BUT I’M GETTING AHEAD of myself. Or if you want it for a joke, I’m forgetting myself.
Because in fact there were a few things happening in the house down the road a half mile west, in this house here where you and I are sitting away a Sunday afternoon.
For one thing my dad just about quit. He damn near quit on himself, quit giving a good goddamn about anything. When he and Edith ran into each other on Main Street — it was a couple of days later, on Saturday afternoon — when Edith told him what had happened that other afternoon and that she wouldn’t leave the house ever, my dad wanted to kill Roy Goodnough.
In front of Nexey’s Lumberyard, across the street from Bishop’s Creamery, my dad said, “I’ll kill him.”
“It’ll be all right,” Edith said. “It has to.”
“I’ll chop his head off.”
There were people on the sidewalk, men in overalls and caps, women in silk stockings, kids sucking horehound candy and bouncing sticks on sidewalk cracks, all walking past and then stopping ten yards away to watch with their mouths held shut and their eyes wide open. They didn’t want to miss anything; they would want to talk about it later.
And my dad was saying, “I’ll kill him.”
And Edith was still saying how it would be all right.
Well, it wasn’t all right, and I believe he could have too — could have killed him. If somehow he could have gotten away with it, it might have been the best thing. Does that surprise you? To think that murdering an old stump-handed man might be an answer? But of course it wasn’t, and he didn’t. That sort of thing only happens on TV. Nobody I know has killed anybody, and you can never mind what they say this approaching trial is about. Whatever the lawyers in their ignorance say about it, I know it isn’t murder.
So instead of anything similar to that, my dad, John Roscoe, who’s been dead now for nearly twenty-seven years, and I still can’t stop thinking about him at least once every day while dehorning a calf or mashing my thumb purple with a claw hammer (still it’s his voice saying, “Smarts pretty good, don’t it?”—it’s still his voice I hear in my head, measuring things, setting standards, his voice and way of looking at things: “But life ain’t fair, Sanders,” he told me once) — my dad, for about three years after he and Edith stopped going out together, went a little crazy.
He began to work like an immigrant during the day and to drink at night like there was no tomorrow. He was going on anger and disbelief and about four hours of sleep. He bought more cattle. He went in debt for another section of grass. He hired one of his cronies to help him. The crony was a short, squat, blocky character named Ellis Burns, who looked like a fireplug with a two-day-old beard, or, when they were working cattle in the pasture, like a fat monkey on a circus horse. He moved Ellis into the house with him and did nothing fancy. They fried meat and opened cans, mixed it together in a black frying pan, and boiled coffee. They rinsed last night’s supper off the two plates and the two forks and sat down to eat. And Ellis Burns never did lose weight.
“Damned if I know why,” my dad said. “I worked his ass off too. Maybe it was the beer.”
They went out drinking four or five times every week. They couldn’t go to town to the dark saloon on the corner of Main and First streets, since this was in the time of Prohibition: the saloon was boarded up for a while and then somebody opened it again as a café. They had to drive instead to Leon Shields’s place, a run-down farmhouse east of town, set back a mile off the highway amongst some trees. Some rough characters showed up there, so I’ve been told, but as far as I know it never got busted. Apparently Leon Shields had the sheriff, one of Bud Sealy’s predecessors, gripped hard by the short and curlies, or at least Leon had him tucked deep into his back pocket. I believe Leon knew something about the sheriff and another man’s wife that wasn’t public knowledge and that the wife’s husband didn’t even know about. Besides, I suppose there must have been the usual exchange of quiet-money, to sweeten it all. Anyway, it was that unpainted farmhouse surrounded by trees that my dad and Ellis Burns would drive to, during those three years. They stayed there drinking homemade beer and playing cards all those nights, until finally along about two o’clock Leon would say, “That’s all, boys — Mama’s waiting on me,” and then start turning the lights off so that at the card table in the back Ellis Burns couldn’t tell now whether it was a jack of clubs or a ten of spades that he still had hopes of drawing. Ellis would say, “Now, damn it all, Leon. I was just about to win a hand.”
“No, you wasn’t, “ Leon would say. “I’m saving you money.”
“Hell, too. Turn them lights back on.”
“Nope. I’m going upstairs to play with the kids’ Mama.”
“Turn them lights on. I’m about to fill a straight.”
“Listen, you sawed-off little pecker shit,” Leon would say. “You never seen a straight in your life. Now get out of here ’fore I knock your nose off.”
“By God,” Ellis would say, and he’d be standing up now in a wobbly crouch. “By God, you better pack a lunch. It ain’t going to be no five-minute job.”
But Leon would just laugh then, and my dad would say, “Give us another beer, Leon, and we’ll go home.”
“All right, John. See you tomorrow.”
“No doubt.”
So they would go home then, west and then south on the highway. Before they got more than a mile down the road Ellis would be asleep, just like Lyman had done those few times, only Ellis was sleeping in the front seat now where, before, Edith had sat beside my dad. The almost-full beer bottle would be standing up between Ellis’s legs at his crotch, sloshing beer onto his pants zipper. It didn’t wake him. He slept on with his slack stubbled chin rocking on his chest bone.
But my dad wouldn’t be asleep. Even after those hard nights at Leon Shields’s and all the beer, he wouldn’t be able to sleep very long once he was home again and in bed. He was up every morning before daybreak, kicking Ellis awake, frying eggs in the just-rinsed frying pan, ready to begin branding cattle or stacking hay or shoeing horses. Anything as long as it kept him from thinking. He didn’t want to think.
Then, towards the end of that three-year period of fierce work and hard drinking, my dad began to get into fights. There wouldn’t be any reason for the fights; he would just be at Leon’s, drinking and still too sober, and he would start a fight. It wouldn’t be about anything. He would hit somebody and wait to get hit back, hardly bothering to fend off whatever blows were thrown at him. He had a bad scar from one of those fights, a white break in the black line of his left eyebrow, which I used to admire when I was still of an age where fist fights seemed to prove something. My dad straightened me out about that too.