Plains Song

by Wright Morris

Chores held no terrors for Cora—quite the contrary, something as explicit as chores were welcome—but implicit in the words of the ceremony were thoughts that clouded her mind long after they were spoken. The marriage itself, in the house of her uncle, rooms having been added to accommodate his growing family, was attended by members of the pastor’s family. A man of strong religious feeling, he carried the faith to his flock by horseback. Some of what he said confused her, but his emotion sealed her vows. She might, and she would, suffer from what was understood to be bondage, but she would never question that it had been sanctioned by God.

  From her window the following morning, she observed her husband bargaining with a man to drive the wagon loaded with supplies and tend to the team. Cora raised the window to remind him that she was not lacking experience with horses. The young man was not pleased to lose the offer of a job, but he smiled with admiration at Cora. Never before had she felt so keenly the pleasurable flush of her own importance. Emerson’s sober gaze seemed more respectful.

  “You’ll feel it in the back,” he said to her later, and put a hand to that area where she would feel it, a liberty, surely, but with no more pressure than a waiter guiding her to a table. They had not exchanged glances. From the first they had done their talking with their eyes averted, as if collecting their thoughts.

  After the first day’s drive she felt it more in the shoulders, but she knew that the back would come later. She found it a relief to walk beside the buggy where the going was slow, her skirts sweeping the grass. The Illinois prairie was like nothing she had seen, but in harmony with much that she had imagined. Having lived near the sea, she was familiar with boundless horizons. Calling his name aloud, hearing him answer, reconciled her to its strangeness. He was Emerson. He pronounced the word “Cora” as he did “caw.” In the fall, on his trip east, Emerson had experienced troublesome clouds of mosquitoes and insects, but in early April they had few complaints but the muscular soreness and the morning chill. She slept on a place he had prepared in the wagon, he slept beneath. This seemed to her an example of the wisdom she might expect from her husband. It was not the time or place, weary and physically sore, for whatever it was she had been led to expect. The ground was soggy and thawing, but they were spared heavy rains. Between the pages of a book of ladies’ fashions Cora pressed flowers for which she lacked names. Was this what she would find where they were going? Emerson seemed to be of two opinions. The soil had more sand in it. The prevailing wind blew from the southwest. Most people noticed the sparseness of trees, but that would change as more were planted. Hundreds had been planted. In a few years they would give cool shade. In a six-hour period enough rain had fallen to fill a milk pail to overflowing. It was easier to wait and see what happened than to say what might.

  She came to see that her husband was a man of few words, and one unvarying mood. His voice might be raised, in handling the horses, but she saw no rise in his temper. When he walked beside the wagon, to stretch his legs, he had the lumbering gait, the downcast eyes, of a horse at ease in the harness. His nature was like that of good livestock. Accustomed to pauses, he would sometimes sit with the reins in his hands, letting the team wander. From what he told her, Orion was different. He liked to hunt, and tinker with machinery. In some ways he bewildered Emerson, but only if he saw too much of him. As soon as it could be managed he would have his own place.

