Free The Tie That Binds by Kent Haruf Page A

her chest. Edith was the only other person there. Together they shoveled the sand in onto the wood box.
    “There ought to be a tree or bush, though,” Edith said. “Even if it’s just the thought of it, she ought to have some shade.”
    The box was covered now. My dad was mounding the sand on top and packing it with the flat of his shovel.
    “I mean in July and August,” Edith said. “I don’t like thinking of her up here then.”
    “Be a awful long way to carry water.”
    “A bucket or two every other day,” she said. “We could take turns.”
    “What kind of tree?”
    “A cottonwood. They grow fast, and if there’s any wind you can hear the leaves washing and turning in it. Unless you’d rather it was something else.”
    “I believe she liked cottonwoods. She never said.”
    “You could get one from along the Arikaree.”
    “I’ll get one this afternoon,” he said. “I guess we’re done here now.”
    They stood on the rise looking at the mound of damp sand, with the -switch grass and brome and sagebrush around it. They could see the house south of where they stood.
    “Do you want me to leave now?” Edith said. “I will.”
    “No. Why would I want that?”
    “Maybe you want to be alone.”
    “I’ll have that as soon as I go down to the house,” he said. “No. No, you look okay there. You might even look pretty if you didn’t have all that wet sand on your shoes.”
    “Go on,” she said.
    “And your big nose wasn’t peeling.”
    “Go on, you,” she said. “But John, she was a good woman, wasn’t she? My mother thought so. She made a difference for my mother.”
    “Sure, she made all the difference. But I’ll never forget how that son of a bitch left her.”
    “Nor you either. He left you too.”
    “Never mind me. I always had her. But she never had anything—just a six-year-old kid and a homestead he hadn’t even got started good yet. The son of a bitch. I don’t know how she stood it.”
    “Some people can’t,” Edith said. “She did though. She was as strong as anything.”
    “She shouldn’t of had to be that strong. That’s what I mean. He just left her out here—with me and a milk cow and one horse. Can you believe that? Hell, he even took the other horse.”
    “I’ll help you water the tree tomorrow,” Edith said.
    So maybe that’s what he was waiting for: his mother to die and Edith Goodnough to suggest some shade for her. Anyway, he planted a cottonwood and they took turns watering it—or watered it together, more like—each of them carrying a bucketful up to the rise in the evenings,and later he built a fence around it, and then they began going out together in his Ford car with Lyman along in the back seat for the ride.
    I T WAS CALLED the Gem Theater then. It was on the other side of the street and north a block and a half from the theater we have now, the Holt Theater. There is a marquee out front above the double-door entrance to the Holt Theater now, so people can see what Blaine Fisher is showing for their enjoyment on the weekend, but you can only read what is showing if you are driving south on Main Street, because Blaine only changes the words on the north side of his marquee. I suppose he figures that’s enough ladder climbing for him, with his big stomach and his skinny legs and high blood pressure. Blaine leaves the other side of the marquee always the same: ENJOY FRESH HOT POPCORN . It makes you wonder now how fresh it is and how hot, considering how many years he’s been advertising it that way.
    As for the old Gem Theater, I can’t remember whether it had one of those things above its doors or not—probably not—and it wouldn’t have had sound by 1922, either. But my dad and Edith and Lyman must have had some fun there just the same, with the lights in the auditorium darkened and the heads on the screen flickering bigger than any human head could be, and then before they were ready for it, that guy with the pencil moustache was tying the