Plainsong (13 page)

Ike and Bobby.

They went up the wood stairs and back along the narrow dimlit corridor after school in the afternoon, but not to collect. When she opened the door Iva Stearns said, It’s not Saturday. What is it? Are you collecting early?

No, Ike told her.

What then? What’d you come for?

They turned their heads and peered into the corridor behind them, too humble and embarrassed to say what it was they wanted even if they could have said exactly what that was.

Mrs. Stearns watched them. I see, she said. You better come in here in that case.

They passed into the room wordlessly. Her apartment was just as it always was: crowded rooms that were too hot, the stores of papers and old bills on the floor and the grocery sacks of her saved remnants loaded onto the ironing board and the portable tv on top of the big hardwood console, and over it all the inevitable smell of her cigarette smoke and the accumulation of Holt County dust. She shut the door and stood looking at them, thinking, considering, a humpbacked woman in a thin blue housedress and apron, wearing a pair of men’s wool socks inside her worn slippers, leaning on her twin silver canes.

I tell you what we better do, she said. I’ve been thinking of making cookies. But I don’t have all of the ingredients and I’ve been too lame and too lazy to go get them. You might go purchase them for me, would you?

What do you need? they said.

I’ll make a list. Do you boys eat oatmeal cookies?

Yes. We like them.

Very well. That’s what we’ll make.

She lowered herself into the stuffed chair against the wall. It took a considerable period of time. When she was seated she caught her breath and stood the two canes beside the chair. She settled the skirts of her dress and apron over her thin knees, then she said, Bring me my purse from the table in there. You know where it is.

Bobby stepped into the next room, where it was just as crowded and just as hot, and found her purse and brought it back and set it in her lap. They stood in front of the chair, watching. Her head was bent forward and they could see that the fine thin yellow-white hair scarcely covered her skull and that her ears looked raw where the bows of her glasses fit over them. The cord of her old-fashioned hearing aid curled down into the neck of her housedress where it disappeared.

She opened the leather purse and took out a wallet, then extracted ten dollars. She gave the money to Ike. That should be more than enough, she said. Bring back the change.

Yes, ma’am.

Now what do we need? She peered at them as if they might know. They stared back at her patiently, simply waiting, standing in front of her. We need most of it, she said.

She took out an ink pen and scratched about in the purse but could not find what else she wanted.

Here, she said. Give me something to write on. That paper will do. Hand me that newspaper. It was the morning’s
Denver News,
still rolled in the rubber band the boys had put on it early that morning at the depot. She unrolled it and from the front page tore off a ragged piece and began to write along the white margin, listing the ingredients—oatmeal, eggs, brown sugar—writing in the old school-taught Palmer script in the fluid style, but shaky now as though she were shivering from cold or fever. There, she said. I gave you the money. She looked at Ike. I’m giving you the shopping list, she said to Bobby. She handed him the scrap of newspaper. Go ahead now. Go on. I’ll be waiting.

But where should we get these, Mrs. Stearns? Ike said.

At Johnson’s. You know the grocery store.

Yes. We know it.

That’s where.

They turned and started out.

Wait, she said. How are you going to get back in here? I don’t want to have to get up and answer the door again. She took a key from the purse and handed it to them.

They left her apartment and went down the stairs to the sidewalk and into the sharp winter air on Main Street and on to Johnson’s at the corner of Second. When they were inside the store it was a good deal more complicated than they had thought it would be. On the ranks of shelves were two brands of brown sugar. Also, there were quick oats and regular oats and two measures of the cardboard barrels they came in. And with eggs, three sizes and two colors. They debated the matter between themselves, standing in the aisles of the store while around them the other shoppers, middle-aged women and young mothers, looked at them curiously and went on pushing their full carts.

We settled on the cheap brown sugar, Ike said.

Yes, Bobby said.

And the big one of regular oats.

Yes.

So now with eggs we take the medium ones.

Why?

