The Tie That Binds

by Kent Haruf

  He walked down through the weeds in the ditch, stepped up over the fence, and stood waiting in the stubble on the exact ground the tractor would have to use if it was to make another turn and go back out across the field. But no matter what the tractor did, my dad wasn’t going to move; he was planted there. The tractor came on. The two heads above it took shape, became Edith’s straw hat and the old man’s hard face. There were stump-arms ruining the air above her hat. The tractor still came on. Its discharge and explosion increased steadily as if someone had loaded it with firecrackers, lady fingers when it was far across the field, and now cherry bombs as it got nearer. My dad stood still, waiting.

  Have you ever seen one of those documentary movies, or a TV news clip, say, showing a little white farmhouse with some outbuildings spread around it, and off in the distance but not too far off, not far enough, sure not, there is a tornado coming? It’s all darkness and huge, massive, the tornado coming black all the time and the white house standing there waiting for the damage. And you know it’s all inevitable; you know it’s going to get it: the windows are going to burst, fly out in space, scatter like thrown water, and the roof’s going to crash, and you wish the damn fool running the projector would have the sense to reverse the goddamn film so that afterwards you wouldn’t have to note the straw sticking out of any tree trunk or watch while an old woman lifts the chimney bricks and the two-by-fours and the window shade off the little girl in her pink dress. If you have seen that then you know how my dad looked waiting in front of that tractor. I won’t forget it. I won’t forget how his back looked.

  But the tractor came on and I thought: Jesus, at least her feet can reach the brake pedals. At least she will remember to kill the throttle. At least by now she knows how to turn the goddamn steering wheel. Doesn’t she?

  Because my dad wasn’t going to move. And he didn’t move. He didn’t have to. Edith got the tractor stopped a foot in front of him; it stayed there racing in idle like a leashed dog growling, wanting to gobble his pants zipper. The old man was wild.

  “Stand back, Roscoe,” he yelled. “Get away. I ain’t got time for no jaw.”

  My dad didn’t say anything.

  “Well, by God,” the old man screamed. “Run him down then. If he don’t move, run him over.”

  But of course Edith wouldn’t do that, didn’t do it. Besides, now my dad was doing all that needed to be done. He stepped up to the tractor and jerked the magneto wire out, ripped it off and threw it away from him into the weeds of the barrow ditch. The tractor coughed and died.

  So then I thought the old man had finally gone completely crazy. I had never seen anyone go full-out wacko before, flat rage and spit, scream murder, but he was doing all of that. And all the time too he was hitting at something with his arms, flailing them windmill fashion, hitting again and again, hard, until the blood showed red on his wrists and bad stubs. Watching him from the pickup I thought at first he was trying to hit Edith, punish her, but that he was so mad, so far gone, that he couldn’t even do that, because in fact he wasn’t hitting her. Then I saw that it was the belt he was hitting, that leather contraption buckled behind him between the tractor fenders, which kept him in place, and he was trying to break it with his stumps and wrists because he had no fingers left to work the buckle. He was furious. He kept hitting at it; Christ, then he was kicking at it. It was raging lunacy.

  But I don’t suppose it lasted all that long, not as long anyway as it takes me now to tell it, because when she understood what he was doing and actually managed to believe it, Edith ducked her head, reached past him, and unbuckled the damn thing. He stumbled off the tractor, fell to his knees, stood up, and came running around the tractor to my dad.

  My dad stood waiting for him like a bulldog might stand and wait to see what injury a gopher with rabies might do him. The old man hit him in the throat. My dad stepped back. Blood from Goodnough’s stump was smeared across his neck. The old man swung again and missed.

  “Daddy,” Edith yelled. “You old fool.”

