The Tie That Binds(7)

But that other woman apparently took some interest in her. Or maybe she felt something like pity towards her— like maybe you would towards some dog that had been dropped off out in the country and not some strong mongrel dog that would manage to live anyhow, but a to poodle, say, or a Pekinese, that belonged in the parlor— because I know for a fact that at least once the woman walked out to Ada, where Ada was stooping beside her two pails at the windmill and horse tank, splashing water onto her wrists and face, and said:

“Don’t you want to take a bath?”

Ada looked at her. She did something with her mouth that was meant to be a smile and then quick looked east to where she could just make out Roy walking behind his horses in the field, and turned back.

“If it wouldn’t be any bother.”

“Come into the house.”

So I know that Ada took at least one more bath that summer besides the one she had taken in the boardinghouse in town. When she was dressed again, she said:

“But don’t tell him. He won’t want to know I took a bath in somebody else’s house.”

Well, Roy never knew that about his wife. And I suppose there were a lot of other things he didn’t know or understand about her, but he did build her a house. He had the first part of it completed by fall. Later there were other rooms added on, a new kitchen and a back porch and also what turned out to be a parlor, but the first square two-story part of the house was raised late that summer. And he was a good rough carpenter, I’ll say that for him.

He had to buy the lumber in town, in Holt, and haul it home in his wagon, and then he had to nail it together himself. Ada helped him to lift the wall frames into place and steady them while he tacked them down, but for the most part he did all the work himself, since he had picked a place to live where there wasn’t another full-grown male anywhere near, and anyway he wouldn’t have asked for help if there had been. They bought a few sticks of furniture to go along with Ada’s sewing machine and moved into the house sometime before time to pick corn.

Roy’s dryland corn didn’t do very well that first year. There wasn’t much to pick. There was too much sagebrush and soapweed and too many grass roots to contend with, and even in his hurry the corn had still been planted late; the corn seed was still in the bags when most of what rain we get here falls in the spring. So his corn didn’t do very well, and I don’t suppose Ada was doing very well, either. By corn harvest I believe she was good and sick, because sometime in August of that summer Roy had found enough sap and energy and time too to get her pregnant, so that on the night of April twenty-first in the following spring, after she had managed somehow to get through that first long High Plains winter, Ada gave birth to a girl she named Edith.

Roy was going to do that by himself, too, of course. He was going to boil the sheets, rotate the head, slap some breath into the baby, and sew Ada up afterwards with needle and thread—without help from anyone. I don’t know, maybe he had read some flyers and government brochures about that too, but things in this case didn’t happen the way he expected them to, either. Because sometime that night, after Ada had been in labor for two or three days with her thin brown hair sweat-stuck to her face and her white thighs gone as rigid as sticks, Roy caught one of his workhorses and galloped that dark half mile west to the other house and woke the half-Indian woman. When her face appeared in one of the upstairs opened windows he yelled up at her:

“Goddamn it, I can do it. But she wants you. She wants you to come over there.”

He was sitting down there on that bareback excited Belgium, yelling up into the dark towards a dark face he could barely see.

“I could do it myself, but now she says she has to have you there. But I’ll make that right too, goddamn it. You wait and see.”

The woman in the upstairs window watched him on his horse in her front yard.

“Don’t you hear me?” he yelled. “Don’t you understand a goddamn thing I’m telling you? She wants you over there.”

But the woman was gone by now, leaving him yelling up into the dark where there wasn’t even a silent face in a window to hear him yell and rage. The woman had gone to wake her boy, who was seven now and had been since February twenty-fourth. She told him to get their saddle horse ready; she was riding over to the Goodnoughs’ to set things right and she would be back in the morning. And I guess Roy understood that he had done enough yelling for one night when he saw the boy go out the back door towards the corral, so he galloped back home again.

The woman got there a few minutes later. I can’t say exactly what she did or how she did it, but I’m certain she got Roy out of the room where he was less than no help, and then I believe she was able to get Ada revived enough to make another effort. Maybe she made some tea or something hot with herbs in it, or maybe it was just her voice and hand, but anyway she delivered the baby girl and Ada got some rest. And afterwards she must have made a couple of things plain enough that even Roy understood them, because two years later in June, when again it was Ada’s time, Roy didn’t wait until his wife had been in labor for two or three days and had turned to frazzle before he decided it was time for him to start howling in the dark. No, he came in broad daylight, knocked at the front door, and asked if the woman would come. So Lyman’s birth went easier, smoother, without the galloping horse and the yelling. This was 1899.

Well, Roy had a girl and a boy now, and I don’t suppose he ever expected much from Edith (more than just constant work, I mean) or ever thought much of hoping something for her either—he wouldn’t have; she was a girl, a potato peeler, an egg gatherer—but he might have expected more from Lyman, so he probably wasn’t real thrilled with the way Lyman turned out. And it wasn’t that Lyman didn’t work hard enough—he did, in his loose, mechanical, dry fashion—and Lyman sure as hell didn’t leave the farm very often until it was almost too late for him to ever leave it at all. But he just didn’t like any of it; he never really got his hand in. Lyman was too much of a lapdog even to suit his father.