The Tie That Binds

  Of course you might always wish that it had been longer, or that it had come earlier, when she was still young, when she still might have borne children, when my dad was still alive, but wishing for such things is a waste of time; it doesn’t make them happen. My dad taught me that, told me as much that day in 1943 when he knocked sense or at least fear into Old Man Goodnough and then afterwards talked to me while I drank beer for the first time and got drunk. So I try to remember it, and even today, knowing what I do about the end, I still take satisfaction in remembering that though Edith was sixty-four when her brother finally returned in his wool suit and Pontiac, and despite the fact that Lyman himself was sixty-two, still, together, almost as if they were honeymooners, they had those six good years from 1961 until 1967 before things suddenly went bad again. It doesn’t change those years to know that after 1967 things turned so much worse finally that something desperate had to be done to end them. Regardless, they were still good years, good times. I believe that.

  THE GOOD TIMES began that same evening, the night Lyman was home again for supper and I was asked over to enjoy the surprise of him. I told you that after we’d eaten he wanted me to see his car and that I refused to sit in it. At the time I was still disgusted. Here he was back in the house again after all that lapsed time; he was eating his sister’s cherry pie and sporting those damn two-tone wing-tip shoes under her kitchen table—without one word of apology or real explanation for having taken so long. But I got over it; I decided that if it made Edith happy— and I could see that it did—then it wasn’t my business to be disgusted or angry or any more asinine than I’d already been. So I tried to partake of their enjoyment. I helped Lyman carry his miserable beat-up metal-and-cardboard suitcases into the house.

  He spread them out on the living-room floor. It was like he was Saint Nick in July. Like he was some far-flung sailor returned home safe from the seven seas. Hell, I don’t know—it was like he imagined himself to be some modern form of Marco Polo come back from the farthest reaches of Outer Mongolia with spoils to prove it. He had treasure for us, for the farm-stuck cocklebur home folks. His suitcases were loaded with the stuff. He spread it around. He gave each of us something. Edith prized what he gave her about fifty-seven times more than it was worth, as if what he’d given her actually amounted to something. She danced back and forth to the mirror to wonder at the latest doodad he hung on her. But, in truth, it was all just junk, an old bachelor’s collection of tourist trinkets. You can buy better things on Sidewalk Sale Day in front of Duckwall’s in downtown Holt. But that didn’t matter to Edith: it was from her brother. He gave her a scarf from Boise, Idaho; a heavy bracelet from the Omaha stockyards; a silver necklace affair that dangled a thin pendant in the shape of a Georgia peach. And me, why me he gave a shoehorn from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It had the name of some shoe-store scratched on the tin handle. I took it and didn’t laugh. But what the hell did I need with a shoehorn, even if it was from Pittsburgh? I wear boots.

  Anyway, I said, “Thank you, Lyman. I appreciate this.”

  He went on dispensing and displaying his junk, his proof of travel. By the time he had finished Edith looked like a circus gypsy. She was weighted with cheap necklaces, purple scarves, earrings and dangling bracelets—all with city names on them. She gave him in return a hug and a kiss; they were having a fine time of it. Then she took him by the hand and led him around the walls of the living room to examine and explain each postcard he had sent her, and each one reminded him of something, recalled for him in droning detail the days and months he’d spent in each place. Edith was as attentive as a lover. She kept saying things like, “And this one you sent from Cleveland, didn’t you? What happend there?” And he would tell her of course; Lyman didn’t require much prompting. He was full of stories. I watched them from the rocking chair, feeling as out of place as an old maid aunt chaperoning at a kids’ party—they were having such a time.

  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 va
cation 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.

  And you understand, before this time Edith had never once seen a thing of life beyond the Holt County border? Not a thing, not once. Now the whole of this Rocky Mountain region was hers. She only had to mention an interest, hint that she wanted to see something—”Lyman, how far down do you suppose it is from the Royal Gorge Bridge?”—and they would take off to find out. Lyman himself was ready to go; in the previous twenty years he had grown used to traveling on any impulse. Gasoline was cheap, his Pontiac was new. On an urge, then, usually Edith’s, they would shut the back porch door and leave, see themselves some new sight, and then come back tired but satisfied, and the next day Lyman would hand wax his green car while Edith finished unpacking and fed the chickens and began to listen for the next urge to take her, tell her what it wanted her to see. During that six-year period they must have passed this house at least a thousand times—going places. I’d see them at any time of the day or night, driving, the windows rolled down, the dust rolling up behind them. Lyman would always be at the wheel in his dress shirt and tie, as solemn as if he was going to trial. Beside him would be his sister, Edith Goodnough in a pale lavender or blue dress, waving at me like a girl as she passed my house on the way out.

  But I don’t suppose they were off traveling all that time, because they also began to fix up that old frame house, which their father had constructed by himself with wagon-hauled lumber from town before either one of them was born. He had kept the house up all along but had never seen any reason to do much extra; it was tight and kept out the wind, which was what he required. To do more would have been too much. So sometime in there Edith and Lyman painted it a bright canary yellow and had the Wilky brothers from west of town give it a new shingle roof. Inside, they bought some new carpet for the downstairs living-room and parlor floors. They had me over to see the carpet.

