The Tie That Binds

by Kent Haruf

  None of us wanted what happened to us, either. Edith, in particular, hated it. I think she blamed herself. But it wasn’t her fault: Lyman was driving. Still, there’s no point in fixing blame. It happened and it’s over. Come August it’ll be ten years.

  Only I think I mentioned earlier how I thought the big back seat of Lyman’s Pontiac would be good for my wife. It shows how much I know, because it was and it wasn’t. My wife didn’t die. Coming home from the fairgrounds, after the nickel toss and the beer and the Ferris wheel, she was asleep in the back seat with me. Up front Edith was dozing in the passenger seat beside Lyman. I wasn’t paying a lot of attention; I was half asleep myself, watching the month-old wheat stubble and the dark shining corn flow by beyond the fence line.

  I came to when we bounced off the near side of the iron bridge rail. We were shooting across to the other side then where we caught the far end of the bridge; the car spun, crossed back to the right side of the highway, cleared the bridge, and then dove nose first off the road-edge; it slammed into the bank of the barrow ditch and rocked back with a leaded jolt onto its top. We were thrown upside down scrambling on top of one another with sharp cutting edges of glass everywhere. There was the bad smell of gasoline, the sound of something dripping. Lyman was out cold; Edith was moaning in shock about her arm. Mavis and I were shoved together, her face twisted away from me against the dome light and her knees drawn up against her stomach. She was crying.

  “The baby.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “But the baby.”

  “We’ve got to get out of here. It’ll catch fire.”

  I started kicking with my boots at the door, but it was jammed hard against the ditch bank, and the other door was sprung so it wouldn’t open. The back window was smashed free of glass except for jagged pieces around the edges, so I kicked those off and crawled out into the ditch. I began to pull Mavis out after me.

  “Please don’t,” she said. “Please don’t move me.”

  “I have to. I can’t leave you in there.”

  I pulled her by the arms as carefully as I could, trying to cradle her head and to support her back, and she was still crying in a soft whisper. I got her out and laid her down in the weeds away from the car. She was lying there in the dark with her knees up. Over her legs her dress was wet and sticky, but I didn’t tell her that. I went back and pulled Edith; she cried out when I tugged one arm so I shifted to the other, and then Lyman after her, out the back window into the ditch. Then a car was there; against the headlights I could see figures sliding down toward us from the lip of the road.

  It was Ed Taylor and his wife. They helped me carry Mavis and Lyman to their car; Edith, though she was still in shock, was able to be led up the steep bank. Ed drove us all to town to the hospital.

  But it wasn’t enough. The baby came that night anyway after a bad time with the forceps and quite severe hemorrhaging. He was born dead. It was a boy too, like we agreed it would be. He had a shock of black hair and on his face a blank pinched look like an old man; there were bruises on the sides of his head from the forceps, and one of his ears was torn. The nurses showed him to me so I could attest to his death. Later, when Mavis came out of the anesthetic she wanted to see him. I told her no, she didn’t; I felt bad enough myself and I didn’t think seeing a dead baby would make her feel any better either. But she said, “I want to see him.”

  So I took the dead little boy in to her, and she had him then, lying flat on her back, with one arm around him on her chest. Mavis was just pale and quiet with tears shining in her eyes; for a while then she was gone from me, gone from all the world and all of us still in it, retreated into someplace where none of us could reach her or interest her in county fairs or jokes about pickle exhibits and betting systems. None of that mattered now. And I began to think it was going to be bad trying to get the baby from her, that I was going to have to talk hard to get him released from those quiet, pale arms; but she wasn’t crazy; Mavis wasn’t mad. She was just deep hurt and saying good-bye to him, and finally she told me his name was John for my father; and then she held him up to me and I took him back to the nurses, while she fell off into a sad sleep.

  So for a day or two I had three people to visit in the Holt hospital. Lyman wasn’t a lot to talk to, though; he was groggy with pain-killer and as distant as last Thursday. They had him in traction with a broken neck. And down the hall Mavis stayed quiet for a while, sleeping when she could, and when she couldn’t sleep staring in pain towards the far corner of the room. So it was Edith I talked to during that brief period after the car wreck. They had her arm in a cast, and she kept saying how sorry she was, like she had assumed all responsibility for the wreck, as if she had been driving the car herself.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said.

  “I know,” I said. “But it wasn’t anybody’s fault. It happened;

  that’s all. And anyway, he’s out of it now. Maybe that’s something.”

  “Don’t say that,” she said. “I was looking forward to him, Sandy. I wanted him to come down the road to see me. Like you used to, all these years ago.”

  “Yes,” I said. “He would have liked that.”

  “I think he would have,” Edith said. “I wanted him to.”

  So I went from one room to another, did chores at home and returned, and then several days later, when both Mavis and Edith were strong enough to be released, we had a private funeral for him up on that rise above the barn. Lyman was still in traction in the hospital, so it was just the three of us—Mavis, still pale and quiet and in pain, and Edith with her arm in a white cast, and me with some stitches where the glass had cut my face. We buried the box, which seemed only half as big as a peach crate—it weighed nothing—buried it beside the little boy’s grandfather and great-grandmother. None of us said anything when the damp sand was packed firm on top of it. We couldn’t think of words that would make any difference.

