Plainsong (26 page)

She’s all right?

She’s awake and she’s talking. But she’s tired. Don’t you want to know about the baby?

What is it?

It’s a girl.

And you say Victoria Roubideaux is all right.

Yes.

Raymond studied him.

And what you say, that’s the truth.

Yes. I tell you, she’s all right.

I didn’t know, Raymond said. I was afraid . . . Then roughly he stooped forward and took hold of old Dr. Martin’s hand and pumped it hard, two times, and let it go, and then he started back inside.

She still had the baby with her in the bed lying on her chest when he entered the room in the maternity ward, and she was gazing at the baby, holding it close. She looked up when he came in, her eyes shining.

He says you’re okay, Raymond said.

Yes. Isn’t she beautiful? She turned the baby toward him.

He looked at it. The baby had a full thatch of crow-black hair and its red face was misshapen a little, pushed out of its true shape, and there was a scratch on its cheek, and he thought in his inexperience that the baby looked like an old man, that it resembled nothing so much as some old wrinkled grandpa, but he said, Yes, she’s a beautiful little thing.

You want to hold her?

Oh, I don’t know about that.

You can.

I don’t want to harm her.

You won’t. Here. You’ve got to support her head.

He took the baby in her white hospital blankets and looked at her, holding her fearfully out in front of his old face as though she were a piece of rigid but delicate kitchen crockery.

My goodness, he said after a minute. The baby’s eyes looked up at him without blinking. Well, my my. My lord almighty.

While he was holding the baby, Harold came into the room. They said I’d find you in here now, he said. You’re all right?

Yes, the girl said. It’s a little girl. You can hold her too.

Harold was still dressed in his work clothes, with hay dust on the shoulders of his canvas chore jacket, bringing with him the smell of the outdoors and of cattle and of sweat. I better not get over-close, he told her. I’m not tidy.

You can just wrap the blanket around her tighter, she said. She’s got to get used to you sometime.

So he took the baby in his turn too, and Raymond sat down and patted the girl’s arm. She was tired and ashen and blurry.

Well then, Harold said, well then, looking at the baby girl. He held her before him and she looked back at him unblinking just as she had looked at his brother, as though she were studying the make of his character. I’m going to tell you what, Harold said. I believe we have just doubled our womenfolk. But I reckon it’s something we can get used to.

Then a different nurse came in and she was angry and said they were not even supposed to be in there, didn’t they know that, not in the maternity room when the baby was in the room, because they were not the husband, were they, they were not the father, and she told them they would have to leave at once, and besides the girl needed to sleep, couldn’t they see she was exhausted, and then she complained bitterly about the baby needing to stay clean and sterile and she took the baby away. But neither the McPheron brothers nor the girl objected to the nurse, because things were all right now; the girl had had the baby satisfactorily after all, and the baby she had delivered was a healthy little clear-eyed girl with her mother’s own black hair, and that was everything anybody in the town of Holt or anywhere else in the world had any right to hope for, and so it was all right.

The next morning, an hour after sunrise, the man at the Holt County frozen food locker on Main Street called Dr. Martin at his home about the half-steer. He wanted to know what the doctor wanted him to do with it.

With what? the old doctor said.

This meat here.

What meat?

McPherons’. They showed up about an hour ago this morning and made me open before I was anywhere near ready, before I even had my morning coffee. With two whole butchered-out hindquarters of prime young black baldy steer. What do you want me to do with it, is what I’m calling about. They said it was yours.

Mine?

They said you’d know why.

The hell they did.

That’s what they said.

All right, the old doctor said. I suppose I do then. I expect I might even have earned it too. Then his voice rose in pitch. Well, hold on to it, for christsake. Don’t give it away. I’ll be down there just as soon as I can get dressed.

Ike and Bobby.

Eight days school had been let out. But the town swimming pool was not yet opened in the park. The summer baseball program had not yet taken up. The fair and carnival rides would not be starting until the first week of August.

