody out here, not even Edith, saw him all that time. I know that for a fact. But I also know, since I’ve seen every damned one of them, that he did send Edith at least one picture postcard each year with a color likeness on it of the biggest skyscraper there was in whatever city he happened to be stopped in right then. I also know, because I’ve seen them too—good Christ, yes—that every year come Christmas he sent her a package of twenty-dollar bills tied up with a red bow. But, like I say, he never sent himself home.
He didn’t even come home when Roy finally died and stopped fouling good air in 1952. Maybe Lyman didn’t know the old man was dead, not in time anyway to come back for the funeral, even assuming he had wanted to. He wouldn’t have been easy to locate. Edith would have had to send word to the last address scribbled on the last picture postcard and hope he was still there, since apparently he never left any forwarding address when he moved on, and besides, the only return address he ever used at any time was just general delivery, and that without bothering to pick up his mail very often, because why should he?
Or consider this: maybe Lyman was afraid to come back even then. Maybe he thought until the old man was a good nine years dead with the ground heavy sunk and filled over him and the grass growing thick on it, that it still wasn’t safe, that somehow the old bastard’s ghost or spirit or voice, whatever, might still be active enough to call him back, lecture him about Saturday-night diddling, and then make him stay there to rake hay and plow sand. And if that was the reason, then you could say Lyman was right to stay away even then, because you couldn’t be real sure the old son of a bitch was dead even when you were actually standing there in front of his coffin and saw him lying there like a slab of mean yellow granite. With his head on a satin pillow he still didn’t look any thinner or stiffer or any less like a ramrod than he did when he was supposed to be alive. His eyes were closed; that was all. That and the fact that those red stumps of his sticking out beneath his white shirt cuffs had finally quit twitching and waving.
Anyway, whatever the reason, Lyman stayed away for nine years more after the old man was dead and buried deep inside that little cemetery, making it two Goodnough headstones so far there beside Otis Murray’s cornfield two miles east of Holt, and then he did come back. He was a little bit tired; his eyes were a little dazed from the sights he had seen, and I suppose there were other parts of him that were a little jaded too from the pleasure he had tasted, but he was still all right, more or less. He was still of some use to his sister. For a while.
ONLY, MEANWHILE, there were those twenty years for her to wait through and to endure. And how did she manage that? What was she doing all that time Lyman stayed away and bought Pontiacs and sent her picture postcards? Nothing.
Well, no, not nothing exactly. She didn’t just do nothing all that time. But she sure God didn’t go traveling off across the North American continent, either. She didn’t even go those seven miles into Holt very often. She stayed home. Jesus, that’s about all you can say: Edith Goodnough stayed home. And if you figure it up, if you do your arithmetic from those chiseled dates in the cemetery, then you know Edith was seventeen when her mother died in 1914; she was fifty-five when the old man died in 1952; and she was sixty-four when Lyman finally returned in 1961. It amounts to a lifetime of staying home.
When Lyman left for L. A. and for what he thought was going to be at least a good hitch in the army, it got worse almost immediately. Edith was still doing all the work at home she always did: she was still milking cows, separating milk, cooking meals, washing dishes, and—everyday, don’t forget—still cutting Roy’s meat into bites and filling the buttonholes of his shirt with buttons once he had pushed his stumps through the sleeves. But in the following spring, at a time when Lyman was already beginning to save that airplane-factory money of his and to contemplate Pontiacs, Edith got more to do.
My dad and I first saw it one morning from the gravel road beside the Goodnough cornfield on our way to check cattle. I was driving, I remember, and feeling full of myself because I was actually behind the wheel and out on the road itself, not just turning circles in the barnyard or cutting eights in the horse pasture. So I suppose I had already ground through first and second gear and was abusing high—yes, I was flat pounding along the country road, imagining myself to be Holt County’s special gift to Ford transmissions—when my dad said:
“Goddamn it, slow down. Stop this son of a bitch.”
I thought, Now what have I done? Have I busted something? I stopped the pickup but it wasn’t me. My dad was looking out the window at the Goodnoughs’ cornfield.
“Now what do you call that?” he said. “What in the goddamn hell’s he think he’s doing?”
Because there was a tractor out there in the field with a one-way disk behind it. The tractor was coming toward us from across the corn stubble, and as it got closer I could see what my dad meant. There were two heads sticking up behind the body of the tractor, one just visible above it and the other quite a lot higher.
“Goddamn him,” my dad said. “Now maybe he’ll manage to fall off and get more than just his fingers mangled. Which I don’t care, but I suppose she still does. Jesus Christ.”
The tractor came on toward us, grew larger, louder, and then it was obvious that it was Edith driving it. She had her straw gardening hat on and she was sitting there on the tractor seat behind the exhaust stack looking no bigger than a ten-year-old girl. She had both hands clenched tight on the steering wheel, and the disk furrows behind her were as straight as she could make them. And of course it was the old man standing up beside her. We could see him waving his arms, pointing those damn blunt stumps past her head like he was some kind of live Halloween scarecrow and her straw hat was just some yellow corn shock. It made you sick.