Finally when the train got there, waving its beam light back and forth above the tracks and making the ground vibrate, we got out to say good-bye. In the light of the conductor’s lantern I could see that Lyman’s eyes were bleary from the cold and that there was a drip of watery mucus at the tip of his nose. Lyman looked cold and scared. My dad shook his hand, and Lyman patted me on the shoulder, and then in his long overcoat and his best shoes and with his corduroy earflaps tied tight under his chin, he mounted the steps to the train, and that was the last we saw of him. That was the last anyone in Holt County saw of him for almost twenty years. Including Edith.
LYMAN WAS forty-two when he left on that west-bound train, and as I recall his plan involved joining the U.S. Army. The train stopped in Denver, but he didn’t get off there and he didn’t get off in Cheyenne either, nor in Salt Lake, nor in any other place, until the train had finally stopped for good in Los Angeles to turn around and come back east. I suppose he wanted to be sure there were enough mountain ranges and enough Mormons and mesquite between him and that old stump-armed man to prevent himself from being dragged back and put to work again. Because once he had actually managed to escape he sure as hell wasn’t going to take any chances; he wasn’t ever going to sweat his overalls plowing sand again, not if he could help it, not if it was just a matter of putting enough miles between himself and that sand. And in the confusion of December 1941, he had that ready excuse: he was going to join the army to fight the Nips and the Huns — never mind that he had never fought a thing before in his life.
I gather, though, that it didn’t take him long to discover that, as much as everybody was watching the sky for Hirohito to come drifting down out of some imperial orange-and-red cloud, still, the army recruiters were not about ready to sign on any middle-aged farm boy from Holt, Colorado, even if he was as eager as a mongrel bitch in heat. The army recruiters weren’t that desperate yet. So I guess he tried the navy next, and being a little smarter now he no doubt lied about his age, but he wasn’t the fuzzy-cheeked piece of dough the navy was looking for, either; not that he wasn’t used to being treated like a dog, you understand, they just couldn’t be sure he could learn their new tricks. So after the navy I don’t guess he even tried the marines, because I know for certain that he hired on instead to work in a Los Angeles airplane factory. And he stayed there in the factory until the war was over, working his daily shift, pulling levers or grinding gears or running rivets and not talking to anybody much but just doing the work they gave him to do. During lunch break he sat off at the edges of the mechanics and welders where he could watch them and listen to their talk, but he never complained, like they did, because he figured he knew of at least one thing that was worse than this. All the time, anyway, he was saving his money so that when MacArthur returned to take that cob pipe out of his mouth and to sign those surrender papers on board that boat in the Pacific, Lyman already had more than enough money saved up to buy his first new Pontiac automobile.
Then he took off again. His new Pontiac had a full tank of gas; he had seen to the air in the spare tire, and he spent the next sixteen years doing what he said his sister had told him to do: he saw the sights and tasted pleasure. For a half a year to as much as a year and a half he stayed in one city after another. He paid his rent on time for a succession of cheap rooms upstairs over some pawnshop or dentist’s office. He worked at a minimum wage pushing cement up construction ramps or pumped gas or shoveled ballast under railroad ties. Afterwards in the evenings he drank beer in dark bars that had booths along one wall and ranks of bottles in front of chipped mirrors on the other. And about twice a month he would follow the big hips of an aging barmaid up the stairs to his own rented room, where he would release her from her girdle and then sweat on her while she watched past his moving shoulder to see how soon the cracked plaster on the ceiling was going to fall and smother them. Meanwhile, of course, he bought more Pontiacs and he kept moving. Whenever the color of his last car didn’t just suit him anymore, he would buy another new one, and whenever it seemed that he had seen what there was of Boise or Omaha worth seeing, he would take off and drive to Dubuque or Oklahoma City or Memphis. But he never came home again.
Nobody out here, not even Edith, saw him all that time. I know that for a fact. But I also know, since I’ve seen every damned one of them, that he did send Edith at least one picture postcard each year with a color likeness on it of the biggest skyscraper there was in whatever city he happened to be stopped in right then. I also know, because I’ve seen them too — good Christ, yes — that every year come Christmas he sent her a package of twenty-dollar bills tied up with a red bow. But, like I say, he never sent himself home.
He didn’t even come home when Roy finally died and stopped fouling good air in 1952. Maybe Lyman didn’t know the old man was dead, not in time anyway to come back for the funeral, even assuming he had wanted to. He wouldn’t have been easy to locate. Edith would have had to send word to the last address scribbled on the last picture postcard and hope he was still there, since apparently he never left any forwarding address when he moved on, and besides, the only return address he ever used at any time was just general delivery, and that without bothering to pick up his mail very often, because why should he?
Or consider this: maybe Lyman was afraid to come back even then. Maybe he thought until the old man was a good nine years dead with the ground heavy sunk and filled over him and the grass growing thick on it, that it still wasn’t safe, that somehow the old bastard’s ghost or spirit or voice, whatever, might still be active enough to call him back, lecture him about Saturday-night diddling, and then make him stay there to rake hay and plow sand. And if that was the reason, then you could say Lyman was right to stay away even then, because you couldn’t be real sure the old son of a bitch was dead even when you were actually standing there in front of his coffin and saw him lying there like a slab of mean yellow granite. With his head on a satin pillow he still didn’t look any thinner or stiffer or any less like a ramrod than he did when he was supposed to be alive. His eyes were closed; that was all. That and the fact that those red stumps of his sticking out beneath his white shirt cuffs had finally quit twitching and waving.
Anyway, whatever the reason, Lyman stayed away for nine years more after the old man was dead and buried deep inside that little cemetery, making it two Goodnough headstones so far there beside Otis Murray’s cornfield two miles east of Holt, and then he did come back. He was a little bit tired; his eyes were a little dazed from the sights he had seen, and I suppose there were other parts of him that were a little jaded too from the pleasure he had tasted, but he was still all right, more or less. He was still of some use to his sister. For a while.
ONLY, MEANWHILE, there were those twenty years for her to wait through and to endure. And how did she manage that? What was she doing all that time Lyman stayed away and bought Pontiacs and sent her picture postcards? Nothing.
Well, no, not nothing exactly. She didn’t just do nothing all that time. But she sure God didn’t go traveling off across the North American continent, either. She didn’t even go those seven miles into Holt very often. She stayed home. Jesus, that’s about all you can say: Edith Goodnough stayed home. And if you figure it up, if you do your arithmetic from those chiseled dates in the cemetery, then you know Edith was seventeen when her mother died in 1914; she was fifty-five when the old man died in 1952; and she was sixty-four when Lyman finally returned in 1961. It amounts to a lifetime of staying home.