“It won’t make no difference.”
“Yes, it will. It’s the only way, Twyla.”
“I’m just sorry,” she said.
But later that day Twyla allowed me to take her to Denver and to install her in a Holiday Inn near the Stapleton Airport. Then I came home and went about selling the remaining quarters of farmland my dad had accumulated. I take no pride in that. I had to sell some land anyway to pay off the bad debts I had run up through constant partying and buying red pickups and by acting as if I was so rich and so smart that any form of steady discipline could go to hell. Anyway, in part because of my debts, I decided to make a clean sweep of it, so I sold those last quarters and kept only the pastureland, the native grass and the hayfields, so I could still run cattle, and then I returned to Denver and put Twyla Thompson on the plane with fifteen thousand dollars in her purse.
All of that took longer than I expected. It was more like a month than two weeks. But by the time I checked her out of the motel Twyla looked quite a lot better. She seemed almost cheerful again, like a big wonderful farm girl, and her stomach was starting to show. “Sandy,” she said.
“I know,” I said. “Take care of yourself. And tell Clevis. . Just tell him hello for me.”
Then Twyla, in a good blue dress with white trim, walked up the ramp onto the plane. About a year later I got a postcard from her saying the baby was a boy. She didn’t say what he looked like. But she did sign the card Twyla T. Stouffer, so I had to assume she found Clevis and that they were together again the way they belonged. She failed to include a return address though, and I’ve never seen nor heard from either one of them since. Still, I permit myself to believe they remain together, growing fat in the same house somewhere in Portland, Oregon, where they raise a big brood of fat red-cheeked babies. They would have good babies.
DURING all that period of brainless pell-mell drift, the only solid base I had was Edith Goodnough. She was still there in that house down the road. Despite everything— and she could see what was happening all right, don’t think she couldn’t; there was never any lacy veil or donkey’s blind covering her brown eyes — she was nevertheless willing to talk and visit with me in the evening, though what we talked about now while rocking in the porch swing was nothing, not even recollections of my dad. I just stopped by to be there for an hour, and that happened usually whenever for some reason I had not been able to stop thinking, whenever even for a minute I had recognized the true crux of the matter here at home. Then sometime soon afterwards, that same evening or the next day, I would drive down to see Edith. I wouldn’t tell her anything about it. I didn’t have to. She seemed to know. She would link our arms and for a while we would rock and listen to the locusts in the trees in the nearby dark. But if I at least had her, she had nothing for herself. At that time she was trying to live solely on Lyman’s postcards and his packages of twenty-dollar bills mailed each Christmas in brown wrapping paper and a clumsy red bow.
She was completely alone. My dad had died; her father was finally dead, and Lyman was still back east somewhere, seeing cities. So it was not just for an afternoon or a month that she was alone, but for one year after another, on and on, with no particular reason for believing it would ever be one jot different. If you have had that happen to you, then you know that living like that — alone, making yourself cook three meals every day for one person, playing the radio all the time so there will be some human noise in the house even if it’s just the tinny counterfeit sound of some actor wetting his pants over Pepto-Bismol, because if it’s not that then it’s getting up to silence and going to bed in silence, since chicken cackle and bird twitter will go only so far — that can do something to you: make you brittle or dull, cause you to go slightly touched, drive you slowly a little crazy. You forget how to string words together. You can’t recall the true weight of words. It’s as if they all come out in a gush, like a cow pissing, or they don’t come out at all. Well, something along those lines happened to Edith Goodnough.
For one thing, there got to be stories about her. People in town and high school kids began to edify one another with tales of Edith: how she was turning crazy all alone for nothing; how she was starving to death on tea and toast; how it was skunk cabbage and water she was starving on; how she slept in the barn. She was partial to Elvis Presley, they said, and likely to disappear. The only story, though, that might have any truth to it was the one Bill Kwasik told me one night in the tavern.
It was in that last year that Clevis and Twyla were still here. They were dancing to jukebox music, and I was drinking beer at the bar, watching them in the mirror. Then Bill Kwasik, who lives with his wife and kids four miles east of the Goodnough place, came up to me and said:
“Well, I see our neighbor is taken with the stars now.”
“Which neighbor is that?” I said.
“That Goodnough woman. What’s her name — Edith.”
“Oh? What makes you say that?”
“ ’Cause,” he said. “I come home the other night from Lions and I top that rise west of our place, and there she stands in my headlights. I damn near hit her.”
“What was she doing?”
“Nothing. Stargazing. Hell, I thought she was hurt. So I back up beside her and ask her if she’s all right. ‘Yes, I’m all right,’ she says. ‘Well, can I give you a lift home?’ ‘No,’ she says, ‘thank you.’ ‘But Miss Goodnough,’ I say, ‘I mean, what in hell are you doing out here? It’s way past midnight.’ And she says: ‘Never mind, Billy. You can just tell people I was taking a walk. A walk,’ she says. ‘Never mind,’ she says. She don’t even have a coat on.”
“Let her be,” I said. “Forget it.”
“Sure,” Bill Kwasik said. “I wasn’t going to do nothing to her. I thought she was hurt.”
“I know. But just leave her alone.”
“Well, she’s going to get herself run over if she don’t watch out.”
But no one ran Edith over, and she went on walking out at night alone along the road. She also busied herself with those damn picture postcards. She had them straight-pinned in rows on the walls of the living room so that if you cared to — and I didn’t — you could trace Lyman’s progress yearly for almost twenty years across the country, starting in the West, then the Middle West and the Deep South, and finally the East, like he had some feeble notion of reversing the tide of pioneer migration so as to end up at the beginning, where, for him, the first wrong step had been taken, where his old man’s old man had been carried in his great-great-grandmother’s arms down the plank off some boat in shit-filled diapers. The pictures on the cards, arranged like that, displayed in neat long rows like bathroom tiles, were bright circusy things: glass skyscrapers, blue fountains, statues, city parks with pruned trees and green park benches. They made you think of cheap carnival notices, of circus posters cut up in pieces. And always, on the backs of the cards, was that brief, childish, infuriating scribble of his, which told you next to nothing.
Dear Sis,
How are you? I am in Cleveland. Boy, it’s hot.
Love, your brother,
Lyman
That’s the sort of nonsense he wrote to her, and how she managed to live on just that much, I have no idea. If it had been me I’d have torn the damn things up and thrown them out with the chicken scraps and the hog slop — and then goddamned him again for not coming home yet, the slow son of a bitch. But Edith didn’t feel that way at all. I think she was convinced that he at least was having himself a good time seeing this country’s sights, traveling, broadening himself, so that when he eventually did come home — and she never doubted that he would return finally — things would be better again for her too, that some of his recent experience of the world would rub off on her and add something bright to her life. It was all a vague dream to her. I don’t understand it completely, but I suppose her loneliness fed it, made dreaming possible while the years passed and she went on adding to her postcard collection and taking walks at night under these high white stars.