Because they’re in the middle.

So?

It makes a difference, Ike said. The one between the other two ones. It makes it even.

Bobby looked at him, considering. All right, he said. Which color?

Which color?

Brown or white.

They turned toward the refrigerated case once more and regarded the tiers of cardboard egg cartons. Mother bought white ones, Ike said.

She’s not our mother, Bobby said. Maybe she wants brown ones.

Why would she want brown ones?

She had us get brown sugar.

So?

Because it comes in white too, Bobby said. Only she said brown.

All right, Ike said. Brown eggs.

All right, Bobby said.

Medium sized.

All right then.

They carried the eggs and oats and sugar up to the front of the store to the cash register and paid the checkout woman. She smiled at them. You boys making something good? she said. They didn’t answer but took the change from her hand and went back outside and up the stairs to the old woman’s dark and overheated rooms above the alley. They used the key and went in without knocking and discovered her asleep in the chair they’d left her in. She was breathing faintly, a quiet sigh and recover, her head lapsed forward onto the yoke of her blue housedress. They approached and stood before her, hesitant, and seeing how faint the movement was in her chest, watching the meager rise and collapse of the housedress, they felt a little frightened. Ike leaned forward and said, Mrs. Stearns. We’re back. They stood before her, waiting. They watched her. Mrs. Stearns, he said. He leaned forward again. We’re here. He touched her arm.

Abruptly she stopped breathing. She choked a little. Her eyes fluttered open behind the glasses and she raised her head to look about. Well. Are you back?

We just came in, Ike said. Just now.

What trouble did you have at the grocery store?

None. We got everything.

Good, she said.

They handed her the leftover money and the grocery receipt and she held her open palm in front of her face, counting the money with her finger, and put the bills and coins away in her purse. They handed her the front-door key but she said, I’m going to trust you with that. You can come in if you need to. And I won’t have to get up to let you in. Maybe you’ll want to sometime. She looked at them. All right? They nodded. Very well, she said. Let me see if I can stand up. Slowly she began to rise from the chair, pushing back with her fisted hands against the armrests. They wanted to help her but didn’t know where she might be touched. At last she stood erect. It’s ridiculous to get so old, she said. It’s stupid and ridiculous. She took up her canes. Stand back so I don’t trip on you.

They followed her scraping into the kitchen, where they hadn’t been before: a little room with a small window overlooking the tarred roof of the next building, and a plain wood table with a toaster on it, a half-refrigerator, a trash can and an old hard enameled sink containing a single dirty coffee cup and the toast crumbs of her breakfast.

Wash your hands, she said. That’s first. Here.

They stood next to one another before the sink. Afterward she handed them a towel. Then she told them to take down the additional ingredients from the cupboard and set them out on the table, following the order of the old recipe she’d cut from the top of an oatmeal barrel, the recipe gray and worn now, grease-smeared but still legible.

What’s next? she said. Read it.

Vanilla.

Up there. On the middle shelf. Then what?

Baking soda.

There. She pointed. Anything else?

No. That’s all.

All right, she said. You understand? If you can read you can cook. You can always feed yourselves. You remember that. I’m not just talking about here. When you go home too. Do you understand what I’m saying?

They looked at her gravely. Bobby read the scrap of recipe print again. What does cream mean? he said.

Where?

It says cream the butter and sugars.

That means mix them together until they’re soft, she said. Like heavy cream.

Oh.

You use a fork for that.

They began to put it all in and they stirred it together in the bowl while she stood beside them overseeing, instructing, then they spooned dollops of batter onto the greased sheet and set the raw cookies in the oven.

I’ve been thinking, she said. I’m going to show you something. While we wait.

She shuffled into the next room and came back carrying a flat and ragged cardboard box and set it on the table and removed the lid, then she showed them photographs that had been much-handled in the long afternoons and evenings of her solitary life, photographs that had been lifted out and examined and returned to the black picture book album, the album itself of an old shape and style. They were all of her son, Albert. That’s him, she told them. Her tobacco-stained finger pointed at one of the photographs. That’s my son. He died in the war. In the Pacific.