  Then it was finished. There was just the feeling afterwards of being empty. My wife couldn’t accustom herself to there being nothing inside her, nothing kicking and stretching anymore to plan for. She spent a lot of time in the room she had prepared for the baby. It had a crib in one corner with a new sheet stretched tight on the mattress; the store tag was still on the sheet; over the window there were fresh curtains. I found her up there one afternoon in front of the window staring towards the Goodnoughs’ house.

  “I didn’t want to spoil their fun,” she said. “They were having such a good time.”

  “Yes. You did the right thing.”

  “I don’t regret that part of it. Do you?”

  “No. I don’t regret that part of it. Will you come downstairs with me now?”

  “In a minute,” she said. “I’m all right. I was thinking about Edith.”

  A half mile east of us Edith had pain and Lyman to contend with. Lyman was becoming a child.

  •10•

  IT DIDN’T HAPPEN right away. It took almost ten years more for it to get so bad that there seemed to be only one option. But long before the end of 1976 there were already beginning to be too many signs to ignore—which looking at it now, while telling you about it this long quiet Sunday afternoon in April, reminds me—signs that pointed even then to his steady slide and eventual total collapse into an old man’s awful form of childhood. He became as cranky and unpredictable as a two-year-old. For one thing his car was gone.

  They totaled his Pontiac. He never had another one. At about the same time we were burying that little box of ours on the hill above the barn, Bernie’s Wrecking Service winched Lyman’s last green Pontiac up out of the ditch weeds and towed it to town without salvaging even the tires. It’s still there in the junkyard west of the city water-treatment ponds. You might want to take a look at that too before you leave this area; the car stands in the middle of the weedy lot with the hood propped open by some high school kids who scrounged for cheap engine parts but gave up and left without thinking to close the hood. It’s ge
tting pretty rusty. The windows are all smashed out, and the blood inside on the upholstery looks as if it was just coffee stains. In fact you would probably take it for that, believe it was just coffee stains, unless you happened to wonder why there was so much of it upside down staining the roof material around the dome light like it had puddled there.

  Lyman stayed in the hospital for almost three months after the wreck. It was close to Halloween before Doc Schmidt released him. I drove Edith into town to bring him home, and he looked like maybe the nurses had gotten him up to go trick or treating. Around his neck he was still wearing a padded horse-collar affair, and his face showed green and yellow bruises; on his bald head there were crosshatched welts where they had stitched his scalp. When we walked him out the door and down the hospital steps, he seemed somewhat shrunken—shrunken and old-man brittle and confused. The sun hurt his eyes. On the way home when we passed Five Mile Bridge he stared rigidly ahead without a word.

  At the Goodnough place I helped Edith get him out of the car and take him inside to rest. We laid him on the couch in the living room, where the postcards he had sent her during those twenty years of his travel and escape from the old man were still pinned in neat rows on the walls. He closed his eyes and went to sleep with his freckled hands lapsed onto his chest. Edith and I went out to the kitchen.

  “Do you have time for coffee?” she said.

  “I’ve got to get back to work. But Mavis and I will be checking every day to see how it’s going.”

  “He’ll get better,” she said.

  “Sure,” I said. “But you call us if there’s something you need. You don’t have to go this alone, you know.”

  “We’ll see,” she said. “But thank you, Sandy. And tell Mavis thank you.”

  “She’ll be over this afternoon. Now you get some rest too. You look tired.”

  “There’s too much to do,” she said.

  Lyman did get better but he never got well. He never fully regained that crotchety spryness and bounce that he had shown for those six years before the accident; now, more and more, he was just crotchety. He was irritated by little things of no importance—his toast was cold; his shoestring was missing its plastic end; his sock had a hole— and he would pout. In the living room you would find him staring vacantly at the postcards on the wall. In time the padded horse collar around his neck came off and the bruises on his face faded; the welts on his scalp became thin white scars, and he still dressed himself every morning in suit pants and dress shirt with a bow tie at the collar. But he didn’t appear so trim or city-dapper anymore; his clothes seemed to hang on him like they were at least one size too big, as if someone had bought his shirt and pants thinking he would grow into them. He didn’t. He developed an old man’s stoop. Towards the end he was using two canes.

  But for a while that first winter there was talk of buying another car, of replacing his Pontiac. They certainly had more than enough money to do that. Hell, they could have paid cash for three Cadillacs if they had wanted to; it had been that kind of year for wheat and they had no debts of any kind. So twice I drove them into town to shop for cars, looking in the show windows at Happenheimer’s Pontiac Dealership on the highway and sitting in that smell of new cars on display, trying out the comfort of fresh leather seats and playing the radio, while Hap himself hovered over us and talked heavy-duty shocks and horsepower but avoided mention of any trade-in. Like everybody else in Holt, Hap was aware of the wreck; he knew why the Goodnoughs were in the market for a new car and had the good sense not to say so. On the second trip to town Lyman decided to try one out.

