The Tie That Binds(60)
“I didn’t want to spoil their fun,” she said. “They were having such a good time.”
“Yes. You did the right thing.”
“I don’t regret that part of it. Do you?”
“No. I don’t regret that part of it. Will you come downstairs with me now?”
“In a minute,” she said. “I’m all right. I was thinking about Edith.”
A half mile east of us Edith had pain and Lyman to contend with. Lyman was becoming a child.
?10?
IT DIDN’T HAPPEN right away. It took almost ten years more for it to get so bad that there seemed to be only one option. But long before the end of 1976 there were already beginning to be too many signs to ignore—which looking at it now, while telling you about it this long quiet Sunday afternoon in April, reminds me—signs that pointed even then to his steady slide and eventual total collapse into an old man’s awful form of childhood. He became as cranky and unpredictable as a two-year-old. For one thing his car was gone.
They totaled his Pontiac. He never had another one. At about the same time we were burying that little box of ours on the hill above the barn, Bernie’s Wrecking Service winched Lyman’s last green Pontiac up out of the ditch weeds and towed it to town without salvaging even the tires. It’s still there in the junkyard west of the city water-treatment ponds. You might want to take a look at that too before you leave this area; the car stands in the middle of the weedy lot with the hood propped open by some high school kids who scrounged for cheap engine parts but gave up and left without thinking to close the hood. It’s getting pretty rusty. The windows are all smashed out, and the blood inside on the upholstery looks as if it was just coffee stains. In fact you would probably take it for that, believe it was just coffee stains, unless you happened to wonder why there was so much of it upside down staining the roof material around the dome light like it had puddled there.
Lyman stayed in the hospital for almost three months after the wreck. It was close to Halloween before Doc Schmidt released him. I drove Edith into town to bring him home, and he looked like maybe the nurses had gotten him up to go trick or treating. Around his neck he was still wearing a padded horse-collar affair, and his face showed green and yellow bruises; on his bald head there were crosshatched welts where they had stitched his scalp. When we walked him out the door and down the hospital steps, he seemed somewhat shrunken—shrunken and old-man brittle and confused. The sun hurt his eyes. On the way home when we passed Five Mile Bridge he stared rigidly ahead without a word.
At the Goodnough place I helped Edith get him out of the car and take him inside to rest. We laid him on the couch in the living room, where the postcards he had sent her during those twenty years of his travel and escape from the old man were still pinned in neat rows on the walls. He closed his eyes and went to sleep with his freckled hands lapsed onto his chest. Edith and I went out to the kitchen.
“Do you have time for coffee?” she said.
“I’ve got to get back to work. But Mavis and I will be checking every day to see how it’s going.”
“He’ll get better,” she said.
“Sure,” I said. “But you call us if there’s something you need. You don’t have to go this alone, you know.”
“We’ll see,” she said. “But thank you, Sandy. And tell Mavis thank you.”
“She’ll be over this afternoon. Now you get some rest too. You look tired.”
“There’s too much to do,” she said.
Lyman did get better but he never got well. He never fully regained that crotchety spryness and bounce that he had shown for those six years before the accident; now, more and more, he was just crotchety. He was irritated by little things of no importance—his toast was cold; his shoestring was missing its plastic end; his sock had a hole— and he would pout. In the living room you would find him staring vacantly at the postcards on the wall. In time the padded horse collar around his neck came off and the bruises on his face faded; the welts on his scalp became thin white scars, and he still dressed himself every morning in suit pants and dress shirt with a bow tie at the collar. But he didn’t appear so trim or city-dapper anymore; his clothes seemed to hang on him like they were at least one size too big, as if someone had bought his shirt and pants thinking he would grow into them. He didn’t. He developed an old man’s stoop. Towards the end he was using two canes.
But for a while that first winter there was talk of buying another car, of replacing his Pontiac. They certainly had more than enough money to do that. Hell, they could have paid cash for three Cadillacs if they had wanted to; it had been that kind of year for wheat and they had no debts of any kind. So twice I drove them into town to shop for cars, looking in the show windows at Happenheimer’s Pontiac Dealership on the highway and sitting in that smell of new cars on display, trying out the comfort of fresh leather seats and playing the radio, while Hap himself hovered over us and talked heavy-duty shocks and horsepower but avoided mention of any trade-in. Like everybody else in Holt, Hap was aware of the wreck; he knew why the Goodnoughs were in the market for a new car and had the good sense not to say so. On the second trip to town Lyman decided to try one out.
It was kind of a silver-gray, two-door Bonneville, a nice car. One of the mechanics backed it quick out of the showroom and left it running. We got in, Lyman behind the wheel, and I thought at first it was going to be all right. I thought he could manage driving again. He seemed competent enough, able. But it was the hour for kids to be walking home in the afternoon from grade school, bundled up in the dry cold in stocking caps and mackinaws, throwing snowballs and kicking ice clods in the gutters, and at an intersection Lyman damn near ran over two girls and a boy who were crossing in front of us. I don’t know— maybe the low winter sun slanting from the west blinded him.