The Tie That Binds(50)

When they had made the complete circuit of the postcards, Edith sat him down again on the couch behind his opened, emptied suitcases. “Now there’s something more I want to show you,” she said.

“Can’t we have some more pie first?”

“No, you can’t. Not yet. I’ve got a surprise for you.”

She went over to the bureau and brought back that shoe box of hers, the one with those damned unspent, unused, never-even-counted twenty-dollar bills wrapped in bows.

“What’s this?” he said.

“Yours. Ours now.”

“How come . . .”

He looked up at her from the couch, and she was staring down at him out of all those years. He didn’t know what to say. He rifled through the fussed-over bills, stacked them in piles, counted them out on the couch.

“That makes twenty-seven hundred dollars,” he said. “How come you never used it?”

“Because.”

“You never spent a one?”

“No.”

“Look here, Sandy,” he said. “She never spent my money.”

“I know it,” I said. “I’ve seen that box before.”

I stood up to leave then. Edith tried to keep me there for more dessert, but I was full. I was too full, for the moment, of everything.

They walked with me to the back porch door. From my pickup I looked back at them; they stood waving at me from the lighted doorway—a tall gaunt bald-headed man in a winter suit beside a trim little lady with shining brown eyes—two kids in their sixties with arms linked.

I went home. In the kitchen I poured myself a long shot of Jack Daniel’s without water or ice, threw it down, poured another and seated myself in the easy chair in front of the television to watch the ten-o’clock news and weather. Lyman was home and Edith was pleased. Bleary eyed, I watched Rusty Thompson, the Denver weather man, predict sun for tomorrow.

SO EDITH and Lyman Goodnough got to be kids for a while. It was like they were just-bloomed teenagers, full of overdue sap and pent-up vinegar. The time was ripe for it, too. The country, remember, and even Holt County, was up for grabs during that period. I’m talking here about the 1960s, when kids everywhere were growing hair and wearing costumes, showing their breasts and generally refusing to do whatever it was their folks knew damn well they should do, had by God better do if they knew what was good for them, until some of them began to get permanent greetings and immediate marching orders from a Texas president, and then it turned out that it wasn’t so good for them after all, because so many never came back alive. It was a stupid war. We lost two boys from Holt County to it. They were our insane ante in that murderous poker game. But I’m not going to talk about that: too much has already been said about it and none of it helps. No, I’m talking about my neighbors, the Goodnoughs, who were also kids in the sixties.

I suppose you could say that what happened to them was like they were having a second childhood—only that wouldn’t be accurate. You can’t have seconds of something until after you’ve had firsts of the thing. And of course they never had firsts. Ada Twamley, their mother, had been too weak chinned, too consumed with dreaming backwards, to see to it that Edith and Lyman were allowed to be kids while she herself still lived; then she died and left them alone in total charge and control of the old man. And that old son of a bitch didn’t believe in any such luxuries; kids were laborers to him, custom-made, self-sired farmhands to be ordered around however, whenever, he deemed fit. Besides, there were always those stumps of his and that routine meanness, as if he figured it was not only his God-given right but his particular duty too to be forever mean and harsh. But I already told you some of that, told you too that he released them finally by dying in that upstairs bedroom with his mouth locked open. Of course it took Lyman nine years to realize it. But, anyway, now he had; he was home again. For the first time in their lives, Edith and her brother were absolutely alone on that farm in that house down the road from me.

They didn’t quite know what to make of it at first. What in the world were they going to do with all that vacation time, that freedom from duty and direction? Well, they didn’t do anything rash, exactly. On her part Edith learned to sip gimlets from a barroom goblet, to go a little giggly and pink cheeked in a nice sort of girlish way. And as for Lyman, once he was home and realized there wasn’t anyone there to tell him what to do, Lyman refused to change clothes. What I mean is, he wouldn’t wear work shoes or overalls again. He went on dressing up every day like he believed he was a banker, a retired mortician. Every day he put on his wing tips, his dress pants, shirt, and tie. He was definitely finished with farming; he wasn’t going to plow sand anymore. As far as he was concerned, I could go on farming their place just as I had done for the past ten years. They got their share of the profits regularly; they had that twenty-seven hundred dollars Edith had saved; it was fine with Lyman. So now they had both money and freedom, and a new green Pontiac waiting outside at the picket gate.

They put miles on it. If the slightest urge took them— and it took them about three times a week—they went to town. To see a show, watch a softball game, buy some blue grapes, get a sack of Bing cherries, whatever. Why hell, they even started to drive out Saturday night to dance at the Holt Legion. There they’d be, Edith sipping gimlets and Lyman nursing Coors beer in a corner booth, until Shorty Stovall and the boys struck up their rendition of the “Tennessee Waltz,” and then they would rise and slide slow around the floor in a kind of funeral two-step, her hand on the padded shoulder of his houndstooth suit coat. Also they drove to Denver, went to Elitch’s Amusement Park, viewed the summer show at Central City, toured Estes Park, ate the trout dinner at the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs, watched the buffalo herds trot across the highway in the Black Hills. By God, where didn’t they go? It got so they were a regular traveling concern.