Then, before we made town, my dad said to Lyman, “I don’t suppose you thought to tell Edith you’re leaving.”
“Why sure,” Lyman said. “She knows.” He patted his coat pocket. “She packed me some sandwiches. I got them right here with me.”
“What does she say about it?”
“Well, I’ll tell you,” Lyman said. He leaned forward to look past me at my dad. “She says for at least one of us to get away. That’s what she told me last night.”
“Jesus Christ,” my dad said. “When’s she going to quit?”
“And I’m going to write her about it,” Lyman said. “Edith says for me to see all the sights I can and taste pleasure.”
“Well, see that you do it.”
“I will. You can bet on that.”
“I’m talking about writing her,” my dad said.
“Oh,” he said, and sat back again to look ahead down the road. He brought one of his big red winter-chafed hands up to play with the belt strapped around the metal suitcase on his lap.
When we drove into Holt all the houses were dark and the big globes suspended above the corners on Main Street were off. I didn’t see anything moving. No one was at the depot either; Lyman was going to have to buy his ticket once he got on the train. My dad stopped the pickup beside the cobblestone platform, and though we were almost an hour early, Lyman got out with his suitcase under his arm and stood to face east up the tracks. My dad and I stayed in the pickup with the motor and heater running and watched him wait. Once while we watched him, my dad said, “Well, this is a piece of history that won’t appear in no history books.” But he was talking more to himself than he was to me.
Finally when the train got there, waving its beam light back and forth above the tracks and making the ground vibrate, we got out to say good-bye. In the light of the conductor’s lantern I could see that Lyman’s eyes were bleary from the cold and that there was a drip of watery mucus at the tip of his nose. Lyman looked cold and scared. My dad shook his hand, and Lyman patted me on the shoulder, and then in his long overcoat and his best shoes and with his corduroy earflaps tied tight under his chin, he mounted the steps to the train, and that was the last we saw of him. That was the last anyone in Holt County saw of him for almost twenty years. Including Edith.