  It was kind of a silver-gray, two-door Bonneville, a nice car. One of the mechanics backed it quick out of the showroom and left it running. We got in, Lyman behind the wheel, and I thought at first it was going to be all right. I thought he could manage driving again. He seemed competent enough, able. But it was the hour for kids to be walking home in the afternoon from grade school, bundled up in the dry cold in stocking caps and mackinaws, throwing snowballs and kicking ice clods in the gutters, and at an intersection Lyman damn near ran over two girls and a boy who were crossing in front of us. I don’t know— maybe the low winter sun slanting from the west blinded him.

  “Lyman,” Edith said. “For goodness sake, stop!”

  He hit the power brakes too hard and threw us forward against the dash. In front of the car the kids’ faces looked shocked, white, big eyed. They stood there staring at us, then the boy—he must have been a fourth- or fifth-grader— gave Lyman the finger, and they scooted up onto the curb, where they regrouped, yelled at him and then ran off laughing like big stuff along the sidewalk. Lyman was sweating.

  “Here,” he said. “You take it.”

  “Nobody’s hurt,” I said.

  “Goddamn it, I can’t drive anymore. I don’t even want to.”

  “We’d better go home,” Edith said.

  Lyman and I changed places. I drove back to Happenheimer’s and there was no more talk of buying a car. Edith, I think, was relieved. It was one thing less to contend with, to be responsible for, to manage and determine that it came out right—or at least to prevent its causing harm to anybody else regardless of what it caused her. Never mind me, she would have said if you had asked, and I didn’t ask; it was not the sort of thing you asked of a woman like Edith Goodnough, that small trim lady who went on surviving, who continued to endure by plain courage and a clear eye to duty, and no matter how much you might have wished to God that she would just relax that white-knuckled hold of hers for a while, for a week, say, or a day or even an hour, she wouldn’t. She would not. I don’t believe she would even have known how. It was like she held the reins of the world in her two hands and she had seen enough of old men’s fingers, mangled and chaff coated in the stubble behind a wheat header, and enough of dead babies, miscarried in the hospital because of car wrecks, to fear ever letting go, even for a minute. So I believe at the very least that she was relieved when Lyman said he wouldn’t drive anymore. It was that much less to worry about. But she herself would not drive either. She had decided not to. I suppose she understood too well how it would be an affront to Lyman for him to have to sit there in his banker’s outfit while she drove. It would have been like twisting some kind of bad knife in his guts every time she did it, and you have to remember she loved him—she wasn’t going to do that. So Happenheimer lost the sale of a new car that winter. Neither Goodnough ever drove again.

  It meant they were dependent on us. For the next ten years if they—except that later it was just Edith—if they needed to get out or had to go somewhere, had to see Doc Schmidt or buy bread and navy beans at the store, Mavis and I took them. Hell, we didn’t mind. It was never anything like a chore to either one of us; we were glad to do it, and for a while we tried hard to take them both along whenever it was anything we thought they might like or be able to manage. I recall once—this must have been sometime during the next three years, since Lyman was still willing to leave the house—once, the four of us went out on a Saturday night to dance at the Legion.

  Shorty Stovall was being touted to be there again with his band. The whole town was full of it; there were posters in the store windows and an entire half-page ad in the Holt Mercury. Christ, you would have believed it was the Second Coming. Well, it was something to do on a Saturday night. We asked Edith and Lyman to go with us.

  Spruced up for the occasion, we drove to town and arrived early enough at the Legion to hold the corner booth, which the Goodnoughs favored. We sat down in the darkened room, which was already layered with smoke, beside the bandstand, where sure as hell—the ads hadn’t lied—Shorty and his boys were making warm-up noises. They each had Stetsons stuck down over their bushy heads, Shorty in a red hat, the boys in black, and the whole band had the kind of doodad beads hanging from knots on the leather strings of their vests that little kids will play with. They were drunk or doped to the gills. While they hit their warm-up licks they kept saying stuff to one another and
then laughing, like whatever it was the other guy had said flat proved he was witty. It was better not to watch them, to just listen to them play once they got started, because in fact they could play music. It only made you sick if you watched them.

  After we had been there for a few minutes Marvella Packwood came over to take our order. When she wasn’t canning pickles or populating the town with another baby, Marvella waited bar at the Holt Legion. I suppose that was where she discovered the fathers for her kids, only she seemed lately to have slacked a little in her efforts, because there hadn’t been a new kid sired in a couple of years. I wasn’t up-to-date on her pickles. Anyway, she stood in front of us now in a purple low-necked shirt and pink jeans so tight the stitches showed; she was carrying a cocktail tray while she popped gum. “What am I going to get you folks?” she said.

  “Marvella,” I said. “You’re looking good.”

  “You think so? I just bought this blouse this morning. Like it?”

  “Why sure. Don’t you, Lyman?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  Marvella leaned over the table, showing a good deal of what she had under the blouse to Lyman as she patted his cheek. “What’s the matter, darlin’?” she said. “Don’t you feel any good tonight?”