The Tie That Binds(47)

Dear Sis,

How are you? I am in Cleveland. Boy, it’s hot.

Love, your brother,

Lyman

That’s the sort of nonsense he wrote to her, and how she managed to live on just that much, I have no idea. If it had been me I’d have torn the damn things up and thrown them out with the chicken scraps and the hog slop—and then goddamned him again for not coming home yet, the slow son of a bitch. But Edith didn’t feel that way at all. I think she was convinced that he at least was having himself a good time seeing this country’s sights, traveling, broadening himself, so that when he eventually did come home—and she never doubted that he would return finally—things would be better again for her too, that some of his recent experience of the world would rub off on her and add something bright to her life. It was all a vague dream to her. I don’t understand it completely, but I suppose her loneliness fed it, made dreaming possible while the years passed and she went on adding to her postcard collection and taking walks at night under these high white stars.

Of course the rest of us thought he would never come back. He’d been gone so long what difference would it make anyway? Besides, what we remembered of him hadn’t been something you would pin much hope on—a tall, lank bachelor with thinning hair and loose red hands that played vacantly with jackknives and straps on metal suitcases. No, I figured the only way he’d ever return would be in a wood box shoved in amongst piles of crated fruit on a railroad refrigerator car. Someday, I figured, the manager of some cheap boardinghouse in Buffalo, New York, or Trenton, New Jersey, would happen to remember that he hadn’t seen Lyman lately, that the rent was overdue, or that there seemed to be some rank, foul stench oozing out of that room upstairs; so he would mount those dark stairs, knock, get no answer, then try his master key and discover Lyman dead as fish on the sagging bed, and then after looking in his wallet and removing rent money and a little extra for the trouble, he would ship his cold stiff body home to a rural address in Holt County, Colorado. But Edith knew better than the rest of us.

She was certain that he would come back. I remember spending a long evening sitting next to her on the couch, with the postcards pinned neat on the walls around us, during that first winter after Clevis and Twyla had gone. It must have been soon after Christmas because she had a new package of twenty-dollar bills.

“Did I tell you Lyman’s in Pittsburgh?”

“Is he?” I said.

“Yes. He sent me another card and this packet of money.”

She handed me the money to admire. I turned it over a couple of times and gave it back. “What’s he doing in Pittsburgh?”

“I believe he’s doing very well.”

Then she stood up from the couch and brought a shoe box from the bureau and set it on my lap. “Open it,” she said.

“Now, Edith,” I said.

“It’s all right. There’s no secret between us, Sandy.”

So I opened it. Not that it was any surprise to me; I knew what I’d find inside—all those packets of unused, unspent dollar bills, all of them twenties, all still wrapped like a seven-year-old kid might wrap them in red bows. It was obvious which packets had been sent first, too. The bows tied around the earliest bills looked frayed and ragged, as if they had been handled too often in the long silence of evening, as if they had been fussed over—not for themselves, though, because I don’t think for a minute that the actual fact or worth of the money meant a piddling thing to her. I doubt that she even counted it. It wasn’t money she needed; she had all the farm profits. Instead, those damn bungled packets of green stuff seemed to represent something else to her, something more, and just because they had been tied, stamped, and mailed by Lyman’s hand. I suppose she thought they were proof of something.

“But why don’t you spend some of this?” I said. “Buy something. You could take a trip yourself. Get away for a while.”

“Oh, I will,” she said. “When he comes back.”

“But that might not happen, Edith.”

“Of course it will.” She looked at me like I was a little slower than usual. “Of course he’ll come back.”

“Okay,” I said. “He will then.”

She took the shoe box from me and put the lid on it. “There wouldn’t be any point if he doesn’t,” she said. “Would there?”

So it was then that I put my arm around her. I felt so damn sorry for her. It seemed to me she had lost so much of her life to waiting, and she was still waiting even now. And for what? For nothing, I thought. For a wandering bum, a damn mush-minded permanent escapee, her brother. So I pulled her close; she rested her head against my shoulder. She was thin and small. Under the cotton of her dress I could feel the points of her shoulders and the clean edges of her shoulder blades. Her hair had grown a little gray at the temples but it was still curly and still primarily dark, and her eyes were still clear brown, though behind them there was a kind of pained, distant look. The skin of her cheeks, with threading wrinkles beside her eyes, was smooth. So we sat together for a moment on the couch, and I ran my hand over her hair, cupping her head, and out of affectionate concern for her I kissed the top of her head, and then—smelling her hair—I began to kiss the side of her face, her smooth soft cheek, and then it was not just concern that I was feeling, and suddenly I was pressing against her mouth and she was not resisting or stopping me but allowing it to continue and maybe even returning some of it. I slipped my hand into the back of her dress and felt the silk there, the points of bone along her spine and her bra strap, and then it stopped. I stood up.