Plainsong (27 page)
Holt.
Memorial Day. The two women came out onto the steps of the porch in the evening with the light behind them burning in the kitchen, visible through the open door, backlighting them. Except for the discrepancy in their sizes, they might have been mother and daughter. Their dark hair was damp about their faces and their quiet faces were flushed from the hot kitchen, from the cooking. Behind them in the dining room the table had been pulled open and the leaves put in and the white tablecloth laid on, and afterward the table had been laid with tall candles and with the old china the girl had discovered in the high shelves of the kitchen, the old dishes that had been unused for decades, that were chipped and faded but still serviceable.
Alone at the table the old white-haired man, Maggie Jones’s old father, sat facing the windows, waiting without words or complaint, a dish towel already tied about his neck. He stared across at the uncurtained windows in some thought of his own that was long familiar to him. Absently he took up the silver from beside his plate and held it in his hands, waiting. Suddenly he spoke into the air. Hello. Is anybody there?
On the porch the women looked out into the yard where the two boys were seated in the swing with the baby and farther out toward the barn lot and the work corral where the three men stood at the fence, each with a booted foot crooked on the bottom rail, an elbow slung over the top rail, comfortable, talking.
The boys had the baby in a glider swing, rocking her a little in the evening, this little thatch-haired black-eyed girl. Guthrie had said an hour earlier, I don’t know about this. They might be careless with her, forget her for a moment. But the girl had said, No they won’t. I know they’ll take good care of her. And Maggie Jones had said, Yes. To which Guthrie had said, But you boys be careful with her.
So they had the little girl in the glider under one of the stunted elm trees inside the old hogfencing wire, rocking her by turns on their laps in the cool evening, while the blue farmlight played over her face.
Meanwhile out at the work corrals the McPheron brothers and Guthrie looked over the fence at the cattle and calves. The red-legged cow was among them. Guthrie noticed her. The old cow eyed him with rancor. Is that her? he said. That same one I’m thinking of.
That’s her.
Didn’t she have a calf? I don’t see one with her.
No sir. She was open all along, Raymond said.
She never threw a calf this spring?
No.
What do you plan to do with her?
We aim to take her to town, to the sale barn.
Harold looked out past the red cow toward the darkening horizon. We heard in town the Beckmans got theirselves a lawyer now, he said.
Yes, Guthrie said. I’ve been hearing that.
What’ll you do?
I don’t know yet. I haven’t made up my mind. It depends on what comes of it. But I’ll be all right. I’ll do something else if I have to.
Not farming, Harold said.
No. Guthrie grinned. Not farming, he said. I can see what that leads to. He nodded back toward the house. What about her now?
We want to hope she’ll be here for a good while yet, Raymond said. She has another year of school. Besides this last term she missed. She’ll be here a while still, we believe. We sure hope she will.
She might want to go to college, Guthrie said.
We’d favor that. But there’s time enough to think about that later. We don’t have to think about that just yet, I don’t guess we do.
Now the wind started up in the trees, high up, moving the high branches.
The barn swallows came out and began to hunt leaf-bugs and lacewinged flies in the dusk.
The air grew soft.
The old dog came out from its rug in the garage and wandered into the fenced yard and sniffed the boys’ pantslegs and sniffed the baby and licked its hot red tongue across the baby’s forehead, and then it scuttled up to the women on the porch and looked up at them, and looked all around and turned in a circle and lay down, flopping its matted tail in the dirt.
The two women stood letting the breeze blow coolly on their faces, and they opened the fronts of their blouses a little to let it play on their breasts and under their arms.
And soon, very soon now, they would call them in to supper. But not just yet. They stood on the porch a while longer in the evening air seventeen miles out south of Holt at the very end of May.
KENT HARUF
Plainsong
Kent Haruf’s
The Tie That Binds
received a Whiting Foundation Award and a special citation from the PEN/Hemingway Foundation. Also the author of
Where You Once Belonged,
he lives with his wife, Cathy, in Illinois and Colorado. He teaches at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale.
ALSO BY
K
ENT
H
ARUF
THE TIE THAT BINDS
In this critically acclaimed first novel, Kent Haruf delivers the sweeping tale of a woman of the American Plains as told by her neighbor, Sanders Roscoe. As Roscoe shares what he knows, Edith’s tragedies unfold: a childhood of predawn chores, a mother’s death, a violence that leaves a father dependent on his children and forever enraged. Here is the story of a woman who sacrifices her happiness in the name of family obligation and then, in one grand gesture, reclaims her freedom.
“An impresive, expertly crafted work of sensitivity and detail. . . . Powerful.”
—
Los Angeles Times Book Review
Fiction/Literature/0-375-72438-9
WHERE YOU ONCE BELONGED
In
Where You Once Belonged,
acclaimed novelist Kent Haruf tells of a small-town hero who is dealt an enviable hand—and cheats with all of the cards. Fun-loving and independent, Burdette engages in the occasional prank. But when the boy turns into a man, his hijinks turn into crimes—with unspeakable consequences. Now, eight years after his departure, Burdette has returned to commit his greatest trespass of all. And the good people of Holt County may not be able to stop him.
“[A] beautifully told parable—simple and stark and true.”
—
Newsday
Fiction/Literature/0-375-70870-7
Copyright © 1999 Kent Haruf
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1999 and in trade paperback by Vintage Books in 2000.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Contemporaries and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Sections of this book first appeared in different form in
Crab Orchard Review
and
Grand Street.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Haruf, Kent.
Plainsong / by Kent Haruf.—1st ed.
p. cm.
I. Title.
PS3558.A716 P58 1999
813’.54—dc21
99-15606
CIP
Author photograph © Cathy Haruf
eISBN: 978-0-375-72693-4
v3.0
