The Tie That Binds

by Kent Haruf

  All the time, though, my dad and I listened to the radio. Between news bulletins we got out the world atlas and discovered the dots in the Pacific Ocean that meant Hawaii and with a ruler tried to figure the miles between Honolulu and Tokyo and between Tokyo and California. The news kept coming in on the radio, and it seemed to me that it was all happening right then, since I was only just hearing about it. I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to bomb such a small speck on the ocean in our atlas— before that Sunday Pearl Harbor and naval installations hadn’t existed for me: there weren’t a lot of sailors in Holt County—but I could tell from my dad’s face that something important was happening and what was happening was bad. My dad’s face, more than the pitch of the broadcaster’s voice, made it seem so. His face was hard set all day. It looked even worse than it did those times when he looked up and watched the Goodnoughs’ car pass our house, passing on down the road into dust. He said that what we were hearing on the radio was the start of a war, a world war that now we in this country were going to have to be a part of. He hated it all. He only hoped that it would be over before I was old enough to be called to it.

  Of course people in town were talking about it, too. All along Main Street in the poolhalls and the grocery stores they were talking about it, and much of the talk was crazy, wild, frantic nonsense, and it wasn’t long before anything seemed possible to believe. The men in the bank and the beer drinkers in the tavern were even speculating that Hirohito would somehow drop down into Los Angeles and start marching up Sunset Boulevard to conquer Betty Grable: there was that kind of fear and excitement loose everywhere. So, with all that going on, I don’t remember that we were very much surprised a couple nights later when long after we had gone up to bed and were sound asleep Lyman came and started knocking the holy bejesus out of our front door. My dad just got up and put his pants on and went downstairs to let Lyman in before he broke the door down.

  I got up too and stood in the dim light at the top of the stairs to watch. I could see Lyman below in the front hallway; he had his heavy overcoat on and he was wearing his winter cap with the corduroy earflaps. Beside him on the floor was a metal suitcase with a belt strapped around it. My dad and he were talking, and though I couldn’t hear what they were saying, I could tell that Lyman was more than a little excited. He began to tie and untie the strings on the earflaps of his cap, and he was shifting from one foot to the other like he had to use the toilet. In my goofy sleepiness I wondered whether that was the reason why he had come over—to piss in our pot—except that wouldn’t have explained why he had brought a suitcase. Then my mother was there, too, beside me at the top of the stairs.

  “Sanders,” she said. “Go back to bed.”

  “It’s Lyman Goodnough.”

  “I don’t care who it is. I want you to get dressed or to go back to bed.”

  My mother had a maroon robe on with matching open-toed slippers. Her blond hair, treated so that it stayed blond, looked freshly combed.

  “Lyman’s seen striped pajamas before,” I said.

  “That is not the point.”

  “Here comes dad.”

  My dad came up the stairs and met us at the top landing. His face and neck and hands were dark tanned to the shirt line; against the rest of him they looked purple in the dim light. He had black hair on his bare chest and he was smiling.

  “So the vigilantes are up too,” he said.

  “This is not the time for your jokes,” my mother said. “What does that man want?”

  “You mean Lyman Goodnough.”

  “I know who it is. What’s wrong with him?”

  “Nothing particular. He’s just discovered he has something like a backbone.”

  “And what’s that supposed to mean?”

  “He wants a lift into town.”

  My mother looked at my dad as if he was talking utter nonsense, as if she still thought he was trying to be funny. “Now?” she said. “At this hour? Whatever for?”

  “He wants to catch the train. He’s leaving.”

  “But that’s ridiculous. He can’t do anything. Where can he go?”

  “He can go west, I suppose,” my dad said. “That’s the direction the train is headed in.”

  “West,” she said. It sounded foolish and obscene in her mouth. “Well, I hope you had the sense to tell him no.”

  “No, I told him I would. I come upstairs to get my shirt and boots on.”

  “Are you insane?”

  “Probably,” my dad said. “And I’m getting cold standing here talking about it.” He turned to go back to their bedroom.

  “Dad,” I said. “I want to go.”

  “Get dressed then.”

  “He’s not going. You’re not going,” my mother said.

  But she wasn’t even looking at me. She followed my dad into the bedroom, and I followed her down the hallway and stood in the door. My dad went over to the closet and took a flannel shirt off a hanger. She watched him as if it was a conspiracy against her, as if he and Lyman Goodnough had decided to get up a plot. With one hand fisted at the neck of her maroon robe, she watched him unbutton his pants and begin to tuck his shirt in.

  “Will you tell me,” she said, “why that man can’t at least drive himself to town?”

  “Yes, but you aren’t going to like it.”

  “Of course not. I don’t like any of this. But I assume you mean it’s something more than just the fact that he can’t get his own car started.”

  “He never tried it,” my dad said. “He’s afraid if he starts the car it’ll wake the old man.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Well, that does make sense, doesn’t it. He can’t wake his own father but it’s perfectly all right to wake us.”

  “I said you weren’t going to like it.”

  “Yes, you did say so and you are right about that. But what about her? What about his sister? I suppose she’s afraid to disturb the poor old man too.”

