Plainsong

by Kent Haruf

  Who?

  Doris. She works here.

  I met her, yes.

  What do you think about her?

  She’s nice.

  She’s a bitch. She locked me out and called the cops on me.

  Oh, the girl said. She watched him, to see what he was going to do.

  What do you think I got in the car? he said. Go ahead, think about it.

  I don’t know.

  I got a gun out there, he said, looking straight into her eyes. With three shells loaded in it. Cause there’s three of us. Her, me and her goddamn dog. I’d love to kill that son of a bitch. I can’t stand that son of a bitch. You think I’m crazy, don’t you.

  I don’t know you.

  I am crazy. That fucking dog. I wouldn’t hurt you though. When do you get off?

  I’m not sure yet.

  Sure you are.

  No. It may be later. I don’t always know.

  Here. I’ll buy some chewing gum. I got her goddamn dog anyway. I got him out in the car with me right now. She can lock me out but I got her dog. I can start with him if that’s what she wants. Okay, don’t work too hard, he said. He took his package of gum and went outside.

  The girl watched him get into his car and drive away and she made a note of his license plates and gave the numbers to the manager, and in the following days she watched the newspapers for anything about the man, but nothing was ever reported. Doris, when she was told about him, said he was more or less harmless. She didn’t know what the girl was talking about, she didn’t have a dog. The last dog she’d had was five years ago.

  In Denver Dwayne took her to a few parties. They attended one on a Friday night at the apartment of some people he knew from work, Carl and Randy. Randy was a big tall girl with tight jeans and skinny legs, and she wore a little tube top and had fixed breasts. Carl was a talker. By the time they got there he was wound up. There were lots of other people in the apartment too. They were all drinking and smoking and on the coffee table a basket of joints was set out for anybody’s use. The walls of the room were covered with tinfoil, with blinking Christmas lights still up, and the room was hot and the music was going so loud she could feel it in her stomach. People were dancing and laughing. One girl was dancing on the sofa, flinging her hair back and forth. A boy was dancing between two girls, in a routine of bumping hips. Randy brought her a drink from the next room and she stood back against the wall and watched, and Dwayne went into the kitchen with Carl. Randy looked at her and said, Hey, enjoy, you know? and smiled brilliantly and spread her arms in a gesture, meaning: You can have all of this, and disappeared. She stood against the wall, watching.

  Later she went out to the kitchen to find Dwayne. He was seated at the table playing euchre and drinking with some others and she stood behind him, and once he put his hand on her stomach and said, How’s my little man? and patted her and drank from his glass. She watched the game for a while and wandered away to find the bathroom. The door was closed and she knocked and somebody opened it enough that she saw in quickly, and there were two boys sitting on the edge of the bathtub waiting their turn while a girl was taking on another boy on the toilet. The girl was naked from her waist down, her long white legs spread out, and the girl might have been Randy, but she couldn’t see her well enough since the door was closed so fast, the boy who opened it only saying, Wrong place. Upstairs.

  When Dwayne took her home it was about four in the morning. By that time she had been coaxed into drinking four or five vodka Squirts and taking hits from the joint whenever it came around. She was so out of place and so lonely she couldn’t care for a while, she wanted something like everybody else did, and in time she ended up losing herself to the music and the crowd-feeling, and danced and danced, holding herself under her stomach, supporting the baby while she twirled around the room. When she woke the next morning she felt sick immediately, as she had in the first months, except it was for a different reason now. There was a red bruise high up on her leg that she could feel with her fingers though she had no memory of where it had come from. She turned in the bed. Dwayne was still sleeping beside her. She lay for a long time feeling sick and sad. She looked at the bar of sunlight that showed thinly along the edge of the window shade. She didn’t even know what the weather was doing anymore. The sun was shining but what else was there? She drifted into a daze of sorrow and disbelief. She didn’t want to think what any of the night before might have done to her baby. She could only remember the first of it. She could remember the dancing, but there were other things too. She didn’t want to think about them. But it was what she couldn’t remember that scared her most.

