The Tie That Binds (2 page)

“Mr. Roscoe,” he says. “Isn’t there some place else we can talk?”

“Oh,” I tell him, motioning at the cows, “you’ll have to never mind them. They just haven’t seen many yellow pants before. Give them a little more time—they might get used to it.”

He looks doubtful over at the cows again. I have to admit they haven’t changed much. They still look like they flat want to run or fly or get loose somehow. They’re still facing him with their eyes rolled back and their butts
jammed up against the fence as tight to it as they can get.

“Well,” he says, turning back to me, “if I can, I’d like to ask you some questions. Can I ask you a few questions?”

“Depends,” I say.

“On what?” he says.

“On what you’re asking.”

So then he asks me, and what he asks shows he’s not even a state farm agent, that he doesn’t even amount to that much. It shows too that yellow pants or no, the joke’s over. Because what he asks is:

“You’re a neighborly sort of man, aren’t you, Mr. Roscoe?”

“I can be,” I say, because I know what he’s driving at now; I know what’s coming.

“I mean,” he says, “you know all the neighbors around here.”

“Maybe. Some of them.”

“Edith and Lyman Goodnough, for instance?” he says. “People tell me you knew them better than anyone else did. That you did things for them. Is that true?”

So there it is. It hasn’t taken him long. And I say, “Didn’t all these people you say you talked to at least tell you how to say their name—while they were telling you the rest of it?”

“You mean it’s not Good-now?”

“No.”

“What is it then?”

“Good-no.”

“Okay,” he says. “Suit yourself.”

Then he reaches behind him again to dig in his back pocket. He draws out a little spiral notebook and writes something into it with that Eversharp pencil he used a little while earlier to flick the cow manure off his shirt. When he’s done scribbling he says, “They used to live down the road from you, didn’t they?”

“It’s still theirs,” I say. “Nobody else has bought it from them yet.”

“Yes,” he says, “and I already know it’s located down the road from you.”

So he’s starting to talk that way now, like he’s sure of himself, because with that spiral notebook and that pencil in his hands he’s forgotten he’s standing on top of cow manure inside a work corral where, thirty feet away from him, some fresh-doctored cows are still on his side of the fence, and they would just as soon run through him as have to look at him any longer.

But he goes on. He says, “I’ve been told that you were the first one there that night, last December. That when the others arrived they found you already waiting for them, and then you didn’t want to let them go inside. You tried to prevent them. Why is that?” he says.

“You tell me. You know all about it.”

“Look,” he says, “Mr. Roscoe. I’m just trying to get what my editor sent me out here to get. And I don’t think I like it any better than you do. But I think I know how you must have felt about—”

“You don’t know a damn thing,” I tell him.

“All right,” he says. “All right then, forget that. But listen, let me just ask you this. Let me ask you: you agree it was deliberate, don’t you? You don’t think it was just an accident.”

I don’t answer him. Here he is, standing in front of me in his yellow Ping-Pong pants; he’s not more than an arm’s length away from me, and for what he’s trying to get me to commit myself to saying I ought to swing on him. But I don’t. I just look at him.

So he says, “But we both know that, don’t we? I just want to know what you think of it.”

I’ve had enough of him now. More than enough. I say, “You want to know what I think?”

“Yes.”

“I think it’s none of your goddamn business. I think you better go on back to Denver.”

“Mr. Roscoe,” he says, saying my name this time like he was saying shit. “I’ve already talked to the sheriff, Bud Sealy. And he told me—”

“No,” I say. “No, you better go now.” And I take a step towards him. He looks surprised, like he’s just opened the wrong door and come up on something he never expected. He backs up a couple paces.

“It’ll all come out anyway,” he says. “I’ll find out from somebody.”

“Not from me you won’t.”

I step towards him again and look at him close up, a foot away from his face. His moustache is thin under his nose and he’s got pockmarks along the side of his jaw. He could use a haircut. But—I’ll give him this much—he doesn’t back up anymore, even if he is just a kid, so I’m through playing with him now. I walk around him over to the corral gate and open it by throwing back the bar latch and holding it for him.

