The Tie That Binds (7 page)

Or if Edith and Lyman had been country kids living now, alive and howling in the 1970s, things might have been different too. It’s TV and movie shows and high school and 3.2 beer and loud music and paved highways and fast cars (and what goes on and comes off too in the back seats of those cars, until maybe Bud Sealy shines his flashlight in through the side windows)—it’s all those things and more that country kids have now, and you can’t tell a farm kid from a town kid, even with a program. They’re just about all the same, all alike in their cars, driving up and down Main Street every Saturday night, honking and howling, in Holt, Colorado.

But Edith and Lyman didn’t have those things, those chances and opportunities to escape. They were farm kids in the second decade of this violent century, and they were
stuck. Their mother died early, like I’ve already said; their father was Roy Goodnough, and even if he was a raging madman sometimes, even if he yelled too much at them, he was still their father. And then—to clinch matters, to turn that heavy vise a few more turns to the right—they had to see him get his hands ruined. They had to be right there when it happened; they had to witness it all, watch his hands being ground to hamburger; they had to run for help, get him to town, carry what was left of his fingers wrapped up in a damn handkerchief, and then one of them had to hold an arm in place, and they both had to watch while Packer did what little he could to rectify the bloody mess of his hands—and all the time he was still talking about I told you so, I told you, didn’t I?

So when I say they were stuck, I don’t mean they were stuck just a little bit. I don’t mean they were just sort of stuck the way you might be if you stepped into some mud and you were able to get out of it if you made the effort, and once you were out of it about all the loss you’d have to show was that you might have to leave a pair of good new shoes behind you in the mud. No, I mean they were deep stuck. I mean it was like they were stuck clear up to their chins, almost up to eye level, and no real effort was even possible. They might manage to wiggle their arms a little bit now and then, they might turn their heads a few degrees, but they couldn’t get out no matter what, and about all they could see in any direction around them, when they did manage to turn their heads a little bit, was just more mud. More of the same. Or, in their case, more sand and more work and duty and obligation.

So Edith went on, of course, cooking and cleaning and mending and washing clothes and ironing. Also, she still had the garden to manage: to plant, hoe, water, can, and pickle. Also, she had the wood to cut and carry in, the stove to stoke, the chickens to feed, the eggs to gather and
clean. Also now, every morning and every night, on top of all those other duties she had to do the milking.

Have you ever milked cows? No, I suppose not. Well, milking cows is all right if there isn’t any way you can get out of it, but it’s not quite the fun times old pictures make it out to be, with some bare-armed milkmaid sitting down beside some nice brown and white Guernsey cow under an oak tree and over there not far away is a blue stream bubbling and everything looks lazy and fine and somehow it’s always summer. No, you get up—Edith got up—every morning in the dark, never mind if it was blizzarding out, never mind if she was still exhausted. She got up, threw on a dress and a coat and went outside to find the five or six Shorthorns in the cow pasture. She walked them through the gate and into the barn, set the head catch to hold them there, hitched up her skirt and coat to climb up the ladder to the loft, threw down some hay into the manger, climbed down again, set the T-shaped milk stool in place, sat down with her head close to the cow’s flank to keep from getting hit in the face too much by the stinging shit-filled, eye-blinding tail, washed the tits off with a wet rag, pulled some first squirts of milk from each tit to further clean them and to check for mastitis, squeezed the bucket between her knees, and then, finally, milked the cow out enough to still leave some for a calf to suck and survive on. And then she did the same with the next cow, and the next, and the next. And all the time she was talking quietly to them to keep them calm enough that they would let the milk down and not kick the bucket away from her.

When she was finished milking, she turned the cows out to pasture again, and then carried the buckets of milk into the house to the back porch, where she ran the milk through the separator, turning the crank by hand. Afterwards, sometime during the day, she had to find time to make butter and to get the sour cream ready to take to
town to sell. I believe they did that once a week, took the cream and eggs they didn’t need into town to Bishop’s Creamery opposite the railroad tracks.

