"Where Olmsted County News Comes First"

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The Tie That Binds by Kent Haruf is a chilling fictional account of a pioneer family fighting to survive on their northeastern Colorado homestead at the turn of the twentieth century. Haruf shows the desolate grit of their daily lives through his narrator, the nearest neighbor to the Goodenough family, Sanders Roscoe. Sanders succeeds as narrator for this story because of his complex proximity to the protagonist, Edith Goodenough—both geographical and relational.

Haruf begins the novel with a chapter which means to delimit the privilege of storytelling to those who have real proximity to their subjects. Sanders tells of his encounter with a city slicker journalist who has dipped out of Denver and onto Sanders’s farm in Holt County hoping to score a scoop on 80-year-old Edith as she has become a murder suspect in the death of her brother Lyman. Sanders resents the intrusion. He uses brand names to depict the journalist (the only time he does so in the novel), as a man who writes on his notepad “with that Eversharp pencil he used a little while earlier to flick the cow manure off his shirt,” who wears “yellow Ping-Pong pants” into a barn, and whose story for the Denver Post is none of his “goddamn business.”

No sooner has the Denver hack Dick Harrington been shooed from the premises to spark “trial talk” with his newspaper account, than Sanders sits us down to tell us the truth. This story is so rich and tangled that it absorbs the remainder of the book. Sanders’s voice as a narrator comes across as though the reader is sitting there on the porch with him, or maybe in Holt Café with chipped mugs of bad coffee. He is neighborly with his reader. Because of his familiar tone, and his proximity to the story—his rightfully defended turf— he seems a reliable narrator who gets as close to the truth as anyone could. Early in the book Sanders delivers a caveat which could be the preamble to any piece of creative nonfiction, “Most of what I’m going to tell you, I know. The rest of it, I believe” (14). Admitting fallibility is the surest way to sell truth.

Haruf renders the monotony and squalor of pre-modern farming with juicy and odorous detail. The conditions of Edith’s prison are the central drama of the story. Her family farm is a place she remains due to her respectable sense of duty to family and also, probably, because of the severe codependency that can arise of necessity in family industry (hence, I suspect, the title The Tie That Binds). Haruf’s descriptive passages are raw and need no hyperbole. One particularly well done stomach turner is one in which Edith is milking a cow she has milked “twice a day, every day of the week, all those years,” but on this day the cow has a three-day-old afterbirth hanging down between her back legs that is “manure-soaked, juicy, buzzing with flies” which, midway through milking, the cow swings and hits her with “all of that blood and manure and juice and unbelievable outrage, right across her face.” Edith can feel it “dripping down the back of her neck,” and she throws up until she is “gagging on acid bile, her stomach hurts, and she is groping for air” (56). Notice the three or four-part phrases Haruf uses to convey litanies of hell. One thing after the other. Day after day after day. Edith is hit with manure in the face and her life seems a constant groping for air. Powerful awful thing to imagine.

There is another scene in which Edith’s father is screaming and waving his stump-arms at her while she drives the tractor through the wheat field for him on account of all his fingers getting chopped off in the section blades of his tractor (on account of his stubbornness and ill-temper). She absorbs the verbal abuse, the grunt work of never ending chores (which pile upon her higher after Lyman leaves home), the bleakness and isolation of rural Colorado, the love lost when her father denies her suitor’s marriage proposal, and at the end, after 80 years of nothing good ever happening to her, she absorbs the blame of Lyman’s murder.

Were this novel to have been told from the narratorial voice of the Denver hack, Edith might have seemed like a crazy old rural wretch who snapped late in life and killed her brother. It would have been a quick and dirty account. The conclusion foregone. But Sanders is a tender witness. His raw litanies expose a woman’s misery and portray her dedication and perseverance as dignified, and also, somehow equally, pitiable and tragic. His coffee shop testimony offers a story so believable, with a nearness to truth so compelling, it feels as impossible to judge Edith as to be impartial with a lover. She grows fifty years too close to convict or acquit. Haruf brilliantly begins the book with what feels like an airplane view (from Ping-Pong pants Denver) with the illusion of clear cut boundaries; homestead acres seem like neat and tidy quilt squares from above. Slowly, the reader descends from the clear cut vantage point of a distant observer to land in the fields with Edith where the air is obscured by chaff and other feelings, sometimes too thick to breathe.