Plainsong

by Kent Haruf

  So on this Tuesday she had been in and out of her small bedroom throughout the afternoon, during those first few uncertain hours, busying herself with the new crib and the sheet and the blankets, and moving about in the neat little room, tidying up what wasn’t untidy, straightening what wasn’t out of order, dusting where no accumulation of dust had been allowed at any time since she had come back from Denver. And as a result she had everything about two times more than ready, and she had already packed and repacked at least twice whatever it was she would need to take with her to the hospital in the travel bag, including a nightgown and pads and baby clothes, all that the books said she would need, all that Maggie Jones had told her to take as well. Earlier she had thought that she would call Maggie on the day that the pains started, but she had decided against it now. She had decided she would call her later from the hospital when she had something certain to call about. She had a feeling about wanting this to happen just for herself. And just for them too, the old brothers, without others being involved. She thought they had earned that. So she busied herself about the house and about the little room and waited until they got harder and more definite, and then late in the afternoon, about five o’clock, she went out to the corrals where they were working and stood waiting at the board fence until they should look up from the cow and calf they were inspecting and see her. And then they did look up and she called to them:

  It’s started. I’m just telling you. But I don’t want to go into town yet. It’s too soon. He said it would be a while after they started, about twelve hours or so, he said, so there isn’t any rush yet. I’m just telling you.

  They were holding on to a big red calf, holding it down in the corral dirt on its side so they could check it, while its excited mother eyed them balefully from a distance of about ten feet. The McPheron brothers looked up at the girl. Then it was as if they had all at once, and both at the same moment, understood what it was that she was trying to tell them. They released the rope on the calf and it bawled and jumped up and trotted over to its mother, hiding behind her where the old cow had already begun to lick it into calmness and quiet, while the two men came hustling over to the fence across from where the girl stood and said, What’s this? Are you sure?

  Yes, she said.

  And you’re feeling all right? Raymond said.

  I feel fine.

  But you shouldn’t even be out here, Harold said. You ought to be back there in the house.

  I just came out to tell you, she said. That they started.

  Yes but, he said—well damn it, Victoria, you shouldn’t even be on your feet. You need to go back to the house. This ain’t no place for you.

  I’m all right, she said. I just wanted to tell you. I’ll go back now.

  She turned and started back. They stood together at the fence, watching her, this slight young heavy-laden girl with the long black hair fallen down her back, walking carefully, picking her steps slowly across the rutted gravel drive under the late afternoon sun. Then she stopped once out in the open before she got up to the house. She stood still, her head bowed, holding herself, waiting for it to pass, then after a time she raised her head again and she went on. Five minutes later the McPheron brothers, without saying anything to each other about it, without ever having to make any apparent decision whatsoever, turned all the mother cows and calves back out into the pasture, quit the work corral together and followed the girl, one after the other, directly into the house.

  They found her lying on the old soft double bed in her room. They hovered over her. They let her know that they thought she should get up, they wanted to take her into town now, not to wait, that they thought that such would be better, safer, they didn’t want to take any chances, they told her to take care and get up cautiously and they would drive her in right now, and that in effect altogether she should hurry up and do it in a slow way. But she simply looked at them and said again, Not yet. I don’t want to be a bother and make a fool of myself.

  So they waited the rest of the afternoon. They waited through the remainder of daylight. Then the sun started down and the air darkened. The brothers turned the lights on in the house. Raymond went out into the kitchen and made some supper for the three of them at the stove. Yet when it was ready the girl would not eat; she came out and sat with them for a while at the table and drank a little warm tea, but that was all. Once while she sat with them a pain came to her and she stared straight ahead, breathing, and when it was over she looked up and smiled at them and waved a little dismissively with her hand. They watched her from across the table, stricken. Presently she rose and went back into her room and lay down. The brothers looked at each other. After some time they got up and went in and sat down in the parlor under the single floor lamp and made a pretense at reading the Holt Mercury. It was very quiet. Every twenty minutes or so one or the other of them would rise and go in and stand at the doorway to look at her in the old bed.

  Then about nine o’clock the girl came out of her little room into the dining room carrying her bag. She stopped beside the walnut table. I think we should go now, she said. I think it’s time.

  At the hospital the nurses asked her all the questions. Name, and expected date of confinement, and blood type, if the membranes had ruptured, and when, what the contractions were, how often, how long, where she felt them, what bleeding, the amount and color of it, movement of the baby, last food taken, what and when, what allergies, what medications. She answered these all with patience and thoroughness while the McPheron brothers stood in a kind of mute panic and intolerable outrage, waiting beside her at the counter, waiting for them to be done with this exasperation and waste of time and remove her to safety. Then the nurses wheeled her away into the labor room while the brothers waited behind in the hall, and she got out of her clothes into a loose hospital gown and the one nurse examined her and afterward said she was only three centimeters dilated, that was all. She asked if she could say again how long she had been feeling the pains. The girl told her. Then yes, she would very likely be a good while yet since she was no more dilated than that. Still, that was something no one could ever tell about, how long it would be, because she herself had seen cases where the babies came very fast once they had decided to start coming, and they could hope.