But you understand, don’t you, that what I’ve told you so far was just the morning milking. Because she had to do it all over again late in the afternoon before she cooked supper; twice a day she had to do it, every day in the week. You also understand that what I’ve said about milking cows is based on the shaky assumption that everything would go right. I mean, that’s how it was supposed to be. But, of course, it didn’t always go that way. There were many days when whatever could go wrong, did go wrong. A cow stepped on her foot. Another one kicked the bucket over. One of them turned up sick and had to be doctored. Or maybe they just didn’t want to come in from the pasture in the first place. Who knows what an old speckle-faced cow is thinking? Or if she’s thinking anything at all? Well, some people claim pigs are smart, and maybe they are, but nobody I know has ever said that about cows.

But the worst part of milking was always that constant stinging foul tail. Now a shit-filled tail is bad enough. Struck across your eyes or snapped into your mouth, a shit-filled tail will do for starters, and it happens all the time. But you don’t know what bad is, you haven’t experienced the full benefit of stink and outrage, until you’ve had a fresh cow (especially an old raw-boned bitch of a one that you hate anyway) come in to be milked for the first time after having a calf, and when she gets in she has a three-day-old afterbirth hanging down out of her because she hasn’t cleaned out right. So there it is, that damned stuff is hanging down out of her, swinging there between her back legs; it’s shit-soaked, juicy, buzzing with flies, and the rottenness of it is so putrid, so God-awful, that it’s all you can do to keep from throwing your guts up. But you’ve got to milk her, don’t you? That’s what she’s
there for. So you set the bucket down, perch your butt on the milkstool, and you pray or hope or cross your fingers, you make all kinds of impossible promises: if only you can just get her milked without having to taste any of that putrid foulness. And by God, yes, it looks like you’re going to make it. Yes, that’s right, you’re going to make it. So easy now, easy Mama, easy. That’s right. And Jesus, yes, you’ve almost got her milked out enough to call it good—when bang, oh holy shit, oh Christ on a crutch, she hits you with it all, all of that blood and shit and juice and unbelievable outrage, right across your face. It covers your eyes, your nose, your mouth. You can even feel some of it dripping down the back of your neck. Oh brother, help me. Son of a bitch. Then you can’t hold it any longer: you throw up, all over yourself, all over the damn cow, all over the milk bucket. You throw up until you’re gagging on acid bile, your stomach hurts, and you’re groping for air.

Well, it happened to me once. Once was enough. It made me want to kill something. But I suppose it happened to Edith Goodnough a number of times. It had to. Edith milked cows twice a day, every day of the week, all those years.

B
UT LYMAN
, meanwhile what about Lyman? Because, after all, Lyman was stuck, too. I mean, he sure as hell wasn’t any sixteen-year-old kid from the city. He was just a tall big-boned mop-haired farm kid, with raw wrists and patched overalls and high-topped shoes, and he seemed to stumble about in a kind of daze, like he had lost something and couldn’t remember what it was he had lost, let alone know where to look for it. Lyman was stuck out here on that same sandhill farm, stuck in the same way his sister was. He was caught in the same vise, smothered in the
same mud hole with just his chin (weak and pointed like his mother’s) sticking up above it, and I don’t believe Lyman was even able to get his head up enough to look around him, to see that there wasn’t a thing in the world out there but more of the same.

Roy saw to that. Roy, with his destroyed hands and his hard eyes, kept Lyman’s nose buried in it. It was like Lyman was just some ass-whipped mongrel dog that Roy kept at heel on a short chain, and any time Lyman got any notion otherwise, then his father would give him a sharp jerk to make him remember and pay attention. Because that’s the way it was for a long time: Roy kept Lyman’s nose buried right there at home. He made damn sure that Lyman never had time enough to hatch up any escape plans; he saw to it that Lyman spent all his brain and all his muscle and all his sweat right there planting those quarter sections of corn and wheat, planting the same corn rows year after year and then cultivating that corn and handpicking it, planting the same wheat fields and disking and harvesting, and in between times when he wasn’t working corn or working wheat, then he was exhausting himself with raking the same hayfields and stacking the same haystacks.

So, for a long time, Lyman stayed there working. And it wasn’t that there was anything particularly unusual about that—everyone in the country worked, worked hard too— but what made it worse for Lyman, the thing that must have made it seem like he had one of those barbed goat heads, one of these poisonous sandburs, buried forever in the back of his neck was the fact that all the time, every day, he was being ordered around. There was never any letup. It was Roy who decided everything. Roy ruled it all. If Lyman had had any say-so, if he had had any choice in when to plant the corn or where to stack the hay or how many acres of wheat he was going to plant, then it
might have been all right. But he didn’t. He might just as well have pissed against the wind as to suggest anything to Roy.

