The Tie That Binds Read Online Free PDF Page A

upstairs opened windows he yelled up at her:
    “Goddamn it, I can do it. But she wants you. She wants you to come over there.”
    He was sitting down there on that bareback excited Belgium, yelling up into the dark towards a dark face he could barely see.
    “I could do it myself, but now she says she has to have you there. But I’ll make that right too, goddamn it. You wait and see.”
    The woman in the upstairs window watched him on his horse in her front yard.
    “Don’t you hear me?” he yelled. “Don’t you understand a goddamn thing I’m telling you? She wants you over there.”
    But the woman was gone by now, leaving him yelling up into the dark where there wasn’t even a silent face in a window to hear him yell and rage. The woman had gone to wake her boy, who was seven now and had been since February twenty-fourth. She told him to get their saddle horse ready; she was riding over to the Goodnoughs’ to set things right and she would be back in the morning. And I guess Roy understood that he had done enough yelling for one night when he saw the boy go out the back door towards the corral, so he galloped back home again.
    The woman got there a few minutes later. I can’t say exactly what she did or how she did it, but I’m certain she got Roy out of the room where he was less than no help, and then I believe she was able to get Ada revived enough to make another effort. Maybe she made some tea or something hot with herbs in it, or maybe it was just her voice and hand, but anyway she delivered the baby girl and Ada got some rest. And afterwards she must have made a couple of things plain enough that even Roy understood them, because two years later in June, when again it was Ada’s time, Roy didn’t wait until his wife had been in labor for two or three days and had turned to frazzle before he decided it was time for him to start howling in the dark. No, he came in broad daylight, knocked at the front door, and asked if the woman would come. So Lyman’s birth went easier, smoother, without the galloping horse and the yelling. This was 1899.
    Well, Roy had a girl and a boy now, and I don’t suppose he ever expected much from Edith (more than just constant work, I mean) or ever thought much of hoping something for her either—he wouldn’t have; she was a girl, a potato peeler, an egg gatherer—but he might have expected more from Lyman, so he probably wasn’t real thrilled with the way Lyman turned out. And it wasn’t that Lyman didn’t work hard enough—he did, in his loose, mechanical, dry fashion—and Lyman sure as hell didn’t leave the farm very often until it was almost too late for him to ever leave it at all. But he just didn’t like any of it; he never really got his hand in. Lyman was too much of a lapdog even to suit his father.
    But at least with both a boy and a girl on hand now to help, Roy could believe enough in tomorrow to begin adding on to his original quarter section, and he did. God only knows he was frugal enough. In fact, he was about so tight as to be able actually to squeeze blood from the turnips Ada grew in the family garden. As for his farming, he would do things like go on tying his machinery together with baling wire and patching it up however he could, rather than do anything as rash as to buy something new. Before he would do a thing that crazy he had to be dead certain that baling wire and goddamns wouldn’t work anymore. He never spent five cents on himself or his wife or his kids, and what he made he saved, and then about once every eight or nine years he would suck in his belt, spit, and then finally buy another quarter section of nearby Holt County sand for Lyman to help him sweat over. So in time, Roy acquired quite a lot of land. He had some Hereford cows with calves on grass, and a few Shorthorns to milk, besides the wheat and cornfields to till and plant and harvest.
    Meanwhile, Edith and Lyman were growing up out here seven miles from Holt, and they were