Plains Song

by Wright Morris

  Through Sharon’s viewpoint the reader witnesses many of the novel’s crucial events, despite (or because of) the fact that Cora has tried to punish her into voicelessness and silence early on by slapping her palm with the back of a hairbrush. This event, Sharon’s being slapped, is one of the novel’s most important dramatic moments—the sound and feeling of that slap resonate all the way to the end. But the lesson of silence doesn’t take with Sharon in the same way that it did with Cora, and Sharon’s vocation is devoted to making sounds, to being productively enraged and finding a music for her life. And yet, near the end of the book, she realizes that she “had been Cora’s girl.”

  In this respect she fits a classic mode, the character who cannot go home again but, thanks to circumstances and loyalty and ties that cannot be broken, must do so anyway. Like Jim Burden in Willa Cather’s My Ántonia or Miranda in Katherine Anne Porter’s “Old Mortality,” Sharon must revisit the very place she did her best to escape, where the lives were half-submerged or unseemly or broken on one wheel or another. And near the end, when she finds herself in a museum in Lincoln, Nebraska, gazing upon stuffed replicas of the creatures that had once roamed the plains, it occurs to her, as it must also occur to the reader, that she has a personal museum of her own located in her head, filled with memories of extinct creatures whose forms of life have all but vanished. Although she is not one to give herself to the past, she is about to become one of those creatures.

  The women in this novel trade in one kind of strength for another kind, and Sharon is the one to watch the transition, to be there when it happens. She moves from protest to a form of contemplation, a rapturous attention to a world of phantoms. In a characteristic passage, “she felt withdrawn from the scene, as if she saw it through a window, or within the frame of a painting.” So there is our photograph again, bringing us to a scene and also keeping our distance from it.

  The last thirty pages or so of this novel comprise some of the most beautiful and hair-raising prose that Morris ever wrote, and their subject is how a world is lost and other worlds are born in its place. They are written with heartbreaking restraint. In these passages Sharon is paying lyrical attention to what the world lays before her, as if every scrap contained a clue to what is no longer there. What she feels most powerfully is longing. Longing is a particular kind of desire that has lost its way, desire without a clear object. Longing creates search parties and then sends them out into the world without a specific thing to search for. Longing, I would say, is the governing emotion of this book, longing mixed with wonder.

  The conventional novel—and Morris never wrote a conventional novel—begins with a situation that creates a set of questions that the novel then does its best to answer. Morris typically reversed the order. The reader will note that in Plains Song the story begins with assertions but ends with a flood of questions. Has there ever been another novel with so many narrative questions as this one? The last thirty pages are filled with them. They are a testament to the characters’ ability to feel wonder, to gaze upon the world and simultaneously to pose a question without demanding an answer, to remain placidly in that condition.

  Finally, Plains Song is a kind of cabinet of wonders, of things collected, including a green shed with white windows, with cobs inside pressed against the glass; a covey of pale gray doves on the dung-whitened ridge of the shingle roof; a cradle made from a wedge-shaped box used as a feeding trough; a small Axminster rug; new linoleum in the kitchen; a piano; a birthmark where nobody would be likely to see it; Cora and Emerson; Belle and Orion; Sharon; Beulah Madge; Ned Kibbee; and Sharon—among many others. It does little good to list them. You have to go into this world, reader, and discover them for yourself.

  The music of this plains song is marvelously counterpointed and breathtakingly complex. Do not be deceived by the title. As Morris knew, plains does not mean simple. One letter, creating a plural, changes everything.

  PLAINS SONG

  It is a curse in this family that the women bear only daughters, if anything at all.

  “Let her nap,” said a voice. “She needs her nap.”