In the mornings the two boys delivered the paper and came home and did the chores at the barn, fed Easter and the dog and the cats, then went up to the house to breakfast. Three afternoons a week Guthrie was teaching a summer class for the community college in Phillips. And their mother was still living in Denver. They were to understand that their mother was going to stay living there in Denver from now on. Often in the mornings they rode out along the tracks on Easter and took their lunch and once rode as far as the little cemetery halfway to Norka where there was a stand of cottonwood trees with their leaves washing and turning in the wind, and they ate a lunch there in the freckled shade of the trees and came back in the late afternoon with the sun sliding down behind them, making a single shadow of them and the horse together, the shadow out in front like a thin dark antic precursor of what they were about to become. School had been let out eight days already, and they were alone much of the time.

.  .  .

On an afternoon when Guthrie was in Phillips, teaching, they walked out on the railroad tracks on the creosoted cross ties between the rails going west and walked out past the old man’s house and then on past the abandoned house at the end of Railroad Street and it was hot and dry. Walking a mile and more farther west on the black ties between the shining twin rails along the red ballast. Then they stopped at a railroad cutout gouged through a low sandhill, and they got out the coins and the glue bottle from their pockets.

So the four bright coins lay stuck now on the hot rail, glued and waiting, the four denominations in a row, penny, nickel, dime, and quarter, while the high afternoon sun glinted on them, copper and silver alike, and shone on her bracelet too from the chest of drawers where they had taken it from the guest room where she had left it months ago, the one they had tried on their own wrists that once, before they had climbed up to the apartment and discovered Mrs. Iva Stearns already dead five hours in her chair. At first they hadn’t seen how to rest the bracelet on the rail with the four coins since it would not lie down flat, since on its side it would most likely flip off when the first big driving wheel of the engine hit it, to go spinning off in the air like some piece of glittering ice or glass to land in the cheetweed and redroot where they’d have to look for it and maybe not even find it again, because they had lost pennies and quarters that way before, before they had learned to use the single little drop of glue. Then they hit on the expedient of fitting it over the rail as though it were fitting over an arm and tried it, and it worked satisfactorily like that. So it was hooked over the rail below the coins now, waiting too. And the train would be coming soon.

They waited. They were squatted back fifteen feet from the raised railbed in the cutout, their backs against the high embankment, shaded by the sheered red dirt. No one out on the high plain could have seen them, had anybody been looking at this hour late in May in the middle of the afternoon. Ike got out two of Guthrie’s cigarettes from his shirt pocket and handed Bobby one. He took out a box of matches from his pocket and struck one and lit their cigarettes, first his then his brother’s, and poked the burning match head into the dirt. It made a little white puff when the flame was extinguished. They smoked and waited. After a little while they spat, one after the other, between their feet on the dirt. There wasn’t any train coming yet. They smoked and held the cigarettes out in front to see and then drew on them and blew smoke and looked at each other, and smoked again. It wasn’t coming yet. Ike spat in a looping arc toward the rail. Bobby spat likewise, railward. They smoked the cigarettes down and put them out. Then Ike stood up and looked up the track. He couldn’t see it yet, not its light nor its black shimmering bulk, and he stepped up to the trackbed and lay along the track holding his ear to the rail. After a while his eyes changed. It’s coming, he said. Here it comes.

You can’t tell from that, Bobby said.

It’s coming, Ike said. His head was next to the rail. I hear it.

Bobby got up and listened too. Okay, he said. So once more they crouched together against the dirt embankment within its shade, waiting for the train. There was a grasshopper on the weeds, watching them, chewing its mouth. Ike threw a piece of dirt at it and it hopped onto the track. The train came on from a distance, whistling sudden and long at a mile crossing. They waited. The coins and her bracelet were out on the track. After a time they could see the train, dark-looming in the haze. It came on and got louder, bigger, and appeared as terrific as if it were dreamed, shaking the ground, the grasshopper still watching the two boys, and then the train was on them. They looked at the man standing high above inside the roaring locomotive and dirt was flying everywhere in the air in a white gale so sudden and violent that they had to protect their eyes, then its long string of freight cars was rushing past, clattering and squealing, whistling, a loose rattling clacking noise, the joint in the iron rail before them dipping as the wheels passed, carrying the weight, and then it was gone and the man in the caboose looked back at them and they stared back, not waving. When the train was far down the tracks they rose and picked up the coins and her bracelet.

