Plainsong by Kent Haruf
Well sure, Harold said. I reckon we could try. Because the market . . . But maybe you’d like to sit down again first. At the table here.
Raymond rose at once and pulled out her chair. She seated herself slowly and he pushed the chair in for her and she thanked him and he went back to the other side of the table and took his place. For a moment the girl sat rubbing her stomach where it felt tight, then she noticed they were watching her with close interest, and she put her hands forth on the table. She looked across at them. I’m listening, she said. Do you want to go ahead?
Why sure, of course, Harold said. As I was saying. He began in a loud voice. Now the market is what soybeans and corn and live cattle and June wheat and feeder pigs and bean meal is all bringing in today for a price. He reads it out every day at noon, the man on the radio. Six-dollar soybeans. Corn two-forty. Fifty-eight-cent hogs. Cash value, sold today.
The girl sat watching him talk, following his lecture.
People listen to it, he said, and know what the prices are. They manage to keep current that a-way. Know what’s going on.
Not to mention pork bellies, Raymond said.
Harold opened his mouth to say something more, but now he stopped. He and the girl turned to look at Raymond.
How’s that? Harold said. Say again.
Pork bellies, Raymond said. That’s another one of em. You never mentioned it. You never told her about them.
Well yeah, of course, Harold said. Them too. I was just getting started.
You can buy them too, Raymond said to the girl. If you had a mind to. He was looking at her solemnly from across the table. Or sell em too, if you had some.
What are they? the girl said.
Well that’s your bacon, Raymond said.
Oh, she said.
Your fat meat under the ribs there, he said.
That’s right, Harold said. They’re touted on the market too. So anyway, he said, looking at the girl. Now do you see?
She looked from one old man to the other. They were waiting, watching for some reaction, as if they’d been laying out the intricacies of some last will and testament or perhaps the necessary precautions to take against the onset of fatal disease and the contagion of plague. I don’t think so, she said. I don’t understand how he knows what the prices are.
The man on the radio? Harold said.
Yes.
They call them up out of the big salebarns. He gets the market reports from Chicago or Kansas City. Or Denver maybe.
Then how do you sell something? she said.
All right, Raymond said, taking his turn. He leaned forward toward her to explain these matters. Take for instance you want to sell you some wheat, he said. Take, you already got it there in the elevator in Holt next to the railroad tracks where you carried it back in July at harvest time. Now you want to sell some of it off. So you call up the elevator and tell him to sell off five thousand bushel, say. So he sells it at today’s prices and then the big grain trucks, those tractors and trailers you see out on the highway, they haul it away.
Who does he sell it to? the girl said.
Any number of places. Most likely to the milling company. Mostly it goes for your baking flour.
Then when do you get your money?
He writes you out a check today.
Who does that?
The elevator manager.
Except if there’s a storage charge, Harold said, taking his turn again. He takes that out. Plus your drying charge, if there is one. Only, since it’s wheat we’re talking about, there’s never much drying charge with wheat. Mostly that’s with your corn.
They stopped again and studied the girl once more. They had begun to feel better, a little satisfied with themselves. They knew they were not out of the woods yet, but they had begun to allow themselves to believe that what they saw ahead was at least a faint track leading to a kind of promising clearing. They watched the girl and waited.
She shook her head and smiled. They noticed again how beautiful her teeth were and how smooth her face. She said, I still don’t think I understand it. You said something about cattle. What about them?
Oh, well, Harold said. Okay. Now with cattle.
And so the two McPheron brothers went on to discuss slaughter cattle and choice steers, heifers and feeder calves, explaining these too, and between the three of them they discussed these matters thoroughly, late into the evening. Talking. Conversing. Venturing out into various other matters a little too. The two old men and the seventeen-year-old girl sitting at the dining room table out in the country after supper was over and after the table was cleared, while outside, beyond the house walls and the curtainless windows, a cold blue norther began to blow up one more high plains midwinter storm.
Ike and Bobby.
As per agreement they spent Christmas week in Denver with their mother. Guthrie drove them to the city in the pickup and went up with them to the seventh floor of the apartment building on Logan Street where their mother’s sister lived. They took the elevator and followed a runner of carpet in the long bright corridor. Guthrie saw them into the front room and talked briefly to their mother without heat or argument, but he wouldn’t sit down and he left very soon.
Their mother seemed quieter now. Perhaps she was more at peace. Her face looked less pinched and pale, less drawn. She was glad to see them. She hugged them for a long time and her eyes were wet with tears while she smiled, and they sat together on the couch and she held their hands warmly in her lap. It was clear she had missed them. But in some way their mother had been taken over by her sister who was three years older. She was a small woman, precise and particular, with sharp opinions, pretty instead of beautiful, with gray eyes and a small hard chin. She and their mother would contend now and then over little things—the table setting, the degree of heat in the apartment—but in the matters of consequence their mother’s sister had her way. Then their mother seemed remote and passive as though she could not be roused to defend herself. But the two boys didn’t think in such terms. They thought their aunt was bossy. They wanted their mother to do something about the way their aunt was.
