The Tie That Binds

  After a time I said to him, “I suppose you know what I’m doing here.”

  “I see you got your tie on,” he said. “I figured there was some reason for it.”

  “There is.”

  “More than just to eat Mavis’s chicken dinner, you mean.”

  You understand the old son of a gun, that old wheat farmer, wasn’t going to help me any. He was enjoying himself; it was better than a Sunday afternoon nap. Usually he was the sober type, steady and humorless as a corner fence post, but now with a straight face he was playing me like a calf.

  “That,” I said. “And also to see what you thought of Mavis and me getting married.”

  “Tell the truth,” he said, “I haven’t given it much thought.”

  “Mavis has,” I said.

  “Has she now?”

  “Yes. Considerable.”

  “And what does she think about it?”

  “She’s in favor of it.”

  “But you ain’t said nothing about yourself yet. Most times I believe it takes two to get married.”

  “Oh, I don’t mind,” I said.

  “Well, now,” he said, looking at me. “Well, now. She’s in favor and you say you don’t mind. I guess that’ll have to do, won’t it?”

  He kept looking at me. He had the usual white forehead and burnt cheeks and neck that all farmers have, but I could see where Mavis got her eyes. Finally he bent down over his knees and began to untie the laces in his town shoes.

  “I don’t like these tie-up shoes,” he said. “Always make my feet hurt. The missus says that’s so I’ll keep awake in church. Most times she’s right too.”

  He didn’t take his shoes off—I was still company as yet—but merely loosened the laces good, then he sat up straight again and in his own time blew his nose thoroughly, one nostril then the other, loud, and put the handkerchief back in his hip pocket.

  “I don’t know whether you know it, Sanders,” he said, “but I was well acquainted with your father. I used to see him at farm sales. He was a good man, your father was. I don’t know your mother.”

  “No,” I said. “She doesn’t go to farm sales.”

  “I suppose not,” he said. “Well, now. About this marriage business—it sounds like Mavis has her mind all made up.”

  I nodded.

  “She’s like that. So I don’t see where it would do me much good to object even if I wanted to. Can you?”

  “No.”

  “I thought as much. Well, it’s nice having girls in the house. I believe I’ll miss that.”

  That was all he said. We talked about wheat prices and farm futures afterwards. Then the women came into the parlor with us, and after a while Mavis and I excused ourselves and went outside to walk along the windbreak planted westerly towards a slight hill.

  “Well?” she said.

  “Well what?” I said.

  “What’d he say?”

  “Weren’t you listening from the kitchen?”

  “Yes, but I want you to tell me.”

  “Well. He said I was a damn fool to want to marry any daughter of his. You’re too hardhearted, he said. Then he asked me if I had any intentions to speak of.”

  “He did not.”

  “Sure he did. ‘What are your intentions?’ he said. Go and ask him.”

  “All right then, what did you say?”

  “Nothing. I didn’t say a word. I told him I didn’t have any intentions. Other than throwing you down in bed every chance I get.”

  “You’ve already done that.”

  “I plan to do it again. Right now.”

  “Don’t be silly. They can still see us from the house.”

  “Hell,” I said. “We’re as good as married already, aren’t we?”

  “No,” she said. “But we will be. Now stop that and tell me what he said.”

  THE ONLY interesting particular I recall now about the wedding was the thing that happened just afterwards. The wedding was over; we had promised our mutual I do’s; Mavis and I were coming down the church steps to get inside my paint-smeared car and away from all the thrown rice. People were gathered in two rows along the steps and sidewalk—her folks; my mother and her last husband, Wilbur Cox; Edith and Lyman Goodnough; a crowd of others, friends. We had just about reached the safety of my car when Vince Higgims, Junior, one of my drinking partners from the Holt Tavern, grabbed Mavis up in his arms and started to run with her. She still had that white dress on and that collection of stiff petticoats, all of which swooped up so high in his arms that you could see her garters and clear to Denver if you wanted to. Vince Jr. was about smothered. I believe his idea was to kidnap her, spirit her away so that I would have to come look for her. Which might have been funny, only Vince didn’t know Mavis enough. In no time Mavis worked one arm free and jammed Vince so hard in the Adam’s apple with her elbow that he dropped down cold like he’d been shot with both barrels. Her white dress and stockinged legs were all over him, the two of them sprawled out on the church curb, so that after they were eventually untangled somebody had to take old Vince over to Doc Schmidt to determine how much damage he had suffered to his throat. It turned out he was lucky; he just had to stay off solids for a week. Vince said it was enough to scare him off weddings altogether.

