The Tie That Binds(4)
“What are you doing?” he says. “You can’t do that.”
“Son,” I say, “get your ass off my place. And don’t you ever come back here. Understand? I don’t ever want to see you again.”
He starts to say something more; his mouth opens beneath the moustache, then it closes. He turns and walks away from me over to his car. He gets in and for a minute watches me through the window. Then he turns the key; the car moves, spraying gravel out behind him as he leaves. I watch him out the lane onto the road back to town. When I can’t see him anymore I look at the scribble on the piece of paper I took from his notebook. It reads: Sanders Roscoe—fiftyish—heavyset—obstinate—Goodnough’s neighbor—Good-no. Then I tear it up and drop it underfoot. My boot heel grinds it into the cow shit until it’s disappeared, gone, turned into just brown nothing. The damn squirt.
But it didn’t do any good. He found out anyway. It got into the papers anyway. He must have talked to Bud Sealy again and some of those others in town. They put it on the front page. That’s why they’re talking of trial now. His damn newspaper account sparked this trial talk.
SOME OF IT was even right. Some of what they threw on the front page between those two pictures of Edith and Lyman was even the truth, because I guess even a Denver newspaper reporter can walk into the Holt County Courthouse and copy down the date from a homestead record, and then, after he gets that straight, drive on out to the cemetery and read what it says on the three headstones that are standing there side by side in brown grass, away off at the edge of the cemetery, where there’s just space enough left over between that last stone and Otis Murray’s cornfield for one more grave. Because yes, he managed to get that much straight. And after he got it, his paper managed to arrange it clever on the front page.
They had Edith’s picture over here on the left and Lyman’s picture opposite it, over here on the right, with both of them staring into the middle so that they seemed to not only be looking at one another but to also be studying what was between them. And what was there, between them, like it was some kind of funeral notice or maybe just the writing on the inside cover of a family Bible, was this:
ROY GOODNOUGH BORN, CEDAR COUNTY, IOWA, 1870
ADA TWAMLEY BORN, JOHNSON COUNTY, IOWA, 1872
R. GOODNOUGH & A. TWAMLEY, MARRIED 1895
GOODNOUGHS, HOMESTEAD, HOLT COUNTY, COLORADO,
1896
EDITH GOODNOUGH BORN 1897
LYMAN GOODNOUGH BORN 1899
ADA TWAMLEY GOODNOUGH DIES 1914
ROY GOODNOUGH DIES 1952
And then, finally, below that there was just one more date, that last one, the one that was the reason for there even being a story on the front page at all:
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 31, 1976
So that much of it—that much of what that Denver reporter found out and that much of what his paper printed—was right. But that wasn’t all of it. That wasn’t even all of that much. It didn’t touch on the how; it never mentioned the why. And even when it went on to repeat what Bud Sealy must have told him about those half-dozen chickens and that old dog and Lyman asleep on his cot while Edith rocked, even then it wasn’t complete. For one thing, it left out Roy’s stubs. For another, it didn’t say a word about Lyman’s wait, nor his Pontiacs and postcards and twenty-dollar bills. For still another, it didn’t tell how Edith herself waited, first for one to die and then for the other to come back, and what she did with him when he did come back, and how, finally, she ever managed to live through those years of travelogue. It never mentioned my dad.
But then, to tell truth, I don’t guess that Denver reporter could have written about those things, even if he’d have wanted to, because nobody told him about them in the first place so that he could go on and write them up after he was told. I wouldn’t tell him. I would have been the one to tell him too—Bud Sealy was right about that. But I wouldn’t. By God, I would not.
But listen now, if a person didn’t want to print it up in some damn newspaper or throw it all over the front page between two pictures that were arranged so the people in the pictures had to stare at what was printed between them like it was a thing to be ashamed of—no, if a person just wanted to sit down quiet in that chair across the table from me and, since it’s Sunday afternoon, just drink his coffee while I talked, and then if he just didn’t want to rush me too much—well, then, I could tell it. I would tell it so it would be all, and I would tell it so it would be right.
Because listen:
?2?
MOST OF WHAT I’m going to tell you, I know. The rest of it, I believe.
I know, for example, that they started in Iowa, like the papers said.
I believe, on the other hand, that he must have seen flyers talking about it. Maybe he saw notices in the Iowa papers and government brochures too, all talking about it, saying there were still some acres of it left out here and if he proved on some of it, stayed on it, it was his to homestead.
He was twenty-five. He had married late. Ada had married later—for a woman, I’m talking about, since this was eighty-two years ago and she was already twenty-three. But things like age and time would have bothered him in a different way than they did her, because the pictures I have seen of her show that she was a small thin woman with eyes that seemed too big for her head—one of those women with blue veins showing at both temples. A woman like that—tight strung, nervous, too fine altogether for what was wanted of her—never should have married somebody like him, and she paid for it. He was a hard stick. He was all stringy arms and legs, with an Adam’s apple like a hickory nut that jugged up and down when he chewed or said something, and I don’t suppose he was much more than just getting used to having a woman in his bed before he was already thinking something like: Here I been married a half year already, but I’m still at home. I’m still shoveling corn to another man’s hogs, still spooning soup at somebody else’s dinner table. Jesus God.