“No, it’s Wednesday. And don’t wait up: the tavern doesn’t close till midnight.”
I suppose I should explain. I don’t expect you to like my response to her little news—she certainly didn’t like it—but you might try to understand my side of it some. It was less than two years after my dad had died—that’s what bitched it all for me. A month less than two years. Hell, she had waited longer than that after her first husband died, Jason Newcomb, that miserable bank teller who hanged himself in the potato cellar. For me, my dad was still as clear and present everywhere about the place as if he had gone just the day before. He was still there for me wherever I was, whatever I was doing, working cattle or fixing fence, and it seemed to me that he should have been enough man for any woman to last a lifetime.
Now I suppose that’s an illogical, an unsound way to think, but that’s how I felt about it. And I didn’t have the slightest notion that she even knew Wilbur Cox to marry him. Of course I understood that she knew him—everybody knew Wilbur Cox. He sold life insurance. He had that tidy little brick office on Main Street in Holt and drank coffee everyday with the boys in the cafe. He was tall, stringy as a green bean; he oiled his hair. Maybe you will understand what I mean about him if I tell you that he is one of those guys who likes to shake hands a lot, shaking your hand with both of his. But like I’ve said before, my mother was not stupid. She no doubt already had Wilbur Cox picked out. She must have seen very clearly in advance that Wilbur was going to be the form of husband she could manipulate, rule and run, make him stay home and attend to business, and she did all that. He fit into her scheme like an obedient poodle. Well, there was always something grasping about her, still is for that matter. She can’t let go. She has to go on striving at things, refusing to let them be as they are. She can’t abide them until she has changed them to meet her own mold. I don’t believe it makes her happy, though.
Anyway, I relented a little in December. When the solid brick house at the edge of town was complete with carpet and paint, I stood up for her at the wedding. I gave her away. I even agreed to sell a dryland quarter to pay for the house.
THERE WAS at least one other thing to happen in 1952 that has some bearing on this story. It must have been October, but you can check his gravestone if it makes a lot of difference to you: old Roy Goodnough died down the road from us. He went in his sleep. Edith went in to his bedroom that morning to dress him for the day in his overalls, and she found that she wasn’t ever going to have to do that again. He was as rigid as stone; his mouth was locked open, like a piece of box iron. So she drew the sheet up over his face and went downstairs to call me.
“It’s over,” she said.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“He died last night. Will you help me make the arrangements?”