Plainsong (Plainsong #1)(82)
So they had the little girl in the glider under one of the stunted elm trees inside the old hogfencing wire, rocking her by turns on their laps in the cool evening, while the blue farmlight played over her face.
Meanwhile out at the work corrals the McPheron brothers and Guthrie looked over the fence at the cattle and calves. The red-legged cow was among them. Guthrie noticed her. The old cow eyed him with rancor. Is that her? he said. That same one I’m thinking of.
That’s her.
Didn’t she have a calf? I don’t see one with her.
No sir. She was open all along, Raymond said.
She never threw a calf this spring?
No.
What do you plan to do with her?
We aim to take her to town, to the sale barn.
Harold looked out past the red cow toward the darkening horizon. We heard in town the Beckmans got theirselves a lawyer now, he said.
Yes, Guthrie said. I’ve been hearing that.
What’ll you do?
I don’t know yet. I haven’t made up my mind. It depends on what comes of it. But I’ll be all right. I’ll do something else if I have to.
Not farming, Harold said.
No. Guthrie grinned. Not farming, he said. I can see what that leads to. He nodded back toward the house. What about her now?
We want to hope she’ll be here for a good while yet, Raymond said. She has another year of school. Besides this last term she missed. She’ll be here a while still, we believe. We sure hope she will.
She might want to go to college, Guthrie said.
We’d favor that. But there’s time enough to think about that later. We don’t have to think about that just yet, I don’t guess we do.
Now the wind started up in the trees, high up, moving the high branches.
The barn swallows came out and began to hunt leaf-bugs and lacewinged flies in the dusk.
The air grew soft.
The old dog came out from its rug in the garage and wandered into the fenced yard and sniffed the boys’ pantslegs and sniffed the baby and licked its hot red tongue across the baby’s forehead, and then it scuttled up to the women on the porch and looked up at them, and looked all around and turned in a circle and lay down, flopping its matted tail in the dirt.
The two women stood letting the breeze blow coolly on their faces, and they opened the fronts of their blouses a little to let it play on their breasts and under their arms.
And soon, very soon now, they would call them in to supper. But not just yet. They stood on the porch a while longer in the evening air seventeen miles out south of Holt at the very end of May.
KENT HARUF
Plainsong
Kent Haruf’s The Tie That Binds received a Whiting Foundation Award and a special citation from the PEN/Hemingway Foundation. Also the author of Where You Once Belonged, he lives with his wife, Cathy, in Illinois and Colorado. He teaches at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale.