Plainsong (Plainsong #1)(79)

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.