  McPherons.

  There came a night at the end of winter when Raymond McPheron went into town for a meeting of the board of governors of the Holt County Farmers’ Co-op Elevator. He was one of the seven farmers and ranchers elected to the board. When the meeting was over he drove out with some of the men for a drink at the Legion, and he was sitting at a table with them when the man across from him, not one of the farmers but a man in town he knew by name only, said:

  Too bad that little girl didn’t work out.

  I think so, Raymond said.

  You got some good out of her anyway, I guess.

  What do you mean?

  You taking turns with her, I mean. Was that how it was? Tell us the truth now. Was it sweet? The man grinned. He had little even teeth, well-spaced.

  Raymond looked at him for a time, not saying anything. Then he leaned over the table and took hold of his wrist just below the shirt cuff and said, You say something like that again about Victoria Roubideaux and I’ll cave your fuckin head in.

  Well what in the hell? the man said. He tried to pull back. Let go of me.

  You heard what I said, Raymond told him.

  Turn loose. I never meant nothing.

  Yeah. You did.

  I’m just saying what others have.

  I’m not talking to no others.

  Turn loose of me. What the hell’s a-wrong with you?

  You mind me. Don’t you even think something like that again about her.

  Then Raymond opened his hand and let go. The man stood up. You dumb old son of a bitch, he said. I was joking.

  You got some of that right, Raymond said.

  The man looked at him, then walked over and stood at the bar and spoke to the bartender and a second man standing there. They had seen what happened. He talked to them, rubbing his wrist, looking back at Raymond.

  At the table Raymond finished his beer and got up and went outside to his pickup and drove home in the moonless late-winter night. When he was back inside the house again he walked into the girl’s bedroom and switched on the overhead light and stood looking at the old double bed with the quilt on it and the new crib against the wall with the new sheet stretched tight over it and the blanket folded down, all of it in readiness yet for the girl and the baby just as it had been before the girl had left that other morning and not come back. He stood looking around the room for some time. Thinking, remembering, considering different things here and there. Finally he switched the light off and went upstairs and paused in the hall. He stood in the open door to his brother’s bedroom. You awake? he said.

  I am now, Harold said. I heard you come up the stairs. You must be flat perturbed about something, for the racket you was making. The room was dark, with just the light from the hall shining in. A pale square of window at the back wall gave out onto the yard and barn and corrals. Harold raised up in bed. What’s the matter? Something go wrong at the board meeting? Corn prices gone to hell?

  No.

  What then?

  I went out for a drink afterward. At the Legion there with some of em.

  Yeah? They haven’t made that a crime yet. What about it?

  You know they’re talking, Raymond said.

  Who is?

  People in town. They’re talking about Victoria. About you and me with her. Saying things about the three of us.

&nbs
p; So that’s what this is about, is it? Harold said. What did you expect would happen? Two old men take in a girl out here in the country, with nobody else around to look in on em. And the girl is young and good-looking even if she is pregnant, and the two old men that’s keeping her are still men even if they are about as old and dried up as some of this calcified horse shit. It’s going to happen. People are going to talk.

  Maybe they are, Raymond said. He looked at his brother in the dark room with the window squared behind him. Only I don’t care for it, he said. They can keep their goddamn mouths off her. I don’t care for it even a little bit.

  There isn’t a whole hell of a lot you can do about it.

  Maybe not, Raymond said. He turned to cross the hallway to enter his own room, then he turned back. I might even come to understand that too, he said. But that don’t mean I got to like it. That don’t mean I’m ever going to get so I got to like it.

  Ike and Bobby.

  In the early morning they woke in the same bed at almost the same moment, with the stain already visible and distinct above the north windows across the room. Ike got up and began to dress. Then Bobby got up and dressed while his brother stood beneath the water stain, looking out the windows past the well-house toward the barn and fence and windmill. Beyond the fence Elko was doing something to himself. Look at that crazy son of a bitch, Ike said.