The apartment had two bedrooms and the boys stayed with their mother in her room, chatting and telling little jokes and playing cards, and at night they slept on the floor on pallets, with warm blankets folded over them at the foot of her bed. It was like camping. But much of the time they couldn’t be in the bedroom since their mother was having her silent spells again, when she wanted to be alone in a darkened room. The spells started the fourth day they were in Denver, after Christmas. Christmas had been disappointing. The red sweater they’d bought their mother was too big for her, though she said she liked it anyway. They hadn’t thought to buy their aunt anything. Their mother had bought them each a bright shirt, and later, one day when she was feeling better, she took them shopping downtown and bought them new shoes and new pants and several pairs of socks and underwear. When they stopped at the register to pay Ike said, It’s too much, Mother. We don’t need all this.
Your father sent me some money, she said. Should we go back now?
It was very quiet in their aunt’s apartment. Their aunt was a supervisory clerk in the municipal court system with an office in the civic center downtown, and she had been there for twenty-three years and as a result she had developed a stark view of humanity and its vagaries and the multitude of ways it found to commit crimes. She had been married once, for three months, and since that time had never considered marrying anyone again. She was left with two passions: a fat yellow neutered cat named Theodore and the television soap opera that came on at one o’clock every weekday while she was at work, a program she taped religiously and watched without fail every night when she was home again.
The boys were bored right away. Their mother had seemed better, but after the silent spells began she appeared defeated again and went back to bed, and their aunt told them they must be quiet and let her rest. This was after she’d gone into their mother’s room one e
We have been quiet.
Are you arguing with me.
What’s wrong with Mother?
Your mother is not strong.
So their aunt went to work and their mother went back to bed lying with her arm folded over her eyes in a darkened room, and they were left alone in the seventh-floor apartment in Denver and were told strictly not to go outside. They spent their time reading a little and they watched tv until they were blind, while still being careful at the critical hour not to interfere with the taping of their aunt’s soap opera. Their only recourse was the balcony at the front of the apartment, which they entered by sliding back a glass door. It overlooked Logan Street and the sidewalk and there were cars parked all along the curbing and they could see into the tops of the leafless winter trees. They began to go out on the balcony to watch the cars go by in the street and to see people walking their dogs. They put their coats on and stayed for longer and longer periods of time. After a while they took to dropping things off the balcony. They started by leaning over the rail to watch what the wind did with their spittle, then they made up a game to see who could sail scraps of paper the farthest, floating the paper like feathers, and they invented a system of points for distance and placement. But that was too unpredictable. Wind had too much to do with it. They found that dropping things that had weight was better. And eggs were best.
After this had gone on for a couple of days someone in the building told their aunt about it. When she came into the apartment that evening she removed her coat and hung it up, and then she took them both by the wrist and led them into their mother’s room. Do you know what these two have been doing?
Their mother leaned up in bed. No, she said. She looked pale and drawn again. But it couldn’t be very bad, she said.
They’ve been smashing eggs on the sidewalk.
How?
Dropping them off the balcony. Oh, it’s very intelligent.
Have you? she said, looking in their faces.
They stood looking at her impassively. Their aunt was still holding their wrists.
Yes, they have.
Well, I’m sure they won’t do it anymore. There’s too little for them to do up here.
They can’t do that anymore. I won’t have it.
So that was the end of that. They were forbidden to go out onto the balcony.
At the end of the week they woke one night in the dark and discovered that their mother wasn’t in the room. They opened the door and went out into the living room. No lights were on, but the curtain was drawn back from the glass balcony door and the lights of the city came in through the glass. Their mother was sitting on the davenport with a blanket wrapped around her. Though she was awake, so far as they could see, she wasn’t doing anything.
Mother?
What is it? she said. What woke you?
We wondered where you were.
I’m just out here, she said. It’s all right. Go back to bed.
Can’t we sit here with you?
If you want. It’s cool out here though.
I’ll get a blanket, Ike said.
But you won’t like it, their mother said. I’m not very good company.
Mother, can’t you come home again? Bobby said. What good is it here?
No. Not yet, she said.
When?
I don’t know, she said. I’m not sure. Here. Slide closer. You’re getting cold. I should make you go back to bed. They sat for a long time watching out the window.
The boys were glad the next day when their father returned to pick them up. They wanted to go home again, but they felt confused and uneasy about leaving their mother in Denver in the apartment with her sister. Guthrie tried to make them talk on the way back. They wouldn’t say very much of anything, though. They didn’t want to be disloyal to their mother. The trip seemed to take a long time. Once they were in the house upstairs in their own bedroom it was better. They could look out and see the corral and windmill and horse barn.
