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.
Ike.
What?
Come on now.
We are.
You too, Bobby.
He looked out the window. The
sun was higher, the light beginning to slide down the ladder of the windmill,
brightening it, making rungs of rose-gold.
When he turned again to the bed
he saw by the change in their faces that they were awake now. He went out into
the hall again past the closed door and on into the bathroom and shaved and
rinsed his face and went back to the bedroom at the front of the house whose
high windows overlooked Railroad Street and brought out shirt and pants from
the closet and laid them out on the bed and took off his robe and got dressed.
When he returned to the hallway he could hear them talking in their room, their
voices thin and clear, already discussing something, first one then the other,
intermittent, the early morning matter-of-fact voices of little boys out of the
presence of adults. He went downstairs.
Ten minutes later when they
entered the kitchen he was standing at the gas stove stirring eggs in a black
cast-iron skillet. He turned to look at them. They sat down at the wood table
by the window.
Didn't you boys hear the train
this morning?
Yes, Ike said.
You should have gotten up then.
Well, Bobby said. We were tired.
That's because you don't go to
bed at night.
We go to bed.
But you don't go to sleep. I can
hear you back there talking and fooling around.
They watched their father out of
identical blue eyes. Though there was a year between them they might have been
twins. They'd put on blue jeans and flannel shirts and their dark hair was
uncombed and fallen identically over their unmarked foreheads. They sat waiting
for breakfast and appeared to be only half awake.
Guthrie brought two thick
crockery plates of steaming eggs and buttered toast to the table and set them
down and the boys spread jelly on the toast and began to eat at once,
automatically, chewing, leaning forward over their plates. He carried two
glasses of milk to the table.
He stood over the table watching
them eat. I have to go to school early this morning, he said. I'll be leaving
in a minute.
Aren't you going to eat
breakfast with us? Ike said. He stopped chewing momentarily and looked up.
I can't this morning. He
recrossed the room and set the skillet in the sink and ran water into it.
Why do you have to go to school
so early?
I have to see Lloyd Crowder
about somebody.
Who is it?
A boy in American history.
What'd he do? Bobby said.
Look off somebody's paper?
Not yet. I don't doubt that'll
be next, the way he's going.
Ike picked at something in his
eggs and put it at the rim of his plate. He looked up again.
But Dad, he said.
What.
Isn't Mother coming down today
either?
I don't know, Guthrie said. I
can't say what she'll do. But you shouldn't worry. Try not to. It'll be all
right. It doesn't have anything to do with you.
He looked at them closely. They
had stopped eating altogether and were staring out the window toward the barn
and corral where the two horses were.
You better go on, he said. By
the time you get done with your papers you'll be late for school.
He went upstairs once more. In
the bedroom he removed a sweater from the chest of drawers and put it on and
went down the hall and stopped in front of the closed door. He stood listening
but there was no sound from inside. When he stepped into the room it was almost
dark, with a feeling of being hushed and forbidding as in the sanctuary of an
empty church after the funeral of a woman who had died too soon, a sudden
impression of static air and unnatural quiet. The shades on the two windows
were drawn down completely to the sill. He stood looking at her. Ella. Who lay
in the bed with her eyes closed. He could just make out her face in the
halflight, her face as pale as schoolhouse chalk and her fair hair massed and
untended, fallen over her cheeks and thin neck, hiding that much of her.
Looking at her, he couldn't say if she was asleep or not, but he believed she
was not. He believed she was only waiting to hear what he had come in for, and
then for him to leave.
Do you want anything? he said.
She didn't bother to open her
eyes. He waited. He looked around the room. She had not yet changed the
chrysanthemums in the vase on the chest of drawers and there was an odor rising
from the stale water in the vase. He wondered that she didn't smell it. What
was she thinking about.
Then I'll see you tonight, he
said.
He waited. There was still no
movement.
All right, he said. He stepped
back into the hall and pulled the door shut and went on down the stairs.
As soon as he was gone she
turned in the bed and looked toward the door. Her eyes were intense,
wide-awake, outsized. After a moment she turned again in the bed and studied
the two thin pencils of light shining in at the edge of the window shade. There
were fine dust motes swimming in the dimly lighted air like tiny creatures
underwater, but in a moment she closed her eyes again. She folded her arm
across her face and lay unmoving as though asleep.
Downstairs, passing through the
house, Guthrie could hear the two boys talking in the kitchen, their voices
clear, high-pitched, animated again. He stopped for a minute to listen.
Something to do with school. Some boy saying this and this too and another one,
the other boy, saying it wasn't any of that either because he knew better, on
the gravel playground out back of school. He went outside across the porch and
across the drive toward the pickup. A faded red Dodge with a deep dent in the
left rear fender. The weather was clear, the day was bright and still early and
the air felt fresh and sharp, and Guthrie had a brief feeling of uplift and
hopefulness. He took a cigarette from his pocket and lit it and stood for a
moment looking at the silver poplar tree. Then he got into the pickup and
cranked it and drove out of the drive onto Railroad Street and headed up the
five or six blocks toward Main. Behind him the pickup lifted a powdery plume
from the road and the suspended dust shone like bright flecks of gold in the
sun.
Excerpted from Plainsong by
Kent Haruf . Excerpted by permission of Vintage, a division of Random House,
Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or
reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.