The Tie That Binds by Kent Haruf Read Free Book Online Page A

the tank?” John Roscoe said. “Head first?”
    “I wish I did,” Lyman said. “Ain’t it hot?”
    “Going to get warts on your dinkus that way, boy. There’s toads in that horse tank.”
    “Hell, too,” Lyman said.
    They went back and sat down in the shade then, and ate the fresh peas and beans Edith brought, and the salt pork and thick slices of bread and cold boiled potatoes and Dutch apple pie, and drank buttermilk in tin cups. When they were finished Edith put the things away and Roy got up to oil the gears and chains on the machinery and to examine the section blades. Then Edith and Lyman and John Roscoe lay down with their straw hats over their faces and talked to one another up through the sweaty crowns of their hats.
    “Ludi Pfeister and his crew going to thresh for you again this year?”
    “I don’t know,” Lyman said. “Pa don’t tell us nothing one way or another.”
    “He is,” Edith said. “I wrote the letter to him in Kansas.”
    “I thought him and Ludi had a little argument last fall.”
    “They did,” Lyman said. “Ludi thought the wheat hadn’t sweat enough. Too wet to thresh,’ he said. Pa said, Thresh it anyhow.’”
    “Ludi’s all right. He’s got to think of his thresher, though.”
    “Daddy’s right, too, sometimes,” Edith said.
    “I’m just talking, Edith. I never meant nothing.”
    “I know,” she said.
    The sun speckled through the straw weave of their hats, and they could hear the horses stamping and rattling their harness. Lyman lay between Edith and John Roscoe; the wet back of his shirt and overalls was caked now with sand. They could smell the cut wheat, dusty and heavy in the air, and the sharp green smell of the sagebrush across the fence line in the native pasture that belonged then to the Roscoes and still does. Lyman went to sleep in a little while, breathing slow, regularly, like a small boy, but I believe his sister and my father must have stayed awake together, thinking about one another across Lyman’s overalls, with the sun speckling down onto their faces. I know I would have.
    “Get up,” Roy said. “Come on.”
    Because the horses had finished eating, you understand. The horses had rested enough, and all the gears and chains were oiled, and he wanted to get back into the wheat field. So they began to work again like they had all morning, only it was hotter now.
    Roy was up on his seat between the horses, sitting up there ramrod stiff in the sun, with the reel ahead of him turning and the sharp section blades along the sickle bar cutting the wheat off close to the ground, and then the canvas belts carrying the wheat off and up through the chute to drop into the header barge Edith drove alongside so Lyman could level it off in the back. My father stayed on the stack, forking the wheat level and even all around him, and I believe they would have finished too. I believe, if what I remember about that afternoon is everything that I was told about it, that they would have finished cutting that field of wheat before dark, and then all Roy Goodnough would have had to do was to let it stay there in thestack sweating for a couple of months until it was dry enough for Ludi Pfeister to come along with his crew and threshing machine and thresh it for him.
    But late in the afternoon, along about five o’clock, the header stopped working. It jolted hard, lurched, and then passed over several rods of wheat without cutting them off.
    “Goddamn it, back up,” Roy shouted. He sawed at the lines to the horses, pulling them back. “Now stand still,” he said.
    The horses stood there, nervous, high-strung, hot, bothered by flies, while Roy climbed down to see what had happened. They had just made one of the square turns at the end of the field next to the barbwire fence separating Roy’s wheat from the native pasture across from it. So maybe that’s where they picked up the wire. Or maybe a piece of the heavy wire Roy always tied his machinery together with