NOW I DON’T pretend to think that a mere stretch of six years is anywhere near enough time. But I suppose if that’s all you’re given and no more, then six years will have to do. In the end that’s what Edith Goodnough had: she had six years of what you may call fun. Or good times. Or better, just the day-in, day-out mean rich goodness of being alive, when at night you lie down in the warm dark pleased with your corner of the world, and then you wake the next morning still pleased with it, and you know that, too, while you lie there for a time listening in peace to the mourning doves calling from the elm trees and telephone lines, until finally the thought of black coffee moves you up out of bed and down the stairs to the kitchen stove, so that once again you can begin it all afresh, with pleasure, with eagerness even. Because yes, Edith had that for a while. During that period it was written all over her face. Her brown eyes shone and snapped for six years.
Of course you might always wish that it had been longer, or that it had come earlier, when she was still young, when she still might have borne children, when my dad was still alive, but wishing for such things is a waste of time; it doesn’t make them happen. My dad taught me that, told me as much that day in 1943 when he knocked sense or at least fear into Old Man Goodnough and then afterwards talked to me while I drank beer for the first time and got drunk. So I try to remember it, and even today, knowing what I do about the end, I still take satisfaction in remembering that though Edith was sixty-four when her brother finally returned in his wool suit and Pontiac, and despite the fact that Lyman himself was sixty-two, still, together, almost as if they were honeymooners, they had those six good years from 1961 until 1967 before things suddenly went bad again. It doesn’t change those years to know that after 1967 things turned so much worse finally that something desperate had to be done to end them. Regardless, they were still good years, good times. I believe that.
THE GOOD TIMES began that same evening, the night Lyman was home again for supper and I was asked over to enjoy the surprise of him. I told you that after we’d eaten he wanted me to see his car and that I refused to sit in it. At the time I was still disgusted. Here he was back in the house again after all that lapsed time; he was eating his sister’s cherry pie and sporting those damn two-tone wing-tip shoes under her kitchen table—without one word of apology or real explanation for having taken so long. But I got over it; I decided that if it made Edith happy— and I could see that it did—then it wasn’t my business to be disgusted or angry or any more asinine than I’d already been. So I tried to partake of their enjoyment. I helped Lyman carry his miserable beat-up metal-and-cardboard suitcases into the house.
He spread them out on the living-room floor. It was like he was Saint Nick in July. Like he was some far-flung sailor returned home safe from the seven seas. Hell, I don’t know—it was like he imagined himself to be some modern form of Marco Polo come back from the farthest reaches of Outer Mongolia with spoils to prove it. He had treasure for us, for the farm-stuck cocklebur home folks. His suitcases were loaded with the stuff. He spread it around. He gave each of us something. Edith prized what he gave her about fifty-seven times more than it was worth, as if what he’d given her actually amounted to something. She danced back and forth to the mirror to wonder at the latest doodad he hung on her. But, in truth, it was all just junk, an old bachelor’s collection of tourist trinkets. You can buy better things on Sidewalk Sale Day in front of Duckwall’s in downtown Holt. But that didn’t matter to Edith: it was from her brother. He gave her a scarf from Boise, Idaho; a heavy bracelet from the Omaha stockyards; a silver necklace affair that dangled a thin pendant in the shape of a Georgia peach. And me, why me he gave a shoehorn from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It had the name of some shoe-store scratched on the tin handle. I took it and didn’t laugh. But what the hell did I need with a shoehorn, even if it was from Pittsburgh? I wear boots.