The Tie That Binds(34)

When they closed on the end of the field near us, we could hear him yelling at her too: “Brake it. Brake it. Now turn it. Can’t you turn this thing?”

My dad opened the pickup door. I thought he was going to get out. “I ought to killed him when I had the chance,” he said. “By God, I will yet. The dirty son of a bitch.”

But somehow Edith got the tractor turned and got the disk headed back out across the field. As she was making the turn she had looked up once, quick, toward my dad in the pickup, not for help, I don’t think, but like she was still saying, Yes, I know. But it’s okay; it’s all right, and then she was past us, going away from us, with the disk rolling up dirt and dust behind her and the noise of the tractor decreasing in the widening distance between her and us.

We watched them out into the middle of the field. Then my dad finally spoke again. “Did you see the belt?” he said.

“What belt?”

“That belt contraption he had buckled across behind him. Between the fenders.” “What for?”

“So he wouldn’t fall off. So he could stand there and work his arms. So he could at least protect hisself even if he didn’t give a good piss in hell about her.”

“I didn’t see it,” I said.

“Never mind. You saw enough. Start this pickup.”

So I jerked the pickup into gear again and drove away toward the cow pasture. My dad wasn’t paying any attention to how I was driving anymore; he didn’t watch the speedometer. He was watching out the window, and every once in a while I noticed him sort of shake his head as if he was coming out of a hard sleep, as if he was trying to change what he had seen.

But it didn’t change. It went on like that all spring. Edith and the old man finished the disking, and then the drilling too. At our place my dad got more and more silent; at the dinner table my mother would tell him what was happening in town, serve him the latest Holt County gossip with our new garden peas, or she would detail for him her complaints about the scandalous manner in which Mrs. Vince Higgims was leading Rebecca Circle at the Methodist Church, but he wouldn’t respond. He wouldn’t even make his familiar joke about what he called her church gang, her heifer herd for Jesus. I doubt that he was listening to her at all; there was something else, something more important, and it was playing nonstop in his head, and he was concentrated on that.

Then in the long days of July, in that dry heat, he woke up. He discovered that now Roy had begun to have Edith cut hay too. The sun rose at five and set at nine, and most of that time she had been out there under it while he stood over her on the tractor and told her where to turn one minute and when to turn the next and in between times told her how fast. That evening my dad called me over to him, held me hard by the front of my overalls.

“Listen to me,” he said. “Are you listening? I want that stopped.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I want you to go over there in the morning and drive that tractor yourself. Can you do that?”

“Yes, but—”

“Just a minute; I never said it was going to be easy. But you do it. I’d do it myself, only I’d have to kill him first. Understand?”

“All right,” I said. “Yes.”

His eyes were looking hard at me; I couldn’t see anything else. There was something awful in his eyes, hurt and anger, I suppose, but something more too, something further back.

“And, son, if he says one word to you . . . if that miserable cock says just one word—”

“I know,” I said.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll tell your mom to pack you a good lunch.”

He let go of my overalls and I went in to bed.

Early the next morning I was waiting beside the Goodnoughs’ tractor when Edith and Roy came out to start work. Edith smiled at me. “Why, here’s Sandy,” she said.

But the old man wasn’t smiling. He was looking at me like I was a form of cutworm or a new strain of corn blight.

“What do you want?” he said.

“Nothing. I came over to help out.”

“Oh? And who asked you to help out?”

“Nobody.”

“That’s right: nobody. So you better just hightail it back to home.”

“I can drive the tractor,” I said.

“You can talk manure too,” he said.

“I can, though. I do at home.”

“Hah,” he said. “Straddled on somebody’s pants leg. Or diddling the wheel out in the machine shed.”

“No. In the field. By myself.”

“Sandy doesn’t mean any harm,” Edith said. “Leave him alone.”

“He’s a runt,” the old man said. “His ears is still wet.”

“At least let him try. He walked all the way over here.”

“It would speed things up,” I said. “Maybe it would free Edith to do something else. Miss Goodnough.”

I gave her a look and she winked at me. “I am way behind on the canning,” she said.

The old man looked at her and then looked over at the garden behind the wire fence. The beans and peas were beginning to wrinkle on the vines; the radishes had gone to seed, and the whole garden needed hoeing.

“Go ahead, Sandy,” Edith said. “Climb up.”