  Who?

  Elko.

  Bobby looked at him.

  Then he was dressed and they went downstairs where Guthrie was drinking black coffee and smoking cigarettes at the kitchen table, and as usual on a Sunday morning, reading something, a newspaper or magazine opened to the sunlight on the table. Passing through the kitchen they went down off the porch and on across the gravel in a hurry. They opened the gate and stepped into the corral. But the horse wasn’t dead then. He was still only kicking himself in the stomach. He was standing off by himself against the barn, away from Easter and the cats, and the sweat was dark along his neck and ribs and flanks. While they watched he dropped down into the dirt and rolled, his feet kicking into the air like a black bug or insect overturned and crawling its legs, his belly exposed while he rolled, lighter colored than the rest of him, brownish, and then he grunted and stood up again and swung his long black head back across his shoulder to look at his stomach. Immediately he began to kick at himself as if he were tormented by flies. But it wasn’t flies. They watched him for another minute, until he fell down onto the dirt again beside the barn, then they ran back to the house.

  Guthrie was at the stove, stirring eggs. Wait, he said. Can’t one of you boys talk at a time?

  They told him again.

  All right, he said. I’ll go look. But you stay here. Eat your breakfast.

  He went outside. They could hear his steps on the porch. When the screen door slapped shut they sat down at the bare wooden table against the wall and began to eat, sitting across from each other, chewing quietly and then listening and looking at each other and beginning to chew again, their brown heads and blue eyes almost identical above the crockery plates. When he finished eating, Ike stood up and looked out the window. He’s coming back, he said.

  I guess he’s going to die, Bobby said.

  Who is?

  Your horse. I guess he’s going to die today.

  No he isn’t. Eat your breakfast.

  I already ate my breakfast.

  Well eat some more.

  Guthrie came back into the house. He crossed to the phone and called Dick Sherman. They talked briefly. Then he hung up and Ike said: What’s he going to do to him? He’s not going to hurt him, is he?

  No. He’s already hurt.

  But what makes him do that?

  I’m not sure.

  Was he still kicking himself?

  Yes. There’s something the matter with him. Something in his stomach, I guess. Dick’ll look him over.

  I guess he’s going to die, Bobby said.

  You be quiet, Bobby.

  He could die though.

  But you don’t know that. You don’t know anything about it. So keep your mouth shut.

  Stop now, Guthrie said.

  The two boys looked at each other.

  Both of you, he said. And you better go get your papers started. I heard the train half an hour ago. It’s time you were leaving.

  Can’t we do it later?

  No. People pay on time and they want their papers on time.

  But just this once? Dick Sherman’ll be gone already.

  He might be. And if he is I’ll tell you about it. Go ahead now.

  You won’t let him hurt him.

  No, I won’t let him hurt him. But Dick wouldn’t anyway.

  Anyway, Bobby said. He’s hurt already.

  They went back outside into that early morning cold sunlight for the second time and walked their bikes out of the yard. They looked toward the barn and corral. Elko was still humped on three legs, still kicking. They mounted the bikes and rode out of the driveway onto the loose gravel on Railroad Street and east a half mile to the Holt depot.

  When they were finished with their paper route they met again at Main and Railroad and rode home. It was a little warmer now. It was about eight-thirty and they were sweating a little under the hair on their foreheads. They rode past the old light plant beside the tracks. When they passed Mrs. Frank’s house on Railroad Street and then the line of lilac bushes in her side yard, the new little heart-shaped leaves beginning to open along the branches now, they could see the extra pickup was still in the driveway at home, parked beside the corral.

  Anyway, Ike said, he’s not done with him yet. That’s Dick Sherman’s pickup.

  I bet he’s still kicking, Bobby said. Kicking and grunting.

