by Kent Haruf
. . .
On an afternoon when Guthrie was in Phillips, teaching, they walked out on the railroad tracks on the creosoted cross ties between the rails going west and walked out past the old man’s house and then on past the abandoned house at the end of Railroad Street and it was hot and dry. Walking a mile and more farther west on the black ties between the shining twin rails along the red ballast. Then they stopped at a railroad cutout gouged through a low sandhill, and they got out the coins and the glue bottle from their pockets.
So the four bright coins lay stuck now on the hot rail, glued and waiting, the four denominations in a row, penny, nickel, dime, and quarter, while the high afternoon sun glinted on them, copper and silver alike, and shone on her bracelet too from the chest of drawers where they had taken it from the guest room where she had left it months ago, the one they had tried on their own wrists that once, before they had climbed up to the apartment and discovered Mrs. Iva Stearns already dead five hours in her chair. At first they hadn’t seen how to rest the bracelet on the rail with the four coins since it would not lie down flat, since on its side it would most likely flip off when the first big driving wheel of the engine hit it, to go spinning off in the air like some piece of glittering ice or glass to land in the cheetweed and redroot where they’d have to look for it and maybe not even find it again, because they had lost pennies and quarters that way before, before they had learned to use the single little drop of glue. Then they hit on the expedient of fitting it over the rail as though it were fitting over an arm and tried it, and it worked satisfactorily like that. So it was hooked over the rail below the coins now, waiting too. And the train would be coming soon.
They waited. They were squatted back fifteen feet from the raised railbed in the cutout, their backs against the high embankment, shaded by the sheered red dirt. No one out on the high plain could have seen them, had anybody been looking at this hour late in May in the middle of the afternoon. Ike got out two of Guthrie’s cigarettes from his shirt pocket and handed Bobby one. He took out a box of matches from his pocket and struck one and lit their cigarettes, first his then his brother’s, and poked the burning match head into the dirt. It made a little white puff when the flame was extinguished. They smoked and waited. After a little while they spat, one after the other, between their feet on the dirt. There wasn’t any train coming yet. They smoked and held the cigarettes out in front to see and then drew on them and blew smoke and looked at each other, and smoked again. It wasn’t coming yet. Ike spat in a looping arc toward the rail. Bobby spat likewise, railward. They smoked the cigarettes down and put them out. Then Ike stood up and looked up the track. He couldn’t see it yet, not its light nor its black shimmering bulk, and he stepped up to the trackbed and lay along the track holding his ear to the rail. After a while his eyes changed. It’s coming, he said. Here it comes.
You can’t tell from that, Bobby said.
It’s coming, Ike said. His head was next to the rail. I hear it.
Bobby got up and listened too. Okay, he said. So once more they crouched together against the dirt embankment within its shade, waiting for the train. There was a grasshopper on the weeds, watching them, chewing its mouth. Ike threw a piece of dirt at it and it hopped onto the track. The train came on from a distance, whistling sudden and long at a mile crossing. They waited. The coins and her bracelet were out on the track. After a time they could see the train, dark-looming in the haze. It came on and got louder, bigger, and appeared as terrific as if it were dreamed, shaking the ground, the grasshopper still watching the two boys, and then the train was on them. They looked at the man standing high above inside the roaring locomotive and dirt was flying everywhere in the air in a white gale so sudden and violent that they had to protect their eyes, then its long string of freight cars was rushing past, clattering and squealing, whistling, a loose rattling clacking noise, the joint in the iron rail before them dipping as the wheels passed, carrying the weight, and then it was gone and the man in the caboose looked back at them and they stared back, not waving. When the train was far down the tracks they rose and picked up the coins and her bracelet.
In the shade of the cutbank they squatted and inspected what they had now. The coins were misshapen oval disks, the profiled heads of the presidents like ghostly shadows, bright, shiny, out-of-round. The faces in outline only, no depth or texture, no dimension. Her bracelet was flattened the same, thin as paper, they could break it. They turned the coins over in their hands and regarded the bracelet, and after a while they poked a hole in the dirt and buried the four coins together with their mother’s bracelet in the dirt under the sheered bank and put a rock over the place.
