Plainsong (Plainsong #1)(74)

From the doorway Ike said, Mrs. Stearns.

She didn’t respond. They approached, moving closer. A cigarette had burned out in the ashtray placed on the wide arm of the chair. It was a long white cold ash.

Mrs. Stearns. It’s us.

They stood still in front of her. Ike reached forward to touch her thin arm to wake her and then he drew his hand back as suddenly as if he’d been struck or burnt. Her arm was cold and rigid. It was as though the chill skin of her arm had been drawn over sticks of wood or some manner of iron rods in a winter basement, to make her feel so hard and cold.

Feel her, Ike said.

Why?

Go ahead.

Bobby reached forward and touched her arm. Immediately he put his hand in his pants pocket.

The two boys looked at Iva Stearns for a long time, standing before her slumped and silent motionless figure in the quiet overheated room, the smell of smoke and dust still present in the close air, with the faint vague muffled noise of the street coming up to the room as if from a great distance. In the hours since she had stopped breathing, before they found her, the old woman’s face had collapsed and now her nose seemed to have risen, thin and high-ridged, shiny and waxy in the middle of her face, while her eyes seemed to have fallen away altogether behind her glasses. In her lap the old blue-veined freckled hands still clasped each other fiercely in a kind of mute and terrific stasis, as hard and silent as dug-up tree roots.

I want to touch her again, Ike said.

He did so. He felt her arm, touching her longer this time. Then Bobby touched her again.

All right, Ike said. You ready?

Bobby nodded.

They went out of her apartment and locked the door, then pedaled home and left their bikes at the house and went on to the barn, where they saddled Easter.

And so, in the middle of the afternoon in the spring of the year, mounted up like sojourners in the great world, Bobby in the saddle, Ike behind, they rode out.

By sundown they were eleven miles south of Holt.

They still had not found the right crossroad. When they left the house they’d skirted the town, and then had followed the two-lane blacktop, riding south along the barrow ditches and fencelines, the horse all the time making steady progress in the dry weeds and the new spring grass, her head up, nervous and antsy with the traffic on the highway. As they rode in the lowering sun the cars raced by, honking at them sometimes and the people inside hollering and waving, and three times big trucks roared down on them, blowing them up against the barbed-wire fences, making the mare want to squat and take off, but they held her back and she only danced sideways, sidling, throwing her head a little, and afterward they went on.

By dark they knew they’d gone too far, had somehow passed the turnoff. They believed they would recognize the road they were looking for, but the roads all looked so much alike that they hadn’t. At last they stopped at a ranch house next to the highway and Ike got off and went up to the door and asked for directions.

The man at the door was wearing slippers and dark trousers and a white Sunday shirt, and holding a newspaper. Don’t you want to come in, son? he said.

We’re suppose to go over there.

Over to their house?

Yes sir.

Well.

Could you tell us how to find their place? We missed their road.

You come too far, he said. You got to go back two miles and take that one. Not the first mile road, but the next one. He told Ike what they should look for when they got there. Can you remember that? he said.

Ike nodded.

You’re sure you don’t want to come in?

No. We got to go on.

All right. But you be careful out there on that highway.

He went back out to his brother, who still sat the horse in the yard under the new-leafed trees, and Bobby kicked his foot out of the stirrup and he climbed up and they turned back out of the drive. They traveled back northward along the highway with the headlights of the onrushing cars coming at them now out of the increasing darkness, the lights growing bigger and brighter and then blinding them, after which the cars and their lights would rush past like some kind of runaway train racing to hell, while down in the ditch the horse would start to hop and dance and collect herself as if she were going to jump, and it was all they could do to hold her back. Finally they rode her up onto the hard blacktop and clattered down the highway, making time between the approaching cars, galloping, letting her out, and they passed the first county road that way and then turned east off the highway onto the second one. At the gravel road they slowed down and let her breathe.

He said about seven miles from here, Ike said. Turn off at the track, next to the mailbox. We’ll see a cedar tree and the house sitting back from the road with outbuildings down below. A horse barn and loafing shed and corrals.

It was completely dark now, and turning cold again since the sun had gone down. They rode on, the land all flat and starlit around them. They could hear cattle over to the south. When they found the mailbox and track leading off the gravel it was about ten-thirty.

I don’t see any cedar, Bobby said. Didn’t he say a cedar tree?

Down by the outbuildings he said, by the garage.

I can’t read the mailbox.

But that’s the track like he said leading off to that place back there. To that farmlight that’s shining.

What do you want to do?

We got to try it. We don’t have any choice. It’s late.

They put the horse forward again and turned up the old track. She had sweated and dried and sweated again and they let her take her time moving back toward the house where it was all dark except for that single yardlight, shining from a high lightpole. When they rode into the drive the old dog came barking out of the garage, standing on stiff legs in the gravel. They dismounted and tied Easter to one of the hogfencing posts, and as they did this the dog came up and sniffed at them and seemed to recognize them and licked their hands, and then they went in through the wire gate up to the house and climbed the steps to the porch and stood knocking. After a while a light came on in the kitchen. Then somebody was at the door: a girl in her nightgown. They didn’t know who she was. They thought they must in some way have come to the wrong house. The girl looked heavy and misshapen, like there was something wrong with her; she was holding herself under the front, the soft material of her gown pulled tight over her enormous stomach. They realized that they had seen her before in town, but had no idea what her name might be, and they were about to turn and leave without saying anything at all to her, when the McPheron brothers appeared behind her in the door.