Plains Song

by Wright Morris

  There were spells when the two women said nothing they remembered, or were aware that they had said. Ned Kibbee helped himself to the food on the table that Sharon no longer took the trouble to offer. He didn’t think it rude. He really preferred to help himself. Without interrupting what she was saying to Sharon, Madge would spoon-feed food into the mouth of Blanche, half of which she spat out. While eating she tightly clenched her little fists and banged them hard on the shelf of the highchair. Madge’s comment was that like her daddy, she would make a good carpenter.

  Ned took time from his work to drive them both to the station, where Madge refused to weigh herself on the waiting room scales. “It’s no business but my own,” she said to Ned. Ned weighed 179½. Sharon weighed 104, including one pound of homemade fudge. She would come to visit them again at Christmas, if she cared to, or if not at Christmas, early the next summer. Hugging Sharon to her the best she could, Madge repeated, “It did Cora good to see you. You’re like one of her own.”

  The long night of fitful sleep on the train Sharon felt herself in limbo, neither coming nor going, seized with a longing that had no object. What was it she wanted? Loneliness overwhelmed her. The lights of villages flashing at the window, even the glow of lamps in solitary farmhouses, made a mockery of her independence. What was it in her nature that led her to choose a life alone? If the man across the aisle, graying at the temples, reminding her of Professor Grunlich of Dartmouth, wearing a Palm Beach suit with bits of grass in the pants cuffs, buckskin shoes with toes that were grass stained—if this man had spoken to Sharon, if he had suggested she join him for dinner in the diner, if he had sensed, as he surely would, the contradictory needs in her nature and had been free to administer to them, the Sharon Rose who boarded the train in Columbus might not have been the one who got off it in Chicago, and the book of her life might have been different. But he did not speak to her. When she awoke from a spell of napping he was gone.

  During the Sunday service Madge studied with interest every married couple she could set her eyes on. There they sat. A few hours earlier, there they lay. Some on their sides, some on their backs, and a few on top of each other. She saw it only dimly, but as something she had experienced she could accept it. It strained her mind, however, it strained her very soul, to accept this fact for the others. The women corseted and solemn. The men sober as judges. Between and beside them the children that had to be made.

  Madge would soon have been married for sixteen months. Was there a day of fifteen of those months she had not pondered her experience? Wanting children, she had been prepared for the worst, knowing that the worst had happened to Cora. It could be endured because it need not happen too many times. Madge had chosen Ned as a man she liked and had felt he might minimize the necessary torment. This proved to be true. It had startled her to find how such an easygoing man could become, on the instant, almost a different person, but this could as soon be said of herself. It more than startled her to admit it. She was humbled and bewildered to find that such a torment gave her pleasure.

  What would her husband think if he knew that she enjoyed it? Her pains to deceive him relaxed when it seemed clear that it hardly mattered. She had assumed it would end with her pregnancy and was part of a new bride’s remarkable sensations, but with the child born she had felt desire for her husband. That she concealed, of course, scarcely admitting it to herself. She had no way of knowing if Ned was aware of her reluctant-willing collaboration. She feared what might happen if she took the initiative. Now that she was pregnant again he turned on his side and was usually snoring while she brushed her hair. She liked his snoring. What would it be like to have a man who lay snoreless and awake?

  Madge had hoped that Sharon had come back to say that she had met a man and planned to get married. Only when this had happened would Madge be free to hint that she found Ned different than she had expected. In what way? Sharon would ask. Madge could not touch on it until Sharon had had the experience. The two girls were open and frank with each other, but they had seldom discussed men and boys. They had never discussed boys and girls. Sharon had blurted out her opinion of marriage on hearing that Madge was engaged to Ned, but Madge felt that this was in part her anger at losing her friend. Sharon was such a pretty thing, like a beautiful doll, Madge found it hard to see her sleeping with a man. She was like a child. How did such little women mate with grown men and have babies? Madge was curious. She felt in Sharon no curiosity on the subject. Madge had had a baby. It might have been brought by storks.