The boys bent forward to see him.

That’s my Albert in his Navy uniform. That’s my favorite picture of him as a grown man. Do you see that look on his face? Oh, he was a handsome boy.

He was a tall thin boy in a dark Navy uniform, wearing his dress blues, and his white dixie cup pushed back on his head, his shoes gleaming. In the picture he was squinting into the sun. Behind him there was a tree in leaf and a pool of dark shade. He was grinning terrifically.

I miss him every day, she said. I still do.

She turned the page and there was a photograph of the same boy standing with his arm draped around the shoulders of a slender woman with dark wavy hair in a white gabardine dress.

Who’s that? they said. That lady with him.

Who do you think? she said.

They shrugged. They didn’t know.

That’s me. Couldn’t you guess?

They turned to look at her, examining her face.

That’s how I used to look, she said. I was young once too, don’t you know.

Her face was close to theirs, old and bespectacled, agespotted; she had soft loose cheeks, her thin hair was pulled back. She smelled of cigarette smoke. They looked again at the picture of her when she was a young woman wearing a handsome white dress in the company of her son.

That was when Albert was home for the last time, she said.

Where was his father? Ike said. Was he home too?

No, he was not. Her voice changed. She sounded bitter and tired now. He was gone by then. His father was nowhere. That’s where he was.

Bobby said, Our mother’s in Denver now.

Oh, she said. She looked at him. Their faces were close. Yes, I think I heard something about that.

Because she was just renting that house, Ike said. She’s in Denver staying with her sister.

I see.

We’ll be going to visit her pretty soon. At Christmastime.

That’ll be good, won’t it. She must miss you terribly. I would. Like breath itself. I know she does too.

She calls on the phone sometimes, Ike said.

The timer dinged on the stove. They took the first oatmeal cookies out of the oven and now there was the smell of cinnamon and fresh baking in the dark little room. The boys sat at the table and ate the cookies together with the milk Mrs. Stearns had poured out into blue glasses. She stood at the counter watching them and sipped at a cup of hot tea and ate a small piece of a cookie, but she wasn’t hungry. After a while she smoked a cigarette and tapped the ashes in the sink.

You boys don’t say very much, she said. I wonder what you’re thinking all the time.

About what?

About anything. About the cookies you made.

They’re good, Ike said.

You can take them home with you, she said.

Don’t you want them?

I’ll keep a few. You take the rest home when you go.

Guthrie.

Maggie Jones said, You’re not leaving so soon?

Guthrie stood in the front hall with his winter coat in his hand, while behind Maggie other teachers stood about in groups holding little paper plates of food, drinking and talking, and still others sat in chairs and on the davenport. In the corner of the living room one of them was listening to Maggie Jones’s father. The old man had on a corduroy shirt and a green tie and he was gesturing with both hands, telling the woman something, some story out of his own old time when he was young.

Why so soon? Maggie said. It’s still early.

I’m not much for these things, Guthrie said. I think I’ll go on.

Where are you going?

Over to have a drink at the Chute. Why don’t you come with me.

I can’t leave these people here. You know that.

Guthrie pulled his coat on and zipped it.

Wait for me, she said. I’ll come join you when I can.

All right. But I don’t know how long I’ll be there.

He opened the door and went outside. He felt the cold air at once on his face and ears and inside his nose. There were cars parked all along the street in front of her house and around the corner. He walked up half a block and climbed into his pickup. It turned over grudgingly, then it caught and he shoved his hands in his pockets while it warmed up a minute, then he pulled out into the street. Three blocks south on the almost empty highway he stopped at the Gas and Go, leaving the pickup engine idling, and bought a pack of cigarettes and came back out and drove over a couple of blocks east to the Chute Bar and Grill. It was smoky inside and somebody had fed the jukebox. The usual crowd was there, for a Saturday night.

