“Hell of a place,” I said.
Then I went home to feed corn to castrated bulls and to fork hay to fat cattle. And you can make of the Goodnoughs’ bedroom arrangement whatever you want to. Stir it according to your own lights. Myself, I don’t make anything of it. If they wanted to sleep in the same bed, warm their feet under the same old-fashioned patchwork quilt like they had when they were kids before this century ever began—well, that was their business, because when you know people all your life you try to understand how it is for them. What you can’t understand you just accept. That’s how I felt about Edith. At the time I could still remember like it was yesterday how she fed me chewing gum while we cleaned chicken squirt from brown eggs at the kitchen sink and how one summer she brought me ice tea and lemonade when I was driving tractor in a hayfield and an old man was waving stumps past my head and screaming nonsense in my ears. I intended to help her however I could. It was not my business to ask fool questions that didn’t concern me. That’s where Rena Pickett came in. To help Edith, I mean. Only help isn’t the right word.
From the time Rena was born in 1969 Edith enjoyed her. I already told you how she was a compensation, but she was more than that. I suppose it had something to do with having a little kid dancing around in the house where otherwise there were only old folks, something to do with a little girl’s noise and giggles breaking up all that daily silence, that ongoing concentrated crotchetiness filling the parlor and the entire downstairs. Why hell, Rena put some fun into that yellow house, and Mavis and I encouraged it. Whenever there was occasion to be out at night or excuse to go to the National Western Stock Show in Denver, Rena went to Edith’s. She went there a lot, not just when we were gone but often for a whole day when we were home during the summer and also for an hour or two during the week after school. By the time she was six she was going there by herself. She’d throw a halter on Echo and trot down to the Goodnoughs’. We didn’t worry about her when she was there; it was obvious that she and Edith got along together like two beads on the same string. Besides, it was educational. I’ll bet Rena is the only seven-year-old kid in all of Holt County who not only knows how to scald a chicken and pluck tail feathers but also how to get from Dallas to St. Paul by train and bus. Because she was a help with Lyman too, you understand. My daughter could bring that old man out. She treated him as an equal. Together they played travel in the parlor for hours.
On a late-winter afternoon if I went in to bring Rena home for supper I’d find her with Lyman, the two of them sitting at that loaded mahogany desk in that west room, the light from the overhead lamp reflecting off his bald visored head and her shiny black hair, her hair fallen forward around her face. The maps would be tacked up on the walls. Around them on the floor the whole room would be full of stuff, cluttered so you couldn’t walk, overflowing: all those damn brochures and pamphlets and flyers; schedules for the whole country creased five times and looking used up; all of it spilling out of cardboard boxes; a hell of a mess. If Edith wanted to clean in there she had to dust around them; they knew where they wanted things. They allowed her to store the extra piles of stuff on the steps leading up to the unused bedrooms, but she had to ask first. And that was all right because Rena was keeping Lyman occupied; he was almost happy when she was there. So, while Edith folded clothes or cooked supper, the two travelers were busy, engrossed in serious play, both of them sitting bent over that desk where Rena colored train tickets and Lyman studied the numbers in his train schedule and tried to figure how to get them to Detroit if they boarded in Denver. It was solemn business. And Rena would be saying something like: “I’m just sick of this orange. I’m going to make them red.”