  That this baby was a female, the image of Cora, the fifth girl child in a family of females, might have discouraged a man like Ned from the prospect of a large family. Of Mrs. Kibbee’s five children, three were sons. The two girls, who came third and fifth, had the advantage of a likeness to their mother, a handsome Scotswoman with almost orange-colored hair and a complexion she had to keep out of the sun. The two daughters were married off before the sons, one to a station agent in Fremont. Mrs. Kibbee felt that children blessed a marriage, but not if they ran exclusively to girls men did not consider attractive. Mrs. Kibbee spoke to Madge, feeling that the woman had the final say in such matters, and Madge was grateful for the advice, knowing that it was so well intended and being in agreement that a family of girls you couldn’t marry off was hardly a blessing to a marriage. Madge didn’t say so, of course, but to have borne Cora’s child as her first one had led her to look forward to the second, her first child being, in everything but name, Cora Atkins’s second. Anybody could see it. Nor was it Madge’s nature to deceive herself. Some weeks before Mrs. Kibbee discussed the matter with her, Madge was two months pregnant with her second child, not a word on the subject of children having been exchanged with her husband. Need there have been? He would have left it to her. He was like Emerson in the way he would walk and stand at the screen if she had a problem, and hear what she had to say while he gazed at the sky and picked at his teeth.

  “You do as you see fit,” he’d say, and push the screen open to close the discussion. With a hammer, a saw, and some nails he could build a house, he could measure, consider, and come to decisions, but all matters that he couldn’t hammer, saw, and measure he left to her. She was flattered.

  “Ned takes care of the outside,” she said to Sharon. “He leaves the inside to me.” Weeks after Sharon had left she found herself pondering what she had said. It did not please her that Cora might have said the same thing.

  “She looks like her father,” Cora said of Madge, “but she’s not at all like him. She likes to work.”

  She was slow, and she took her work easy, as she had to, but she liked it. She differed from Cora. Unfinished work weighed so on Cora’s mind she might get up at night, or from a nap, to do it. Told to rest, she would reply, “I can’t rest while there’s work to be done.” In that very fact Madge took pleasure. Leaving off at night, or resting during the day, she thought of the unfinished ironing and mending and fruit canning. That it remained to be done reassured her. That it was endless did not depress her. She got up pleased in the knowledge there was work to be done. Ned had bought her a motor-driven washing machine that spared her the drudgery of tub-washing sheets and diapers, but she reserved his shirts and socks for the pleasure it gave her to use the washboard. She liked the sound of it. She liked the feel of it under her knuckles. A new bar of Fels-Naphtha soap seemed as fragrant to her as bread from the oven. She liked to slice it as she did butter. The smell of soap on her hands was not unpleasant. The laundry chore to which she looked eagerly forward was hanging out the wash: the blue-whiteness of sheets stretched on the line, and their sun-dried sweetness when she took them by the armful and squeezed the fragrance into her face. They smelled to her like freshly kneaded dough, or cooling bread. Ironing she kept for evenings, when it was cooler, her board set up in the draft from the back to the front, her skirts pinned up so that it would blow cool on her legs. In the winter, the side blinds drawn, she would take off her dress and iron in her slip, her back
side warmed by the hot air from the floor radiator. The glide of the iron, the silken feel of the cloth, the sight and smell of a new scorched patch on the pad (reminding her of Cora) were overlapping pleasures so satisfying she delayed work that she might have finished. While ironing she reviewed the day’s events, or lack of events, reflections that might come to her mind at a time when she was not in a position to enjoy them. The scorched odor of the pad was attractive to her, and like strokes of the iron, her mind would pass over and over the wrinkle in her thought till she had smoothed it out. Tilting the iron on its end often signaled a resolution, and the slap of her moistened fingers on its bottom, testing its heat, indicated a fresh beginning. Her own swelling body had its scent which puffed from the dress she stretched on a hanger. She liked to iron without her slippers, enjoying the coolness of the linoleum floor in the summer, and the warmth in the winter, the pipes of the hot-air furnace passing beneath. Ned browsed in the catalogues while she ironed, comparing Ward and Sears Roebuck prices, smearing the heel of his hand with the order forms he had made out with his indelible pencil. She was a help to him in wording letters of complaint.