  They rode on, pedaling over the loose gravel, past the narrow pasture and the silver poplar and turned in at the drive and left their bikes at the house. They approached the corral but didn’t enter; instead they looked through the fence boards. Elko was on the ground now. Their father and Dick Sherman were standing beside him, talking. He was down on his side in the corral dirt with his neck reached out as if he meant to drink at the barn’s limestone block foundation. They could see one of his dark eyes. The eye was open, staring, and they wondered if the other eye was open too like that, staring blindly into the dirt under his head, filling with it. His mouth was open and they could see his big teeth, yellow and dirt-coated, and his salmon tongue. Their father saw them through the fence and came over.

  How long have you boys been here?

  Not very long.

  You better go back to the house.

  They didn’t move. Ike was still looking through the fence into the corral. He’s dead. Isn’t he? he said.

  Yes. He is, son.

  What happened to him?

  I don’t know. But you better go back to the house. Dick’s going to try to find out.

  What’s he going to do to him?

  He has to cut him open. It’s called an autopsy.

  What for? Bobby said. If he’s already dead.

  Because that’s how we find out. But I don’t think you want to watch this.

  Yes we do, Ike said. We want to watch.

  Guthrie studied them for a moment. They stood before him across the fence, blue-eyed, the sweat drying on their foreheads, waiting in silence, a little desperate now but still patient and still waiting.

  All right, he said. But you ought to go up to the house. You won’t like it.

  We know, Ike said.

  I don’t think you do, son.

  Well, said Bobby. We’ve seen chickens before.

  Yes. But this isn’t chickens.

  They sat on the fence and watched it all. For most of it Dick Sherman used a knife with a steel handle, which was easier to clean up afterward, and there wasn’t the problem of a wooden handle’s breaking. It was a sharp knife and he began by stabbing it into the horse’s stomach and working it sawlike along his length, sawing up through the tough hide and brownish hair a
nd pulling with his other hand to open the cut wider. When the knife grew slippery with blood he wiped it and his red hands on the hair over the ribs. Then the yard-long incision had been made and Dick Sherman and their father began to peel back the hide, their father pulling the upper flap of skin and hair backward while Sherman shaved at it underneath, freeing the hide from the ribs and stomach lining, exposing a thin layer of yellow fat and the fine sheaf of red muscle. Dick Sherman was kneeling at the horse’s stomach with the knife and their father was crouched over his back. Both men had begun to sweat. Their shirts showed darker along the back and their faces shone. But they paused only briefly, routinely, to wipe their forearms across their shining foreheads, then fell to work again over the prone horse, whose one visible eye, as far as the boys could determine from the fence, had not changed at all but was still wide open, still staring indifferently into the blank featureless sky above the barn as if he didn’t know or didn’t care what was being done to him, or as if he had decided at last not to look anywhere else ever again. But Dick Sherman wasn’t finished yet.

  He drove the knife into the groin inside the top back leg to cut through that big muscle so he could sever the tendon in the joint. Afterward, with their father’s help, the leg could be pulled back away, leaving the gut exposed and accessible. It took a while, stabbing and probing, to find the tendon and then to free the joint, but he found it finally.

  Try it, Sherman said. See can you pull his leg back, Tom.

  Their father took Elko at the back cannon and pulled hard, wrenching it, carrying the long fine-boned leg back and up so that it stood up now into the air almost perpendicular to his body, awful-looking, horrible. Sitting on the fence, watching it, the boys began to understand that Elko was dead.

  The rich muscle at his groin where Dick Sherman had opened him lay thick and heavy and raw, exposed to view like steak. The hide had torn some when their father pulled and was bleeding along the tear. But now the gut could be opened. Sherman cut into the stomach lining. Then the yellow bags and the blue knots of stuff spilled out onto the dirt and the wispy manure. There was mucousy blood and fluid, yellow- and amber-colored. The transparent membranes shone silver in the sun.