The Tie That Binds(65)
From the time Rena was born in 1969 Edith enjoyed her. I already told you how she was a compensation, but she was more than that. I suppose it had something to do with having a little kid dancing around in the house where otherwise there were only old folks, something to do with a little girl’s noise and giggles breaking up all that daily silence, that ongoing concentrated crotchetiness filling the parlor and the entire downstairs. Why hell, Rena put some fun into that yellow house, and Mavis and I encouraged it. Whenever there was occasion to be out at night or excuse to go to the National Western Stock Show in Denver, Rena went to Edith’s. She went there a lot, not just when we were gone but often for a whole day when we were home during the summer and also for an hour or two during the week after school. By the time she was six she was going there by herself. She’d throw a halter on Echo and trot down to the Goodnoughs’. We didn’t worry about her when she was there; it was obvious that she and Edith got along together like two beads on the same string. Besides, it was educational. I’ll bet Rena is the only seven-year-old kid in all of Holt County who not only knows how to scald a chicken and pluck tail feathers but also how to get from Dallas to St. Paul by train and bus. Because she was a help with Lyman too, you understand. My daughter could bring that old man out. She treated him as an equal. Together they played travel in the parlor for hours.
On a late-winter afternoon if I went in to bring Rena home for supper I’d find her with Lyman, the two of them sitting at that loaded mahogany desk in that west room, the light from the overhead lamp reflecting off his bald visored head and her shiny black hair, her hair fallen forward around her face. The maps would be tacked up on the walls. Around them on the floor the whole room would be full of stuff, cluttered so you couldn’t walk, overflowing: all those damn brochures and pamphlets and flyers; schedules for the whole country creased five times and looking used up; all of it spilling out of cardboard boxes; a hell of a mess. If Edith wanted to clean in there she had to dust around them; they knew where they wanted things. They allowed her to store the extra piles of stuff on the steps leading up to the unused bedrooms, but she had to ask first. And that was all right because Rena was keeping Lyman occupied; he was almost happy when she was there. So, while Edith folded clothes or cooked supper, the two travelers were busy, engrossed in serious play, both of them sitting bent over that desk where Rena colored train tickets and Lyman studied the numbers in his train schedule and tried to figure how to get them to Detroit if they boarded in Denver. It was solemn business. And Rena would be saying something like: “I’m just sick of this orange. I’m going to make them red.”
“Red what?” Lyman would say.
“Our train tickets. Don’t you know we got to buy train tickets? Did you forget that again?”
“I ain’t forgetting nothing. Tickets is your business.” And a little later: “But look here. We got us that same damn layover in Chicago. Three hours’ worth.”
“How much minutes is that?”
“I just told you. Ain’t you listening?”
“You said hours. And you’re not suppose to say ‘ain’t.’”
“Mind your own business.”
“Well, you’re not suppose to.”
And a little later still:
“There. I’m done with all these tickets. Now hurry up with that schedule thing.”
So, in time, they would take up red tickets and board the train and pretend to see all that country between Denver and Detroit, with a three-hour layover in Chicago, where Rena would say she was shopping for presents for her school friends and Lyman would say he was drinking himself a bottle of cold beer.
At Christmas Edith gave my daughter a green visor like the one her traveling partner wore. It was Rena’s favorite present. She hung it on a nail beside the maps in the travel bureau.
THEN, about a year ago in March, the Goodnoughs acquired an old milky-eyed dog by default, and at about the same time we learned that there was reason for us to worry about Rena’s going over there by herself to play travel with Lyman. Lyman had finally reached that edge of his. In fact, he seemed at times to have passed it. For days his mind would be about as good as it had been; he might still manage to function in the parlor, more or less, but then for no reason that anybody could detect he’d be gone for half a day, turn blank and vacant, his mind as empty of sense as a dead stick is of sap. He’d go silent in some corner or he’d babble from his bed in the living room about nothing, about railroad ballast, or car keys and fence wire. I remember he spent one entire afternoon talking about nettles. I also remember how Edith reported that he pissed on the clothes in the makeshift closet in the pantry one time; apparently Lyman thought he had discovered the toilet among his sister’s dresses. But that was later in the fall. In the meantime he was still trying to travel. And when things didn’t connect right he could turn violent. He used those canes of his.
Now whether the dog had anything to do with Lyman’s final collapse, I don’t know. Probably not. Probably it was just coincidence. If it hadn’t been a dog, it would have been something else just as trivial. However you look at it, it doesn’t make any sense. Anyway, the dog wandered into the yard one night. Edith found it the next morning when she went out to feed the chickens and to break ice in the water pan.
It was an old black-and-brown dog with mottled white on its belly, a mixture of border collie and spaniel and whatever else had been available and interested at the time. There were clots of matted hair on its back legs, and its eyes were milky with cataracts. It slept a lot and whimpered when it wasn’t sleeping. There was a leather collar buckled around its neck when Edith found it, so we figured some town folks had dropped it off—they will do that; ask any farmer who lives within a ten-mile radius of any town what he has discovered in the ditch in front of his house and he’ll tell you—just shoved the old dog out onto the road in front of the Goodnoughs’ mailbox with the mistaken notion that such a thing would be kinder than a ten-minute trip to the vet and a quick injection. Anyway, being the kind of woman she is, Edith kept the dog. She fed it and brought it into the house.