  Cora does not need a nap, but she welcomes silence. Is the past a story we are persuaded to believe, in the teeth of the life we endure in the present? Even Cora Atkins, whose life is over? Her mind is sealed, like a tomb, but her eyes are open. The humiliations of age have won from her one concession: the nightcap she wears to conceal her baldness. Silken wisps of hair loop over the pulleys of her ears, the parts of her body that have never stopped growing, but the dome of her head is smooth as a gourd. Chairs have been brought in for the visitors to sit on, but none resemble the woman propped up in the bed. Age has eliminated the frills of individual distinction. She looks old, as her grandchildren look young. She was never spry, comforting, or twinkling, and the young are reluctant to call her Grandma to her face. Nor do they raise their faces to her to be kissed. Not that she is cold, unloving, or insensible. She is implacable. Her talon-like hands lie before her, the right placed on the left, a scar blue as gun metal between the first and second knuckle, a seam on the flesh. How did she acquire it? It is said a horse bit her. For a farmer’s wife that is not unusual. She had stood in the doctor’s office, near the glare at the window where he had looked at her hand with the torn flesh, the knuckle bone exposed. “What happened?” he had asked. She had been speechless. Tobacco juice oozing at the corner of his mouth, her husband, Emerson, had said, “Horse bit her.” She had been both relieved and appalled. But she preferred it to admitting she had bitten herself.

  Would it have been better if she had stayed with her father, a gentle man with a cracked, pleading voice? She sees him looming above her, one long arm stretched to the top shelf behind the counter, where a can, with peaches on the label, tilts forward to fall into the hammock of his apron. Before placing it right side up on the counter, he will give the lid a swipe with a wad of the apron. He was reluctant to sell it. He stocked only the best, and hated to sell his stock. Nothing equaled his pleasure, every morning, in sprinkling the floor with sawdust, then sweeping it up. He liked to clean up, to wash up, to fix up. He wore a cap made of a folded Boston newspaper, and licked his fingers after ladling the butter. She saw him best when he leaned forward, his glasses low on his nose, to read the weight on the scales.

  A voice in the room says, “She needs her sleep.”

  What Cora sees, now that her eyes are lidded, is the father slicing cheese, pausing to pick up the crumbs with his moistened finger. The smell of brine in the pickle barrel puckers her lips. But she no longer sees things too clearly. The glass of memory ripples, or is smoked and darkened like isinglass. Her father had written to a brother, who had settled in Ohio, that his daughter was now of marriageable age. A young woman who was taller and stronger than most would surely be appreciated where women were lacking. She was also experienced as a seamstress, and could keep accounts.

  It had been unthinkable, and Cora did not think it, that she would go against her father’s wishes. If it so happened that marriage did not materialize, that disaster would be faced, but one did not think about it. A spinster aunt of Cora’s had spent her entire life traveling from one relation to another, helping with the chores, the sickness, the new babies. She had had the labor and care of children, but none of the insurance for old age. That winter Cora had been twenty, lean rather than thin, with what she had heard described as an English complexion. Her eyes were prominent in her angular face. A portrait taken in Salem is characteristically solemn. She was somewhat fleshier than she would ever be again, but the man who took her arm would find it firm and spare as a rail. Perhaps her height made her unsure of her footing: she walked stiffly, with her elbows lifted. This had the effect of fencing her off from smaller, friendlier people. Kin of her mother, with five marriageable daughters, took her with them on their way to Wisconsin, where it was said that able-bodied girls, on the plump side, would soon find takers.