He walks over towards me, and when he’s just about to pass me to go through the gate I take his little notebook out of his hand and rip the top page out of it, the one he wrote something on while he was talking to me. Then I give the notebook back to him. His face looks like somebody just slapped him.

“What are you doing?” he says. “You can’t do that.”

“Son,” I say, “get your ass off my place. And don’t you ever come back here. Understand? I don’t ever want to see you again.”

He starts to say something more; his mouth opens beneath the moustache, then it closes. He turns and walks away from me over to his car. He gets in and for a minute watches me through the window. Then he turns the key;
the car moves, spraying gravel out behind him as he leaves. I watch him out the lane onto the road back to town. When I can’t see him anymore I look at the scribble on the piece of paper I took from his notebook. It reads:
Sanders Roscoe—fiftyish—heavyset—obstinate—Goodnough’s neighbor—Good-no
. Then I tear it up and drop it underfoot. My boot heel grinds it into the cow shit until it’s disappeared, gone, turned into just brown nothing. The damn squirt.

But it didn’t do any good. He found out anyway. It got into the papers anyway. He must have talked to Bud Sealy again and some of those others in town. They put it on the front page. That’s why they’re talking of trial now. His damn newspaper account sparked this trial talk.

S
OME OF IT
was even right. Some of what they threw on the front page between those two pictures of Edith and Lyman was even the truth, because I guess even a Denver newspaper reporter can walk into the Holt County Courthouse and copy down the date from a homestead record, and then, after he gets that straight, drive on out to the cemetery and read what it says on the three headstones that are standing there side by side in brown grass, away off at the edge of the cemetery, where there’s just space enough left over between that last stone and Otis Murray’s cornfield for one more grave. Because yes, he managed to get that much straight. And after he got it, his paper managed to arrange it clever on the front page.

They had Edith’s picture over here on the left and Lyman’s picture opposite it, over here on the right, with both of them staring into the middle so that they seemed to not only be looking at one another but to also be studying what was between them. And what was there, between them, like it was some kind of funeral notice or maybe
just the writing on the inside cover of a family Bible, was this:

ROY GOODNOUGH BORN, CEDAR COUNTY, IOWA, 1870
ADA TWAMLEY BORN, JOHNSON COUNTY, IOWA, 1872
R. GOODNOUGH & A. TWAMLEY, MARRIED 1895
GOODNOUGHS, HOMESTEAD, HOLT COUNTY, COLORADO,
1896

EDITH GOODNOUGH BORN 1897
LYMAN GOODNOUGH BORN 1899
ADA TWAMLEY GOODNOUGH DIES 1914
ROY GOODNOUGH DIES 1952

And then, finally, below that there was just one more date, that last one, the one that was the reason for there even being a story on the front page at all:

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 31, 1976

So that much of it—that much of what that Denver reporter found out and that much of what his paper printed—was right. But that wasn’t all of it. That wasn’t even all of that much. It didn’t touch on the how; it never mentioned the why. And even when it went on to repeat what Bud Sealy must have told him about those half-dozen chickens and that old dog and Lyman asleep on his cot while Edith rocked, even then it wasn’t complete. For one thing, it left out Roy’s stubs. For another, it didn’t say a word about Lyman’s wait, nor his Pontiacs and postcards and twenty-dollar bills. For still another, it didn’t tell how Edith herself waited, first for one to die and then for the other to come back, and what she did with him when he did come back, and how, finally, she ever managed to live through those years of travelogue. It never mentioned my dad.

But then, to tell truth, I don’t guess that Denver reporter could have written about those things, even if he’d have wanted to, because nobody told him about them in the first place so that he could go on and write them up after he was told. I wouldn’t tell him. I would have been the one to tell him too—Bud Sealy was right about that. But I wouldn’t. By God, I would not.

But listen now, if a person didn’t want to print it up in some damn newspaper or throw it all over the front page between two pictures that were arranged so the people in the pictures had to stare at what was printed between them like it was a thing to be ashamed of—no, if a person just wanted to sit down quiet in that chair across the table from me and, since it’s Sunday afternoon, just drink his coffee while I talked, and then if he just didn’t want to rush me too much—well, then, I could tell it. I would tell it so it would be all, and I would tell it so it would be right.

