The Tie That Binds by Kent Haruf
KENT HARUF
THE TIE THAT BINDS
Kent Haruf’s The Tie That Binds received a Whiting Foundation Award and a special citation from the PEN/Hemingway Foundation. He is also the author of Where You Once Belonged, Plainsong, a finalist for the National Book Award, and Eventide. He lives with his wife, Cathy, in Colorado.
for Ginger and Mark
?1?
EDITH GOODNOUGH isn’t in the country anymore. She’s in town now, in the hospital, lying there in that white bed with a needle stuck in the back of one hand and a man standing guard in the hallway outside her room. She will be eighty years old this week: a clean beautiful white-haired woman who never in her life weighed as much as 115 pounds, and she has weighed a lot less than that since New Year’s Eve. Still, the sheriff and the lawyers expect her to get well enough for them to sit her up in a wheelchair and then drive her across town to the courthouse to begin the trial. When that happens, if that happens, I don’t know that they will go so far as to put handcuffs on her. Bud Sealy, the sheriff, has turned out to be a son of a bitch, all right, but I still can’t see him putting handcuffs on a woman like Edith Goodnough.
On the other hand, I don’t suppose Bud Sealy ever intended to become a son of a bitch at all. As late as nine days ago he was sitting on a barstool at the lunch counter in the Holt Café. It was Friday afternoon; it was about two-thirty, that slack time that comes every day for him when he’s got all his paper work filled out, when there isn’t a thing more for him to do except wait for the high school kids to get out of school so they can begin to race up and down Main Street or drive out onto U.S. 34 and cut cookies on the blacktop. So Bud had time. He was relaxing. Already he had eaten his butterscotch pie and Betty had cleared his plate. Now, while he waited for his second cup of black coffee to cool, he was turned around on the barstool so as to front the men who sat opposite him in the booths. The men had come in earlier in their town pants and adjustable caps. Two or three of them had slapped him on the back like they do, and they had all taken their places on the other stools or in the nearby booths so they could hear the talk and keep current.
Most of the talk that afternoon was Bud’s. He was telling them a story. I believe most of the men had heard this particular story at least twice before, though I doubt that any one of them would have thought to stop him from telling it again, since the one thing they all had too much of was just that—time. I mean two or three had already retired from the work they had never gotten around to beginning.
At any rate, the story Bud was telling that afternoon had to do with how there was this guy at the National Western Stock Show who was walking around in public with a piece of pink thread tied to himself, like what it was tied to was one of the agricultural exhibits in the pavilion hallways. He was sort of displaying himself to folks. That is, until the police collared him and took him to jail for indecent exposure and creating a nuisance. They booked him. A few weeks later when they stood him up in front of a judge—an old man with wire glasses and no hair to speak of—the judge says to him: “Son, I’m going to ask you just one question and I want an answer. Son, are you crazy?” And the guy with the pink thread says, “No sir, I don’t believe so.” And the judge says: “Well then, are you just half crazy?” And the guy says . . .