Kent Haruf - Plainsong

The second time she drove out there she had the girl with her, beside her in the front seat of the car. The girl looked frightened and preoccupied, as if she were going to confession or jail or some other place that was so unpleasant that she was willing to go only under force of circumstance and nothing else. It was Sunday. A cold and bright day and the snow still as brilliant as glass under the sun, with the wind blowing as usual in sudden but regular gusts so that outside when they got beyond the town limits it was the same as before except that the wind had turned west in the night. The cattle, the same shaggy black baldy cattle spread out in the corn stubble as the day before, were still there. It was only as if the cattle had made a collective rightface in the night when the wind had changed and had then gone on slicking up the spilled corn, wrapping their tongues around the dry corn husks, raising their heads and staring off into the distance, all the time chewing steadily.

Maggie Jones had driven more than halfway to the McPherons before the girl said any word at all. Then she said:

Mrs. Jones. Would you stop the car?

What is it?

Please, would you pull over?

Maggie slowed and steered the car off onto the rutted shoulder. A bank of snow alongside was packed into the barrow ditch and from behind the car the white smokelike exhaust tore away in the gusting wind.

What is it? Are you sick?

No.

What then?

Mrs. Jones, I don’t know if I can do this.

Oh. Well honey, yes you can.

I don’t know, the girl said.

Maggie turned to face her. The girl was looking straight ahead with one hand on the door handle, sitting up rigid and tense in the seat as though she were waiting for the right moment to jump out and run.

All right, I’ll tell you again, Maggie said. I can’t guarantee anything about this. Don’t ask that. But you need to regard this as an opportunity. They called last night and said they would take you, that they’d try it. That’s a great deal for them to say. I think it will be all right. You don’t have to be at all afraid of them. They’re about as good as men can be. They may be gruff and unpolished but they don’t mean anything by that, it’s only they’ve been alone so much. Think of living your life alone for half a century and more, like they have. It would do something to you. So you can’t let their gruffness bother you or deter you. Yes, they are rough around the edges, of course they are. They haven’t been rounded off. But you’ll be safe out here. You can still come in to school, ride the bus back and forth and complete your course work as usual. But you have to try to remember what it’s been like for them. Both their folks died in a highway truck wreck when these old men were younger than you are now. Afterward they just quit attending school, if they’d ever gone very much anyway, which I don’t think they did, and they stayed at home and went to work ranching and farming, and that’s about all they’ve known in the world or had to know. Up to now that’s been enough.

She stopped. She studied the girl’s face to see what effect her talking had had.

The girl was looking out over the nose of the car toward the straight two-lane highway. After a while she said, But Mrs. Jones. Do you think they’ll like me?

Yes, I do. If you give them a chance they will.

But it seems crazy to be going out here to live with two old men.

That’s right, Maggie said. But these are crazy times. I sometimes believe these must be the craziest times ever.

The girl turned her head to look out the side window at the native pasture beyond the ditch and fenceline. The flower spikes of the soapweed stuck up like splintered sticks, the seed pods dry and dark-looking against the winter grass. Do they have a dog? she said.

There’s an old farm dog.

Do they have any cats?

I didn’t see any. But I would guess they do. I’ve never heard of a farm yet without at least one or two stray cats around to keep down the mice and rats.

I’d have to quit my job at the Holt Café. I’d have to tell Janine.

Yes. But you wouldn’t be the first one to quit washing dishes for Janine. She expects that.

Does she?

Yes.

The girl continued to look out the window. Maggie Jones waited. Whenever there was a gust of wind the car was rocked on its wheels. After a while the girl turned back and faced forward again. You can go on if you want to, she said. I’m okay now.

Good, Maggie said. I thought you would be. She steered the car back onto the blacktop and they drove down the narrow highway. After a time they turned east onto the gravel county road and then onto the track which led back to the old house with the rusted hogwire strung around it and the stunted elm trees standing up leafless inside the rusted wire. Maggie stopped the car in front of the gate. She and the girl got out.

The McPheron brothers had been watching for them. They came out of the house at once onto the little screened porch and stood waiting for the women to come up to the house. But they neither spoke nor made any gesture. They looked as stiff and motionless as if they’d been shaped out of plaster and then stood up on the porch like two lifelike statues of minor saints.

When she got out of the car the wind had wrapped the girl’s hair across her face so that her first view of the McPherons was obscured by her own thick dark hair. But the old men had dressed for the occasion. They wore new shirts with pearl snaps and had on clean Sunday trousers. Their red faces were clean-shaven and their iron-gray hair was combed down flat on their heads with a considerable excess of hair oil, leaving it so heavy and stiffened that even the gusting wind couldn’t move it. The girl followed Maggie Jones up onto the porch.

Maggie made the introductions. Harold and Raymond McPheron, she said, this is Victoria Roubideaux. Victoria, this is Harold. This is Raymond.

The two brothers stepped forward one after the other in a kind of vaudeville drill, without yet looking directly into the girl’s face, and both shook her hand, each in his own turn, giving her one quick brisk hard-clenched squeeze and release, feeling her hand so small and soft and pliable in their own big hard callused hands, and then stepped back. Then they did look at her. She stood silently beside Maggie Jones in her winter coat and blue jeans, a young girl with long black hair and black eyes, carrying a red purse over the shoulder of her dark coat. But they couldn’t tell whether she was pregnant or not, she seemed so young and slight.

Well, Harold said. I guess you better come on in the house. It’s a booger out here.

They let the girl enter the kitchen ahead of them. Then Maggie followed and they followed her. Inside, it was apparent at once that the McPheron brothers had made an effort. The sink was empty of dishes, the table was scrubbed clean, the kitchen chairs were free of the mechanics’ rags and the pieces of machinery they had held the day before, and the floor looked as hard-swept as if an immigrant woman had used her broom on it.

This here is the kitchen, Harold said, what you’re looking at. Over here’s the sink. Next to it there is the gas range. He stopped. He looked about him. I reckon all that’d be more or less obvious to anybody. It don’t require me to tell you. In here’s the dining room and parlor.

They moved farther into the house, into two larger rooms which were intersected by shafts of daylight since the cracked brown shades bracketed above the windows had been rolled up at some point years ago, leaving both rooms filled with unshaded light as in a country schoolhouse or a rural train depot. In the first, the dining room, positioned under a hanging light fixture was an old square walnut table supported by a heavy pedestal, with four wood chairs gathered about it. The table had been cleared only very recently and the sunbleached outlines of books and magazines were still visible on its surface. Beyond, in the next room, were two worn-out plaid recliner chairs placed like housebroken outsized animals in front of a television set, with a floor lamp located at exact equidistance between the chairs and piles of newspapers and Farm Journals spread on the linoleum at the chairs’ feet. The girl turned and looked, taking it all in.