“But for godsake, Edith. Your mother is dead.”
“I know that. That’s what I mean. When mother died I had to take things up into my own hands. And you know it doesn’t matter if I wanted to or not: sometimes now I don’t even know what it was I might have wanted once. I can’t recall. It’s been too long; it will be eight years in August since mother died. But anyway, these things and these people here are mine now. I’ve taken them up. That’s all there is. And besides, what would Lyman do?”
So what was my dad going to say to any of that? He was lying there in sandhill grass, watching her while she talked and while the light shone pale on her fine face, and I suppose he must have known that he couldn’t win any fight against the memory of any frail little woman, even if that woman was just skinny and tiny and homesick and even if she had been dead for close to eight years. But perhaps he still had reason to hope—I suppose he did— so perhaps he changed targets and aimed instead at Edith’s obligation to Lyman, because maybe he still thought he could at least win a fight against a twenty-three-year-old shuffling, shambling brother. With humor then my dad must have said something like:
“All right, hell then. If he has to, Lyman can come live with us. I’ll cut him another hole in the outhouse.”
“What? Don’t be silly.”
“He can have his own Sears, Roebuck catalog too. We won’t bother it none. We won’t even notice if he uses all the pages except the ones with corsets and women’s socks on them. He can spend all the time he wants to out there— we won’t care.”
“You are good for me,” Edith said.
“Why sure. Old Lyman will be as happy as a dead sow in clover.”
Edith felt about in her hair to see if she had all of the grass combed out. “Give me another kiss,” she said. “And stop all this talking about outhouses and dead sows.”
THEY WENT HOME THEN, out of the sandhills where, for a while, they had been alone in the sage and the blue light, then north on the highway to the corner and east almost a mile, before they got to the Goodnoughs’, to find Lyman. They didn’t find him, though, not right away. They had to stop the car and look for him along the roadside in the tall grass, and they didn’t find him until they turned the headlights of the car on again. Even then they didn’t find him immediately. He was lying on his side, rolled into himself like a kid, asleep with spit dribbled onto his chin. He was a good fifteen feet off the road. Edith brushed him off.
“Are you awake now?” she said.
“Where’s Pa?”
“In the house. Come on. Can you get in the car?”
My dad drove them into the yard and squeezed Edith’s hand before she got out. Then he drove the half mile home, and Edith and Lyman walked into the house together. Roy was waiting for them in the kitchen. He was sitting at the kitchen table in his work pants and long underwear, with his raw hands and one good finger resting on the white enameled wood in front of him. Some things weren’t any simpler then than they are now.
“Get upstairs,” he told Lyman.
Lyman looked at Edith. He was fully awake now and aware, but he went upstairs anyway. The barn door had just banged shut again for him.
“You’re done with that,” Roy said to Edith. “That’s enough of Roscoe.”
Edith stood on the other side of the table, waiting, watching her father feel his little finger over the bad nubs of his right hand. His finger looked like a claw raking dead meat.
“I seen him stop the car,” Roy said. “I seen the lights on the road go off and come on again. But that’s done with.”
“I’m twenty-five,” Edith said.
“That don’t mean a diddle.”
“John’s thirty-two.”
“That don’t mean a goddamn, either. He’s a half-breed bastard, and you’re done with him.”
“He’s not either.”
“He is if I say he is, goddamn it. And you’re his whore. Now get to bed. You must be all wore out after tonight.”