We went downstairs and outside to the horse tank. My dad washed the blood and grit off his face, then we walked over to the pickup. My dad got in behind the wheel. He drove us in to town, to Holt, to the Payday Liquor Store, where he bought a fifth of whiskey and some beer. He brought it out in a paper sack. Then he drove us back out here to the country and stopped the pickup on top of a sand hill in a cow pasture.
“Son, you ever drank beer before?” he said.
“No, sir.”
“It’s time you started.”
So in the middle of a Saturday morning in 1943 I sipped the beer my dad bought me until I was drunk, while he drank whiskey and talked. He talked for hours, talked, said more to me that morning than he had in all the previous fifteen years we had lived together. He told me about his mother, his father too, what little he could remember of him, told me about the Goodnoughs, how it started with Ada and the two water buckets, how it was when Roy lost his hands, told me how he and Edith and Lyman had driven to the movies together in town for six weeks one summer. And once he had started telling it he couldn’t seem to stop; he couldn’t seem to explain things enough. There was too much of it.
I didn’t interrupt him. I sipped my beer, took a piss now and then in the sagebrush and soapweeds, and listened to him as well as I could. But towards the end of it I remember saying something innocent and foolish like, “But it’s not fair.”
And he said, “ ’Course it’s not fair. There ain’t none of it that’s fair. Life ain’t. And all our thinking it should be don’t seem to make one single damn. You might as well know that now as later.”
7
ONLY IN FACT my dad couldn’t accept his own advice. Against the odds and against all kinds of craziness he kept trying to change things, to ease them, even if he couldn’t finally make them fair. I suppose some of that has rubbed off on me. It’s the reason I’m telling you this. It’s why I can’t accept the idea of anybody wanting to put a woman like Edith Goodnough on trial for a thing in the world, let alone murder.
But at any rate that Saturday morning was the last time she had to drive a tractor. That same week my dad arranged it so that Charlie Best, who neighbored us to the south, would work the old man’s ground on shares. I don’t know the details, but I remember that Charlie had a hired man, a gap-toothed old plodder named Ralph Johnson, and it was Ralph Johnson who did the farming and all the tractor driving at the Goodnough place for the next nine years or so — until the old man died, that is, because after her father was dead Edith leased the ground to me. But while he still lived, breathed air and drank black coffee, nobody named Roscoe touched his land. It would have been too much. It would have been like kicking a man when he was down, like rubbing his nose in his own shit. My dad understood that; he accepted at least that part of it. So, without allowing the old man to see his hand in it, my dad arranged for Charlie Best to lease the land and then helped Charlie keep things up at the Best place.
After that we all settled into our ruts again. And sometimes, looking at this story, it seems to me like that’s about all it is: a series of independent ruts. Some of them lasted for four or five years and some lasted for twenty, but they were ruts just the same, a bunch of worn-out cow paths winding down occasionally to water and a bit of rest and maybe a good blow for a while over a block of salt, but then back again once more into all this Holt County sand. Hell, you can see it any time in any cow pasture.
But at least Edith Goodnough’s particular rut was slightly changed now. She didn’t have to disk stubble or cut hay while the old man rode insane behind her. No, all she had left to do now was take care of him, keep up the house and the garden, and still milk cows; and then the cows gradually took care of themselves: they died. One by one they got too old to milk; they were trucked to Brush to the slaughterhouse and were not replaced.
And as for the old man, he was changed some, too, now. For one thing he stopped talking. After he ordered my dad out of the house that morning, the old bastard wouldn’t say a piddling word, not a damn thing. And in some ways that was all right too; at least he wasn’t wasting air damning you anymore. But in other ways it made it harder. Now Edith had to try and guess what in the hell it was he wanted, and if she didn’t always guess right then he would stump-shove his bowl of mush off the kitchen table or he would piss his pants while she watched him— all out of meanness and that bitter old man’s silence that he refused to break. So most of the time from first spring until late fall she fed him quick and then took him outside to sit in the car alone where he could watch while Ralph Johnson made slow progress steadily in the Goodnough corn- and hayfields. In the winter months she sat him on a straight chair in front of a south window.
Also, she went on collecting Lyman’s postcards — he was in Mobile now, now in Montgomery, then in Baltimore — and she continued to collect the bow-tied twenty-dollar bills he sent her at Christmas. The cards and money were kept in separate boxes in a dresser drawer in her bedroom. Later she would pin the postcards, picture-side out, on the walls of the living room, but she didn’t start that until the old man had died. The old man didn’t seem to remember who the blazes Lyman was when she showed him a picture of a glass building or some photograph of Robert E. Lee waving a saber from atop a marble horse. He seemed to confuse Lee with Lyman. Or, occasionally, if he did seem to recall just who Lyman was, then it only made him madder. He would spit on the floor or wet the front seat of the car. So Edith stopped showing him the postcards and kept them to herself. She was saving them.
OVER HERE we had our ruts too. My dad and mother went on tolerating one another for the duration. The separate and independent lives they lived didn’t change much even though they still ate at the same table and slept in the same bed. My mother had her church work, her circle, and she was on the school board for a term or two. But the war years were hard on her: she couldn’t keep fashionable. The shelves and racks in the Holt dress shop were empty almost always, and you couldn’t purchase a bolt of cloth to make something yourself. The army got all the good cotton and wool for uniforms.
“They take everything,” my mother said. “And all that material is just going to get soiled. Or perforated.”
So, once during those years, she and Mrs. Schmidt, who was the wife of Holt’s one doctor after Marcellus Packer died of a stroke in the tavern, drove in my mother’s car to shop in the big stores in Denver, and they managed to find a pair of stockings apiece and a few dresses. But the trip to Denver turned out to be a one-time affair, a single charge. When Doc Schmidt found out where his gas coupons had gone he was not exactly ecstatic. If nothing else he stopped leaving his coupons out in the open on his dresser top. So what I remember of the hurried-up victory celebration on the football field in 1945—the band played marches, I remember; the mayor spoke and there were preachers on the wood platform — all that is mixed up with the memory of my mother’s anticipation of stocked shelves again, dresses and hats. “Thank God,” she said, when we heard about the armistice on the radio. And I don’t guess the only thing she had in mind was the end of killing. But then I don’t suppose she was the only one who felt that way, either. Maybe she was a little more honest, that’s all. Because to do her justice, it was what she had to live on.
In different ways my dad suffered over the war, too. There was that bad business with Edith and the tractor because of the war — I mean Lyman would never have managed to jump up and run off if there hadn’t been a war — but there was also the fact that my dad had spent enough nights drinking and fighting to have a pretty good idea of what men could do to one another for no reason; and now with the war they had a reason, and they were actually being trained and encouraged to do more than just hit one another in the face. So, while I can’t say much of that touched me hard, I believe it made my dad sick. He hated it. And sometime back I think I said he wasn’t a man who laughed a lot — well, now he didn’t seem to laugh at all. On the other hand, to do him justice too, he must have made some money during those years. The cattle market stayed steady with the increased need for meat, and he went on castrating calves and experimenting with seed bulls and hauling fat cattle to the sale barn. I suppose he learned to live with the connection between his raising beef and all that blood being spilled in Europe.