So what was I going to do now? What in hell was I supposed to do? We were out there in that native pasture, and it was all finished by the time I found him. Finally I put his arms down at his sides and straightened his leg and brushed the sand from that white scar that Frank Lutz had given him. There was grit in his eyes too from lying on his face with his eyes open. I wiped the sand out of those brown staring eyes and then closed his eyelids. There wasn’t anything to do after that; I wanted there to be something more but there wasn’t. So I sat beside the length of his body and just cried. I didn’t even know how to cry for him; my chest and throat felt like somebody was kicking me. Then the flies found him under that June sun and I was almost glad they did. It gave me something more to do: I could fan his quiet face with my hat. And I did that for a long time, sat there and fanned him, waiting for the moment when I knew I would have enough force to move again, to gather him up and ride him home. I suppose it took a couple of hours before I felt ready.
When I got him home Doc Schmidt confirmed for me what I knew I had seen when I turned him over. My dad died of a heart attack.
It also turned out that I was right to have delayed taking him home, because in the next forty-eight hours my mother and I had some bad fights. The fights closed everything down, shut it all off. She was going to bury my dad in the town cemetery.
“No, you’re not,” I said.
“I’ve already purchased two plots from the city. You should have told me sooner.”
“I’m telling you now. You use them. Dad’s not going to.”
“He is, though.”
“No, he’s not. You don’t have the right to do that.”
“I’m his wife. That gives me the right. I put up with him for twenty-five years, Sanders.”
“Shut up,” I said. “Can’t you shut up about that?”
Her eyes went flat then. Her hands were shaking. “You think that was easy?” she said. “You do, don’t you? You think it was all my fault that I wasn’t enough for him. Well, you don’t have even the first idea what it was like. You’ve always taken his side against me, even from the very beginning you did. It was always you and your father together, and somewhere — don’t ask me how — but somewhere I was supposed to fit in.”
“You had your dresses,” I said. “Your goddamn church meetings.”
“Church?” she said. “My God, you’re stupid. You think I would have cared about the church if there was anything else?”
“Well, it’s too late now. Dad’s staying here.”
“We’ll see about that.”
“No, we won’t. It’s already decided.”
So I played the bastard with her. I admit I was a real son of a bitch about it. But I was not going to let her take him into town to that damned cramped little cemetery so that one of the boys who worked summers for the city could water and mow the grass over him and so they could mount plastic tulips beside his grave on Memorial Day. And in the end I had my way about it. I told John Baker, the mortician, to prepare my dad for a funeral out here in the country. He could shave him and dress him up in a suit if that would please my mother, but I didn’t want any powder or rouge smeared on his face to make him look alive. He was dead. Let him be dead. He wasn’t to go out looking like some wax manikin.
The funeral was on June fourteenth, in the heat of a clear morning. The whole country showed up — people like Charlie Best and Frank Lutz and Agnes Wilson and Wenzel Gerdts and Ellis Burns and Leon Shields and even old Ludi Pfeister from Kansas with his canes, who were all my dad’s friends, and others too, my mother’s friends from church. Edith Goodnough was also there. We walked up to that rise, past the corrals and beyond the horse barn, to the just-dug hole beside the old grave that was sunk past ground level, my grandmother’s grave. When we were assembled the minister spoke to us, told us about a man he himself didn’t know much about, while my dad’s friends who did know him stood unhatted in the sun and wiped away the sweat that trickled down their white foreheads. Up close to the grave we were in the shade of that big cottonwood and it was cooler.
After the service several people shook my hand and one or two tried to tell me that at least he had died doing something he enjoyed. But I didn’t listen to that. My dad should have lived for another twenty years. Then my mother took her friends down to the house to drink ice tea and to visit and commiserate while the box was being lowered into the hole, and I told John Baker to go on, that I would fill it in myself. That left only Edith there with me.
It didn’t take long to fill in the grave. The sand was loose and moist, making it easy to shovel. When I had finished packing it into a long mound behind the plain stone that reads JOHN ROSCOE FEB. 24, 1890—JUNE 11, 1950, I stood back with Edith to look at it.
Edith had been crying. She was wearing a new dress and she had done something to her hair, but she hadn’t been able to do anything about her face. Her face had gone to pieces. I put my arm around her.
“He asked me to marry him,” Edith said. “Did you know that?”
“Yes. He told me.”
“But I couldn’t. You understand, don’t you, Sandy?”
There was a little bit of wind in the cottonwood over us. The leaves were turning and washing in the wind. Below us on the road, cars were starting back toward town.
“Yes,” I said. “But understanding it and liking it aren’t the same things.”
“No,” she said. “No, they are not the same things.”
Then she was crying again, for the last time that I have known her to cry. There wasn’t much sound to it. I held her hand and felt like hell.
8
SO I WAS HOME again for good now. At twenty-two I took up the responsibility of managing the ranch my dad had made, the big cattle operation and the quarters of farmland. It was almost entirely clear of any debt when I took it over. There was plenty to do, though, and in short time I began to discover what it meant to be my dad in Holt County, to make decisions which afterwards you had to live with. Meanwhile my mother and I struck an edgy quiet kind of truce. We talked to one another when it was necessary. I took her out to eat about twice a month and sometimes to an acceptable movie in town when there was one, kept her car in tune and changed the snow tires, and on her part she held her tongue when I didn’t come home on Saturday nights. We avoided any topic that would take us back to that other June. That lasted about two years.
Then in the spring of 1952 we had another fight. It was one evening during supper, after steak and potatoes but before the dessert, that my mother dropped some news on me, an announcement she wanted to make. She said she preferred that I hear it from her before someone else had the chance to tell me and get it all wrong.
“I’m thinking of marrying again,” she said.
I took a drink of coffee and lit a cigarette. “Okay,” I said. “Do whatever you want.”
“I intend to. But I wanted to discuss it with you first. It will mean some changes in both our lives.”
“Not in mine,” I said. “I’m not marrying him.”