?10?
IT DIDN’T HAPPEN right away. It took almost ten years more for it to get so bad that there seemed to be only one option. But long before the end of 1976 there were already beginning to be too many signs to ignore—which looking at it now, while telling you about it this long quiet Sunday afternoon in April, reminds me—signs that pointed even then to his steady slide and eventual total collapse into an old man’s awful form of childhood. He became as cranky and unpredictable as a two-year-old. For one thing his car was gone.
They totaled his Pontiac. He never had another one. At about the same time we were burying that little box of ours on the hill above the barn, Bernie’s Wrecking Service winched Lyman’s last green Pontiac up out of the ditch weeds and towed it to town without salvaging even the tires. It’s still there in the junkyard west of the city water-treatment ponds. You might want to take a look at that too before you leave this area; the car stands in the middle of the weedy lot with the hood propped open by some high school kids who scrounged for cheap engine parts but gave up and left without thinking to close the hood. It’s getting pretty rusty. The windows are all smashed out, and the blood inside on the upholstery looks as if it was just coffee stains. In fact you would probably take it for that, believe it was just coffee stains, unless you happened to wonder why there was so much of it upside down staining the roof material around the dome light like it had puddled there.
Lyman stayed in the hospital for almost three months after the wreck. It was close to Halloween before Doc Schmidt released him. I drove Edith into town to bring him home, and he looked like maybe the nurses had gotten him up to go trick or treating. Around his neck he was still wearing a padded horse-collar affair, and his face showed green and yellow bruises; on his bald head there were crosshatched welts where they had stitched his scalp. When we walked him out the door and down the hospital steps, he seemed somewhat shrunken—shrunken and old-man brittle and confused. The sun hurt his eyes. On the way home when we passed Five Mile Bridge he stared rigidly ahead without a word.
At the Goodnough place I helped Edith get him out of the car and take him inside to rest. We laid him on the couch in the living room, where the postcards he had sent her during those twenty years of his travel and escape from the old man were still pinned in neat rows on the walls. He closed his eyes and went to sleep with his freckled hands lapsed onto his chest. Edith and I went out to the kitchen.
“Do you have time for coffee?” she said.
“I’ve got to get back to work. But Mavis and I will be checking every day to see how it’s going.”
“He’ll get better,” she said.
“Sure,” I said. “But you call us if there’s something you need. You don’t have to go this alone, you know.”
“We’ll see,” she said. “But thank you, Sandy. And tell Mavis thank you.”
“She’ll be over this afternoon. Now you get some rest too. You look tired.”