Plainsong (Plainsong #1)(62)

Then their father said: It must be getting time to eat. You better let me buy you lunch at the café, Dick.

Sure, Dick Sherman said. I’d like to. But I can’t. I promised my boy I’d take him chub fishing over in Chief Creek.

I didn’t think you were old enough to have a boy to fish with.

I’m not. But he thinks he wants to try it. When I was leaving this morning he said I’d never get back in time. Then Sherman paused, thinking. I am pretty young though, Tom.

Course you are, Guthrie said. We all are.

Then they walked out of the corral and Dick Sherman started his pickup and drove home. The two boys got down from the fence and stood beside their father. He put his hands on their brown heads, dry and hot from the sun, and studied their faces. The boys weren’t so pale now. He brushed the hair back off their foreheads.

I’ve got one more thing to do, he said. Then we’re finished with this. Can you stand it?

What is it? Ike said.

I’ve got to drag him out into the pasture. We can’t leave him here.

I guess so, Ike said.

You can open the gates for me.

All right.

Open that corral gate first. And Bobby.

Yes.

You watch Easter. Don’t let her get out while the gate’s open. Keep her back.

So Guthrie backed his pickup into the corral, and while he was hooking a log chain around Elko’s neck Ike closed the gate and then both boys got up into the back of the pickup and watched over the tailgate. When the pickup moved, Elko swung around and followed headfirst, dragging heavily across the dirt, the dirt pushing up in front of him a little and the dust rising to hang momentarily in the bright air, the horse still coming behind them, his legs loose and bumping, bouncing some when they hit something, and on around the barn toward the pasture, leaving behind them a wide dirt-scraped trail on the ground. For fifty yards or more Easter followed, trotting and interested, then she stopped and dropped her head and bucked and stood still, watching the pickup and Elko disappear. They pulled him across that first small pasture north of the barn. At the gate to the big pasture to the west, Guthrie stopped while Ike jumped down and opened the gate for the pickup to go through.

You can leave it open, Guthrie said. We’re coming right back.

Ike got back into the pickup and they went on. The horse was dirty now, dust-coated. The twine at his stomach had broken in one place and they could see a dirty ropelike piece of him trailing out behind as they moved out across the pasture and sagebrush, and then the piece caught on something and was torn away.

Their father drove the pickup down into the gravel wash at the far side of the pasture and stopped. He got out and unhooked the chain from Elko’s neck. They were finished now.

One of you boys want to drive back? he said.

They shook their heads.

No? You can take turns.

They were still looking at the horse.

Why don’t you get up front with me anyway?

We’ll stay back here, Ike said.

What?

We want to stay back here.

All right. But I’ll let you practice driving if you want to.

They went home then. Guthrie took them out to eat lunch at the Holt Café on Main Street though they weren’t very hungry. In the afternoon they disappeared into the hayloft. After a couple of hours, when they hadn’t returned to the house or made any noise, Guthrie went to the barn to see what they were doing. He climbed the ladder and found them sitting on hay bales, looking out the loft window toward town.

What’s going on? he said.

Nothing.

Are you all right?

What will happen to him now? Ike said.

You mean Elko?

Yes.

Well. After a while he won’t be there. It’ll just be bones that’s left. I think you’ve seen that before, haven’t you? Why don’t you come back to the house now.

I don’t want to, Bobby said. You can.

I don’t want to either, Ike said.

Pretty soon though, Guthrie said. Okay?

In the evening they ate supper at the kitchen table and afterward the boys watched tv while their father read. Then it was nighttime. The boys lay in bed together upstairs in the old sleeping porch, with one of the windows opened slightly to the quiet air, and once in the night while their father slept they were quite certain that out in the big pasture northwest of the house they could hear dogs fighting and howling. They got up and looked out the windows. There wasn’t anything to see though. There were just the familiar high white stars and the dark trees and space.





Maggie Jones.

In the night, while they were dancing slow, she said, Do you want to come over afterward?

Do you think I should?

I think so.

Then maybe I better.

They’d been dancing and drinking for two hours in the Legion on the highway in Holt, and sitting between dances with some of the other teachers from the high school at a table in the side room with a view of the band and the dance floor through the big sliding doors that were pushed back for Saturday night.

Ike and Bobby were in Denver with their mother for the weekend, and Guthrie had come in by himself about ten o’clock. The Legion was already smoky and loud when he’d come down the stairs and paid the cover to the woman sitting on a stool at the doorway and gone past her toward the crowd standing at the bar. The band was on a break, and people were standing close together in front of the bar, talking and ordering more drinks. He bought a beer and moved over to the edge of the dance floor, surveying the tables and booths along the wall. That was when he’d noticed some of the teachers sitting at a table over to the left in the other room, and that Maggie Jones was among them. When she saw him and waved him over, he raised his glass to her and walked across the empty dance floor. Care to join us? she said.