BUT if Edith and Lyman had been city kids, things might have been different. City kids, even in 1915, had some opportunities to escape which farm kids didn’t have. City kids could take off and walk ten or fifteen blocks or jump on a trolley car going across town and end up as far away from home as if they were in another state entirely, another country even. Then they could make their mark, or not make it, and start their life over or end it, but whatever happened, at least the ties would have been cut, the limits of home would have been broken.
Or if Edith and Lyman had been country kids living now, alive and howling in the 1970s, things might have been different too. It’s TV and movie shows and high school and 3.2 beer and loud music and paved highways and fast cars (and what goes on and comes off too in the back seats of those cars, until maybe Bud Sealy shines his flashlight in through the side windows)—it’s all those things and more that country kids have now, and you can’t tell a farm kid from a town kid, even with a program. They’re just about all the same, all alike in their cars, driving up and down Main Street every Saturday night, honking and howling, in Holt, Colorado.
But Edith and Lyman didn’t have those things, those chances and opportunities to escape. They were farm kids in the second decade of this violent century, and they were stuck. Their mother died early, like I’ve already said; their father was Roy Goodnough, and even if he was a raging madman sometimes, even if he yelled too much at them, he was still their father. And then—to clinch matters, to turn that heavy vise a few more turns to the right—they had to see him get his hands ruined. They had to be right there when it happened; they had to witness it all, watch his hands being ground to hamburger; they had to run for help, get him to town, carry what was left of his fingers wrapped up in a damn handkerchief, and then one of them had to hold an arm in place, and they both had to watch while Packer did what little he could to rectify the bloody mess of his hands—and all the time he was still talking about I told you so, I told you, didn’t I?
So when I say they were stuck, I don’t mean they were stuck just a little bit. I don’t mean they were just sort of stuck the way you might be if you stepped into some mud and you were able to get out of it if you made the effort, and once you were out of it about all the loss you’d have to show was that you might have to leave a pair of good new shoes behind you in the mud. No, I mean they were deep stuck. I mean it was like they were stuck clear up to their chins, almost up to eye level, and no real effort was even possible. They might manage to wiggle their arms a little bit now and then, they might turn their heads a few degrees, but they couldn’t get out no matter what, and about all they could see in any direction around them, when they did manage to turn their heads a little bit, was just more mud. More of the same. Or, in their case, more sand and more work and duty and obligation.