That’s when the trouble started seriously with Lyman. I suppose you’d have to say he was jealous of the damn thing. It was like he felt his sister was spending too much of herself caring for something that wasn’t him. Like a kid, he wanted her total concentration and concern to himself. If she wasn’t looking, he’d give the dog a boot, hit it with his cane. Things got worse. Then my daughter had to be there when it all went to hell.
It was one of those late-winter, early-spring afternoons in March, that in-between time when a gray sky can’t decide what to do, drop snow or spit rain, so it does a little of both. Rena had come home as usual on the bus after school, and I had taken her with me to the Goodnoughs’ to play in the house while I worked on a tractor I kept stored out of the weather in the machine shed. It was getting along towards five, darkening already, and I had turned on the drop-light over the tractor. Then Edith was calling me from the steps of the back porch.
“What?” I yelled back at her. “I’m out here.”
“You better come to the house.”
“I’ll be there in a minute.”
“What?”
“In a minute.”
“You better come now.”
She turned and went back in. What in the hell? I thought. I walked across the wet graveled yard and inside the house, in the kitchen, I found Rena on Edith’s lap. Rena was crying, her face close against Edith’s shoulder. Rena didn’t cry much, but she was crying hard now. Through the kitchen door I could see Lyman glaring at me from across the length of the house. He was standing in the parlor doorway as if he would fight anybody who tried to get past him. He looked wild. That travel clerk’s visor of his was tilted lopsided on his head, and his eyes looked flat crazy, insane, bughouse.
“What’s going on?” I said.
Rena was crying something into Edith’s shoulder; it came out muffled and wet.
“What? Honey, I can’t understand you.”
“Never mind now, sweetheart,” Edith said. “It’ll be all right now. Your daddy’s here. Don’t you know it’ll be all right? It always is, isn’t it?”
Rena looked up into Edith’s pale wrinkled face. “But Lyman hit you,” she said. “I saw him hit you with that cane.”
“I know. But never mind now. It’s all over.”
“And he hit Nancy too. I tried to make him stop but he wouldn’t.”
“Nancy will be all right too. You’ll see. Look, she’s over there in the corner on her rug. See how she likes it there where it’s warm. Why, she’s asleep already, so don’t you worry about Nancy—no, now don’t cry anymore. Just lean your head back. There, that’s my girl.”
“Edith,” I said, “what happened here?”
Edith didn’t say anything for a while. She was caressing, calming my daughter. Finally she said, “I don’t know really. I think it’s just too much for him sometimes. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, and then something happens and—”
“And he hurts you.”
“Not very much. I’m all right. It’s just that I don’t know right now what I’m going to do with him. I’ve got to think.”