“Will you tell me,” she said, “why that man can’t at least drive himself to town?”
“Yes, but you aren’t going to like it.”
“Of course not. I don’t like any of this. But I assume you mean it’s something more than just the fact that he can’t get his own car started.”
“He never tried it,” my dad said. “He’s afraid if he starts the car it’ll wake the old man.”
“Oh,” she said. “Well, that does make sense, doesn’t it. He can’t wake his own father but it’s perfectly all right to wake us.”
“I said you weren’t going to like it.”
“Yes, you did say so and you are right about that. But what about her? What about his sister? I suppose she’s afraid to disturb the poor old man too.”
My dad stopped dressing then and looked at my mother. He wasn’t happy. “Leave her out of this,” he said.
“Or hasn’t she learned how to drive a car at night yet? I’ve never seen her driving a car at night.”
“Keep your mouth off her,” he said. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yes, I do,” she said. “I know more than you think I do.”
“No, you don’t,” he said. “You don’t know the half of it.”
“All right,” my mother said, looking at me in the doorway. “I’ve had enough for one night. I’m going to bed.”
“That’s right,” my dad said. “I think that’s a good idea.”
“And you are too,” she said to me.
“No, I’m not,” I said. “I’m going along. Dad, you said—”
“I told you to get dressed,” he said.
“No. That’s definitely out. He’s not going.”
“It won’t hurt him.”
“He’s not going,” she said. “He has school tomorrow. He’s no Edison, or haven’t you noticed?”
“It won’t hurt him. And he can still make school.”
“I don’t want him to go with you. I forbid him to go.”
“I believe he’s going, though.”
“AH right,” she said. “All right, go then.”
But she wasn’t looking at me. She was watching my dad. It didn’t have anything to do with me anymore — if it ever did.
“Go,” she said. “You may as well get yourself involved in this too. You’re just like him. You don’t care what I think. Why do you bother to ask?”
But she didn’t go back to bed yet and she wasn’t finished talking. She had more to say to my dad. From their bedroom down the hall I could hear her talking to him while I got out of my pajamas. Her voice was going on and on with steel in it, like she was some lawyer summing up the defense in a bad case, and even though by 1941 it must have been an old defense and an old case, she did not sound tired of it. There was all that steel and ice mixed up in it. But my dad wasn’t saying anything. I could hear just the sound of him sitting down on the edge of the bed to put his boots on and the noise on the wood floor as he stamped into them. Then I was dressed and out in the hallway again ready to go downstairs, and I heard him say something to her. It sounded like two words, and they must have been enough, or too much maybe, because after he said them it was only silence coming out of their bedroom. I went downstairs.
Lyman was still standing in the front hallway. The strings of his earflaps were tied tight in a double knot under his chin pulling the bill of his cap down low on his forehead like he was expecting heavy weather, and he was standing there holding his suitcase.
“You coming along too?” he said. “For the send-off?”
“Yes, sir.”
I put my coat and stocking cap on, and we stood facing one another, waiting for my dad. We examined the rug and each other’s feet.
“At least,” Lyman said after a while, “at least it don’t look like it wants to snow.”
“No, sir.”
“I hope it don’t,” he said. “Not anyhow.”
The rug was an oval braided one made of bright rags, and Lyman’s shoes were his best, those black polished shoes he must have worn to the Holt Tavern a year earlier. They had sand on them now from his walking the half mile to our house. The sand was getting on my mother’s rug.
“Well,” Lyman said. “How’s the sixth grade?”
“What?”
“The sixth grade. At your school in town.”
“I’m in the eighth grade,” I said.
“Eighth,” he said. “Well, don’t never quit.”
“No, sir.”
“Take me,” he said. “You never know when you might need all your education.”
“Yes, sir.”
“That’s right,” he said. Then like he’d been pondering this question for a good long time, he said, “What’s the capital of California?”
“San Francisco.”
“That’s right,” he said. “You see? — that’s what I’m talking about.”
My dad came down the stairs then and put his coat on, and we went outside to the pickup. It was cloudy and just flat dark, but it wasn’t going to snow; it was too cold to snow, and there wasn’t that heaviness in the air that comes before snowfall. I sat between my dad and Lyman in the pickup with the gearshift between my knees and the light from the speedometer showing yellow on my dad’s face. Nobody said anything for a while. The gravel on the dirt road kicked up underneath the fenders, and then we were on the highway, where there was the sound of the snow tires on the blacktop. Outside the window the headlights picked up the brush and tumbleweeds caught along the fence line beside the highway, and beyond the fence line the country was all dark, with the few trees standing up leafless and showing even darker against Owens’s white house on the right when we passed it and again two miles later against Wheelers’s yellow house on the left as we passed it too, driving north towards town. There were no yard lights on anywhere in the country.
Then, before we made town, my dad said to Lyman, “I don’t suppose you thought to tell Edith you’re leaving.”
“Why sure,” Lyman said. “She knows.” He patted his coat pocket. “She packed me some sandwiches. I got them right here with me.”
“What does she say about it?”
“Well, I’ll tell you,” Lyman said. He leaned forward to look past me at my dad. “She says for at least one of us to get away. That’s what she told me last night.”
“Jesus Christ,” my dad said. “When’s she going to quit?”
“And I’m going to write her about it,” Lyman said. “Edith says for me to see all the sights I can and taste pleasure.”
“Well, see that you do it.”
“I will. You can bet on that.”
“I’m talking about writing her,” my dad said.
“Oh,” he said, and sat back again to look ahead down the road. He brought one of his big red winter-chafed hands up to play with the belt strapped around the metal suitcase on his lap.
When we drove into Holt all the houses were dark and the big globes suspended above the corners on Main Street were off. I didn’t see anything moving. No one was at the depot either; Lyman was going to have to buy his ticket once he got on the train. My dad stopped the pickup beside the cobblestone platform, and though we were almost an hour early, Lyman got out with his suitcase under his arm and stood to face east up the tracks. My dad and I stayed in the pickup with the motor and heater running and watched him wait. Once while we watched him, my dad said, “Well, this is a piece of history that won’t appear in no history books.” But he was talking more to himself than he was to me.