  Cooking was a chore that had to be done, but it gave Madge little satisfaction, eating being a chore necessary in the performance of duty. Ned ate without comment, his head over his plate, glancing up to look for something that proved missing: Madge read these glances and handed him the salt, the sugar, the syrup, the butter. She had her own breakfast later, when her hands were free. He was fond of his pancakes hot from the griddle, two at a time. She liked to watch him eat. Watching him eat she first saw his long tangled eyelashes. As well as she knew him she wouldn’t think of mentioning it. Every man she knew smoked, or chewed, or both, but Ned did neither. “How come you don’t smoke or chew?” she had asked him, the first thing she had liked about him. “I guess I never started up,” he replied. As a carpenter he needed his mouth free to hold nails. He hammered one thumbnail so many times it surprised her it wasn’t black. She said to him, “Ned, you got just one pair of hands. You go on like this and you’ll have just a half pair.” He startled her by replying, “Which half you like me to pinch you with?” Actually, it wasn’t so unlike him to pinch her, but it was not at all like him to say so. If he caught her stooping he might give her rump a slap, or give a flip to her skirts as she passed the table. “Ned Kibbee!” she would say. “What if your mother saw you?” “She prob’ly did,” he replied. “She don’t miss much.” Most people were ignorant of the playful side to his nature. Sunday afternoons he would lie on the floor and let Blanche crawl over him looking for his head. He could hide it so well the child would get worried. Playing with her father was the only time she smiled. He could give her hiccups by lowering his head and blowing his hot breath on her belly. “What’s she going to think if you keep that up?” Madge joshed him. “She’s going to like boys more than girls,” he replied.

  Nothing more than that was ever said between them on a subject that went unmentioned. Until Ned had made the comment, Madge had had no idea that he was aware she might have options. Did he know what they were? How had he concealed from her such thoughts as he had? She knew so well what he would say before he spoke up this other Ned Kibbee aroused and disturbed her. What might he be thinking? Did he think about all of the things that she did? The way they slept together was acceptable to Madge because it took place in the dark, and required no discussion, but her very consciousness quivered to think that he thought about it in the light of day. When he lifted his eyes to glance at her, might it be on his mind? This alerted her to feeling that she possessed, at the root of her nature, something that she should not surrender, and it was a lucky thing for them both that she felt this the keenest when seven months pregnant. So there was no occasion for her to show reluctance where she had been such a willing accomplice.

  The winter was a bad one, with the snow drifting to conceal the windows on one side of the house, so that she had to keep the lights burning, and sometimes woke up at night feeling that they had been buried alive. The silence terrified her. She would have to get up and rattle pans around in her kitchen, shivering in the heat from the oven. Ned slept so soundly he didn’t miss her. A month before the child was born she decided on the name of Caroline, if it was another girl, or Raymond if it happened to be a boy, choosing it in the hope that a name like Ray would make a boy’s life easier. In Madge’s judgment, her Uncle Orion had suffered most of his life from the name he’d been given, requiring that people ask him to repeat it and boys his own age make fun of it. Nor had the name Emerson helped her father, a man too solemn to be given a nickname. Only Cora could pronounce it so often and not grow to hate it. Long before she learned that the name Beulah was a common one among colored people, Madge had grown to dislike it. Fay, Ray, Bess, Les—names that came easily to the tongue were the ones she liked. But Ned had his Aunt Blanche, a favorite, and his sister Caroline Louise, who would look on the new child with more interest if it had her name, and didn’t look like Cora. Madge would like a boy for Ned, but she really didn’t mind having girls for herself. They would be a help later, and little girls could grow to mean, as she knew, a great deal to each other. Madge could already sense that Blanche would need someone like Sharon to like her, and she would never get from an aggressive little boy what she just might get from her sister. They should be as unalike as Madge and Sharon Rose.

