Nobody out here, not even Edith, saw him all that time. I know that for a fact. But I also know, since I’ve seen every damned one of them, that he did send Edith at least one picture postcard each year with a color likeness on it of the biggest skyscraper there was in whatever city he happened to be stopped in right then. I also know, because I’ve seen them too—good Christ, yes—that every year come Christmas he sent her a package of twenty-dollar bills tied up with a red bow. But, like I say, he never sent himself home.
He didn’t even come home when Roy finally died and stopped fouling good air in 1952. Maybe Lyman didn’t know the old man was dead, not in time anyway to come back for the funeral, even assuming he had wanted to. He wouldn’t have been easy to locate. Edith would have had to send word to the last address scribbled on the last picture postcard and hope he was still there, since apparently he never left any forwarding address when he moved on, and besides, the only return address he ever used at any time was just general delivery, and that without bothering to pick up his mail very often, because why should he?
Or consider this: maybe Lyman was afraid to come back even then. Maybe he thought until the old man was a good nine years dead with the ground heavy sunk and filled over him and the grass growing thick on it, that it still wasn’t safe, that somehow the old bastard’s ghost or spirit or voice, whatever, might still be active enough to call him back, lecture him about Saturday-night diddling, and then make him stay there to rake hay and plow sand. And if that was the reason, then you could say Lyman was right to stay away even then, because you couldn’t be real sure the old son of a bitch was dead even when you were actually standing there in front of his coffin and saw him lying there like a slab of mean yellow granite. With his head on a satin pillow he still didn’t look any thinner or stiffer or any less like a ramrod than he did when he was supposed to be alive. His eyes were closed; that was all. That and the fact that those red stumps of his sticking out beneath his white shirt cuffs had finally quit twitching and waving.
Anyway, whatever the reason, Lyman stayed away for nine years more after the old man was dead and buried deep inside that little cemetery, making it two Goodnough headstones so far there beside Otis Murray’s cornfield two miles east of Holt, and then he did come back. He was a little bit tired; his eyes were a little dazed from the sights he had seen, and I suppose there were other parts of him that were a little jaded too from the pleasure he had tasted, but he was still all right, more or less. He was still of some use to his sister. For a while.
ONLY, MEANWHILE, there were those twenty years for her to wait through and to endure. And how did she manage that? What was she doing all that time Lyman stayed away and bought Pontiacs and sent her picture postcards? Nothing.
Well, no, not nothing exactly. She didn’t just do nothing all that time. But she sure God didn’t go traveling off across the North American continent, either. She didn’t even go those seven miles into Holt very often. She stayed home. Jesus, that’s about all you can say: Edith Goodnough stayed home. And if you figure it up, if you do your arithmetic from those chiseled dates in the cemetery, then you know Edith was seventeen when her mother died in 1914; she was fifty-five when the old man died in 1952; and she was sixty-four when Lyman finally returned in 1961. It amounts to a lifetime of staying home.