“All this does is,” he told me, running his thick finger over the wide jagged spot above his eye, “it reminds me how I was a damn fool. It don’t mean a thing else. And don’t you think it does.”
“What was it about, though?” I said. “The fight.”
“Nothing. It wasn’t about nothing. I hit Frank Lutz because he happened to be there and because I wasn’t drunk and because I knew Frank would hit me back. And he did.”
“Did you hurt him?”
“Yes. And I went over to apologize to him the next day. I liked Frank. Had nothing against him.”
“Did he hurt you?”
“Not much. Not enough.”
“Because you were tougher,” I said. “Because you beat him.”
“No,” he said. “And I told you I don’t want you thinking like that, Sanders. I said, not enough, because a month later I hit Frank again. For the same no reason. And he hit me again. That’s why I got this scar, to remind me to stop being such a damn fool — at least that form of a fool anyway. Now do you understand?”
“No.”
“You will.”
But I didn’t understand, not then, not for a few years more. I only really understood it when later I found out what he hadn’t told me about that period of his life — that he and Ellis Burns stopped going out drinking. I was also able to put another set of two and two together and then I understood that instead of drinking beer to keep himself from thinking, my dad married my mother. And I want to think that being married to Leona Turner Newcomb was at least somewhat better than being hit in the face by Frank Lutz. I want to believe that much about it if for no other reason than the fact that pretty soon I came along, I came out of that marriage, and that’s what I meant a while ago when I said I was forgetting myself, take it for a joke.
WELL, I was a surprise to them. Not a shotgun surprise, but a surprise just the same, because Leona Turner Newcomb wasn’t supposed to be able to have babies. She had been married for ten years — from 1910 until 1920— to Jason Newcomb, who worked in the Holt Bank, with red garters on his sleeves and who sported a clean little moustache under his fine nose. Together they hadn’t had any children in a decade. But I don’t know that children would have made any difference to them. Children would just have made things stickier, I suppose, because one morning in August of 1920 Jason Newcomb put on a black bowtie and combed his hair wet and then went down to the cellar and hanged himself with a cotton rope. My mother thought he had gone to work, and the bank thought he was taking a sick day. So he wasn’t discovered until late that afternoon when my mother went down to the cellar to get some potatoes to peel for supper. I guess by then that his face had stopped being blue but that he had begun to be pretty much bothered by spiders. My mother, Jason Newcomb’s wife, didn’t like talking about it. She was twenty-seven at the time.
So she was the young Widow Newcomb then, for about five years. She was good-looking enough, too, in a churchy women’s society sort of way, with pins tucked neat into her dark blond hair to keep it trim, and she wore high-necked collars with lace and kept her shoes polished. She still keeps herself up, even today out there in that new brick house at the edge of town where she lives with that faint red on her cheeks, which she expects me to kiss, and that blue on her eyes, and maybe that’s because she fears that she will outlive Wilbur Cox too and will need to be ready to do it all over again, even in her eighties. I don’t know why she bothers; she’s in two or three different wills by now, but I know she didn’t have Mr. Cox then and she didn’t have my father yet either. During those five years that she was still the Widow Newcomb (and he apparently didn’t leave her anything but a little gimcrack house in town), my mother kept her nose clean, brushed her blond hair the required one hundred strokes, applied cream to her face, went to the Methodist Episcopal Church, smiled, and during working hours she sold hats to the Holt ladies in Mrs. Kerst’s Millinery Shop on Main Street, next door to the Gem Theater, opposite Doc Packer’s storefront office. She was probably good at that too — selling hats, I mean. She certainly knew how to say what she thought you wanted to hear. She could even make it sound like something you yourself had thought of. My mother, at that time, must have been one of those women that other women call poor brave dears and then sigh and say My goodness.
Well, she should have been a gambler. She had the nerves for it and the face too. My mother should have been a poker player — or a politician. She might have done even better for herself at the card tables in Las Vegas or in the smoke-filled parlors of Denver. A town the size of Holt, with no more than a mere thousand rural types living here in 1925, had to be a waste of her particular talents, because my mother also knew how to get what she wanted. Behind that polished, perfumed surface, she was all ice and frozen stuff, which she would allow to melt a little bit if and when she saw something she wanted. That was true even if it meant she had to allow someone like my dad, John Roscoe, with his recent reputation for drinking and fighting and his thick rancher’s hands, to muss her trim hair and to lift her widow’s skirts. She knew he had all those cattle and she suspected that he was not the sort of man to hang himself with any cotton rope in any cellar that had spiders. So I don’t believe she even cried afterwards or whimpered anything about respect. No, she would have just allowed the ice to melt in her a little bit, enough so that she could at least pretend that it was wonderful and then make him promise there would be a fall wedding — with the implication of course that there would be a lot more of the same where that came from. My mother was not stupid.
About my dad I can only guess — and he was not stupid either; you can’t achieve what he did and then hold on to it too, even during the depression, when just about everything else around him was turning to dust and foreclosed mortgages, you can’t do that and not have something more than just gas and sawdust separating your ears — I guess my dad must have been at the point where melted ice seemed preferable to warm beer and a fist in the face. Anyway, they got married in the fall of 1925, which would make Widow Newcomb thirty-two and my dad thirty-five, and then three years later, on March 9, 1928, I came along.
And like I say, I was a surprise to them. So it must have been Jason Newcomb who couldn’t have babies that other time. Or at least together with my mother, he hadn’t been able to make any. And I don’t believe that was the reason why he hanged himself, either. Knowing my mother, I believe there must have been a few other reasons.
SO ALMOST twenty years passed.
Prohibition came and went. The Great Depression came — and then lasted so long that people began to think of it as a normal condition. There was a civil war in Spain, a Roosevelt in the White House, a madman loose in Germany, and nothing happened to the Goodnoughs down the road from us. It was all the same slow gray there. Edith and Lyman went on doing all they had to do, and Roy continued waving his grim stumps.
My dad and Edith didn’t see each other very much during those years, though I believe they still thought about one another a great deal. My dad had stopped helping with the harvest; Roy wouldn’t have him on the place; Roy had begun to trade Lyman’s sweat for someone else’s help when it came time to cut wheat. So, whenever it happened that both my dad and Edith were in town and then by chance ran into one another on Main Street — and that was rare — they would stop and talk for a minute about nothing important. Only once or twice my dad asked her, “Are you all right?”