The Tie That Binds(36)

So I sat down in the elm shade while she returned to the house to start the old man, butter his bread, tuck his napkin in. I leaned back against the trunk of the tree. Now what am I going to do? I thought. I’ve got to eat two women’s lunches and I’m not even hungry. I’m too damn hot to be hungry. The shade freckled across the grass up the side of the house. I took my cap off to let the breeze blow my hair.

Then she came back with a feast on a platter—ice tea, fried chicken, potatoes, peas in butter, fresh bread, homemade ice cream. I wanted to whine and kick my feet, but I ate all she gave me and heard someone with my voice ask for seconds. I suppose it was a cause worth dying of bloat for.

“You don’t have to do this,” she said, watching me. “Any of this, you know.”

“You don’t either.”

“I want to,” she said.

“So do I,” I said. I was half in love with her myself.

“I know, but just the same, Sandy. And you thank your daddy for me, too. Will you?”

She knew all right. She knew. I was there driving the tractor so she wouldn’t have to and I was stuffing myself stupid while she watched me with those brown grown up-woman’s eyes—because my dad had sent me. I guess it was enough too, because I did all the tractor driving there was to do at the Goodnoughs’ that summer, raked hay, cultivated corn, all of it, and ate my mother’s lunch on the half-mile walk to and from their house, hiding the bucket in the soapweeds between times, because how was I supposed to tell my mother I didn’t want or need her lunch either? She wasn’t wild about my being over there in the first place. She had her suspicions.

Anyway, I think I grew three inches that summer and began to get hair in places I didn’t have hair before and to gain weight. I was too busy to notice it much, though, and too confused to care.

WHEN THE SUMMER ended I went back to school where things were a lot less complicated. I began high school that year and played a clumsy halfback on the freshman football team and held sweaty hands at a dance or two with a plump little girl named Doris Sweeter. Doris is married and divorced now in Denver, I hear, and the best our football team could manage was a nothing-to-nothing win over Norka, but none of that matters anymore—didn’t matter much then either—because at least in school I didn’t have to stand still while somebody held me hard by the overalls and asked me to do something he couldn’t do himself without first killing someone in order to do it. And nobody was fanning my face with ruined hands or screaming insanity at me, and nobody was watching me eat while she wished maybe I was somebody else or at least her own boy, and if things had been different I might have been, too. No, school seemed like a positive relief after the summer.

But it didn’t last long enough. Spring came. So it started all over again. Only this time my dad wouldn’t have it, not any of it; he made it all stop. But at first it was just the same: I was driving the pickup and we were going to check cattle or fix fence, something of the sort, and it was Saturday morning, early, bright, with not enough wind to blow the sand off the tops of the hills, and there, out there in the field, there was that damn John Deere tractor again. Two heads were sticking up beyond the exhaust stack, one somewhat higher than the other, and the tractor was coming toward us from across the corn stubble pulling a disk. My dad didn’t have to tell me to stop. I braked the pickup to the side of the road, and this time he not only opened the door, he got out. “You stay here,” he said.

He walked down through the weeds in the ditch, stepped up over the fence, and stood waiting in the stubble on the exact ground the tractor would have to use if it was to make another turn and go back out across the field. But no matter what the tractor did, my dad wasn’t going to move; he was planted there. The tractor came on. The two heads above it took shape, became Edith’s straw hat and the old man’s hard face. There were stump-arms ruining the air above her hat. The tractor still came on. Its discharge and explosion increased steadily as if someone had loaded it with firecrackers, lady fingers when it was far across the field, and now cherry bombs as it got nearer. My dad stood still, waiting.

Have you ever seen one of those documentary movies, or a TV news clip, say, showing a little white farmhouse with some outbuildings spread around it, and off in the distance but not too far off, not far enough, sure not, there is a tornado coming? It’s all darkness and huge, massive, the tornado coming black all the time and the white house standing there waiting for the damage. And you know it’s all inevitable; you know it’s going to get it: the windows are going to burst, fly out in space, scatter like thrown water, and the roof’s going to crash, and you wish the damn fool running the projector would have the sense to reverse the goddamn film so that afterwards you wouldn’t have to note the straw sticking out of any tree trunk or watch while an old woman lifts the chimney bricks and the two-by-fours and the window shade off the little girl in her pink dress. If you have seen that then you know how my dad looked waiting in front of that tractor. I won’t forget it. I won’t forget how his back looked.

But the tractor came on and I thought: Jesus, at least her feet can reach the brake pedals. At least she will remember to kill the throttle. At least by now she knows how to turn the goddamn steering wheel. Doesn’t she?

Because my dad wasn’t going to move. And he didn’t move. He didn’t have to. Edith got the tractor stopped a foot in front of him; it stayed there racing in idle like a leashed dog growling, wanting to gobble his pants zipper. The old man was wild.