SO EDITH and Lyman Goodnough got to be kids for a while. It was like they were just-bloomed teenagers, full of overdue sap and pent-up vinegar. The time was ripe for it, too. The country, remember, and even Holt County, was up for grabs during that period. I’m talking here about the 1960s, when kids everywhere were growing hair and wearing costumes, showing their breasts and generally refusing to do whatever it was their folks knew damn well they should do, had by God better do if they knew what was good for them, until some of them began to get permanent greetings and immediate marching orders from a Texas president, and then it turned out that it wasn’t so good for them after all, because so many never came back alive. It was a stupid war. We lost two boys from Holt County to it. They were our insane ante in that murderous poker game. But I’m not going to talk about that: too much has already been said about it and none of it helps. No, I’m talking about my neighbors, the Goodnoughs, who were also kids in the sixties.
I suppose you could say that what happened to them was like they were having a second childhood—only that wouldn’t be accurate. You can’t have seconds of something until after you’ve had firsts of the thing. And of course they never had firsts. Ada Twamley, their mother, had been too weak chinned, too consumed with dreaming backwards, to see to it that Edith and Lyman were allowed to be kids while she herself still lived; then she died and left them alone in total charge and control of the old man. And that old son of a bitch didn’t believe in any such luxuries; kids were laborers to him, custom-made, self-sired farmhands to be ordered around however, whenever, he deemed fit. Besides, there were always those stumps of his and that routine meanness, as if he figured it was not only his God-given right but his particular duty too to be forever mean and harsh. But I already told you some of that, told you too that he released them finally by dying in that upstairs bedroom with his mouth locked open. Of course it took Lyman nine years to realize it. But, anyway, now he had; he was home again. For the first time in their lives, Edith and her brother were absolutely alone on that farm in that house down the road from me.
They didn’t quite know what to make of it at first. What in the world were they going to do with all that vacation time, that freedom from duty and direction? Well, they didn’t do anything rash, exactly. On her part Edith learned to sip gimlets from a barroom goblet, to go a little giggly and pink cheeked in a nice sort of girlish way. And as for Lyman, once he was home and realized there wasn’t anyone there to tell him what to do, Lyman refused to change clothes. What I mean is, he wouldn’t wear work shoes or overalls again. He went on dressing up every day like he believed he was a banker, a retired mortician. Every day he put on his wing tips, his dress pants, shirt, and tie. He was definitely finished with farming; he wasn’t going to plow sand anymore. As far as he was concerned, I could go on farming their place just as I had done for the past ten years. They got their share of the profits regularly; they had that twenty-seven hundred dollars Edith had saved; it was fine with Lyman. So now they had both money and freedom, and a new green Pontiac waiting outside at the picket gate.