  Cora welcomed demands of a useful nature, such as the chores of a household, the mending of clothes, the care and hoarding of limited resources, but she had given little thought to the breeding of children. They would come. It was for this he had taken a wife. Whatever Emerson’s feelings or thoughts in such matters, they were like hers in that he kept them to himself. This shared characteristic made for repose, whether they stopped to rest the horses or prepare for the night, but what was not shared in this unspoken manner seemed to strain the efforts of speech. Cora could frame the thought, she could choose the words, but his reposeful silence made her reluctant to speak. She looked forward to Burlington, a Mississippi River crossing, where they would stay in an inn, take baths, and Emerson would shave. In the scrub of his beard his face seemed to lack features. His eyes, creased by the wind and the light, were gray as gooseberries, and showed no whites. He seemed startled by her speech, replying, “How’s ’at?” in a way that she found distracting. That would change when they were free of the creak of the wagon, and the open air she found intimidating. Her voice might crack, uncertain of its volume or pitch. In Burlington, after a heavy meal, she put herself to bed. He came back from his bath smelling of soap, his face nicked by the razor, his hair up wild from his scrubbed scalp, his thick body tight in a suit of oatmeal-colored flannel. For some time, as if alone, he sat on the edge of the bed rubbing his scalp. His hair needed cutting: his head, seen from the back, was like that of a just plucked chicken. Nor was he in a hurry. Her heart pounded as he stooped to trim his nails. The words of the seamstress came to her with such force that she saw him as an utter stranger. Before he puffed the lamp out and rolled toward her, the bed creaking like the body of the wagon, her dismay had given way to a dread that paralyzed her will. When he moved on her, his groping hands confusing the sheet with her nightgown, she had already put her clenched fist into her mouth and stared sightlessly at the ceiling. What did she experience? It might be likened to an operation without the anesthesia. Horror exceeded horror. The time required by her assailant to do what must be done left her in shock. In the dawn light she found that she had bitten through the flesh of her hand, exposing the bone. Emerson’s bafflement moved him to speech. Aloud he asked how such a thing might have happened. Unable to grasp it, he seemed to doubt what it was he saw. He was able to escort her to the lobby, however, and inquire where they might find a doctor. One block down the street, over a pharmacy, his name shadowed on the half-drawn blind at the window, Dr. Talbot’s office was blue with cigar smoke, through which Cora saw the skeleton suspended in the corner. To see Cora’s wound clearly, he raised the blind at the window.

  “How did this happen?” he asked her, but she had been speechless. He had turned to Emerson, whose lips were puckered to hold in his chew. He looked about for a spittoon, saw one near the desk, lowered his head to relieve himself, then said, “Horse bit her.”

  With Emerson Dr. Talbot exchanged a glance of understanding. He advised her to be more cautious with horses, and soak the hand, twice a day, in hot water to which Epsom salts had been added. This puzzled and interested Emerson, familiar with the use of salts for other discomforts. The two men discussed horses and farming while the doctor cleaned the wound with alcohol. They then returned to the hotel, where Emerson had his breakfast in the restaurant off the lobby while Cora sat in the bedroom, soaking her hand in hot water. The pain seemed to settle her disordered emotions. Emerson’s shameless falsehood had appalled her, but she did not take it as a personal betrayal. He was a man, and spoke this way to other men. As other women had hinted, the time would come when her eyes would be opened and she would be tested. In her soul she knew that one life had ended, and another begun.

  Later she removed the bloodied sheet from the bed and wore it under her skirts when Emerson came for her, her blood feverish with emotions that both pleased and shamed her. His offer to help her to the seat of the buggy she declined, managing by herself, gripping the reins in the manner of a woman familiar with the bite of a horse.

  While Emerson had been in Ohio, acquiring supplies and a wife, Orion and a part-time hired hand had built a two-room structure with a gabled roof, a loft in the east end of the gable, it being the custom among settlers who could afford it to build a small, temporary dwelling while constructing the main house. Orion being the one with an eye for the ladies, it had never crossed his mind his brother would return with a wife. This woman with the bandaged hand and the somber expression (two inches taller than Orion before she put her shoes on), the morning she arrived, her bag still unpacked, her hand in a sling improvised from a flour sack, cleaned o
ut the mess he had made during the winter and rearranged the house to her liking. To Orion’s offer of help (Emerson had been silent, as if this had been determined beforehand) she replied that when she couldn’t take care of a house she would not be moving into it. These words were not spoken rudely, but in the interests of clarification. With the bed occupied by the newlyweds, a place was found for Orion behind the new range, where it was close but snug. Although it was Cora’s work, being part of her domain, Orion was allowed to shake down the ashes and start up a new cob fire in the morning—it started with a whoosh, when sprinkled with coal oil—since it seemed rude for her to do it with him lying on the floor behind it. It was Emerson’s pleasure to fill the pails at the pump and return them to the porch without spilling. Orion could not seem to do that, the length of his legs, or his arms, causing them to sway in such a manner they splashed. Framed in the door (where he was out of her way), Orion would wait to be called to the table, where he would eat with his eyes on his food rather than lift them and gaze at Cora. From the back side, her arms lifted, she reminded him of a witch. What did he know of witches? He had seen them pasted on schoolhouse windows. Feeling his eyes on her back, she had said, “Have you nothing to do but sit and stare like a calf?” Her voice was not shrill, but it was penetrating. Gripped in her good hand, as she spoke to him, she held the nickel-plated wire-handled plate lifter. He stopped staring at her. He spied on her, of course, with quick furtive glances, but what she saw in his face gave her little reason to scowl at him. He was merely dumfounded, an emotion known to her personally.

