The Tie That Binds Read online

  “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.

  SOME 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•

  MOST 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 n
ot 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.

  Even now there are not many trees here, although people in towns like Holt have full-grown trees that were planted by early residents sixty and seventy years ago in backyards and along the streets—elm and evergreen and cottonwood and ash, and every once in a while a stunted maple that somebody stuck in the ground with more hope for it than real experience of this area would ever have allowed. In the country we have a few trees now, too, of course, standing up around our houses, and you can tell where somebody lives, or used to live, because of those trees, but we are more interested in windbreaks. The 1930s taught us windbreaks, and the government wants to encourage it.

  Every spring now the soil-conservation office tries to sell us red cedar, blue spruce, ponderosa pine, Russian olive, Nanking cherry, cottonwood, lilac, sumac, plum, and honeysuckle—thin saplings at nine dollars for a bundle of thirty or fifteen dollars for a bundle of fifty. For another twenty cents per tree the government will send out somebody to plant them for us. Last spring it was an old man on a tractor plowing a furrow so that a young woman riding a tree planter behind the tractor, with a bundle of saplings in a box beside her and her feet raised onto stirrups to be out of the way, could poke the saplings down between her thighs into the plowed furrow almost like she thought she was giving birth. This particular young woman enjoyed getting as much sun as she could all over her body, and the folks down at the soil-conservation office are still trying to figure out how much to charge us for watching her do that.

  But then I was talking about what it was like in this country in 1896 when Roy and Ada rode here in a wagon from Iowa to homestead, and I said there were almost no trees here then, and that’s true. The only trees in this country at that time stood along the rivers and the creeks, and there were only two each of those. To the north was the South Fork of the Platte River and about one hundred and fifty miles to the south was the Arkansas River; in between were the two creeks, the Republican and the Arikaree.

  What they found when they got here then—and I don’t believe Ada ever got over the shock of it—was a flat, treeless, dry place that had once belonged to Indians.

  It was a hell of a big piece of sandy country, with a horizon that in every direction must have seemed then— to someone who didn’t know how to look at this country and before Henry Ford and paved highways diminished it just a little—to reach forever away under a sky in summer that didn’t give much of a good goddamn whether or not the bags of corn seed Roy was going to plant in some of that sand ever amounted to a piddling thing, and a sky in winter that, even if it was as blue as picture books said it should be and as high and bright as anybody could hope for, still didn’t care whether or not the frame house Roy was going to build ever managed to keep the snow from blowing in on Ada’s sewing machine. There just wasn’t a thing in the world concerned enough to care whether Roy’s corn did anything more than shrivel, and there wasn’t a thing tall enough or wide enough anywhere between Canada and Mexico to stop the snow from blowing.

  No, Ada never got over the shock of this country. There was too much of it, and none of it looked like Iowa.

  But Ada wouldn’t have left Iowa at all if this had still been Indian country. She wasn’t the kind of woman to dare that much. Somehow she would have blocked Roy’s homestead plans, and she would either have found a way to endure Roy’s cold feet or she would have gone home to her mother, like I’ve already suggested. But whatever, she would have stayed in Iowa, which was established country by that time, and feeling at home she would have gone on attending church circles and making little forays to town to buy thread for doilies and gimcracks for the house, and if that had happened, if she had stayed in Iowa, that dark lost look, which pictures of her show, might never have taken root in her eyes. But the Indians were gone. She didn’t have that ready excuse nor good reason not to come. She had to follow her husband, if what he proposed to do seemed even remotely reasonable, and after all, by the beginning of the last decade of the last century, this country was already starting to fill up with homesteaders; there wasn’t much homestead land left. So Ada came.

  But Roy now, I suppose Roy would have come anyway, even if Indians were still here. He was about enough of a fox terrier to trot into a territory that belonged to somebody else, and once he got there, raise his hind leg to it, claim it for his own, without thinking twice about prior claims or possible consequences. But Roy never got the chance to prove that either. Colorado had already been a state for twenty years by the time he got here; the Indians had been gone for at least that long; and the little piece of land he claimed was signed over to him in a local government office.

  But all right, by late spring in 1896 the Goodnoughs got here in their wagon from Iowa, and if they were disappointed, if what they found wasn’t what they expected to find, having read those flyers and government brochures, still they stayed; they didn’t go back. They unhitched the wagon, and then, no doubt, Roy stuck Ada in the ramshackle boardinghouse in town to bide her time, to wash the dirt out of her hair and write another long miserable letter home, while he rode out on one of the workhorses to look this country over. I don’t suppose that took him very long. He was in too much of a hurry; he was too muleheaded; he wanted to get some seed in the ground; and he might even have known that if he didn’t do something quick, then Ada might somehow wake from her dream and daze, sit up and look around her, and then just take off, walking if she had to, with her small chin and her big eyes pointed east. So, in a hurry, he looked this country over, finding the expanses of bluestem and buffalo and sand love and switch grass and prairie sand reed, which still stood belly high on his Belgium, locating those areas that still remained after other, earlier homesteaders had staked their claims and done their chopping and busting.

  He found what he thought he wanted seven miles south of town. There was already a house and a shed or two and a couple of pens, just a half mile west of the corner of the quarter section Roy intended to claim for himself, but in the house there was only a six-year-old boy living alone with a black-eyed silent woman. And I believe Roy picked that place because he thought that boy and that half-Indian woman who lived there, a half mile up along what wasn’t even a wagon track yet, would never last, in fact, could never last. With time then, and not very much time at that, he believed he would be able to take over that other place that was already started, because there wasn’t any man around. The man who should have been there had disappeared three years earlier. On a Saturday morning he had gone to town—to the three stores, the boardinghouse, the saloon and graveyard and fifteen or twenty wood houses
that meant Holt then—and he never came back, and never wrote either, since the six-year-old boy couldn’t read yet and because the pipe-smoking woman he left behind never would be able to read. It would just be a waste of pen and paper and a two-cent stamp to do something like compose a letter and tell why.

  Anyway, you understand, because it was that particular quarter section of grass a half mile east of that other house that Roy picked for his own, decided in all the world was his, that’s the reason why I know what I do about him, and also about Ada and Edith and Lyman, because, of course, the six-year-old boy living in the house was John Roscoe, and John Roscoe lasted.

  Well, the Goodnoughs lasted, too. And things—at least at first—went along about like you would have expected them to. Roy filed his claim, put his horses to pulling a sod-busting plow, planted his bag of Iowa seed as best he could in the rough ground, bought a cow or two to stake out on the nearby grass, and then turned finally to throwing together a frame house for Ada. She’d been living under a tarp till then, which was tied to the side of the wagon and which had to be untied any time Roy decided he needed to haul something, living almost like she was some kind of nomad Arab but without even that much permanence or experience at it. She had to cook over an open fire and try to coax a few beans and peas and maybe a couple of zinnia plants to grow in the corner of the plowed sod Roy allowed her to call a garden. It wasn’t easy. To water her little garden and even to have something to drink but never to have enough left over to take a bath in, Ada had to walk a half mile one way with two yoked pails across her thin shoulders and fetch water from that other place where the boy and the woman lived and owned a windmill that pumped water.

  But that other woman apparently took some interest in her. Or maybe she felt something like pity towards her— like maybe you would towards some dog that had been dropped off out in the country and not some strong mongrel dog that would manage to live anyhow, but a to poodle, say, or a Pekinese, that belonged in the parlor— because I know for a fact that at least once the woman walked out to Ada, where Ada was stooping beside her two pails at the windmill and horse tank, splashing water onto her wrists and face, and said: