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, icebound 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 schoolweek 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 was only just saying, Harold said. What are you getting so riled up about it for?
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.
I hear what you’re saying, Harold said.
The two brothers looked toward the house, thinking. The house was old and weathered, nearly paintless, the upstairs windows looked down blankly. Next to the house the bare elm trees blew and tossed in the wind.
I’m going to tell you what though, Harold said. I’m beginning to have a little more appreciation for these people with kids nowadays. It only appears to be easier from the outside. He looked at his brother. I think that’s the truth, he said.
Raymond was still looking toward the house, not saying anything.
Are you listening to me? I just said something.
I heard what you said, Raymond said.
Well? You never said nothing.
I’m thinking.
Well, can’t you think and talk to me at the same time?
No, I can’t, Raymond said. Not with something like this. It takes all my concentration.
All right then, Harold said. Keep thinking. I’ll shut my mouth if that’s what it takes. But one of us had better come up with something pretty damn quick. Her staying in that bedroom all the time can’t be any good for her. Nor for that baby either she’s carrying inside her.
That night Harold McPheron put in a call to Maggie Jones. Harold and Raymond had decided that he should do that. It was after the girl had gone back to her bedroom for the night and had shut the door.
When Maggie picked up the phone Harold said to her, If you was to buy a crib, where would you think to get it?
Maggie paused. Then she said, This must be one of the McPheron brothers.
That’s right. The goodlooking smart one.
Well, Raymond, she said. It’s nice of you to call.
That’s not as comical as you think, Harold said.
Isn’t it?
No, it ain’t. Anyhow, what’s your answer? Where would you buy a crib if you was to need one?
I’m to understand that you don’t mean a corn crib. You wouldn’t have to ask me about that.
That’s right.
I believe I’d drive over to Phillips. To the department store. They’d have a baby section.
Whereabouts is it?
On the square across from the courthouse.
On the north side?
Yes.
Okay, Harold said. How you doing, Maggie? You doing all right?
She laughed. I’m doing fine.
Thanks for the information, he said. Happy New Year’s to you, and hung up.
The next morning the McPheron brothers came up to the house from work about nine o’clock, covered up against the cold, stomping their boots on the little porch, taking their thick caps off. They had purposely timed their return to the house so as to find the girl still seated in the dining room at the walnut table, eating her solitary breakfast.
She looked up at them where they stood hesitating in the doorway, then they came in and sat down across from her. She was still in her flannel nightgown and heavy sweater and stockings and her hair was shining in the winterslanted sun coming in through the uncurtained south windows.
Harold cleared his throat. We’ve been thinking, he said.
Oh? the girl said.
Yes ma’am, we have. Victoria, we want to take you over to Phillips to do some shopping in the stores. If that’s all right with you. If you don’t have something else planned for the day.
This announcement surprised her. What for? she said.
For fun, Raymond said. For some diversion. Don’t you want to? We thought you might appreciate getting out of the house.
No. I mean, what are we shopping for?
For the baby. Don’t you think this little baby you’re carrying is going to want some place to put his head down some day?
Yes. I think so.
Then we better get him something to do it in.
She looked at him and smiled. What if it’s a girl though?
Then I guess we’ll just have to keep her anyway and make the best of our bad luck, Raymond said. He made an exaggeratedly grave face. But a little girl’s going to want a bed too, isn’t she? Don’t little baby girls get tired too?
They left the house about eleven that morning after the McPheron brothers had finished the morning feeding. They had come back in and washed up and changed into clean pants and clean shirts, and by the time they had put on the good handshaped silverbelly Bailey hats that they wore only to town the girl was already waiting for them, sitting at the kitchen table in her winter coat with the red purse looped over her shoulder.
They set out in the bright cold day, riding in the pickup, the girl seated in the middle between them with a blanket over her lap, with the old papers and sales receipts and fencing pliers and the hot wire testers and the dirty coffee mugs all sliding back and forth across the dashboard whenever they made any sharp turn, driving north toward Holt, passing through town and beneath the new water tower and carrying on north, the country flat and whitepatched with snow and the wheat stubble and the cornstalks sticking up blackly out of the frozen ground and the winter wheat showing in the fallplanted fields as green as jewelry.