  He hit my dad again, in the face this time, under the eye, leaving some more of his own blood. My dad caught him by the front of the shirt, held him eye level, then flung him hard onto the ground. The old man faltered, seemed to catch his breath; he pushed himself up from the plowed sand with his red stumps and came again, flailing his arms. My dad blocked most of that wildness but caught one in the ear. So he had the old man’s blood all over his face, and that was enough. He hit the old man with all his weight on the point of the chin, rocking his head back. The old man went down. I thought he was dead. My dad must have thought so too; he knelt beside him and lifted his eyelids. Edith scrambled off the tractor. Together they carried him over to the pickup, let down the tailgate, and laid him flat in the back. He was one hell of a mess: his hands were caked with sand; there was a raw blue swelling beginning to show on his chin; he had sandburs stuck all over his clothes. He wasn’t dead, though. He was still alive and mean in his eyes.

  They stayed in the back with him while I drove the pickup over to the Goodnough house. At the house my dad carried him like he was folded clothes up the steps and on up to the bedroom, where he laid the old man down on a bed.

  “Wash his face off and get some ice. He’ll live.”

  Edith went back downstairs. The old man stared at my dad out of yellow watery eyes. He didn’t move any but just lay there, making a bad mess of the bed and watching my dad. Then his eyes filled and ran down his cheeks. I suppose I felt sorry for him then, too, the old bastard. He wasn’t any good; he was less than no good. His face was all pinched up, and there was that water grizzling down his cheeks into his shirt collar. But for the first time I did feel sorry for him.

  Edith came back with a wet cloth and a bowl of ice cubes. She cleaned his face and hands and applied the ice to his chin, picked the sandburs from his clothes. The old man paid no attention. She took his shoes off.

  “I want him out of my house.”

  “Be quiet,” Edith said. “Haven’t you done enough?”

  “This is my house.”

  “It doesn’t matter whose house it is. Be quiet.”

  “I want him out.”

  “Forget it,” my dad said. “I’m going.” He leaned over the old man. “But don’t you ever put her on that tractor again. You hear me?”

  “Get him out of here.”

  “Next time I’ll kill you.”

  “Get out.”

  “I mean that. I’ll kill you first.”

  The old man’s eyes were full of water again and he began to shiver in his bed like he was cold. We left then. At the bedroom door I looked back, and Edith was covering him with a blanket. She was crying now too.

  We went downstairs and outside to the horse tank. My dad washed the blood and grit off his face, then we walked over to the pickup. My dad got in behind the wheel. He drove us in to town, to Holt, to the Payday Liquor Store, where he bought a fifth of whiskey and some beer. He brought it out in a paper sack. Then he drove us back out here to the country and stopped the pickup on top of a sand hill in a cow pasture.

  “Son, you ever drank beer before?” he said.

  “No, sir.”

  “It’s time you started.”

  So in the middle of a Saturday morning in 1943 I sipped the beer my dad bought me until I was drunk, while he drank whiskey and talked. He talked for hours, talked, said more to me that morning than he had in all the previous fifteen years we had lived together. He told me about his mother, his father too, what little he could remember of him, told me about the Goodnoughs, how it started with Ada and the two water buckets, how it was when Roy lost his hands, told me how he and Edith and Lyman had driven to the movies together in town for six weeks one summer. And once he had started telling it he couldn’t seem to stop; he couldn’t seem to explain things enough. There was too much of it.

  I didn’t interrupt him. I sipped my beer, took a piss now and then in the sagebrush and soapweeds, and listened to him as well a
s I could. But towards the end of it I remember saying something innocent and foolish like, “But it’s not fair.”

  And he said, “ ’Course it’s not fair. There ain’t none of it that’s fair. Life ain’t. And all our thinking it should be don’t seem to make one single damn. You might as well know that now as later.”

  •7•

  ONLY IN FACT my dad couldn’t accept his own advice. Against the odds and against all kinds of craziness he kept trying to change things, to ease them, even if he couldn’t finally make them fair. I suppose some of that has rubbed off on me. It’s the reason I’m telling you this. It’s why I can’t accept the idea of anybody wanting to put a woman like Edith Goodnough on trial for a thing in the world, let alone murder.