McPherons.
There was no school between Christmas and New Year’s. Victoria Roubideaux stayed out in the country in the old house back off the county road with the McPheron brothers, and the days seemed slow. The ground was covered in thin dirty patches of ice and the weather stayed cold, the temperature never rising above freezing, and in the night it was bitterly cold. She stayed inside the house and read popular magazines and baked in the kitchen, while the brothers came and went from the house, haying cattle and chopping ice in the stock tanks, paying close attention all the time to the steady advance of pregnancy in the two-year-old heifers, since they would be the most trouble during calving, and returned to the kitchen from the farm lots and pastures, ice-bound and half frozen, with their blue eyes watery and their cheeks as red as if they had been burnt. In the house Christmas had been quiet and there were no particular plans for New Year’s.
By the middle of the week the girl had begun to spend long hours in her room, sleeping late in the morning and staying up at night listening to the radio and fixing her hair, reading about babies, thinking, fiddling in a notebook.
The McPheron brothers didn’t know what to make of this behavior. They had grown accustomed to her school-week routine, when she had gotten up and eaten breakfast with them every morning and then gone to school on the bus and afterward had come home from her classes and was often out in the parlor reading another magazine or watching television when they came in for the evening. They had begun to talk more easily with her and to rehearse together the happenings of the passing days, finding the threads of things that interested them all. So it bothered them now that she’d begun to spend so many hours by herself. They didn’t know what she was doing in her room, but they didn’t want to ask her either. They didn’t think it was their right to ask or query her. So instead they began to worry.
Late in the week, driving back to the house in the pickup in the evening, Harold said, Don’t Victoria seem kind of sorry and miserable to you lately?
Yes. I’ve noted it.
Because she stays in bed too late. That’s one thing.
Maybe they do, Raymond said. Young girls might all do like that, by their natures.
Till nine-thirty in the morning? I went back into the house for something the other day and she was just getting up.
I don’t know, Raymond said. He looked out over the rattling hood of the pickup. I reckon she’s just getting bored and lonesome.
Maybe, Harold said. But if she is, I don’t know if that’s good for the baby.
What isn’t good for the baby?
Feeling lonesome and sorry like that. That can’t be good for him. On top of staying up all manner of hours and sleeping all morning.
Well, Raymond said. She needs her sleep.
She needs her regular sleep. That’s what she needs. She needs regular hours.
How do you know that?
I don’t know that, Harold said, not for a certified fact. But you take a two-year-old heifer that’s carrying a calf. She’s not up all night long, restless, moving around, is she.
What are you talking about? Raymond said. How in hell does that apply to anything?
I started thinking about it the other day. The similarities amongst em. Both of them is young. Both of them’s out in the country with only us here to watch out for em. Both is carrying a baby for the first time. Just think about it.
Raymond looked at his brother in amazement. They had arrived at the house and stopped on the frozen rutted drive in front of the wire gate. Goddamn it, he said, that’s a cow. You’re talking about cows.
I’m just saying, is all, Harold said. Give it some thought.
You’re saying she’s a cow is what you’re saying.
I’m not either saying that.
She’s a girl, for christsakes. She’s not a cow. You can’t rate girls and cows together.
I don’t appreciate you saying she’s a heifer.
I never said she was one. I wouldn’t say that for money.
It sounded like it to me. Like you was.
I just thought of it, is all, Harold said. Don’t you ever think of something?
Yeah. I think of something sometimes.
Well then.
But I don’t have to say it. Just because I think of it.
All right. I talked out before I thought. You want to shoot me now or wait till full dark?
I’ll have to let you know, Raymond said. He looked out the side window toward the house where the lights had been switched on in the darkening evening. I just reckon she’s getting bored. There’s nothing to do out here. No school nor nothing else now.
She don’t appear to have many friends to speak of, Harold said. That’s one thing for sure.
No. And she don’t call nobody and nobody calls her, Raymond said.
Maybe we ought to take her in to town to a picture show sometime. Do something like that.
Raymond stared at his brother. Why, you just flat amaze me.
What’s wrong now?
Well, do you want to attend a movie show? Can you see us doing that? Sit there while some Hollywood movie actor pokes his business into some naked girl on the screen while we’re sitting there eating salted popcorn watching him do it—with her sitting there next to us.
Well.
Well.
Okay, Harold said. All right then.
No sir, Raymond said. I didn’t think you’d want to do that.
But by God, we got to do something, Harold said.
I ain’t arguing that.
Well, we do, goddamn it.
I said I know, Raymond said. He rubbed his hands together between his knees, warming them; his hands were chafed and red, cracked. It does appear to me like we just did this, he said. Or something next to it. That night when we was talking to her about the market. I tell you, it seems like you get one thing fixed and something else pops up. Like with a young girl like her, you can’t fix nothing permanent.