  In matters of a religious nature, Cora was mo
re into depth of feeling than she was the fine points of dogma. Feeling gave her the truth of the matter, quite beyond the resources of argument. She never lacked for self-knowledge in the matter of vanity. Mirrors impressed her as suspect by nature in the way they presented a graven image. She keenly and truly felt the deception of her reflected glance. Being a practical woman she did not forgo mirrors, but they revealed so little of a person so large she was kept in ignorance. She did her hair in two braids, parted at the rear then curved about her head to meet at the crown, but at twenty years of age she could not tell you what prospect this offered from the rear. She had never held a mirror in such a manner that she might see. A good thing, perhaps, since the wide part showed too much of her bone-white scalp, and the exposure of neck revealed the knobby vertebrae of the spine like a clenched fist. Neither had she (since a child) gazed with open eyes on what the Lord had created below her neck. Long underwear concealed it most of the year, with the assistance of lamplight and early darkness, and she would have sooner spied on her father than glanced at the mirror to see her own nude body. Was that in modesty or repugnance? She needed no mirror to be fully aware that her clothes hung on her body as if from a hanger, and no seamstress would refer to her chest as a bust. Her able-bodied second cousins were well endowed in this department, but slow-witted and lazy. Their mother turned to Cora when she wanted something done. “God pity the men you marry!” she would say too often, but there was never any doubt that men would. From their father she had the disturbing assurance that ignorant and inexperienced young men might overlook her, but a man with kids to raise, who had lost a wife, would see in her the virtues of a good hired hand. They left her with her Uncle Myron, a hotel and stable owner, who did most of his business with travelers from the east, but there were occasionally men from the west who returned to replenish their supplies of horses and livestock, hardware and software, beans and bacon, flour and lard, seed grain, tobacco, and perhaps a wife.

  Just the previous fall Emerson Atkins had gone west with his brother, Orion, to homestead government land on the great plains. The rich land along the Platte River had been settled, but just north of the Elkhorn, in Madison County, the brothers settled a claim and spent the season planting trees for shade and shelter. A cautious, some would say suspicious man, Emerson thought it better to return to Ohio for supplies than deal with the sharks at the Missouri crossings.

  Emerson—he had the name from a pastor, admired by his mother—had the stolid heavy-bottomed figure and slow deliberate movements of a man of forty. His brother, Orion, looked half his age, but at twenty-five was just two years his junior. The spring Emerson met Cora he was clean-shaven, but the previous winter he had been bearded. His hair was brown, but one saw little of it since he took most of his meals with his hat on. A broom straw or long stem of grass was usually wagging at the front of his mouth. He had found it cheaper to chew tobacco than smoke it, so he chewed it. As a rule he was polite but ill at ease with young women, whom he knew to have cagey designs on men. He differed from the blonder, friendlier Orion, however, in not considering himself a “catch.” He gave the impression that he was prudent and assured, but not vain. Any decision at all—such as what to eat on the dinner menu—prompted Emerson into periods of brooding but did not make him impatient. Impatient waitresses could walk away, as they usually did, or wait for him to reach a decision. Cora distinguished herself by waiting. Glancing up to see who it was, it was her that he saw. In the course of a week he removed his hat before taking his seat at the table. Although inexperienced, Cora knew men from boys. The slow, almost drawling speech of Emerson had the effect of putting her at her ease. His humor was drier than any she had heard; even his eyes betrayed no twinkle. A watch that he wound with a key occupied his attention after eating, the hinged lid of the case reflecting the lamplight on the room’s pressed-tin ceiling. From her uncle she learned that his name was Emerson, which she thought appropriate.

  It flatters a man to possess a woman who attracts the envious glances of other men, with her exceptional carriage or well-turned ankles, but a subtler admiration may be aroused if the woman is lacking in such attractions. A plain woman may well have been chosen for her character, or womanly nature, or because the poor devil actually loved her. In any case, the man’s motives might have been of a higher rather than a lower order. Such a woman gets a second, appraising look to determine what it is the man sees in her. Such a man is judged as subtly superior to the attractions that contribute little to a sound marriage, the establishment of a home, and the proper rearing of a family. It reassures those men who have made a similar decision, and is the envy of those who have acted less wisely.

