When Lyman left for L. A. and for what he thought was going to be at least a good hitch in the army, it got worse almost immediately. Edith was still doing all the work at home she always did: she was still milking cows, separating milk, cooking meals, washing dishes, and—everyday, don’t forget—still cutting Roy’s meat into bites and filling the buttonholes of his shirt with buttons once he had pushed his stumps through the sleeves. But in the following spring, at a time when Lyman was already beginning to save that airplane-factory money of his and to contemplate Pontiacs, Edith got more to do.
My dad and I first saw it one morning from the gravel road beside the Goodnough cornfield on our way to check cattle. I was driving, I remember, and feeling full of myself because I was actually behind the wheel and out on the road itself, not just turning circles in the barnyard or cutting eights in the horse pasture. So I suppose I had already ground through first and second gear and was abusing high—yes, I was flat pounding along the country road, imagining myself to be Holt County’s special gift to Ford transmissions—when my dad said:
“Goddamn it, slow down. Stop this son of a bitch.”
I thought, Now what have I done? Have I busted something? I stopped the pickup but it wasn’t me. My dad was looking out the window at the Goodnoughs’ cornfield.
“Now what do you call that?” he said. “What in the goddamn hell’s he think he’s doing?”
Because there was a tractor out there in the field with a one-way disk behind it. The tractor was coming toward us from across the corn stubble, and as it got closer I could see what my dad meant. There were two heads sticking up behind the body of the tractor, one just visible above it and the other quite a lot higher.
“Goddamn him,” my dad said. “Now maybe he’ll manage to fall off and get more than just his fingers mangled. Which I don’t care, but I suppose she still does. Jesus Christ.”
The tractor came on toward us, grew larger, louder, and then it was obvious that it was Edith driving it. She had her straw gardening hat on and she was sitting there on the tractor seat behind the exhaust stack looking no bigger than a ten-year-old girl. She had both hands clenched tight on the steering wheel, and the disk furrows behind her were as straight as she could make them. And of course it was the old man standing up beside her. We could see him waving his arms, pointing those damn blunt stumps past her head like he was some kind of live Halloween scarecrow and her straw hat was just some yellow corn shock. It made you sick.
When they closed on the end of the field near us, we could hear him yelling at her too: “Brake it. Brake it. Now turn it. Can’t you turn this thing?”
My dad opened the pickup door. I thought he was going to get out. “I ought to killed him when I had the chance,” he said. “By God, I will yet. The dirty son of a bitch.”
But somehow Edith got the tractor turned and got the disk headed back out across the field. As she was making the turn she had looked up once, quick, toward my dad in the pickup, not for help, I don’t think, but like she was still saying, Yes, I know. But it’s okay; it’s all right, and then she was past us, going away from us, with the disk rolling up dirt and dust behind her and the noise of the tractor decreasing in the widening distance between her and us.
We watched them out into the middle of the field. Then my dad finally spoke again. “Did you see the belt?” he said.
“What belt?”
“That belt contraption he had buckled across behind him. Between the fenders.” “What for?”
“So he wouldn’t fall off. So he could stand there and work his arms. So he could at least protect hisself even if he didn’t give a good piss in hell about her.”
“I didn’t see it,” I said.
“Never mind. You saw enough. Start this pickup.”