He sat down at the bar and Monroe came over, drying his hands on a white bar towel. Tom, what’s it going to be? Guthrie ordered a beer and Monroe drew it and set it down in front of him. He wiped at a spot on the polished wood but it was something in the grain of the wood itself. You want to start a tab?

I don’t guess so. Guthrie handed him a bill and Monroe turned and made change at the cash register in front of the big mirror and brought it back and set the bills and coins alongside the glass.

Anything happening?

It’s still early, Monroe said.

He went down the bar and Guthrie looked around. There were three or four men on his left and people at the booths behind them and others in the far room at the tables and booths and at the shuffleboard table against the wall. Judy, the high school secretary, was sitting with another woman at one of the tables. She saw him looking at her and raised her glass and waggled two fingers like a young girl would. He nodded to her and turned and looked the other direction back toward the entrance. A couple more men, and slumped on the end stool was a woman in an army jacket. The man next to him turned. It was Buster Wheelright.

That you, Tom?

How’s it going? Guthrie said.

It isn’t any use to complain, is it?

Not that I know of.

Not around here, Buster said.

Guthrie drank from his glass and looked at him. What’d you do, lose some weight? I didn’t recognize you.

Hell yeah. How’s it look on me?

It looks good.

I just got out of detox. I lost some weight in there.

How was that?

Detox?

Yeah.

It was all right. Except once I got sobered up I was depressed as hell. Crying all the time. Doctor give me some anti-depression pills. Then I was okay. Except I couldn’t shit.

Guthrie grinned and shook his head. Hell of a deal.

It’s a hell of a deal, Tom. You can’t live if you can’t shit. Can you?

I don’t believe so.

No. So then he give me some laxatives. Cleaned me out thorough. That’ll make you lose some weight, let me tell you. Only I couldn’t keep up with it. All the time I was in there I eat like a horse but I kept shittin like a full growed elephant. Buster laughed. He was missing teeth on the upper left side of his mouth.

Sounds like a radical cure to me, Guthrie said.

Oh, you don’t want to do it every day, Buster said.

They both drank. Guthrie looked back into the other room. Judy was laughing about something with the people at the table. A big curly-haired man was there now too.

Where’s your partner? Guthrie said. I don’t see him anywhere.

Who?

Terrel.

Oh, hell. Didn’t you hear about that?

No.

Well hell. Terrel he was coming into town yesterday morning driving in his truck on the north side of town there and that little spotted bitch dog of Smythe’s run out in the street in front of him. Terrel feared he run over it. So he slowed down and opened the door and leant out to look behind him and be goddamned if he didn’t fall out of the truck right out in the street. The truck went on without him and runt into Helen Shattuck’s backyard privacy fence. They took him to the hospital, thinking he’d had a cardiac arrest. When he come to he had to tell what it was. Fell out of the truck, all it was. On account of he’s overweight and got to leaning out too far. Overbalanced hisself, I guess. Dumped out on his head right there on Hoag Street.

Guthrie shook his head, grinning. How bad was he hurt?

Oh, he’s all right. Give him a good headache is all.

Did he hit the dog?

Nah. Hell. The dog wasn’t even involved. The dog skedaddled. You reckon there’s a lesson there?

I wouldn’t be surprised, Guthrie said.

My mama use to say it’s a lesson in everything you do if you just have eyes to see it, Buster said.

I believe that, Guthrie said. Your mama was a smart woman.

Yes sir, she was, Buster said. She’s been dead now twenty-seven years.

Guthrie lit a cigarette and offered the pack to Buster. Buster took one and inspected it and put the filter end in his mouth. They smoked and drank for a while. Monroe brought Guthrie another beer and brought a beer and a shot for Buster. Take it out of that, Guthrie said. Buster nodded thanks to him and picked up the little glass and threw the shot back and immediately afterward bent over and had a long drink of beer.