  But at any rate that Saturday morning was the last time she had to drive a tractor. That same week my dad arranged it so that Charlie Best, who neighbored us to the south, would work the old man’s ground on shares. I don’t know the details, but I remember that Charlie had a hired man, a gap-toothed old plodder named Ralph Johnson, and it was Ralph Johnson who did the farming and all the tractor driving at the Goodnough place for the next nine years or so—until the old man died, that is, because after her father was dead Edith leased the ground to me. But while he still lived, breathed air and drank black coffee, nobody named Roscoe touched his land. It would have been too much. It would have been like kicking a man when he was down, like rubbing his nose in his own shit. My dad understood that; he accepted at least that part of it. So, without allowing the old man to see his hand in it, my dad arranged for Charlie Best to lease the land and then helped Charlie keep things up at the Best place.

  After that we all settled into our ruts again. And sometimes, looking at this story, it seems to me like that’s about all it is: a series of independent ruts. Some of them lasted for four or five years and some lasted for twenty, but they were ruts just the same, a bunch of worn-out cow paths winding down occasionally to water and a bit of rest and maybe a good blow for a while over a block of salt, but then back again once more into all this Holt County sand. Hell, you can see it any time in any cow pasture.

  But at least Edith Goodnough’s particular rut was slightly changed now. She didn’t have to disk stubble or cut hay while the old man rode insane behind her. No, all she had left to do now was take care of him, keep up the house and the garden, and still milk cows; and then the cows gradually took care of themselves: they died. One by one they got too old to milk; they were trucked to Brush to the slaughterhouse and were not replaced.

  And as for the old man, he was changed some, too, now. For one thing he stopped talking. After he ordered my dad out of the house that morning, the old bastard wouldn’t say a piddling word, not a damn thing. And in some ways that was all right too; at least he wasn’t wasting air damning you anymore. But in other ways it made it harder. Now Edith had to try and guess what in the hell it was he wanted, and if she didn’t always guess right then he would stump-shove his bowl of mush off the kitchen table or he would piss his pants while she watched him— all out of meanness and that bitter old man’s silence that he refused to break. So most of the time from first spring until late fall she fed him quick and then took him outside to sit in the car alone where he could watch while Ralph Johnson made slow progress steadily in the Goodnough corn- and hayfields. In the winter months she sat him on a straight chair in front of a south window.

  Also, she went on collecting Lyman’s postcards—he was in Mobile now, now in Montgomery, then in Baltimore—and she continued to collect the bow-tied twenty-dollar bills he sent her at Christmas. The cards and money were kept in separate boxes in a dresser drawer in her bedroom. Later she would pin the postcards, picture-side out, on the walls of the living room, but she didn’t start that until the old man had died. The old man didn’t seem to remember who the blazes Lyman was when she showed him a picture of a glass building or some photograph of Robert E. Lee waving a saber from atop a marble horse. He seemed to confuse Lee with Lyman. Or, occasionally, if he did seem to recall just who Lyman was, then it only made him madder. He would spit on the floor or wet the front seat of the car. So Edith stopped showing him the postcards and kept them to herself. She was saving them.

  OVER HERE we had our ruts too. My dad and mother went on tolerating one another for the duration. The separate and independent lives they lived didn’t change much even though they still ate at the same table and slept in the same bed. My mother had her church work, her circle, and she was on the school board for a term or two. But the war years were hard on her: she couldn’t keep fashionable. The shelves and racks in the Holt dress shop were empty almost always, and you couldn’t purchase a bolt of cloth to make something yourself. The army got all the good cotton and wool for uniforms.

  “They take everything,” my mother said. “And all that material is just going to get soiled. Or perforated.”

