Plainsong (Plainsong #1) by Kent Haruf
For Cathy
And in memory of Louis and Eleanor Haruf
Acclaim for KENT HARUF’s
Plainsong
“If the novelist invents a world, then Mr. Haruf has shaped a place of enormous goodness. . . . The story itself—spare, unsentimental, rooted in action—honors the values of the community.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“Resonant, kind and generous.”
—The Boston Globe
“Compelling. . . . A lyrical meditation on community and family, and about how the former increasingly becomes the latter as traditional ties don’t prove binding.”
—Detroit Free Press
“A marvel of a book.”
—The Baltimore Sun
“Haunting, virtuostic writing. Inimitable, it is both spare and descriptive, as painstaking in capturing vagueness as it is precise in detailing the concrete.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Plainsong is nothing short of a revelation.”
—Richard Russo
“I read Plainsong in one sitting, unwilling—unable—to look up until I’d finished. Kent Haruf has given us a pure blessing of a book: a novel of such sweet amplitude, grace and humility.”
—Beverly Lowry
“Kent Haruf has written an American masterwork.”
—Howard Frank Mosher
A loud noise rumbles from this quiet novel . . . a deep language, like the rumble before an earthquake.”
—Los Angeles Times
“A balladeer’s vision of small-town America.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“Plainsong is like authentic Quaker furniture: Beautiful in its plainness.”
—USA Today
“Spare and beautifully effective. . . . A style as natural and unassuming as the world it describes.”
—National Public Radio
“Haruf has a keen eye for the devastatingly casual acts of cruelty that punctuate daily life. He’s simply convinced that decency is ultimately its own reward, and it’s this optimism, along with the quiet sophistication of his technique, that allows him to look into the hearts of his characters while still respecting their privacy.”
—Salon
“Plainsong is a lovely read, illuminated by sparks of spare beauty.”
—Time
“The voices of the characters ring so true that you expect to encounter them in your own life—and feel a little sad when you don’t.”
—San Antonio Express News
“Generously imagined and precisely rendered.”
—The Miami Herald
“Plainsong is a sweet novel. Not cloying, but kind and gracious, and enamored with the simplicity of a story based on human decency.”
—The Indianapolis Star
“Plainsong is written in fine, spare prose, and it’s generous in spirit. By the end, Plainsong is a moving look at our capacity for both pointless cruelty and simple decency.”
—Newsweek
The author wishes to acknowledge the generous support and encouragement of:
Mark Haruf, Verne Haruf, Edith and Bryan Russell, Sorel Haruf, Whitney Haruf, Chaney Haruf, Rodney and Gloria Jones, Richard Peterson, Laura Hendrie, John Walker, Jon Tribble, Ken Keith, Peter Matson, Gary Fisketjon, Dr. Tom Parks, Dr. Douglas Gates, Greg Schwipps, Alissa Cayton, Sue Howell, Karen Greenberg, Southern Illinois University, the Illinois Arts Council, and most particularly, Cathy Haruf.
Plainsong—the unisonous vocal music used in the Christian church from the earliest times; any simple and unadorned melody or air
Plainsong
Guthrie.
Here was this man Tom Guthrie in Holt standing at the back window in the kitchen of his house smoking cigarettes and looking out over the back lot where the sun was just coming up. When the sun reached the top of the windmill, for a while he watched what it was doing, that increased reddening of sunrise along the steel blades and the tail vane above the wooden platform. After a time he put out the cigarette and went upstairs and walked past the closed door behind which she lay in bed in the darkened guest room sleeping or not and went down the hall to the glassy room over the kitchen where the two boys were.
The room was an old sleeping porch with uncurtained windows on three sides, airy-looking and open, with a pinewood floor. Across the way they were still asleep, together in the same bed under the north windows, cuddled up, although it was still early fall and not yet cold. They had been sleeping in the same bed for the past month and now the older boy had one hand stretched above his brother’s head as if he hoped to shove something away and thereby save them both. They were nine and ten, with dark brown hair and unmarked faces, and cheeks that were still as pure and dear as a girl’s.
Outside the house the wind came up suddenly out of the west and the tail vane turned with it and the blades of the windmill spun in a red whir, then the wind died down and the blades slowed and stopped.
You boys better come on, Guthrie said.
He watched their faces, standing at the foot of the bed in his bathrobe. A tall man with thinning black hair, wearing glasses. The older boy drew back his hand and they settled deeper under the cover. One of them sighed comfortably.