Because in fact there were a few things happening in the house down the road a half mile west, in this house here where you and I are sitting away a Sunday afternoon.
For one thing my dad just about quit. He damn near quit on himself, quit giving a good goddamn about anything. When he and Edith ran into each other on Main Street—it was a couple of days later, on Saturday afternoon—when Edith told him what had happened that other afternoon and that she wouldn’t leave the house ever, my dad wanted to kill Roy Goodnough.
In front of Nexey’s Lumberyard, across the street from Bishop’s Creamery, my dad said, “I’ll kill him.”
“It’ll be all right,” Edith said. “It has to.”
“I’ll chop his head off.”
There were people on the sidewalk, men in overalls and caps, women in silk stockings, kids sucking horehound candy and bouncing sticks on sidewalk cracks, all walking past and then stopping ten yards away to watch with their mouths held shut and their eyes wide open. They didn’t want to miss anything; they would want to talk about it later.
And my dad was saying, “I’ll kill him.”
And Edith was still saying how it would be all right.
Well, it wasn’t all right, and I believe he could have too—could have killed him. If somehow he could have gotten away with it, it might have been the best thing. Does that surprise you? To think that murdering an old stump-handed man might be an answer? But of course it wasn’t, and he didn’t. That sort of thing only happens on TV. Nobody I know has killed anybody, and you can never mind what they say this approaching trial is about. Whatever the lawyers in their ignorance say about it, I know it isn’t murder.
So instead of anything similar to that, my dad, John Roscoe, who’s been dead now for nearly twenty-seven years, and I still can’t stop thinking about him at least once every day while dehorning a calf or mashing my thumb purple with a claw hammer (still it’s his voice saying, “Smarts pretty good, don’t it?”—it’s still his voice I hear in my head, measuring things, setting standards, his voice and way of looking at things: “But life ain’t fair, Sanders,” he told me once)—my dad, for about three years after he and Edith stopped going out together, went a little crazy.
He began to work like an immigrant during the day and to drink at night like there was no tomorrow. He was going on anger and disbelief and about four hours of sleep. He bought more cattle. He went in debt for another section of grass. He hired one of his cronies to help him. The crony was a short, squat, blocky character named Ellis Burns, who looked like a fireplug with a two-day-old beard, or, when they were working cattle in the pasture, like a fat monkey on a circus horse. He moved Ellis into the house with him and did nothing fancy. They fried meat and opened cans, mixed it together in a black frying pan, and boiled coffee. They rinsed last night’s supper off the two plates and the two forks and sat down to eat. And Ellis Burns never did lose weight.