The Tie That Binds (18 page)

And that was the worst goddamn hell of it: all that time she was in love with him. Do you understand what I’m saying? I knew she loved him. She was good to him, good for him, that big sloppy open-faced Clevis Stouffer, with his flour-bag stomach and his flapping shirttails and his dirty socks. He was what she wanted, needed. They made a pair, the two of them together, like a couple of plain solid blocks of mineral salt. And on his part, though he never said so or even showed it much, I believe he was at least half in love with her. He certainly deserved something good in his life, and Twyla was that all right; she was good.

Only here I was—that’s what I mean—I was here, too. Things might have been all right if it had been only two of us, or if Clevis and Twyla had lived in town, or even if they had rented some nearby vacant farmhouse or just bought a trailer and put in electricity. But none of that happened; that wasn’t the way it was. It was always three of us, here, in this house. We had our routine, our little family arrangement, and what made it possible, the thing that allowed it to continue, to go on and on regardless, was that in some ways they were both dependent on me: I owned the ranch, didn’t I? I was the hotshot, the rotten dowel pin. The bank account was in my name. And I played on all of that to prevent things from changing. I knew we were on a dangerous ride, but I still didn’t want to end it even if I had known how. It was too much of a good thing, a heedless, continuous, romping jig and party— when I could keep from thinking. Not thinking, refusing to think, got to be a steady habit for me.

I remember sending Clevis out for the afternoon to swathe hay, for example, or to buy baler parts in Sterling sixty miles northwest of Holt, while I stayed home. And he’d stare at me and say, “What are you going to do while I’m gone?”

“Oh, I’ve got those heifers to move.”

“Yeah,” he’d say. “Why course you do.”

So he understood it all right; he recognized the drift, but he would go on anyway, and then after he was out of the way I’d spend an hour sipping iced gin from a shared glass with Twyla in the middle of the afternoon, and in time I’d be breathing the good perfume of her thick orange hair and tasting the salt of her round white shoulders. Because after the first time with Twyla in my room in the afternoon while the sun speckled on the bed and the curtains billowed in the open window, the second time was easier. There was a lot less fumbling afterwards and somewhat less the need to avoid the look in anyone’s eyes, of playing it secret, of pretending there was nothing there between us to pretend about. Then after the third time it was easier yet. I stopped trying to justify anything but just accepted it as you might accept the shipping fever that came with a truckload of delivered sale-barn calves: there was always going to be some bad mixed up with the good. That’s how I was thinking—or not thinking. Matters would take their own irresistible course, I thought, and meanwhile more than anything it felt just fine to be in bed with Twyla. She had all that rich creamy skin, those large ready breasts like fresh bread, and she was soft all over with so much warm woman’s flesh to feel against your own. There was nothing professional about her, though. She wasn’t practiced or schooled at bed. No, it was more that lying with her—while you smoothed her stomach or stroked her rich thighs—for an hour there were little jokes between you and easy laughter, as if you and she were just two kids in clover, say, and that what you were doing in bed on clean sheets was not a thing that was dangerous or harmful to anyone but merely the simple play of children. Besides, being the warm-cheeked girl she was, she wasn’t used to refusing the feelings of anyone.

It went on that way for a year. Maybe more, I don’t know. But I remember how it ended. The consequences I can recall in detail. We were driving home one night, the three of us as usual, drunk in the cab of the red pickup after closing the Holt Tavern on a Wednesday. The radio was blaring Hank Williams above the rattle of wind coming through the rolled-down windows, and we were singing with the music and shouting jokes at one another as we watched ahead down the road through the windshield smattered red and yellow with dead grasshopper bodies, squiggling legs and veined wings. Then we were home again, here in this house, this kitchen. We each had another drink, and Twyla said she knew of one more joke she could tell us.

“You got our entire attention,” I said.

“Not mine,” Clevis said. “I got to bleed my lizard.” He stood up and went to the bathroom. Then he came back and opened another beer. “So what’s your joke?” he said.

“Promise you’ll laugh?”

“Sure,” he said.