As he was finishing it Judy came up from the back room. She stopped behind Guthrie and tapped him on the shoulder. When he turned around she said, I thought you’d be at the party at Maggie Jones’s house.

I was. I didn’t see you there.

I get enough of school at school, she said. It’s just the teachers. The same old talk.

Well, Guthrie said, you’re looking good.

Why, thank you. She turned completely around in front of him, making a little dance. She had on a low-cut white top and tight blue jeans and boots fashioned from soft red leather. The tightness of the top she was wearing made smooth pretty mounds of her breasts.

Can I buy you a drink?

I came over to buy you one, she said.

You can buy the next one, Guthrie said.

All right. I won’t forget.

Monroe brought her a rum and Coke and handed it to her and she tasted it and stirred it with the straw and tasted it again.

You want to sit down? Guthrie said.

Where?

You can have my seat. I’ll stand up awhile.

Shoot. I’m younger than you are.

Are you?

I’m younger than anybody here. I’m the youngest girl out on a Saturday night. She raised her fist and waved it.

The man on the barstool to Guthrie’s left was listening and he turned around and looked at her. He was wearing a big black hat with a bright feather in the band. I’ll tell you what, he said. You can have my seat if you give me a good-night kiss first. I was just about to leave anyhow.

Do I know you? she said.

No. But I’m not hard to get to know. I don’t have nothing, if that’s what you mean.

All right, she said. Lean forward, you’re too tall. He leaned forward from the waist and she took his face in both of her hands, ducked under the brim of his hat and kissed him hard on the mouth.

How’s that? she said.

Jesus Christ, he said. He licked his lips. Maybe I better just stay here.

No you don’t, she said. She pulled him by the arm.

He stood up and patted her on the shouder and went outside. She sat at the bar with Guthrie and turned in his direction. Who was that? she said.

He lives out south, Guthrie said. He comes in here once in a while. I don’t know his name.

I’ve never seen him before.

He comes in about every other week.

Guthrie and Judy sat and talked about various things, about school, about Lloyd Crowder, some of the students, but not for long. Instead she told Guthrie about her daughter, who was a freshman at Fort Collins, and how it was to have the house just to herself now, how it was so quiet too much of the time. And Guthrie said a few things about his boys, told her what they were doing. Then she told him the story about the blonde on the charter plane to Hawaii, and in turn he asked if she knew what the worst thing was for someone to say to you when you were standing at the urinal. They had another drink, which she insisted on buying.

After it came she said, You mind if I ask you something?

What.

Is your wife still in Denver?

Guthrie looked at her. Yes, she’s still there.

Is she?

Yes.

What’s going to happen, do you think?

I can’t say. She might stay there. She’s staying with her sister.

Aren’t you two going to get back together?

I doubt it.

Don’t you want to?

He looked at her. You think we could talk about something else?

Sorry, she said.

He lit a cigarette. She watched him smoke. Then she took the cigarette out of his hand and drew on it, blew two jets of smoke from her nostrils and drew on it again and gave it back.

Keep it.

No, I just wanted that much. I quit.

You can have this one.

No, that’s all right. But listen. Why don’t you come over sometime and let me cook you a steak or something. You seem so lonely. And it’s too quiet over there in my house all the time when it’s just me.

I might do that.

Why don’t you. You ought to.

I might.

A few minutes later the other woman came in from the other room and dragged Judy back to their table. My God, the woman said, don’t leave me with him.

See you later, Judy said, and Guthrie watched them go back into the other room. The two women pulled the curly-haired man to his feet and walked him over to the shuffleboard table and Guthrie watched them play for a while. When he turned back to the bar he found that Buster Wheelright had disappeared. He’d left some change on the bar and then he’d gone off. Guthrie looked around. The woman in the army jacket was still asleep down the bar. He finished his beer and went out into the cold air again and drove up Main Street toward home.