  So, once during those years, she and Mrs. Schmidt, who was the wife of Holt’s one doctor after Marcellus Packer died of a stroke in the tavern, drove in my mother’s car to shop in the big stores in Denver, and they managed to find a pair of stockings apiece and a few dresses. But the trip to Denver turned out to be a one-time affair, a single charge. When Doc Schmidt found out where his gas coupons had gone he was not exactly ecstatic. If nothing else he stopped leaving his coupons out in the open on his dresser top. So what I remember of the hurried-up victory celebration on the football field in 1945—the band played marches, I remember; the mayor spoke and there were preachers on the wood platform—all that is mixed up with the memory of my mother’s anticipation of stocked shelves again, dresses and hats. “Thank God,” she said, when we heard about the armistice on the radio. And I don’t guess the only thing she had in mind was the end of killing. But then I don’t suppose she was the only one who felt that way, either. Maybe she was a little more honest, that’s all. Because to do her justice, it was what she had to live on.

  In different ways my dad suffered over the war, too. There was that bad business with Edith and the tractor because of the war—I mean Lyman would never have managed to jump up and run off if there hadn’t been a war—but there was also the fact that my dad had spent enough nights drinking and fighting to have a pretty good idea of what men could do to one another for no reason; and now with the war they had a reason, and they were actually being trained and encouraged to do more than just hit one another in the face. So, while I can’t say much of that touched me hard, I believe it made my dad sick. He hated it. And sometime back I think I said he wasn’t a man who laughed a lot—well, now he didn’t seem to laugh at all. On the other hand, to do him justice too, he must have made some money during those years. The cattle market stayed steady with the increased need for meat, and he went on castrating calves and experimenting with seed bulls and hauling fat cattle to the sale barn. I suppose he learned to live with the connection between his raising beef and all that blood being spilled in Europe.

  THAT LEAVES ME. And like it or not I can see you’re going to have to hear some more about Sanders Roscoe. It’s the price you pay for asking questions about Edith Goodnough.

  So. I told you I was in high school. Well, I finished high school. I graduated from Holt County High in 1946— hell, I even went to college. But during this period I’ve been talking about I was still in high school, still trying to play some kind of halfback while beside me there was this big fullback who was so good that he was going to make unanimous all-conference and second team all-state. That was Bud Sealy, of course, and he was all right then. He hadn’t begun to show any signs of becoming a sheriff or a son of a bitch yet. No, he was just a big tough kid with a fast car. Only, looking back on it now, I suppose it might have been then that he began to develop a habit for being hard in the middle of things, develop a knack for taking advantage of any opening, never mind whether that opening was on the football field or between the legs of some girl, or, like later, right on the front page of some damn big city newspaper. But I might
be pushing things by saying that. That’s just hindsight. I might be trying to force square pegs into round holes, because if what I’ve just suggested is true, none of us saw it. I sure as hell didn’t see it. At the time I was a lot more interested in trying to get Doris Sweeter to allow me to see more of her, to let me hold something more of hers than just her sweaty hand.

  Then, like Lyman, I left. I went to college at A&M in Fort Collins for a while. It was my mother’s idea as much as anything, though I wasn’t opposed. She wanted a son with a college diploma, and what I wanted was to get away from home. My dad agreed to it too; he thought I might be capable of learning something. Well, I don’t know that I learned a damn thing that matters, at least not of the sort he had in mind—though I can’t be sure of that now either. He probably knew all along.

  Anyway, Fort Collins was a hell of nice little town then; it’s developed middle-age spread since—like the rest of us, it has some heart trouble. But in the four years I was there it was still the sort of town that even a green kid from Holt County could survive in. I mean it provided me with the kind of trouble that, once I got out of it, left me only a little bruised and scratched up but not a lot smarter than I was when I first got there. It wasn’t the kind of trouble or sidewalk show, say, that any seven-year-old kid from any slum sees every day and survives if he’s lucky but ends up changed forever afterwards even if he does. No, I just had some sore places to show for my trouble. It didn’t change the way I see things. It took Holt County to accomplish that.