Because listen:

•2•

M
OST OF WHAT
I’m going to tell you, I know. The rest of it, I believe.

I know, for example, that they started in Iowa, like the papers said.

I believe, on the other hand, that he must have seen flyers talking about it. Maybe he saw notices in the Iowa papers and government brochures too, all talking about it, saying there were still some acres of it left out here and if he proved on some of it, stayed on it, it was his to homestead.

He was twenty-five. He had married late. Ada had married later—for a woman, I’m talking about, since this was eighty-two years ago and she was already twenty-three. But things like age and time would have bothered him in a different way than they did her, because the pictures I have seen of her show that she was a small thin woman with eyes that seemed too big for her head—one of those women with blue veins showing at both temples. A woman like that—tight strung, nervous, too fine altogether for what was wanted of her—never should have married somebody like him, and she paid for it. He was a hard stick. He was all stringy arms and legs, with an Adam’s apple like a hickory nut that jugged up and down when he chewed or said something, and I don’t suppose he was much more than just getting used to having a woman in
his bed before he was already thinking something like:
Here I been married a half year already, but I’m still at home. I’m still shoveling corn to another man’s hogs, still spooning soup at somebody else’s dinner table. Jesus God
.

He was a mean sort of private man, I know from personal experience with him, and more muleheaded even than he was private. He hated like the very goddamn to be dependent on anyone for anything. So I believe there had to be something like those flyers, and I believe he had to have seen them.

On those cold wet Iowa nights then in that first winter of their marriage, with his brothers and sisters sleeping in the bedrooms next door and his folks snoring from another room down the hall, I picture him standing beside a kerosene lamp. I picture him reading those flyers and notices and government brochures till he had them by heart, while in the room with him Ada would have been lying thin and straight in their bed under some thick homemade quilts, lying there waiting for him with her hair already combed out and braided, trying to stay awake for him because she no doubt believed a new wife would do that or should at least try to. And still—because I know that’s the way he was—he must have gone on night after night the same. Gone on standing there beside that damn foul-smoking lamp, reading and planning and shivering in his long sag-butt underwear, with his red feet itching from the cold and his stringy arms and legs gone all to goose bumps and pig’s bristle by the time he finally blew out the lamp and crawled into bed beside Ada—not to sleep yet, you understand, or even to raise Ada’s flannel nightgown so he could rub his calloused hands over her thin hips and little breasts—but just to wake her again, wake her so he could tell her one more time how, by God, he had it all figured.

Well, he had it all figured—he always did—but I don’t
suppose that cold-feet, goose-bump, being-wakened-in-the-night sort of thing could have gone on for too long, because even Ada would not have put up with it forever. She would have gone back home to her mother in Johnson County, claiming whatever they called incompatibility in those days, and then Roy would have fumed and claimed foul and begun to rage something about a wife’s duty. And maybe that would have been the best thing for both of them; at least it would have been the best thing for Ada, because then she might never have had to leave Iowa. But, like I say, that goose-bump business must not have gone on for too long, not to the point where Ada left him, anyway, because come the next spring, the spring of 1896, I know they both left Iowa in a loaded wagon and moved to the High Plains of Colorado.

They drove across western Iowa and ferried across the Missouri River, then they crossed all of Nebraska. They couldn’t have made more than twenty miles a day, and they probably came alone, since there hadn’t been any real wagon trains for thirty years, and maybe by the middle of the second week Ada had stopped looking out the back of the wagon. Anyway, they got here, and when they got out here to northeastern Colorado, what did they find? That happens to be one of the things I know; I know what they found, but what I don’t know is what they expected to find. It depends on what kind of lies those flyers and government brochures told. But if they expected to find some more of Cedar County, Iowa, some kind of extension of that country they had left three or four weeks earlier, then they never should have thrown any bag of seed or any plow or foot-pedal sewing machine into any wagon; they should have stayed put, because this country wasn’t like that. It wasn’t any of that deep-black-topsoil country with forty inches of annual rainfall and good drainage and plenty of hardwood close by—burr oak and black wall
—for lumber and fuel. What this country was was sandy, and it was dry, and for the most part it was just flat, with only some low sand hills running off in a northeasterly direction towards the Nebraska Panhandle. There were almost no trees.