In the shade of the cutbank they squatted and inspected what they had now. The coins were misshapen oval disks, the profiled heads of the presidents like ghostly shadows, bright, shiny, out-of-round. The faces in outline only, no depth or texture, no dimension. Her bracelet was flattened the same, thin as paper, they could break it. They turned the coins over in their hands and regarded the bracelet, and after a while they poked a hole in the dirt and buried the four coins together with their mother’s bracelet in the dirt under the sheered bank and put a rock over the place.

You going to want to smoke again? Ike said.

Yes.

All right.

He got out two more of the cigarettes from his shirt pocket and together they sat smoking fifteen feet back from the tracks in the shade. They watched out into the sun on the trackbed and neither talked nor moved for some time.

McPherons.

When they came up to the house from the horse barn in the afternoon near the end of the month they saw there was a black car parked at the gate in front of the house. They didn’t recognize it.

Who’s that?

Nobody I know, Harold said.

The car had a Denver license plate. They went on around it and up the walk onto the porch. Inside the house they found him sitting at the walnut table in the dining room seated across from the girl. She was holding the baby. He was a tall thin young man and he didn’t get up when they came in.

I come back to take her with me, he said. And the baby too. My daughter.

So that’s who you are, Harold said.

He and the old McPheron brothers looked at one another.

You don’t stand up when somebody enters the room in his own house, Harold said.

Not usually, no, the boy said.

This is Dwayne, the girl said.

I reckoned it must be. What do you want here?

I told you, he said. I come back for what belongs to me. Her and the baby too.

I’m not going though, the girl said.

Yeah, he said. You are.

Do you want to go, Victoria? Raymond said.

No. I’m not going. I told him. I’m not leaving here.

Oh yeah, she’s coming. She’s just playing hard to get. She just wants to be coaxed.

No, I don’t. That’s not it.

Son, Harold said. I reckon you better leave. Nobody wants you here. Victoria’s made that pretty clear. And Raymond and me damn sure don’t have any use for you.

I’ll leave when she gets ready, the boy said. Go on, he said to the girl. Go get your stuff together.

No.

Go on, like I told you.

I’m not going.

Son. Are you kind of hard of hearing? You heard her and now you heard me.

And you heard me, the boy said. Goddamn it, he said to the girl, go on now. Get your things. Hurry up.

No.

The boy jumped up and started around the table and grabbed her by the arm. He pulled her up out of the chair.

Goddamn it, do it. Like I been telling you. Now move.

The two brothers came around the table toward him.

Son. Now you leave her alone. Let go of her.

The boy jerked her arm. The baby fell to the floor and was shocked and began to wail. And she jerked loose and squatted to pick her up. The baby was crying wildly.

I’m sorry, he said. I didn’t mean that. Just come on. She’s mine too.

No, the girl cried. I’m not going. We’re not going.

That’s enough, Harold said. That’ll do. The brothers took him by the arms and he started to fight them, and they lifted him off his feet, squirming and twisting and caterwauling, and carried him out the door, and they were hard and determined and stronger than he was, and they took him outside down the steps through the yard gate.

Let go of me.

On the gravel drive they released him.

The boy looked at them. All right, he said. I’m going, for now.

Don’t come back.

You haven’t heard the last of me, he said.

Don’t you ever come back bothering her again.

He turned and went on to the car and got in and started it and turned around, spraying up gravel behind him, and roared out past the house into the lane and onto the county road. The McPheron brothers went back into the house. The girl had the baby in her arms, sitting at the old table again. The baby was quieted to a whimper now.

You all right, Victoria? Raymond said.

Yes.

Did he hurt you?

No. But he scared me. I tried to hold him here, talking till you came up to the house, hoping you would. I packed some things, taking my time, hoping you’d come up to the house as soon as you could.

Do you reckon he’ll come back? Harold said.

No.

But he might. Is that what you think?

I don’t know. Maybe he will. But I think he just wanted to make a show.

You didn’t want to go with him, did you? Raymond said.

No. I want to be here. This is where I want to be now.

All right. That’s what’s going to happen then.

The girl turned and unbuttoned her blouse and began to nurse the baby and it stopped whimpering, and the old McPheron brothers looked away from the girl out into the room.