  After an hour, when nothing was changed, the nurses allowed the McPheron brothers to come in and stay with the girl in the labor room. The girl had asked the nurses to let them. They came in very quietly and circumspectly, carrying their hats in their hands, as if they were attending some formal occasion or entering upon some religious service for which they were late due to circumstances beyond their control even though their best intentions had been otherwise, and sat down against the wall beside the bed and seemed reluctant at first even to look at her. It was a double room with a ceiling rail for a curtain to be drawn close around the bed, and the bed was raised so that the girl was sitting up in it. The nurses had started an i.v. and there was a monitor on a stand at the head of the bed. When they did look at her, her face appeared flushed and a little puffy. Her eyes had a dark look in them.

  Did they tell you it may be a while yet? she said.

  They nodded.

  I should have waited, she said. I came in too soon.

  No, now, Raymond said. You come just right. We come too late, if anything. This is a considerable lot better for you here, instead of out at the house.

  I didn’t want to be such a bother, she said. I thought I was closer.

  No, Harold said. You done us a favor. We was going to get a little antsy waiting like that, miles out of town that way. We was pure ready to come in about five hours earlier, if you want to know.

  I just wanted to have it right away and not for you to have to wait around. Now that’s not going to happen.

  Well, you can just stop concerning yourself about that, Raymond said. Don’t you even think about us. You just take care of your own business there and you do what you need to do. And if there’s something else we can
do, you got to let us know. We don’t know a thing about this. We don’t know how to help you.

  Well, Harold said, I guess we could go get the calf-puller. I reckon we know that much about getting new things born into this world.

  She looked at him. There was a kind of blank look on her face.

  Oh, hell, he said. You got to excuse me. I was trying for a joke. I didn’t mean nothing, Victoria.

  She shook her head a little and smiled. Her face was quite flushed and her teeth looked very white. I know that, she said. You can joke if you want to. I want you to. You’re both so good to me. Then another pain came and they watched her tighten into herself in the bed, breathing and panting, her eyes closed. After a little while, when it was finished, she opened her eyes again but it was clear that her concentration was still focused on what was going on inside herself and nowhere else except there, and the McPheron brothers sat in the chairs against the wall near her bed and worried about her more than they had ever worried about anything in the last fifty years and watched it all and stayed with her into the night.

  At midnight old Dr. Martin came in and said they might as well go home for a while. He had come in to check on the girl for himself and had found that she was still far from delivery. It wasn’t that unusual, he said, since it was her first baby. He said he would be staying all night himself, sleeping at the hospital, and that the nurses would call him if she got closer, and the nurses could call them too, if that’s what they wanted. But the McPheron brothers wouldn’t leave. They stayed in the room and the girl managed to sleep a little between the contractions, taking little bits of naps occasionally, while beside the bed they sat up awake, silently, in a kind of daze, waiting with her. The nurses came in and out several times every hour to check on her and the brothers would have to step outside in the hall then, and then they would come back after the nurses were satisfied. It went on in that way through the night. By daybreak the McPheron brothers looked bad. Their faces looked as haggard and colorless as chalk, their eyes gone scratchy and red. The girl was relatively calm, though, and determined to do it right. She was very tired but she was all right. She was still concentrated and working hard. She begged them to go home and rest, but they would not leave at her request any more than they had at the doctor’s.

  Finally, at about nine o’clock in the morning, during one of the brief periods when they were waiting in the hallway, Harold said to his brother, At least one of us has got to go home and feed. You know that.

  I’m not leaving, Raymond said.

  I didn’t think so. I figured as much. I’ll be back, then. You stay here. You stay in here for both of us. I’ll be back as soon as I can.

  When they were allowed into the room again Harold told the girl what he was doing and she said, Yes, he should please do that, and he touched her on the arm and walked out. Raymond sat down again on the chair near her bed. When the contractions came he offered what encouragement he could think of to give her and she worked hard, and time continued to pass.

  Then sometime later they told Raymond to step out into the hall again. He stood and waited for them to finish examining her but it took longer than usual, and then they came out, wheeling the girl on the bed and he saw her and she looked at him and smiled a little, and they took her on down the hallway before he could think to say anything to her at all or even to make some gesture of hope for her sake. One of the nurses informed him that Dr. Martin was giving her oxytocin by i.v. drip to accelerate the labor and they were moving to delivery now. The nurse said he should go outside and get some air, he looked like he needed it. One of them would find him afterward.

  Is she going to be okay?

  Yes. You mustn’t worry.

  He stood outside at the back entrance to the hospital in the fresh air and stood just breathing and waiting, not leaning against anything but simply standing away from the wall and the porch support as if he had been located there by some happenstance and told not to move or to lean against anything that might hold him up or support him until somebody should come and tell him he could do otherwise. No one else was out there. He stared toward the alley and the back parking lot. He stood, and didn’t move. His arms dangled at his sides. An hour later Dr. Martin found him that way, still standing in a kind of rigid isolation on the back step.

