And she said, “Yes. Are you?”
And my dad said yes, he guessed he was.
Or — and this happened more often — if he was working within sight of the road and heard a car coming, he would straighten up, and if it was the Goodnoughs he would watch the car pass and notice Edith looking out the window, before the car and the three people in it got shut off from view by the boiling dust. Then my dad would go back to work and not say anything, but you could see that he had his mouth set hard like a horse will do with a curb bit.
Of course my mother didn’t notice the Goodnoughs at all. She never visited them nor encouraged them to visit us. My mother had her own car and she always had the Methodist Church. So I was the only one of us who saw very much of the Goodnoughs then. When I was six or seven I started walking that half mile down to the Goodnoughs’ house about once a week. I would help Edith hoe the garden or gather eggs or wipe dishes — things I hated to do at home and fought my mother about and wouldn’t do until my dad made it plain to me on the seat of my pants. But Edith and I would talk a little bit.
“How’s your mother, Sandy?” Edith would say.
“She’s buying another dress.”
“Your mother looks lovely in dresses.”
“But she makes me go to church with her.”
“Don’t you like church?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“They make you put your gum in a napkin.”
“Well,” Edith would say, “you can chew gum here. We’re not in church now.”
“But I don’t have any gum.”
“Don’t you, Sandy?”
“I chewed it all already. That’s why.”
“Well, I guess we’ll have to see about that.”
So the next time I would walk down to see Edith, she would have a pack of chewing gum in her apron pocket, and she would offer me a stick and take one herself. While we gathered eggs in the chicken coop, with the fierce-looking red chickens jerking their heads about and pecking another smaller chicken behind its head until there was a bare raw spot and all of them squirting that shiny green chicken squirt neat in a dollop onto the dirt, Edith and I would both chew our gum and see if we could make bubbles. Edith would be gathering eggs and I would try to help her, but I couldn’t trust some of those red chickens until I had their heads pinned against the back of the roost box with a corncob. Most of the time, I would just hold the bucket for Edith.
“But look at this big brown egg,” she would say.
“Is it heavy?”
“Yes, but notice these dark specks along here. They’re almost the color of lavender.”
“They look like a face,” I’d say.
“Yes. And you’re a funny old Sanders Roscoe. Aren’t you?”
A little later, while we were in the kitchen, cleaning the bits of straw and the chicken squirt off the eggs, I’d say, “There. I did it.”
“Did what?”
“Blew a bubble. Look.” And I’d have a gum bubble about the size of a withered pea, perched on my mouth.
“Good for you,” Edith would say then. “How’s your daddy?”
So I saw quite a lot of Edith Goodnough during that time, and she always treated me in a way that made me want to keep going back there. My mother didn’t think much of it, though. My mother wanted to know what I did down there all that time, what we talked about. She said they weren’t our kind of people. But my dad told her that as long as I did my chores at home to let me be. He said I might learn something at the Goodnoughs’.
So about once a week I walked over to see Edith. I didn’t see Lyman very often, though. He was always out in the field, disking or stacking hay. And I tried to avoid seeing Roy at all. I had his hands in some of my dreams during those years, and I would wake up in the dark in my room with those raw stumps still there, just behind my eyes. I could see them whenever I closed my eyes, so sometimes I didn’t go back to sleep right away. His hands were all mixed up in that time for me. I didn’t enjoy the sight of them.
BUT OUTSIDE events finally caught up with the Goodnoughs too. By the close of the 1930s the madman loose in Germany had infected enough millions of other people with his madness that things over there had gone absolutely flat insane. When the butchery and betrayal carried over into the start of the 1940s people here in this country began to wonder what their part in it was going to have to be. There got to be a lot of talk about going to war, talk about taking action, and I suppose all that talk about doing something is what made it possible for Lyman.
The barn door that Lyman was waiting all that time to have left open for him, so he could squeeze through and take off running and never look back, did open then — not much; it was just a crack at first, but enough just the same for him to drive into town by himself one Saturday night, late in the summer of 1940, to drink beer in the Holt Tavern. He had his black suit on and a white shirt. He had a yellow tie knotted under his just-shaved chin. He opened the heavy door and stood there looking at all the people enjoying themselves in the smoky near-darkness.
“It was like he’d took the wrong turn somewheres,” Wenzel Gerdts said. “Like he’d come up unexpected inside the women’s outhouse. I mean he looked scared and interested at the same time.”
Wenzel Gerdts was telling this story to my dad the following Saturday afternoon. I was there too with my dad, standing on Main Street in front of Wandorf’s Hardware Store while my mother went across the street to shop for a hat. There were other groups of men standing all along the four blocks of stores on either side of the street. The men stood with one foot cocked up behind them against the brick storefronts or sat on the fenders of the cars parked at the curb, all of them talking in groups of three or four about the weather and corn and Roosevelt and war. Their wives were inside the stores, buying bits of elastic and brown cloth and a week’s worth of groceries. They were talking too, of course, above the canned beans and the macaroni, beside the yard goods and the cash register, while here and there a little girl tugged at a skirt and a little boy peeked out like a shy country rabbit. The women went on talking in the stores and they were not in any hurry, because they were in town now and it was a Saturday afternoon in Holt in 1940.
But my dad and I were outside on the sidewalk listening to Wenzel Gerdts talk about Lyman Goodnough. Wenzel was a tall, stringy farmer dressed for the trip to town in clean overalls and he had a fresh cheekful of Red Man chewing tobacco at work in his jaw. As a kid of twelve I was almost as fascinated with the way Wenzel worked tobacco as I was with what he was saying about Lyman. It was an art the way Wenzel could shoot that long brown spurt of his from where he stood leaning up against Wandorf’s storefront, shoot it clean too, over across the sidewalk down tidy into the gutter, and shoot it every time into the same brown puddle, like he was not just showing off (like if I was doing it, like even if I could do it) but was actually trying to be kind to the folks who might have reason to step there. He would chew awhile and talk and then quick, shoot a neat brown spurt into the gutter, and afterwards lick a drop off his bottom lip, and then go on talking and chewing and not miss a beat.
And Wenzel was saying, “Why sure, the poor dumb geezer looked scared and interested at the same time. And don’t you know I felt kind of sorry for him? Here’s Lyman Goodnough that’s been out there on that farm all them years with the hot sweat running down into his pants, and now he’s somehow turned up inside the Holt Tavern on a Saturday night and he don’t know what to do with hisself.”