  Orion was almost blond, open-mouthed in a somewhat loutish, adenoidal manner, but he was more responsive than Emerson and not indifferent to a show of feeling. It pleased Cora to note the change in his expression. The calf-like open-mouthed bafflement had changed to ill-concealed admiration. She was indeed a strange beanpole of a woman, but he accepted her as a remarkable wife.

  There are women who like to work but do not know how, and women who hate work who push themselves to exhaustion, hardly knowing and never learning that work, in itself, is gratifying. That work was never done reassured Cora. She knew how to work, and asked only that she work to an end. Having worked, she had need to look around and see what she had done. Understandably, her hand recovered quickly, shamed to hang idle in the noose from her neck, and the healing of this wound proved to be of untiring interest to Orion. What would lead a horse, or anything else, to bite a woman’s hand? He differed from Emerson, who had little interest in such misfortunes, even his own. A jack used to raise or lower the level of the house slipped the cog that held it while his hand was beneath it, smashing three fingers. They looked like pulped mash. Cora’s face had blanched to see it: she thought she might faint. The only sound from Emerson, after a few muttered curses, was the statement, “I figure I’ll lose the two in the middle.” He lost the first knuckle of the middle finger, but it could have been worse if it had been the first one, or worse yet if it had been the thumb. Orion was not of that metal, and moaned aloud for two nights with the infection and swelling of an ingrown toenail, with another two days wasted while he sat on a stool soaking the foot in a basin. Emerson came and went as if Orion no longer lived in the house.

  The building of the new house was delayed by the need to get the first crops in. The hired hand who helped with plowing was full of advice on the subject of farming. He had been an egg candler, in Illinois, but he had to shift to farming in a country so barren they lacked even eggs to candle. He proved to be a good and willing worker during those hours he had nobody to talk to.

  A shed was added to the house for him to sleep in, screened at the windows with mosquito netting. The extra space would also shelter a washing machine, and a cream separator shipped from Kansas City. A greater interruption, lasting several weeks, was the piecemeal arrival of the parts of the windmill. Having seen one, Emerson had to have one, although he lacked the livestock to really use it. When the parts were assembled, he had to admit he had no idea how to put it all together. Nor did the hired hand. A man came from Omaha to supervise the construction, staying over on Sunday to go hunting with Orion. Once the contraption was up, the wheel gleaming like a sunburst, the pump working at night while the rest of them rested, Cora marveled how the farm had done without it. The creak of the wheel at night gave her comfort and assurance. The sight of it in the morning was like a church steeple. It moved and awed her to watch it shift with the wind, as if on orders from on high. Until the trees grew higher, the spinning wheel was the first thing she saw, on returning from Battle Creek, eight miles east of Norfork, the wife of a farmer who had finally become a farmer’s wife.

  In the spring, mistakes were detected in the work done over the winter. A miscalculation in the tilt of the roof meant that the second-floor windows were level with the floor, but by raising the lower pane the floor could be swept into the open, until they put up the screens. The hired hand was at pains to tell her that, his crooked face straight.

  To save the time lost coming in from the fields at noon, Cora would carry a pail of food to Emerson, which he would eat while the team rested. She might find him at the far end of the section, coming toward her so slowly he hardly seemed to move. Above the creak of the harness she would hear the swish of the stiff denim between his thighs. With the horses his manner was courtly: he addressed the mare as “girl,” the roan stallion as “boy.” The wind brought his voice to her, the clear Gee and Haw as the furrow wavered. The beasts walked with their heads low, the worn patches on their pelts gleaming. In the deep trough of the furrow, the plow blade in the earth, they appeared to be straining to pull Emerson. Until he arrived, looping the reins about one handle, she might be flushed with pleasurable anticipation.