  My dad stopped dressing then and looked at my mother. He wasn’t happy. “Leave her out of this,” he said.

  “Or hasn’t she learned how to drive a car at night yet? I’ve never seen her driving a car at night.”

  “Keep your mouth off her,” he said. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Yes, I do,” she said. “I know more than you think I do.”

  “No, you don’t,” he said. “You don’t know the half of it.”

  “All right,” my mother said, looking at me in the doorway. “I’ve had enough for one night. I’m going to bed.”

  “That’s right,” my dad said. “I think that’s a good idea.”

  “And you are too,” she said to me.

  “No, I’m not,” I said. “I’m going along. Dad, you said—”

  “I told you to get dressed,” he said.

  “No. That’s definitely out. He’s not going.”

  “It won’t hurt him.”

  “He’s not going,” she said. “He has school tomorrow. He’s no Edison, or haven’t you noticed?”

  “It won’t hurt him. And he can still make school.”

  “I don’t want him to go with you. I forbid him to go.”

  “I believe he’s going, though.”

  “AH right,” she said. “All right, go then.”

  But she wasn’t looking at me. She was watching my dad. It didn’t have anything to do with me anymore—if it ever did.

  “Go,” she said. “You may as well get yourself involved in this too. You’re just like him. You don’t care what I think. Why do you bother to ask?”

  But she didn’t go back to bed yet and she wasn’t finished talking. She had more to say to my dad. From their bedroom down the hall I could hear her talking to him while I got out of my pajamas. Her voice was going on and on with steel in it, like she was some lawyer summing up the defense in a bad case, and even though by 1941 it must have been an old defense and an old case, she did not sound tired of it. There was all that steel and ice mixed up in
it. But my dad wasn’t saying anything. I could hear just the sound of him sitting down on the edge of the bed to put his boots on and the noise on the wood floor as he stamped into them. Then I was dressed and out in the hallway again ready to go downstairs, and I heard him say something to her. It sounded like two words, and they must have been enough, or too much maybe, because after he said them it was only silence coming out of their bedroom. I went downstairs.

  Lyman was still standing in the front hallway. The strings of his earflaps were tied tight in a double knot under his chin pulling the bill of his cap down low on his forehead like he was expecting heavy weather, and he was standing there holding his suitcase.

  “You coming along too?” he said. “For the send-off?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I put my coat and stocking cap on, and we stood facing one another, waiting for my dad. We examined the rug and each other’s feet.

  “At least,” Lyman said after a while, “at least it don’t look like it wants to snow.”

  “No, sir.”

  “I hope it don’t,” he said. “Not anyhow.”

  The rug was an oval braided one made of bright rags, and Lyman’s shoes were his best, those black polished shoes he must have worn to the Holt Tavern a year earlier. They had sand on them now from his walking the half mile to our house. The sand was getting on my mother’s rug.

  “Well,” Lyman said. “How’s the sixth grade?”

  “What?”

  “The sixth grade. At your school in town.”

  “I’m in the eighth grade,” I said.

  “Eighth,” he said. “Well, don’t never quit.”

  “No, sir.”

  “Take me,” he said. “You never know when you might need all your education.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “That’s right,” he said. Then like he’d been pondering this question for a good long time, he said, “What’s the capital of California?”

  “San Francisco.”

  “That’s right,” he said. “You see?—that’s what I’m talking about.”

  My dad came down the stairs then and put his coat on, and we went outside to the pickup. It was cloudy and just flat dark, but it wasn’t going to snow; it was too cold to snow, and there wasn’t that heaviness in the air that comes before snowfall. I sat between my dad and Lyman in the pickup with the gearshift between my knees and the light from the speedometer showing yellow on my dad’s face. Nobody said anything for a while. The gravel on the dirt road kicked up underneath the fenders, and then we were on the highway, where there was the sound of the snow tires on the blacktop. Outside the window the headlights picked up the brush and tumbleweeds caught along the fence line beside the highway, and beyond the fence line the country was all dark, with the few trees standing up leafless and showing even darker against Owens’s white house on the right when we passed it and again two miles later against Wheelers’s yellow house on the left as we passed it too, driving north towards town. There were no yard lights on anywhere in the country.

  Then, before we made town, my dad said to Lyman, “I don’t suppose you thought to tell Edith you’re leaving.”

  “Why sure,” Lyman said. “She knows.” He patted his coat pocket. “She packed me some sandwiches. I got them right here with me.”

  “What does she say about it?”

  “Well, I’ll tell you,” Lyman said. He leaned forward to look past me at my dad. “She says for at least one of us to get away. That’s what she told me last night.”

  “Jesus Christ,” my dad said. “When’s she going to quit?”

  “And I’m going to write her about it,” Lyman said. “Edith says for me to see all the sights I can and taste pleasure.”

  “Well, see that you do it.”

  “I will. You can bet on that.”

  “I’m talking about writing her,” my dad said.

  “Oh,” he said, and sat back again to look ahead down the road. He brought one of his big red winter-chafed hands up to play with the belt strapped around the metal suitcase on his lap.