“Because I think it’s funny anyway.” She wasn’t looking at us; she was watching her finger follow a scratch in the tabletop, as if that interested her. “It’s just that one of you gets to be a daddy pretty soon, and I don’t know whose name to pick.” Then she did look at us. “Don’t you think that’s funny?”

“Hell,” Clevis said. “You never could tell jokes.”

“Just a minute,” I said. “You’re telling us you’re pregnant?”

She nodded. Then she kind of laughed, her eyes shining at us with gin and what must have also been fear. “I mean I don’t know which one of you got me like this.”

“We could always draw straws,” Clevis said.

“And I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” She was still smiling at us, but there were tears flowing down
her cheeks now into her mouth, and she couldn’t wipe them away fast enough to keep up with them.

“What are you crying about?” Clevis said. “Hell, girl, you just bought the farm.”

“Don’t.”

“Why not? I can’t afford no kid. You and him hash it out.”

“But you promised me.”

“I never promised you nothing.”

Her mouth was still open in that awful smile. “You promised me you would laugh.”

“Oh,” he said. “Well: ha ha.”

“Leave her alone,” I said.

“How’s that?”

“I said leave her alone.”

“Now that’s funny—coming from you. That’s real funny.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Sure. You send me over to Sterling or some goddamn place else so you and her can jump in bed as soon as I’m gone, and now you tell me to leave her alone.”

“It wasn’t like that.”

“Wasn’t it? Well, don’t tell me about it. I couldn’t stand no more jokes tonight. I’m wore out.”

He got up then and started to walk back to the bedroom.

“Cleve,” Twyla said. “Honey, wait.”

“What for?”

“Don’t you want me to come with you?”

“Nah,” he said. “You can sleep with lover boy tonight. That shouldn’t be no surprise to anybody.”

Then he left the kitchen. We could hear him in the back bedroom stomping on the floor and after that the rattle of the bed when he lay down heavy to sleep. I sat with Twyla for a while, not talking; it was too late for talk; I wouldn’t have known the right words anyway. Finally I went to bed myself, leaving her sitting there with her red cheeks,
like those of a healthy child, shining wet under the light. She had been an unselfish, uncomplicated girl, but now, six or seven years later, with my interference she had become something different. It was not only that she was pregnant without knowing for sure whose baby it was or that she didn’t know how to ask one of us to claim it—it was more that she had become a woman staring unfocused at a grease spot above a kitchen sink out here in the country in the small hours of a Wednesday night.

She was still here the next morning when I got up. She was asleep with her head twisted uncomfortably on the kitchen table, her shoulders slumped forward. I started some black coffee on the stove and went outside to see how the day looked. Clean, with high clouds gathering in the west, the day appeared acceptable. But the pickup was gone. I went back into the house. Twyla was awake. She looked as if during the night she had been disassembled and put back together with flour glue. Her face was all pasty.

“Did Clevis take the pickup?” I said.

“What?”

“Where did Clevis go?”

“Portland, Oregon.”

“What do you mean Portland, Oregon? Here, drink some coffee.” I poured coffee into a cup for her. “Drink it hot,” I said.

“He said because it was a long ways off,” Twyla said. “He said he wanted to see the water.”

“Water? Jesus Christ. What else did he say?”

“Nothing. Only for me to say he would send back money for the pickup when he found a machine job.”

“But I don’t care about the pickup. He can have the goddamn pickup. I want to know why you didn’t go with him.”

“Because,” she said. “He never asked me.” She was
talking very woodenly; she might as well have been repeating a ten-year-old market report or reciting Dick and Jane, something as indifferent as that. “I was waiting for him to,” she said, “but he never said so.”

“Listen to me,” I said. “I don’t know what you think of me. Maybe you still like me some—I don’t know; we’ve had some good times—but whatever it is, you love him, don’t you? You want this baby you’re having to be his, isn’t that right?”

“I don’t want no baby. Not no more.”

“Yes, you do. You will. Here, listen now: I want you to go to Denver for a week or two. I want you to take yourself a motel room. Rest up, see some movies, buy some clothes, whatever you’re going to need. Then I’ll come there and see you have enough money so you can go to Oregon. Will you do that?”

