But, Christ, what a waste of life. It makes you sick to your stomach. It makes you want to do anything else in the world but think about her.
YOU SEE, Edith and my dad, John Roscoe, went out together that summer. And if you think about that for a minute you’ll understand at least one of the reasons why I feel about Edith the way I do. For six or seven weeks that summer, Edith and my dad went spooning or sparking or whatever it was people called it then when two people drive out together in an old Ford car with the windows rolled down and the dark air blows in on them, carrying that green smell of sage in with it. Driving in the car, they turn towards one another now and then, and then more and more often as the evening fades; they laugh a little bit about something that may seem funny to them only, while the stars have begun to snap overhead, and behind them there’s only that dust billowing up in the road after the car has passed.
So Edith and my dad went to a few dances together. They went into town to a movie or two. They ate supper once in Norka, the next town west of Holt. But mainly they drove along the country roads in the sandhills in my dad’s old Ford, talking and laughing a little bit. It must have seemed enough to be together and to be moving, and almost always they had Lyman with them in the back seat.
Maybe that’s the reason why Roy let them go. With Lyman along to stick his head up between them from the back seat, it may have seemed all right to let Edith go out driving with my dad. I suppose he thought Lyman would put a halt to any funny stuff. Not that Lyman would say anything to anybody—Lyman didn’t do much talking in his life, except maybe to Edith—but he did always seem to be there. You’d be working on something in the machine shed or visiting with someone on Main Street, and then you’d look up and there Lyman would be, standing off a little ways, cleaning the dirt from under his fingernails with a jackknife, and you couldn’t be sure how long he’d been standing there or how much he’d seen or heard, but there he was all right, waiting like a stray dog to see what developed. So maybe that’s the reason why Roy allowed that six-or seven-week vacation, that brief lessening of his hold on the vise that summer, but that’s only a guess. It sure as hell wasn’t like him. Maybe he just wanted to see how far it would go, to kind of test the water. Or maybe he already had in mind what he was going to do next.
Another thing I can only guess at, concerning that summer, was why it took my dad so long. He was already thirty-two. He was still young, of course, still in his prime— strong, tough, black haired, the kind of man dogs and horses will come up to for a scratch and a pat without his ever having to whistle or snap his fingers. But for at least ten years there hadn’t been any reason to doubt that he would make a good go of ranching. He had been well established for quite a while; he had things in control. So maybe he was just waiting. He was a country boy too, after all, and every fall during harvest he was still there helping the Goodnoughs, watching Edith, talking to her some and joking with Lyman, while he himself drove the header now that Roy couldn’t.
Then his mother, my grandmother, died. That was in the spring of 1922. When he came in for supper one evening, he found her dead in the rocking chair with tobacco ashes spilled out onto her black dress, and he buried her up on that little rise north of the barn. He stuck her briar pipe under her hands on her chest. Edith was the only other person there. Together they shoveled the sand in onto the wood box.
“There ought to be a tree or bush, though,” Edith said. “Even if it’s just the thought of it, she ought to have some shade.”
The box was covered now. My dad was mounding the sand on top and packing it with the flat of his shovel.
“I mean in July and August,” Edith said. “I don’t like thinking of her up here then.”
“Be a awful long way to carry water.”
“A bucket or two every other day,” she said. “We could take turns.”