  McPheron?

  Raymond slowly looked at him.

  You can see her now.

  Victoria?

  Yes.

  Is she alive?

  What? Of course she is.

  She’s all right?

  She’s awake and she’s talking. But she’s tired. Don’t you want to know about the baby?

  What is it?

  It’s a girl.

  And you say Victoria Roubideaux is all right.

  Yes.

  Raymond studied him.

  And what you say, that’s the truth.

  Yes. I tell you, she’s all right.

  I didn’t know, Raymond said. I was afraid . . . Then roughly he stooped forward and took hold of old Dr. Martin’s hand and pumped it hard, two times, and let it go, and then he started back inside.

  She still had the baby with her in the bed lying on her chest when he entered the room in the maternity ward, and she was gazing at the baby, holding it close. She looked up when he came in, her eyes shining.

  He says you’re okay, Raymond said.

  Yes. Isn’t she beautiful? She turned the baby toward him.

  He looked at it. The baby had a full thatch of crow-black hair and its red face was misshapen a little, pushed out of its true shape, and there was a scratch on its cheek, and he thought in his inexperience that the baby looked like an old man, that it resembled nothing so much as some old wrinkled grandpa, but he said, Yes, she’s a beautiful little thing.

  You want to hold her?

  Oh, I don’t know about that.

  You can.

  I don’t want to harm her.

  You won’t. Here. You’ve got to support her head.

  He took the baby in her white hospital blankets and looked at her, holding her fearfully out in front of his old face as though she were a piece of rigid but delicate kitchen crockery.

  My goodness, he said after a minute. The baby’s eyes looked up at him without blinking. Well, my my. My lord almighty.

  While he was holding the baby, Harold came into the room. They said I’d find you in here now, he said. You’re all right?

  Yes, the girl said. It’s a little girl. You can hold her too.

  Harold was still dressed in his work clothes, with hay dust on the shoulders of his canvas chore jacket, bringing with him the smell of the outdoors and of cattle and of sweat. I better not get over-close, he told her. I’m not tidy.

  You can just wrap the blanket around her tighter, she said. She’s got to get used to you sometime.

  So he took the baby in his turn too, and Raymond sat down and patted the girl’s arm. She was tired and ashen and blurry.

  Well then, Harold said, well then, looking at the baby girl. He held her before him and she looked back at him unblinking just as she had looked at his brother, as though she were studying the make of his character. I’m going to tell you what, Harold said. I believe we have just doubled our womenfolk. But I reckon it’s something we can get used to.

  Then a different nurse came in and she was angry and said they were not even supposed to be in there, didn’t they know that, not in the maternity room when the baby was in the room, because they were not the husband, were they, they were not the father, and she told them they would have to leave at once, and besides the girl needed to sleep, couldn’t they see she was exhausted, and then she complained bitterly about the baby needing to stay clean and sterile and she took the baby away. But neither the McPheron brothers nor the girl objected to the nurse, because things were all right now; the girl had had the baby satisfactorily after all, and the baby she had delivered was a healthy little clear-eyed girl with her mother’s own black hair, and that was everyt
hing anybody in the town of Holt or anywhere else in the world had any right to hope for, and so it was all right.

  The next morning, an hour after sunrise, the man at the Holt County frozen food locker on Main Street called Dr. Martin at his home about the half-steer. He wanted to know what the doctor wanted him to do with it.

  With what? the old doctor said.

  This meat here.

  What meat?

  McPherons’. They showed up about an hour ago this morning and made me open before I was anywhere near ready, before I even had my morning coffee. With two whole butchered-out hindquarters of prime young black baldy steer. What do you want me to do with it, is what I’m calling about. They said it was yours.

  Mine?

  They said you’d know why.

  The hell they did.

  That’s what they said.

  All right, the old doctor said. I suppose I do then. I expect I might even have earned it too. Then his voice rose in pitch. Well, hold on to it, for christsake. Don’t give it away. I’ll be down there just as soon as I can get dressed.

  Ike and Bobby.

  Eight days school had been let out. But the town swimming pool was not yet opened in the park. The summer baseball program had not yet taken up. The fair and carnival rides would not be starting until the first week of August.

  In the mornings the two boys delivered the paper and came home and did the chores at the barn, fed Easter and the dog and the cats, then went up to the house to breakfast. Three afternoons a week Guthrie was teaching a summer class for the community college in Phillips. And their mother was still living in Denver. They were to understand that their mother was going to stay living there in Denver from now on. Often in the mornings they rode out along the tracks on Easter and took their lunch and once rode as far as the little cemetery halfway to Norka where there was a stand of cottonwood trees with their leaves washing and turning in the wind, and they ate a lunch there in the freckled shade of the trees and came back in the late afternoon with the sun sliding down behind them, making a single shadow of them and the horse together, the shadow out in front like a thin dark antic precursor of what they were about to become. School had been let out eight days already, and they were alone much of the time.