  When we drove into Holt all the houses were dark and the big globes suspended above the corners on Main Street were off. I didn’t see anything moving. No one was at the depot either; Lyman was going to have to buy his ticket once he got on the train. My dad stopped the pickup beside the cobblestone platform, and though we were almost an hour early, Lyman got out with his suitcase under his arm and stood to face east up the tracks. My dad and I stayed in the pickup with the motor and heater running and watched him wait. Once while we watched him, my dad said, “Well, this is a piece of history that won’t appear in no history books.” But he was talking more to himself than he was to me.

  Finally when the train got there, waving its beam light back and forth above the tracks and making the ground vibrate, we got out to say good-bye. In the light of the conductor’s lantern I could see that Lyman’s eyes were bleary from the cold and that there was a drip of watery mucus at the tip of his nose. Lyman looked cold and scared. My dad shook his hand, and Lyman patted me on the shoulder, and then in his long overcoat and his best shoes and with his corduroy earflaps tied tight under his chin, he mounted the steps to the train, and that was the last we saw of him. That was the last anyone in Holt County saw of him for almost twenty years. Including Edith.

  LYMAN WAS forty-two when he left on that west-bound train, and as I recall his plan involved joining the U.S. Army. The train stopped in Denver, but he didn’t get off there and he didn’t get off in Cheyenne either, nor in Salt Lake, nor in any other place, until the train had finally stopped for good in Los Angeles to turn around and come back east. I suppose he wanted to be sure there were enough mountain ranges and enough Mormons and mesquite between him and that old stump-armed man to prevent himself from being dragged back and put to work again. Because once he had actually managed to escape he sure as hell wasn’t going to take any chances; he wasn’t ever going to sweat his overalls plowing sand again, not if he could help it, not if it was just a matter of putting enough miles between himself and that sand. And in the confusion of December 1941, he had that ready excuse: he was going to join the army to fight the Nips and the Huns—never mind that he had never fought a thing before in his life.

  I gather, though, that it didn’t take him long to discover that, as much as everybody was watching the sky for Hirohito to come drifting down out of some imperial orange-and-red cloud, still, the army recruiters were not about ready to sign on any middle-aged farm boy from Holt, Colorado, even if he was as eager as a mongrel bitch in heat. The army recruiters weren’t that desperate yet. So I guess he tried the navy next, and being a little smarter now he no doubt lied about his age, but he wasn’t the fuzzy-cheeked piece of dough the navy was looking for, either; not that he wasn’t used to being treated like a dog, you understand, they just couldn’t be sure he could learn their new tricks. So after the navy I don’t guess he even tried the marines, because I know for certain that he hired on instead to work in a Los Angeles airplane factory. And he stayed there in the factory until the war was over, working his daily shift, pulling levers or grinding gears or running rivets and not talking to anybody much but just doing the work they gave him to do. During lunch break he sat off at the edges of the mechanics and welders where he could watch them and listen to their talk, but he never complained, like they did, because he figured he knew of at least one thing that was worse than this. All the time, anyway, he was saving his money so that when MacArthur returned to take that cob pipe out of his mouth and to sign those surrender papers on board that boat in the Pacific, Lyman already had more than enough money saved up to buy his first new Pontiac automobile.

  Then he took off again. His new Pontiac had a full tank of gas; he had seen to the air in the spare tire, and he spent the next sixteen years doing what he said his sister had told him to do: he saw the sights and tasted pleasure. For a half a year to as much as a year and a half he stayed in one city after another. He paid his rent on tim
e for a succession of cheap rooms upstairs over some pawnshop or dentist’s office. He worked at a minimum wage pushing cement up construction ramps or pumped gas or shoveled ballast under railroad ties. Afterwards in the evenings he drank beer in dark bars that had booths along one wall and ranks of bottles in front of chipped mirrors on the other. And about twice a month he would follow the big hips of an aging barmaid up the stairs to his own rented room, where he would release her from her girdle and then sweat on her while she watched past his moving shoulder to see how soon the cracked plaster on the ceiling was going to fall and smother them. Meanwhile, of course, he bought more Pontiacs and he kept moving. Whenever the color of his last car didn’t just suit him anymore, he would buy another new one, and whenever it seemed that he had seen what there was of Boise or Omaha worth seeing, he would take off and drive to Dubuque or Oklahoma City or Memphis. But he never came home again.

  Nobody out here, not even Edith, saw him all that time. I know that for a fact. But I also know, since I’ve seen every damned one of them, that he did send Edith at least one picture postcard each year with a color likeness on it of the biggest skyscraper there was in whatever city he happened to be stopped in right then. I also know, because I’ve seen them too—good Christ, yes—that every year come Christmas he sent her a package of twenty-dollar bills tied up with a red bow. But, like I say, he never sent himself home.

  He didn’t even come home when Roy finally died and stopped fouling good air in 1952. Maybe Lyman didn’t know the old man was dead, not in time anyway to come back for the funeral, even assuming he had wanted to. He wouldn’t have been easy to locate. Edith would have had to send word to the last address scribbled on the last picture postcard and hope he was still there, since apparently he never left any forwarding address when he moved on, and besides, the only return address he ever used at any time was just general delivery, and that without bothering to pick up his mail very often, because why should he?