  I admired it, then Lyman brought me back to the kitchen. “Look there,” he said. “What do you make of that thing?”

  “Looks like a Kelvinator dishwasher to me,” I said. “But what do I know? Maybe it’s a new form of TV.”

  “Watch this.”

  “Oh, now, Lyman,” Edith said. “Sandy doesn’t have time for this too.” She swatted at him.

  “Course he does,” Lyman said.

  “Course I do,” I said.

  And I did. We sat down at the kitchen table and drank soda pop while their new dishwasher worked through the entire soap and rinse cycles.

  “There. That click means it’s done,” Lyman said. “Now won’t she get lazy with that thing in the house?”

  “Lazy as a hog,” I said.

  “Never you mind,” Edith said. “Either one of you. Who knows—I might take a notion to get fat too. Then what will you say?”

  “Nothing. Good,” I said.

  Together they were having such a hell of a fine time of it. It was fun to watch them.

  SO IN THE SUMMER of 1963 I got married. Or, to be more accurate, I should say Mavis Pickett decided she was not going to wait any longer.

  “Aren’t we ever going to be married?” she said.

  “Sure,” I said. “I was just waiting for you to pop the question.”

  “That’s not funny.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “No, it is not.”

  It was about two o’clock in the morning and we were driving north out of town towards her folks’ place after the annual Fireman’s Ball at the Holt Legion. I was about half drunk, feeling pretty good, but Mavis Pickett wasn’t either of those things. She was stone-cold serious. We had been going out together for at least two years, off and on, and in her view of things our going out to dances and to movies and local parties had not led us anywhere. She was twenty-nine years old. She wanted to be married.

  Which is all right, of course. Only I’m still not sure why it was me she chose to be the beneficiary of that. It’s enough to give me pause even now. I wasn’t what you might call a great catch. I was thirty-five. This gut you see here was already beginning to polish my belt buckle. I had knocked around, drunk too much, worked too little, developed bachelor habits. I was never going to be one of your sandhill millionaire successes: I didn’t have the ambition for it. No, if I was ever going to amount to a decent hill of beans or just a load of dung out of the ordinary, then I should have begun to show some sign of it by then. And I hadn’t. So I don’t know what she saw in me. Maybe it was the challenge. At the time Mavis was working as an L.P.N, at the hospital, and she was used to dealing with cold feet and lost causes. On the other hand, I had good reason to believe she loved me. I’m pretty sure she still does. Probably that clouded her view.

  But when a woman like Mavis Pickett loves you, says in so many words that you’re her form of It, who are you to argue? You’re a damn fool if you do. I wasn’t that much of a fool. She was level-headed and good-looking at the same time. That’s an unusual combination. She had thick blond hair and green eyes, and when she was crossed she could run the strong stuff out of your backbone like it was so much water; she didn’t appreciate nonsense. We’ve had plenty of good times in thirteen years together. We’ve managed to survive the bad times. If she wasn’t in town right now waiting for me to come in a couple of hours to pick her up so we can visit the hospital again, she would no doubt tell you that I’m too bullheaded, that sometimes I lock gates that should be left open. I don’t think logically, she would say. On my side, I might wish occasionally that she had a sense of humor—but it’s worked out. For both of us.

  At any rate, Mavis got us married toward the end of July 1963. I didn’t put up much opposition. I didn’t even argue a lot when she insisted that I had to do the proper thing, that I come to Sunday dinner and ask her father, old Raymond Pickett, whether he had objections. All I said was:

  “How about if I wrote him a postcard?”

  “You’re coming to dinner,” she said.

  “What if I called him on the phone?”

  “No. You will be there at one o’clock. After we get home from church.”

  “I’m not going to church. I don’t believe in it.”

  “All right. But you will be there for dinner. And you will ask him face-to-face like you’re supposed to.”

  “What if he wants to
know what my intentions are?”

  “Make something up. You’re good at that.”

  “Well, Jesus,” I said. “You’re a hard woman.”

  “Yes, and you can stop cussing. It’ll be all right. It’ll be just fine.”

  “Like hell,” I said.

  “You’ll see,” she said.

  Mavis was a little old-fashioned that way. She still is. She has a firm idea of how things are meant to be and she usually sees to it that they turn out the way they’re meant to. They certainly did that Sunday afternoon, cooked chicken and all. I put on a white shirt at twelve o’clock and knotted a tie under my chin, then I drove north through Holt’s church traffic and on another eight miles to the Pickett place, where at a heavy oak table supported by a massive pedestal I ate fried chicken and refrained from sucking the grease off my fingers. It was one of those long quiet awkward dinners. Mavis and her mother talked above the platters of food and fine china while her father and I allowed that it was about normal weather for the time of year. Afterwards, according to plan, the womenfolks cleared the table and Raymond Pickett and I removed ourselves to the parlor. We sat down opposite one another.