Edith went back downstairs. The old man stared at my dad out of yellow watery eyes. He didn’t move any but just lay there, making a bad mess of the bed and watching my dad. Then his eyes filled and ran down his cheeks. I suppose I felt sorry for him then, too, the old bastard. He wasn’t any good; he was less than no good. His face was all pinched up, and there was that water grizzling down his cheeks into his shirt collar. But for the first time I did feel sorry for him.
Edith came back with a wet cloth and a bowl of ice cubes. She cleaned his face and hands and applied the ice to his chin, picked the sandburs from his clothes. The old man paid no attention. She took his shoes off.
“I want him out of my house.”
“Be quiet,” Edith said. “Haven’t you done enough?”
“This is my house.”
“It doesn’t matter whose house it is. Be quiet.”
“I want him out.”
“Forget it,” my dad said. “I’m going.” He leaned over the old man. “But don’t you ever put her on that tractor again. You hear me?”
“Get him out of here.”
“Next time I’ll kill you.”
“Get out.”
“I mean that. I’ll kill you first.”
The old man’s eyes were full of water again and he began to shiver in his bed like he was cold. We left then. At the bedroom door I looked back, and Edith was covering him with a blanket. She was crying now too.
We went downstairs and outside to the horse tank. My dad washed the blood and grit off his face, then we walked over to the pickup. My dad got in behind the wheel. He drove us in to town, to Holt, to the Payday Liquor Store, where he bought a fifth of whiskey and some beer. He brought it out in a paper sack. Then he drove us back out here to the country and stopped the pickup on top of a sand hill in a cow pasture.
“Son, you ever drank beer before?” he said.
“No, sir.”
“It’s time you started.”
So in the middle of a Saturday morning in 1943 I sipped the beer my dad bought me until I was drunk, while he drank whiskey and talked. He talked for hours, talked, said more to me that morning than he had in all the previous fifteen years we had lived together. He told me about his mother, his father too, what little he could remember of him, told me about the Goodnoughs, how it started with Ada and the two water buckets, how it was when Roy lost his hands, told me how he and Edith and Lyman had driven to the movies together in town for six weeks one summer. And once he had started telling it he couldn’t seem to stop; he couldn’t seem to explain things enough. There was too much of it.
I didn’t interrupt him. I sipped my beer, took a piss now and then in the sagebrush and soapweeds, and listened to him as well as I could. But towards the end of it I remember saying something innocent and foolish like, “But it’s not fair.”
And he said, “ ’Course it’s not fair. There ain’t none of it that’s fair. Life ain’t. And all our thinking it should be don’t seem to make one single damn. You might as well know that now as later.”
?7?
ONLY IN FACT my dad couldn’t accept his own advice. Against the odds and against all kinds of craziness he kept trying to change things, to ease them, even if he couldn’t finally make them fair. I suppose some of that has rubbed off on me. It’s the reason I’m telling you this. It’s why I can’t accept the idea of anybody wanting to put a woman like Edith Goodnough on trial for a thing in the world, let alone murder.