For a long time then, while Lyman worked that sandhill farm, about all he could manage to do was to wait and to hope too, I suppose, hope in his dog-eyed dazed fashion, hope that someday somehow some kind of barn door or pasture gate would get left open just enough to let him squeeze through it, so that once he made it through and got his overalls unstuck, then he could take off and start running. And by God, never look back. Not even long enough to see if something was gaining on him.

Well, Lyman didn’t need much, you understand, but he sure as hell did need something.

T
HINGS
went on the same for about seven years, and then it was Edith who made the first attempt to get out. Or at least for one summer she seemed to encourage the possibility of it. And if you’ve understood what I’ve said about her—or more to the point, if I’ve managed to make it plain enough—then it shouldn’t surprise you that it was Edith who made the first attempt to break free. Of the two of them, she was the one who had the sand. Besides, by 1922, when Edith was twenty-five, she must have been just about as beautiful as any woman can be. And I believe she still is, in her own clear-eyed way, and no more so than now, when in four days she will be eighty years old and still lying there in the damn hospital bed, waiting to get well.

But in the summer of 1922 she must have been just about perfect. She was slim and quick, with brown eyes and brown curly hair. She was woman breasted. She had strong hands. She was uncomplaining with plenty to com
plain about. She was . . . but hell, I don’t know how to describe women. Only look here, this is more what I mean: she was quiet and focused and there for you in a way that didn’t make you feel awkward or clumsy even when you were worse than both of those things, as failing on your feet as a newborn colt, as drunk as a just-dropped calf. She made you want to hold her there in the front seat of that car on that country road, hold her, put your arm around her, kiss her, breathe her hair, talk to her, tell her all those things you hadn’t told anyone else before, all those things beyond the jokes and the surface facts of yourself, things you yourself didn’t know for sure you felt or thought until you heard yourself telling them to her in the dark in the stopped car with your arm around her, because somehow it would be all right if she heard them and they would be true then. Edith Goodnough must have been something that summer.

But, Christ, what a waste of life. It makes you sick to your stomach. It makes you want to do anything else in the world but think about her.

Y
OU
SEE
, Edith and my dad, John Roscoe, went out together that summer. And if you think about that for a minute you’ll understand at least one of the reasons why I feel about Edith the way I do. For six or seven weeks that summer, Edith and my dad went spooning or sparking or whatever it was people called it then when two people drive out together in an old Ford car with the windows rolled down and the dark air blows in on them, carrying that green smell of sage in with it. Driving in the car, they turn towards one another now and then, and then more and more often as the evening fades; they laugh a little bit about something that may seem funny to them only, while
the stars have begun to snap overhead, and behind them there’s only that dust billowing up in the road after the car has passed.

So Edith and my dad went to a few dances together. They went into town to a movie or two. They ate supper once in Norka, the next town west of Holt. But mainly they drove along the country roads in the sandhills in my dad’s old Ford, talking and laughing a little bit. It must have seemed enough to be together and to be moving, and almost always they had Lyman with them in the back seat.

Maybe that’s the reason why Roy let them go. With Lyman along to stick his head up between them from the back seat, it may have seemed all right to let Edith go out driving with my dad. I suppose he thought Lyman would put a halt to any funny stuff. Not that Lyman would say anything to anybody—Lyman didn’t do much talking in his life, except maybe to Edith—but he did always seem to be there. You’d be working on something in the machine shed or visiting with someone on Main Street, and then you’d look up and there Lyman would be, standing off a little ways, cleaning the dirt from under his fingernails with a jackknife, and you couldn’t be sure how long he’d been standing there or how much he’d seen or heard, but there he was all right, waiting like a stray dog to see what developed. So maybe that’s the reason why Roy allowed that six- or seven-week vacation, that brief lessening of his hold on the vise that summer, but that’s only a guess. It sure as hell wasn’t like him. Maybe he just wanted to see how far it would go, to kind of test the water. Or maybe he already had in mind what he was going to do next.