You going to want to smoke again? Ike said.
Yes.
All right.
He got out two more of the cigarettes from his shirt pocket and together they sat smoking fifteen feet back from the tracks in the shade. They watched out into the sun on the trackbed and neither talked nor moved for some time.
McPherons.
When they came up to the house from the horse barn in the afternoon near the end of the month they saw there was a black car parked at the gate in front of the house. They didn’t recognize it.
Who’s that?
Nobody I know, Harold said.
The car had a Denver license plate. They went on around it and up the walk onto the porch. Inside the house they found him sitting at the walnut table in the dining room seated across from the girl. She was holding the baby. He was a tall thin young man and he didn’t get up when they came in.
I come back to take her with me, he said. And the baby too. My daughter.
So that’s who you are, Harold said.
He and the old McPheron brothers looked at one another.
You don’t stand up when somebody enters the room in his own house, Harold said.
Not usually, no, the boy said.
This is Dwayne, the girl said.
I reckoned it must be. What do you want here?
I told you, he said. I come back for what belongs to me. Her and the baby too.
I’m not going though, the girl said.
Yeah, he said. You are.
Do you want to go, Victoria? Raymond said.
No. I’m not going. I told him. I’m not leaving here.
Oh yeah, she’s coming. She’s just playing hard to get. She just wants to be coaxed.
No, I don’t. That’s not it.
Son, Harold said. I reckon you better leave. Nobody wants you here. Victoria’s made that pretty clear. And Raymond and me damn sure don’t have any use for you.
I’ll leave when she gets ready, the boy said. Go on, he said to the girl. Go get your stuff together.
No.
Go on, like I told you.
I’m not going.
Son. Are you kind of hard of hearing? You heard her and now you heard me.
And you heard me, the boy said. Goddamn it, he said to the girl, go on now. Get your things. Hurry up.
No.
The boy jumped up and started around the table and grabbed her by the arm. He pulled her up out of the chair.
Goddamn it, do it. Like I been telling you. Now move.
The two brothers came around the table toward him.
Son. Now you leave her alone. Let go of her.
The boy jerked her arm. The baby fell to the floor and was shocked and began to wail. And she jerked loose and squatted to pick her up. The baby was crying wildly.
I’m sorry, he said. I didn’t mean that. Just come on. She’s mine too.
No, the girl cried. I’m not going. We’re not going.
That’s enough, Harold said. That’ll do. The brothers took him by the arms and he started to fight them, and they lifted him off his feet, squirming and twisting and caterwauling, and carried him out the door, and they were hard and determined and stronger than he was, and they took him outside down the steps through the yard gate.
Let go of me.
On the gravel
drive they released him.
The boy looked at them. All right, he said. I’m going, for now.
Don’t come back.
You haven’t heard the last of me, he said.
Don’t you ever come back bothering her again.
He turned and went on to the car and got in and started it and turned around, spraying up gravel behind him, and roared out past the house into the lane and onto the county road. The McPheron brothers went back into the house. The girl had the baby in her arms, sitting at the old table again. The baby was quieted to a whimper now.
You all right, Victoria? Raymond said.
Yes.
Did he hurt you?
No. But he scared me. I tried to hold him here, talking till you came up to the house, hoping you would. I packed some things, taking my time, hoping you’d come up to the house as soon as you could.
Do you reckon he’ll come back? Harold said.
No.
But he might. Is that what you think?
I don’t know. Maybe he will. But I think he just wanted to make a show.
You didn’t want to go with him, did you? Raymond said.
No. I want to be here. This is where I want to be now.
All right. That’s what’s going to happen then.
The girl turned and unbuttoned her blouse and began to nurse the baby and it stopped whimpering, and the old McPheron brothers looked away from the girl out into the room.
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 KENT HARUF
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
www.vintagebooks.com
eISBN: 978-0-375-72693-4
v3.0
