“You’ll probably get infection,” she said. “I suppose you should see Doc Packer again, but I’m not going with you. I’ve been there once. And I might have married John Roscoe. I might have married him. I don’t care what you say. He wanted me to and I might have. Oh yes, God in mercy, I might have. Oh damn you.”
But she was crying then. There wasn’t any sound to it. It was past the point where the puny sound of a human voice can make any difference. She walked out of the house away from her father towards the hayfield to tell Lyman, with the unregarded tears falling onto the breast of her blouse. After that, I know of only two other times in her life that Edith Goodnough allowed herself to cry. Neither was at the death of her father.
?5?
WHAT’S 365 times 20? Something over 7,000, isn’t it? Well, that’s how long it was. That’s how many days.
For over 7,000 days, for almost 20 years, nothing happened to the Goodnoughs. After Roy chopped his last finger off with the ax, nothing happened to the Goodnoughs—or for them either—until almost two decades of slow days had passed. Days that must have seemed as cruel as stillbirth; the pointlessness of them, the sameness, one slow day grinding slow into the next, with no letup and no relief, nothing to look forward to and even less to look back on. Not even those small things the rest of us use to mark the passing of time—what we mean when we say “But you remember, don’t you?”—because Edith and Lyman didn’t have even that much that was worth recalling about last Christmas, never mind the day before yesterday. I believe even the Great Depression, when it came in the thirties, must have seemed like just more of the same to them, or if it was different then it was only slightly worse, because then they stopped going into town once a week to sell eggs and sour cream during the depression, to make a little money.
So it only surprises me that Roy didn’t start in on his toes the same way, chop his ten toes off, nine all at once in the header or hay mower or corn picker and then the last one by itself in the barn with an ax—just for a little variety, I mean. To keep the knack of it fresh. Hell, the old bastard could have yelled Lyman in from the hayfield and made Lyman take the damn things into the house and dump them into the bean bowl or the kitchen sink. Chopped his own ears off, too, for all I know or care. Except I guess even Roy knew he had done enough that one afternoon.
Because Edith never went out riding with my father again. She and Lyman went on working like they had before. Of course, when those six or seven weeks of that summer ended for Edith, she wasn’t the same. It was as if the reason for her to have female hips and soft breasts was gone. She got so she was more what you really mean is thin when you say a woman has a good body, that she’s slim. She didn’t laugh as easy. Something bright went out of her brown eyes. Her quick gestures became deliberate movements, like there was nothing now to hurry about, and it was at that time that she and Roy stopped talking to one another any more than they had to. Oh, she took care of him—I don’t mean that. She buttoned his shirt for him now that he no longer had even one finger to use to poke a button through a hole, and she mashed his potatoes and cut his meat into bites so he could still eat his food by lifting a fork to his mouth between his clenched stumps, and she tied his shoes. But she didn’t have much to say to him and she paid less attention to whatever he said. So there must have been a lot of quiet around that kitchen table for all those years, with about all the talk being just Roy’s orders and farm questions and Lyman’s mumbled grunts of obedience and short answers and pass the pepper and ain’t there any more gravy; and then in December of 1941 it must have got to be almost dead silence.
BUT I’M GETTING AHEAD of myself. Or if you want it for a joke, I’m forgetting myself.