  Emerson’s great deliberation, his concern for the fly nets, his shuffling about to pull up grass for the team, held Cora’s attention as if she were spellbound but at a remove from what she was seeing. His muttered remarks were for the horses, the slap and stroke of his hand caresses. From the pail she had brought him he would take the buttermilk and drink it half down, then give a rumbling belch. Silently he would eat while she stood watching. The dark furrows he had just plowed seemed to please both him and the birds. Orion might encourage Cora to stand close for a moment and talk, while he showed her something turned up by the plow, but neither arrowheads nor bones held interest for Emerson. His pleasure was to cup a handful of the moist loam, letting it sift between his fingers, or smooth it out on his rough palm as if looking for something. It did not please him that Cora took the time to carry food to Orion, on his own section. In reference to Orion, he first called to her attention that a woman in her condition shouldn’t overtire herself. His manner was that it was something she might have overlooked if he hadn’t brought it up.

  Had Cora ever doubted that the nightmare she had survived would result in a child? The logic of it was clear and not to be questioned. The gift of life was holy, and one paid for it dearly. The drama of creation, as she now understood it, a coming together of unearthly forces, was not unlike the brute and blind disorder of her unthinkable experience. So it was meant to be, and so she had found it. Toward Emerson she felt no personal anger, admitting to the necessity of an accomplice. Only in this wise could the mortal body bring forth new life.

  The pastor in Battle Creek, learning of her condition, referred to her discomfort as wages. She pondered this, but did not fully understand it. Stretched on her back, she watched the mound of her body swell to conceal the iron frame at the foot of the bed. In the hollow at her side Emerson slept soundly, and she was grateful for his indifference. Orion was always up before her to fetch the basket of cobs, build a fire, and fill the air with the astringent smell of coal oil. The whoosh and crackle of the flames, the sound of water dipped from the pail to splash in the wash pan, began a day that Emerson would end by winding the alarm clock on the range hood, the alarm set for five. That it seldom rang did not arouse his comment. It was part of the clock, and required windi
ng, to ensure that the sun would rise in the morning. The first cackling of her pullets, before the first light of dawn, always found Cora awake.

  It seemed ordained to her, rather than by chance, as did the sensible progress of the seasons, that as she grew larger and slower, so did the days grow shorter and the work lessen, accommodating itself to her situation. At prescribed periods, on the doctor’s recommendation, she got off her feet. Her long, tapering hands, one with the blue-scarred knuckle, rested on her swollen body as if to calm it, or respond to an expected signal. Appraising her wide hips, the doctor assured her that childbirth would give her little trouble. How could he have known that she found that prediction disappointing? Had she endured so much for a birth of little moment? From day to day, however, being with child gave her the satisfaction of work soon to be completed, a harvest to which she could look forward. One day differed so little from another only Sundays held her attention. She liked the prayer and the worship less than she did the singing of the hymns. Although Emerson had observed the Baptist sabbath in Ohio, he had been reared as Methodist, in Zanesville, but no church of that denomination was nearer than Nehigh, an hour’s ride in the buggy. Cora had been raised a Unitarian, but she was not a stickler for denominations. She would go to the service closest by, if hymns were sung. She was amazed and troubled to learn, however, that Catholics had established themselves in the county, although owing their allegiance to neither God nor country, but to the Pope. She would have thought about it if more urgent matters had not been on her mind.

  Just before Christmas, during their first intense cold spell, Cora suffered from deep drowsiness, with bad headaches which she assumed to be part of her wages, but Dr. Geltmayer threw open the kitchen door to flood the house with icy blasts of air. If she was ill, he said, it was because she lacked air to breathe. The house with its closed windows, its burning range, lacked oxygen. To explain, Dr. Geltmayer lit a stub of candle and covered it with one of Cora’s jelly glasses. They were silent as they watched the flame shrink, then sputter out. Emerson’s astonishment was boundless. To believe it, he had to see it done over, examining the glass and lighting the candle with his own match. After that occasion he would say to Cora, “The air cold enough for you to breathe it?” Nothing else he had heard, read, or seen brought him so close to a smile.