  A young woman six feet tall, with an English complexion, is not accurately described as plain. Cora’s solemn face, her sober gaze, brought to most men’s minds some image of a schoolmarm, and this seemed appropriate to her height. She wore practical blouses, sateen cuffs to protect the sleeves, and in the way of ornament a small gold pin at the collar. The under garments appropriate to all women gave her hips a roundness that was deceptive, but nothing could have been further from her purpose. What could a woman do if modest attire merely enhanced what she meant to conceal? The question is rhetorical: so far as is known, she never asked it. She saw enough of Emerson Atkins in his two-week stay—he extended it a week because of the weather—to grow more or less accustomed to his “joshing” and listen with interest to his comments. She heard the name Ryan innumerable times before she grasped that he meant to say O-rion, the name of his younger brother. His manner of speech was droll, as well as slurred, and led her to be a more attentive listener. Telling a story, for example, he said “s’i,” for “says I,” or “s’ee,” for “says he,” which she found highly irregular and often confusing. She managed to learn that ’Rion had been left on the farm, where he was building a house and putting in the first crop. There was neither pride nor affection in his voice, but that might have been due to his manner. Each brother had his own piece of land, but they planned to pool their resources and farm it together. That way the equipment to handle one farm would farm two. Together they would build separate homes, then lead separate lives. ’Rion understood that. Being brothers, they had seen enough of each other growing up.

  Nor did it seem unusual to Cora that a man like Emerson would confide in a stranger. He was alone. He had much of the day to sit around and talk. As the only child of a widowed father, Cora was long accustomed to the talk of men. Her father had talked cheese, and quality canned goods, which he preferred to keep rather than sell. Emerson Atkins was a farmer. He talked knowledgeably of horses, Holstein cows, compared Plymouth Rocks to Leghorns, and pigs to hogs. In a new country, like it was, he saw a future in dairy products and hogs.

  From her Uncle Myron’s wife, a woman both plain and worn, and for that reason more sympathetic to Cora, she learned that Mr. Atkins had inquired if she might be open to an offer of marriage. Was she flabbergasted? So her uncle reported in a letter to her father. “Dear Cora is flabbergasted,” he wrote, “by the prospect of life west of the Missouri …,” an outright falsehood since it had not crossed her mind to ask or to wonder what his farm might be west of. Unmentioned in the letter, but implicit, was the fact that if Emerson left without her, he would hardly return such a distance for her. Mr. Atkins possessed, in Myron’s opinion, the experience and capital to make a good marriage. He evinced no bad habits. To speak frankly—and he went on to do it—Cora was no prize, although her attainments were considerably beyond the ordinary. She was excellent at figures. As a wife she would be both sensible and frugal. The uncle would recommend that Cora accept Mr. Atkins, if she felt no aversion toward him, but he would not press her in this decision since he judged her to be of an independent cast of mind, a young woman who could act and think for herself.

  If a distinction might be made, Cora felt more dazed than flabbergasted. She had assumed she would have time to acquaint herself with suitors, or would feel toward one of them a strong at
traction. Nor had she dreamed that she would become a bride without an engagement. On the other hand, she certainly felt no aversion, if one excepted his habit of chewing and spitting tobacco. Before he spat, his lips puckered like a fat hen’s bottom; afterward he gave them a twist, between his thumb and forefinger, to clean them. It was something that custom would accustom a woman to. A young seamstress from Buffalo, with a child but no husband, confided to Cora that a long engagement might deprive a woman of what little pleasure a marriage offered. She seemed willing to explain herself, if encouraged, but Cora felt it a breach of the marriage vows to openly discuss such a question. First of all, she knew nothing. What she would come to learn was for her alone to know.

  A further word from Mr. Atkins—hardly a stratagem; it seemed unlikely his mind worked in such a manner—admitted that the suddenness of his proposal might be unfair to Miss Cora, as he called her, and suggested that she might postpone her decision for the two or three weeks he would be on the road. In Omaha he would find her considered answer. If it was yes, he would wait and she would come on by train to join him. This concession pleased Cora and surely testified to Mr. Atkins’s good sense and honorable intent. At the same time it assured Cora that such a postponement was not advisable. What better time to enlarge her knowledge and understanding of her husband than a leisurely trip across the woodlands and prairies in the spring of the year? Not soon again—the young seamstress assured her—would she spend idle days in the seat of a buggy, and eat meals prepared by others. For Cora, more fortunate than most women, this trip would constitute her honeymoon, the pause between her life such as it had once been and the endless chores of a farmer’s wife.