  In February Fayrene came in from the farm to help around the house while Madge had her baby. Madge was not quite three years older than Fayrene, but she sometimes felt she could be her mother. What was it that held her up? Fayrene was a willing worker, but Madge was always surprised to find her a good one. If it was something she baked, Madge checked the oven; if it was something she mended, Madge checked the garment. “It wasn’t Cora who taught you to mend like that, was it?” Madge said. “No,” she replied. If Madge wanted to know who it was that had taught her, she would have to ask her, “Well, then, who was it?” Four out of five times it would be Mrs. Cullen, the wife of the pastor in Battle Creek. Madge and Sharon Rose hardly knew her to speak to, yet she had taught Fayrene most of what she knew. That could only mean that Madge and Sharon Rose had been like Siamese twins, as Emerson described them, and gave no thought to Fayrene. Had she stood and watched them? Had Madge or Sharon ever said, “Where’s Fayrene?” She had her own room in the house, right off the kitchen, where Cora called “Fayrrrrrrr-een!” as if she lived with Orion. Being so much alone should have made her independent, but instead it made her shy and quiet. Madge could be in a room and fail to notice Fayrene was there. Her bad complexion came on her right at the time she was about to meet boys and get around a little, but the only one she knew worked in the creamery in the Ozarks. He wouldn’t lack for girls if it crossed his mind he ought to get married.

  Fayrene came into the house on February 8 and on the eleventh Madge had her second child, a chubby, almost blond girl with the close-set eyes of the Kibbees. The birth was not so easy for Madge as the first one, and Dr. Maas recommended—since she had Fayrene to help her—that she stay off her feet and rest for a spell. Madge was strong, but her legs gave her trouble if she spent, as she did, most of the day on her feet. She was a little top-heavy, in Dr. Maas’s opinion, and the time she spent at the sink or the ironing board put a strain on her back and knees. If she meant to go on having children—and Dr. Maas took that for granted—she would need to reduce some of the house chores that put a strain on her legs. Dr. Maas was the first to point out to Madge what a strange sort of creature people were in the first place, women especially, obliged to live as they did standing upright, and not down on all fours like most animals. Madge had never heard talk like that before, and Dr. Maas let her draw her own conclusions. He was a gruff man, with his own problems (his rheumatism was so bad he winced when he shook a thermometer). Madge sometimes detected an unusual odor on his breath. With Fayrene in the house it was possible for Madge to spend more time sitting, but she found it boring. It was her nature to get up
and do it herself rather than ask somebody else to do it. One trouble with Dr. Maas’s suggestion was that Fayrene was best at cooking but hardly to be trusted with ironing. She couldn’t seem to get the knack of ironing the collar of a shirt, or keeping the heat of the iron right for a sheet. She was sweet and patient with Blanche, however, careful with dishes, and like one of Ned’s own sisters. She had learned from Cora that something well mended was better than ever. A hole never reappeared where Cora had mended a sock.

  Cora’s new phone line was down during part of February but she called Madge on Washington’s birthday to see if it was back in operation. She had nothing in particular to say, but she did it in a voice that indicated she lacked confidence in the apparatus. Madge used the occasion to talk over with Cora if in the last few weeks she had missed Fayrene. Cora did not especially miss her, but she felt that Emerson and Orion did. Emerson complained about her every day of his life but now that she was away he was restive. She wasn’t there to play checkers with him. Orion missed her at meals. Madge said it wouldn’t only be a help to her but better for Fayrene to live in Norfork, where there were more boys and girls her own age and a high school she could walk to. Cora said at her age she ought to be old enough to know her own mind.