  When I was sure he was going to at least be able to drink again, Mavis and I got in the car and drove off for the honeymoon. We went across the Continental Divide to Glenwood Springs on the Western Slope and stayed a few days in the great old Hotel Colorado, where Teddy Roosevelt had once spent some time, and we swam with the tourists and arthritic patients in the block-long hot pool that smelled of sulphur. Later we drove up the valley to Aspen and spent an afternoon and an evening amongst the wealthy summer crowd. Then we came home again to this house. Mavis was still working as a nurse at the hospital, but when she wasn’t changing bedpans or taking blood pressures she was remaking our house to please her, and I went back to farming and ranching, cultivating corn, baling hay, and cutting calves. It was nice coming in for supper and finding her still there every evening waiting for me. She looked good and cool and fresh after I’d been outside in the sun away from her all day. After supper we often had the Goodnoughs over to play Rook or went to their place, and about twice a month the four of us went to the Legion dances on Saturday night. Mavis and Edith got to be good friends. She could tell you some things about Edith that I can’t.

  Then it was August 1967, and Mavis wasn’t working at the hospital anymore because she was eight months pregnant. Her stomach was swollen and hard, blue veined, tight. I could feel with my hand how the little beggar kicked and swam, did his half gainers and watery flips, like he was showing off for us inside his warm sac, like he believed he was nothing so much as a green frog cavorting for all the world in a horse tank. But I was a little concerned about it too. I knew at thirty-three that it was somewhat late for Mavis to be carrying her first baby, but she wouldn’t hear of it. She refused to let me worry. She had helped any number of babies get born at the hospital, and now she had all the confidence and all the equipment she needed to bear this one. I could stop worrying. So I did and we were both pleased about the prospect of having a little boy in the house. It would be a boy, we knew that. We were looking forward to it.

  BUT AUGUST is also traditional Holt County Fair time, and 1967 was no different. It’s considered a big deal around here; everyone and his horse attends, able or not, one hoof in the grave or not. It gives us the opportunity—and the excuse too, I suppose—to visit with folks we haven’t seen for a year.

  In the week before the fair is to begin the Lions Club rakes up the accumulated twelve months of trash at the fairgrounds; they burn the trash and the blown-in tumbleweeds behind the buildings, then they loiter in groups, eating Rocky Mountain oysters and potato salad and drinking beer from kegs. Meanwhile the 4-H kids in the county have begun to fit their steers for the judging by clipping the heads and ears of the animals and by ratting the tails into balls; the kids’ mo
thers and aunts and grandmothers choose their best bread-and-butter pickles for display; somebody begins to work up the racetrack with a disk for the horse races, and somebody else helps the stock contractor unload his bulls and bucking horses at the chutes across the arena from the grandstand. On the afternoon before it is all to begin the carnival people finally pull into town in their battered trucks. They’re usually a bad crew of greasy characters, appearing dog tired, looking as bored with it all as if they have seen it all, and maybe they have. Sweating and cursing, they establish the booths and rides in the fresh-mowed cheat weeds. So then it’s time. Opening day begins with a parade.

  It’s not much of a parade. Just a hometown affair so as not to worry Macy’s, but we went to it that year anyway. This was despite Mavis’s eight-month condition. I told her we ought to skip it.

  “We can go this afternoon,” I said. “We can walk around the booths and then you can watch the rodeo from the grandstand.”

  “You’re not listening to me,” she said. “I have to get out of this house. I’m sick of this house.”

  “All right. I can see that.”