—Kent Haruf, Plainsong (Alfred A. Knopf, 1999)
Some thoughts about this book:
• The blurb: “In the small town of Holt, Colorado, a high school teacher is confronted with raising his two boys alone after their mother retreats first to the bedroom, then altogether. A teenage girl—her father long since disappeared, her mother unwilling to have her in the house—is pregnant, alone herself, with nowhere to go. And out in the country, two brothers, elderly bachelors, work the family homestead, the only world they’ve ever known. From these unsettled lives emerges a vision of life, and of the town and landscape that bind them together—their fates somehow overcoming the powerful circumstances of place and station, their confusion, curiosity, dignity and humor intact and resonant. As the milieu widens to embrace fully four generations, Kent Haruf displays an emotional and aesthetic authority to rival the past masters of a classic American tradition.”
• Holt—the setting for all of Haruf’s novels—is fictional, of course, set on the High Plains east of Denver. That I had just driven through this area, western Kansas and Colorado, probably enhanced my enjoyment of this story.
Plainsong won the Mountains & Plains Booksellers Award, the Maria Thomas Award in Fiction, and was a finalist for the National Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and The New Yorker Book Award.
• Kent Haruf is one of those (ahem) Major American Authors I’d been meaning to read but just hadn’t gotten around to. Then he died, leaving behind a just-finished manuscript that was published posthumously (Our Souls at Night), which brought him back to my attention. My friend Robert, who has exquisite taste in lit fic, suggested I read Plainsong.
The New York Times says, “The title clearly alludes to … the unadorned manner of Haruf’s storytelling. But it’s important not to mistake the plainness of this narrative for the minimalism that has become a long-familiar strain in American fiction. Minimalism has often been something of an emotional stunt, a withdrawal, a coyness on the part of the narrator. The pervading minimalist silence is one of contempt, of irony at the very least, an embellishment of the writer’s autonomy. Nothing could be less like “Plainsong.” Haruf allows himself no irony—and yet forsakes no humor—because he never withdraws from these characters or the country they inhabit.”
Oh, I loved this book, although at first I was not sure about it, because the style is not usually what appeals to me, but the writing is lovely (and the humor! you saw it in the excerpt, yes?) and the story, though slow-moving, is so compelling.
• Take this perfect sentence, for example:
The floor looked as hard-swept as if an immigrant woman had used her broom on it.
This gave me such an image! I have known some immigrant women (my first mother-in-law, for example) and this sentence just stopped me in my tracks. The prose is gorgeous. Or from the sample above:
… her hair was shining in the winterslanted sun
… the country flat and whitepatched with snow
… the winter wheat showing in the fallplanted fields
Did you notice that last paragraph of the excerpt is all one sentence? Read it again and tell me how real and lovely it is.
• Writers will find this discussion of Haruf’s writing method (in the Times’s announcement of his death) fascinating:
Kent Haruf pulled a wool cap over his eyes when he sat down at his manual typewriter each morning so he could “write blind,” fully immersing himself in the fictitious small town in eastern Colorado where he set a series of quiet, acclaimed novels, including “Plainsong,” a 1999 best seller. Mr. Haruf often wrote a chapter a day, most recently in a prefabricated shed in the backyard of his home in Salida, Colo., where he died on Sunday at 71.
Punctuation, capitalization, paragraphs — they waited for the second draft. The first draft usually came quickly, a stream of imagery and dialogue that ran to the margins, single-spaced.
In an earlier article there is more detail from Haruf himself:
I remove my glasses, pull a stocking cap down over my eyes, and type the first draft single-spaced on the yellow paper in the actual and metaphorical darkness behind my closed eyes, trying to avoid being distracted by syntax or diction or punctuation or grammar or spelling or word choice or anything else that would block the immediate delivery of the story.
I write an entire scene or section on one side of one page, in a very concentrated and incomplete way. I’m trying to avoid allowing the analytical part of my mind into the process too soon. Instead, I’m trying to stay in touch with subliminal, subconscious impulses and to get the story down in some spontaneous way.
• I was mesmerized and whipped through Plainsong and Evensong (second book in the Plainsong series) quickly. Moved on to John Williams’s Stoner (similar style), and intended to get to Benediction (my husband had finished all three ahead of me). Then I moved further into the year and needed the “light/happy” reading therapy I mentioned, so I have not read Benediction yet. But I will. Fans of trilogies should note that while there is some character crossover in the books, they are only a series, not a continuing storyline.
Tweet: Kent Haruf is one of those (ahem) Major American Authors I’d been meaning to read but just hadn’t gotten around to.
Tweet: Did you notice that last paragraph is all one sentence? Read it again and tell me how real and lovely it is.