Another thing I can only guess at, concerning that summer, was why it took my dad so long. He was already thirty-two. He was still young, of course, still in his prime— strong, tough, black haired, the kind of man dogs and horses will come up to for a scratch and a pat without his ever having to whistle or snap his fingers. But for at least ten years there hadn’t been any reason to doubt that he would make a good go of ranching. He had been well established for quite a while; he had things in control. So maybe he was just waiting. He was a country boy too, after all, and every fall during harvest he was still there helping the Goodnoughs, watching Edith, talking to her some and joking with Lyman, while he himself drove the header now that Roy couldn’t.
Then his mother, my grandmother, died. That was in the spring of 1922. When he came in for supper one evening, he found her dead in the rocking chair with tobacco ashes spilled out onto her black dress, and he buried her up on that little rise north of the barn. He stuck her briar pipe under her hands on her chest. Edith was the only other person there. Together they shoveled the sand in onto the wood box.
“There ought to be a tree or bush, though,” Edith said. “Even if it’s just the thought of it, she ought to have some shade.”
The box was covered now. My dad was mounding the sand on top and packing it with the flat of his shovel.
“I mean in July and August,” Edith said. “I don’t like thinking of her up here then.”
“Be a awful long way to carry water.”
“A bucket or two every other day,” she said. “We could take turns.”
“What kind of tree?”
“A cottonwood. They grow fast, and if there’s any wind you can hear the leaves washing and turning in it. Unless you’d rather it was something else.”
“I believe she liked cottonwoods. She never said.”
“You could get one from along the Arikaree.”
“I’ll get one this afternoon,” he said. “I guess we’re done here now.”
They stood on the rise looking at the mound of damp sand, with the — switch grass and brome and sagebrush around it. They could see the house south of where they stood.
“Do you want me to leave now?” Edith said. “I will.”
“No. Why would I want that?”
“Maybe you want to be alone.”
“I’ll have that as soon as I go down to the house,” he said. “No. No, you look okay there. You might even look pretty if you didn’t have all that wet sand on your shoes.”
“Go on,” she said.
“And your big nose wasn’t peeling.”
“Go on, you,” she said. “But John, she was a good woman, wasn’t she? My mother thought so. She made a difference for my mother.”
“Sure, she made all the difference. But I’ll never forget how that son of a bitch left her.”
“Nor you either. He left you too.”
“Never mind me. I always had her. But she never had anything — just a six-year-old kid and a homestead he hadn’t even got started good yet. The son of a bitch. I don’t know how she stood it.”
“Some people can’t,” Edith said. “She did though. She was as strong as anything.”
“She shouldn’t of had to be that strong. That’s what I mean. He just left her out here — with me and a milk cow and one horse. Can you believe that? Hell, he even took the other horse.”
“I’ll help you water the tree tomorrow,” Edith said.
So maybe that’s what he was waiting for: his mother to die and Edith Goodnough to suggest some shade for her. Anyway, he planted a cottonwood and they took turns watering it — or watered it together, more like — each of them carrying a bucketful up to the rise in the evenings, and later he built a fence around it, and then they began going out together in his Ford car with Lyman along in the back seat for the ride.
IT WAS CALLED the Gem Theater then. It was on the other side of the street and north a block and a half from the theater we have now, the Holt Theater. There is a marquee out front above the double-door entrance to the Holt Theater now, so people can see what Blaine Fisher is showing for their enjoyment on the weekend, but you can only read what is showing if you are driving south on Main Street, because Blaine only changes the words on the north side of his marquee. I suppose he figures that’s enough ladder climbing for him, with his big stomach and his skinny legs and high blood pressure. Blaine leaves the other side of the marquee always the same: ENJOY FRESH HOT POPCORN. It makes you wonder now how fresh it is and how hot, considering how many years he’s been advertising it that way.
As for the old Gem Theater, I can’t remember whether it had one of those things above its doors or not — probably not — and it wouldn’t have had sound by 1922, either. But my dad and Edith and Lyman must have had some fun there just the same, with the lights in the auditorium darkened and the heads on the screen flickering bigger than any human head could be, and then before they were ready for it, that guy with the pencil moustache was tying the little blond to the railroad tracks, or strapping her down good to a buzz saw, and she was looking Help me right at Lyman chewing his popcorn and right at my dad and Edith holding hands on Edith’s lap, and all over that pretty lipstick mouth she had that big scream screaming “Help.” Some things were simpler then.
But it was late in the summer, after one of those two or three nights in town at the picture show and after a dish of ice cream at Lexton’s Confectionery, that what started right, ended wrong, and it stopped whatever else might have happened later. They were in the car going south towards home. Lyman was asleep in the back seat with his head shoved up against the side. When they got to the corner where they had to turn east to come the mile off the highway to the Goodnoughs’, they woke Lyman up and Edith asked him if he would walk the rest of the way, not quite home, she told him, but wait for her before he got home so they could go into the house together.
“For a favor to me,” she said. “Will you?”
“Don’t forget John,” he said.
“Yes. For him too. What’s wrong, though?”
“Nothing,” Lyman said. “What if Pa finds out?”
“He won’t. Here, you can take my coat to lie on in the grass.”
“But what if he does?”
“I don’t know. Will you do it?”
Lyman got out of the car then and spoke in through the window to Edith, so close that his breath moved her hair. “Don’t forget to pick me up,” he said.
“We won’t. And thank you, Lyman. But don’t you want my coat?”
“No. Lay on it yourself.”
“Don’t say that. Why would you say that? What’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing’s wrong with me.”
“What’s wrong, though? Something is.”
“It better not take very long,” Lyman said. “That’s all I know.”
Then he turned to walk alongside the road in the dark, away from the car. My dad and Edith drove a mile or two farther south on the highway and then turned west into the sandhills.
“He’s tired all the time,” Edith said. “Did you see him back there? He’s going to have a stiff neck tomorrow.”