  “And you know I won’t be any more uncomfortable in town than I am here. Don’t you know that? But I’ll tell you what it is.”

  “What?”

  “It’s because you’re embarrassed to be seen with me. I’m getting too big.”

  “That’s crazy,” I said. “Vince, Junior, told me the other day when he saw us together—he told me you make me look skinny. Hell, he thought I must be losing some weight, and I told him to keep thinking like that.”

  “So what are you talking about?”

  “It’s just that I’m afraid you’ll get tired. That’s all. Then I’ll probably have to carry you around on my back and come damn near ruining myself.”

  “I won’t get that tired,” she said.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes. Now do we go to the parade together or don’t we?”

  “All I know is,” I said. “You’re getting flat unruly. That’s a fact.”

  So we went to the parade all right. We did the entire opening-day program. Only we didn’t go alone. We drove in to town with the Goodnoughs in Lyman’s Pontiac. The day before he had waxed it fresh for the occasion, and I figured the big back seat of that boat of his would be good for my wife. When we got to town that morning he parked the car on a side street away from traffic, then the four of us walked over to Main Street and found a place out of the sun in front of the Coast to Coast store on the east side of the street. There were already hundreds of people lining both sides. Some of the old-timers had arrived early enough to unfold lawn chairs along the curb, and there were kids everywhere, teenagers in shorts and little kids with balloons and cones of ice, and all the townspeople and area farmers. A little after ten o’clock the parade started.

  The color guard came first. They came marching north up Main Street from the high school toward us, and everybody stood still while they passed, four middle-aged veterans stuffed into wool uniforms and sweating plenty. They were followed by some guys on horseback; then the school band was there playing some march or other while the band director hotfooted it along beside them; some more horses then; then the Holt County Fair queen and her two attendants rode up, each of them in new felt hats and bright cowgirl outfits and looking straight ahead without a smile when one of the girls’ horses raised its tail to drop road apples along the pavement in front of everybody; then some kids on decorated bikes; then a half-dozen boosters in convertibles and some more horses; then a float or two, the Future Farmers of America float with some high school boys dressed like Arabs smoking cigarettes in long holders; and the local implement company’s float consisting of an old manure spreader with a painted sign taped to it that said: WE STAND BEHIND WHAT WE SELL; then the candidates for county clerk waving and smiling from convertibles, acknowledging the folks of voting age and throwing candy to the kids, the kids all scrambling for it and their mothers checking to see that it was wrapped in wax paper; then some old tractors and antique cars and still more horses. The city street cleaner with its spray of water and rotating brushes ended the parade. It was finished by eleven o’clock.

  “Well,” I said. “That appears to wrap up any parade for the year. Now what?”

  “I say we eat,” Lyman said. “Sis here got me up before breakfast.”

  We all looked at Edith. “Oh, I don’t listen to him anymore,” she said. “Next thing you know he’ll want a tray in bed.”

  “That’s the idea,” he said.

  “No,” I said. “You want to be careful. One summer she brought me a tray of food out to the side yard every day and I just about died of bloat and discomfort.”

  “Do you remember that?” Edith said.

  “Sure. Every mouthful.”

  “That was a long time ago. You were a nice little boy then.”

  “I still am.”

  “Of course you are,” she said. She patted my cheek. “Sometimes he is,” Mavis said. “But I agree with Lyman. I’m starving.”

  The cafes in town were all crowded with people waiting to find places to sit down, so we drove out to the fairgrounds. Inside the gate a deputy sheriff waved us over toward the parking lots; Lyman parked his Pontiac at a chalked line and we locked the doors to his satisfaction, then we ate lunch behind the grandstand in one of the booths that had a lean-to roof built out over one side with wire screening nailed onto two-by-fours to keep the flies out. There were always a lot of flies during the fair. It tended to discourage some people’s appetite to see flies swimming in the mustard and pickle relish, so a couple of years previous the fair board had ordered screens put up. We each had a hamburger and something to drink; Mavis ordered another sandwich and we kidded her about it. Afterwards we decided to see the exhibits and some of the livestock judging before the rodeo started.