“It won’t make no difference.”

“Yes, it will. It’s the only way, Twyla.”

“I’m just sorry,” she said.

But later that day Twyla allowed me to take her to Denver and to install her in a Holiday Inn near the Stapleton Airport. Then I came home and went about selling the remaining quarters of farmland my dad had accumulated. I take no pride in that. I had to sell some land anyway to pay off the bad debts I had run up through constant partying and buying red pickups and by acting as if I was so rich and so smart that any form of steady discipline could go to hell. Anyway, in part because of my debts, I decided to make a clean sweep of it, so I sold those last quarters and kept only the pastureland, the native grass and the hayfields, so I could still run cattle, and then I returned to Denver and put Twyla Thompson on the plane with fifteen thousand dollars in her purse.

All of that took longer than I expected. It was more like a month than two weeks. But by the time I checked her
out of the motel Twyla looked quite a lot better. She seemed almost cheerful again, like a big wonderful farm girl, and her stomach was starting to show. “Sandy,” she said.

“I know,” I said. “Take care of yourself. And tell Clevis . . . Just tell him hello for me.”

Then Twyla, in a good blue dress with white trim, walked up the ramp onto the plane. About a year later I got a postcard from her saying the baby was a boy. She didn’t say what he looked like. But she did sign the card Twyla T. Stouffer, so I had to assume she found Clevis and that they were together again the way they belonged. She failed to include a return address though, and I’ve never seen nor heard from either one of them since. Still, I permit myself to believe they remain together, growing fat in the same house somewhere in Portland, Oregon, where they raise a big brood of fat red-cheeked babies. They would have good babies.

D
URING
all that period of brainless pell-mell drift, the only solid base I had was Edith Goodnough. She was still there in that house down the road. Despite everything— and she could see what was happening all right, don’t think she couldn’t; there was never any lacy veil or donkey’s blind covering her brown eyes—she was nevertheless willing to talk and visit with me in the evening, though what we talked about now while rocking in the porch swing was nothing, not even recollections of my dad. I just stopped by to be there for an hour, and that happened usually whenever for some reason I had not been able to stop thinking, whenever even for a minute I had recognized the true crux of the matter here at home. Then sometime soon afterwards, that same evening or the next day, I
would drive down to see Edith. I wouldn’t tell her anything about it. I didn’t have to. She seemed to know. She would link our arms and for a while we would rock and listen to the locusts in the trees in the nearby dark. But if I at least had her, she had nothing for herself. At that time she was trying to live solely on Lyman’s postcards and his packages of twenty-dollar bills mailed each Christmas in brown wrapping paper and a clumsy red bow.

She was completely alone. My dad had died; her father was finally dead, and Lyman was still back east somewhere, seeing cities. So it was not just for an afternoon or a month that she was alone, but for one year after another, on and on, with no particular reason for believing it would ever be one jot different. If you have had that happen to you, then you know that living like that—alone, making yourself cook three meals every day for one person, playing the radio all the time so there will be some human noise in the house even if it’s just the tinny counterfeit sound of some actor wetting his pants over Pepto-Bismol, because if it’s not that then it’s getting up to silence and going to bed in silence, since chicken cackle and bird twitter will go only so far—that can do something to you: make you brittle or dull, cause you to go slightly touched, drive you slowly a little crazy. You forget how to string words together. You can’t recall the true weight of words. It’s as if they all come out in a gush, like a cow pissing, or they don’t come out at all. Well, something along those lines happened to Edith Goodnough.

For one thing, there got to be stories about her. People in town and high school kids began to edify one another with tales of Edith: how she was turning crazy all alone for nothing; how she was starving to death on tea and toast; how it was skunk cabbage and water she was starving on; how she slept in the barn. She was partial to Elvis
Presley, they said, and likely to disappear. The only story, though, that might have any truth to it was the one Bill Kwasik told me one night in the tavern.

It was in that last year that Clevis and Twyla were still here. They were dancing to jukebox music, and I was drinking beer at the bar, watching them in the mirror. Then Bill Kwasik, who lives with his wife and kids four miles east of the Goodnough place, came up to me and said: