Eventide (Plainsong #2)(60)

Look what you done, he said. Are you satisfied now?

Help me out of here, she whimpered. Her eyes were wet with tears. She was half wrapped up in the curtain.

You going to quit?

Help me out of here.

Tell me you’re going to quit.

I quit. All right? I quit. You son of a bitch.

You better behave.

He pushed the curtain aside and pulled her by the hand and stepped back, waiting, but she only looked at him. Her makeup had run and her eyes were awash with mascara. Without a word she hurried out of the bathroom and ran through the apartment to the bedroom closet where she grabbed an armful of his shirts, hangers and all, and then rushed back into the front room. He was standing in the kitchen doorway and, when he saw what she was doing, came forward to stop her, but she’d already thrown the door open and flung his shirts through the door out across the stair landing into the night, his flannel work shirts and his good western shirts alike, all drifting and sailing to the ground as in some dream or fantasy.

There, she cried. I did it. Now get out. Get out, you filthy bastard. I’m done with you.

Then Hoyt hit her in the face with his fist.

She fell back against the door and he wrenched it open and went leaping down the stairs to collect his shirts, ducking and bobbing across the yard as he picked them up.

Laverne pulled herself up and shoved the door closed, locked it, and stood looking out the narrow window, panting. She wiped at her nose with her shirt cuff, leaving a smear across her cheek. Her soft woman’s face looked like a Halloween fright mask now. The mass of her maroon hair was all undone.

Hoyt came pounding back up the stairs with his shirts under his arm and tried to turn the knob. Bitch, he said. You better let me in.

Never.

You goddamn bitch. You better open this f*cker.

I’ll call the police first.

He hammered on the door, then stepped back and rammed it with his shoulder, glaring back at her through the little window.

You’re going to be sorry for this, he said.

I already am. I’m sorry I ever met you.

He spat at her face in the window and it dribbled slowly down the glass. He stood and watched it for a moment, then walked back down the stairs. He looked around but the houses along the street were all quiet and dark. He walked toward downtown as far as Albany Street, and hid the shirts under a bush across from the courthouse, then went on to the tavern at Third and Main. He was still wearing his work clothes, his flannel shirt, the denim jacket spattered with chili, and his manure-stained jeans. He entered and went directly to the bar.



BY MIDNIGHT HE WAS WEAVING DRUNKENLY ON THE STOOL next to an old local man named Billy Coates who had long dirty white hair and lived alone in a tarpaper house north of the railroad tracks. Hoyt had been telling him his tragic story for an hour and Coates finally said: They’s the davenport if you want it. If you don’t got nowheres else to go.

I don’t have no place else, Hoyt muttered.

I got a dog but you can just push him off. He won’t bother you any.

When the tavern closed, they walked to Albany Street to collect Hoyt’s shirts. The shirts were frozen stiff and Hoyt gathered them up and carried them like boards under his arm, then followed Billy Coates across the tracks to his house, and immediately fell to sleep on the davenport in the front room. The old mongrel dog whined for a while but finally curled up on the floor next to an old coal oil heater, and they each—man and man and dog—slept soundly until Sunday noon.





32


WHEN THE CALVES CAME IN FEBRUARY, RAYMOND ROSE two and three times in the freezing night to check on the cattle he had noticed were showing springy and had begun to bag down, having moved the cattle into the corrals and loafing shed next to the barn in the days before. Once he was there he would check that the nose and the front feet were exposed and started out as normal, or he would catch the laboring cow and pull the calf with the calf-chain, ratcheting the calf out, and sew the cow up afterward and doctor her with antibiotics. So, for weeks of these indistinguishable days and nights, he was exhausted, he was worn out almost beyond thinking. He still had the ordinary daily chores and the hay-feeding to do as always, which by themselves would have been almost too much for one man to do and keep up with, but he was doing all of it alone now, since his brother had been killed in the previous fall. He went on regardless. He went on in a kind of daze. He found himself falling asleep at the kitchen table, noon and night and sometimes, though he’d just risen, in the mornings too when he sat down to his meager solitary hurried meal. Then he would wake an hour or two later, with his neck stiff and his hands numb and his tongue as dry as paper from having breathed through his open mouth for too long with his head lolled back against the chair back, and with the food before him already long gone cold on his plate and the black coffee on the table no longer even tepid in his cup. Then he would sit up and rouse himself and look around, study the light or the lack of it in the kitchen window, and push himself up from the old pinewood table and get into his canvas coveralls and overshoes again and pull on his wool cap and step outside into the winter cold once more. And then walk across the drive to the corrals and calving shed to begin it all again. This routine, day and night, lasted for something over a month.

So it was already the start of March before he felt rested enough to think he might allow himself a single night’s vacation in which to drive to town once again to the tavern on Main Street.