  When we got to the hog barn they were judging the January boar-pig contest. We sat down to watch the fun from the second row of the bleachers. In front of us was a good-sized enclosure of heavy fence panels with sawdust spread deep on the dirt floor. The 4-H kids had already run the pigs into the pen and were trying now to move the pigs back and forth in front of the judge so he could see the muscling. It was hard work. The pigs were tall, long, tough hided, independent. It was hot in there under the tin roof. The pigs were hot; a pig doesn’t have a very good cooling system, you know. They kept moiling, trotting off to look for mud. Their round eyes looked mean, heavy lashed; their big ears flopped the flies away while their squirreled tails twisted and switched as they moved, and they were all grunting and squealing up one hell of a pig racket. If anything, the kids looked hotter, more miserable than the pigs. The kids were red-faced from the strain, and nervous, dressed right for the show in new blue jeans and white shirts and wielding hog canes and racehorse bats in the attempt to keep those damn big pigs circling to the best advantage in front of the judge. It required considerable whacking and wielding of canes to do that.

  Meanwhile the judge stood ankle deep in the sawdust and pig squirt in the center of the pen. He had his arms folded and he did not look happy. He was hired as pig judge; he took himself serious as Sunday. I believe a cold beer in a cool bar would have saved him. And all the time the 4-H kids were having a hell of a time of it: the pigs wouldn’t cooperate. They were either trying to dig out from under the fence panels with their tough snouts and so get shut of that miserable hot business, or they were fighting, a bad racket then, a higher pitched squeal than before, if that was possible; it made your hat jump—the two pigs squealing, chewing at one another’s ears and jowls while the kids whacked at them, beat with canes and bats and called for the board—”Board! Board!”—until one of the men standing on the outside stepped over the fence and shoved a heavy sheet of plywood down hard between the screaming pigs and stopped the fight. Separated, the pigs would look sort of dumbfounded, like where did that other son of a bitch go, I ain’t finished chewing on him yet, and so it would all go on ag
ain as before.

  Only towards the end there was a slight hitch in the routine, I remember: one of the pigs pissed all over the judge’s alligator boots. The kid who owned that pig was in trouble and he knew it. He began to kick sawdust onto the mess but it didn’t help a lot. The damage was done. Finally in pure hope he looked up into the judge’s face for mercy, for a sign of humor. But the judge apparently didn’t have any, or not enough anyway, because when it came time for ribbons the pig with the empty bladder didn’t win a thing. In the bleachers we were offended. The pig was our popular favorite. Edith and Mavis booed the judge for an idiot.

  “Men,” Mavis said.

  “Now you can’t blame that on us,” Lyman said.

  “I do,” she said.

  After the hog judging we walked past the sheep in the wood pens panting in the heat, and saw the quarter horses, their round-muscled butts shining smooth under the lights in the horse barn. Working our way down the alleys between the 4-H kids sitting on tack boxes in the cow barn we saw the show steers and fat heifers lying half asleep on clean straw. The cattle were all trim and neat; some of them still had their ratted, puffed-up tails protected by plastic bags to be clean for the beef-feeding contests when the time came. The cattle were hot.

  Outside again, we walked over to the exhibits in the home-ec. building. The county women had their quilts on display, and their artwork, flower arrangements, and pickles. When we got to the bread-and-butter-pickle department we found that Marvella Packwood had won it again. The out-of-town judge had hung a blue ribbon on her pickle jar, which amused Lyman and me a good deal. Everybody in the county knew that Marvella Packwood had just delivered her third kid without benefit of a single marriage certificate. There were folks who found that not only scandalous but excessive. It was the times, they said.

  Mavis said, “Don’t you say a word, you two.”

  “But that there was a woman judge,” Lyman said. “You ain’t going to complain about that?”

  “She thinks like a man,” Mavis said.

  “Looks like a good jar of pickles to me,” I said. “Look at that color. I probably ought to ’ve married her. I always did fancy bread-and-butter pickles with my dinner steak. Didn’t you, Lyman?”