“Nothing. Stargazing. Hell, I thought she was hurt. So I back up beside her and ask her if she’s all right. ‘Yes, I’m all right,’ she says. ‘Well, can I give you a lift home?’ ‘No,’ she says, ‘thank you.’ ‘But Miss Goodnough,’ I say, ‘I mean, what in hell are you doing out here? It’s way past midnight.’ And she says: ‘Never mind, Billy. You can just tell people I was taking a walk. A walk,’ she says. ‘Never mind,’ she says. She don’t even have a coat on.”
“Let her be,” I said. “Forget it.”
“Sure,” Bill Kwasik said. “I wasn’t going to do nothing to her. I thought she was hurt.”
“I know. But just leave her alone.”
“Well, she’s going to get herself run over if she don’t watch out.”
But no one ran Edith over, and she went on walking out at night alone along the road. She also busied herself with those damn picture postcards. She had them straight-pinned in rows on the walls of the living room so that if you cared to—and I didn’t—you could trace Lyman’s progress yearly for almost twenty years across the country, starting in the West, then the Middle West and the Deep South, and finally the East, like he had some feeble notion of reversing the tide of pioneer migration so as to end up at the beginning, where, for him, the first wrong step had been taken, where his old man’s old man had been carried in his great-great-grandmother’s arms down the plank off some boat in shit-filled diapers. The pictures on the cards, arranged like that, displayed in neat long rows like bathroom tiles, were bright circusy things: glass skyscrapers, blue fountains, statues, city parks with pruned trees and green park benches. They made you think of cheap carnival notices, of circus posters cut up in pieces. And always, on the backs of the cards, was that brief, childish, infuriating scribble of his, which told you next to nothing.
Dear Sis,
How are you? I am in Cleveland. Boy, it’s hot.
Love, your brother,
Lyman
That’s the sort of nonsense he wrote to her, and how she managed to live on just that much, I have no idea. If it had been me I’d have torn the damn things up and thrown them out with the chicken scraps and the hog slop—and then goddamned him again for not coming home yet, the slow son of a bitch. But Edith didn’t feel that way at all. I think she was convinced that he at least was having himself a good time seeing this country’s sights, traveling, broadening himself, so that when he eventually did come home—and she never doubted that he would return finally—things would be better again for her too, that some of his recent experience of the world would rub off on her and add something bright to her life. It was all a vague dream to her. I don’t understand it completely, but I suppose her loneliness fed it, made dreaming possible while the years passed and she went on adding to her postcard collection and taking walks at night under these high white stars.
Of course the rest of us thought he would never come back. He’d been gone so long what difference would it make anyway? Besides, what we remembered of him hadn’t been something you would pin much hope on—a tall, lank bachelor with thinning hair and loose red hands that played vacantly with jackknives and straps on metal suitcases. No, I figured the only way he’d ever return would be in a wood box shoved in amongst piles of crated fruit on a railroad refrigerator car. Someday, I figured, the manager of some cheap boardinghouse in Buffalo, New York, or Trenton, New Jersey, would happen to remember that he hadn’t seen Lyman lately, that the rent was overdue, or that there seemed to be some rank, foul stench oozing out of that room upstairs; so he would mount those dark stairs, knock, get no answer, then try his master key and discover Lyman dead as fish on the sagging bed, and then after looking in his wallet and removing rent money and a little extra for the trouble, he would ship his cold stiff body home to a rural address in Holt County, Colorado. But Edith knew better than the rest of us.
She was certain that he would come back. I remember spending a long evening sitting next to her on the couch, with the postcards pinned neat on the walls around us, during that first winter after Clevis and Twyla had gone. It must have been soon after Christmas because she had a new package of twenty-dollar bills.
“Did I tell you Lyman’s in Pittsburgh?”
“Is he?” I said.