Plainsong Read Online Free PDF Page A

off the remaining milk and set the glasses in the sink and went back outside again.
    They crossed the drive toward the horse lot and opened the plank gate and passed through. In front of the barn the two horses Elko and Easter, one red, one a dark bay, stood dozing in the warm sun. When the horses heard the boys enter the corral they threw their heads up and watched them warily. Go on, Ike called. Get in the barn. The horses began to step sideways, sidling away. The boys spread out to head them. Here now, Ike said. No you don’t. He ran forward.
    The horses broke into a high-stepping trot, tossing their heads, and broke past the boys, flowing stiff-legged along the fence past the barn, and loped across the corral to the back fence where they wheeled again and eyed the boys, watching them with great interest. The boys stopped at the end of the barn.
    I’ll go get them, Ike said.
    You want me to get them this time?
    No. I will.
    Bobby waited opposite where both halves of the door gaped open. Ike turned the horses back toward him, the horses trotting again now, their heads high up, watching the small boy standing wide-legged ahead of them in the corral dirt. Then he began to flap his arms and to shout. Hey! Hey! He looked very small in the open space of the corral. But at the last moment the two horses veered abruptly and clattered over the high doorsill into the barn, one after the other, and settled down immediately in the stalls. The boys followed them.
    It was cool and dark inside, smelling of hay and manure. The horses stamped in the stalls, blowing into the empty grain boxes built into the corners of the mangers. The boys poured oats into each box and then brushed and saddled the horses while they ate. Then they buckled on the bridles and mounted up and rode out along the railroad tracks going to the west away from town.

Victoria Roubideaux.
    The evening wasn’t cold yet when the girl left the café. But the air was turning sharp, with a fall feeling of loneliness coming. Something unaccountable pending in the air.
    She went out of the downtown, crossing the tracks and on toward home in the growing dark. The big globes had already shuddered on at the street corners, their blue lights shining now in flat pools on the sidewalks and pavement, and at the front of the houses the porch lights had come on, lifted above the closed doors. She turned into the meager street passing the low houses and arrived at her own. The house appeared unnaturally dark and silent.
    She tried the door but it was locked. Mama? she said. She knocked once. Mama?
    She stood up on her toes and peered inside through the narrow window set into the door. There was a faint light toward the back of the house. A single unshaded bulb burning in the little hall between the two bedrooms.
    Mama. Let me in now. Do you hear me?
    She clutched at the doorknob, pulling and twisting it, and she knocked on the window, rattling the hard little pane, but the door stayed locked. Then inside the house the dim hall light went out.
    Mama. Don’t. Please.
    She clung to the door.
    What are you doing? I’m sorry, Mama. Please. Can’t you hear me?
    She rattled the door. She leaned her head against it. The wood felt cold, hard, she felt tired now, all at once worn out. There was something like panic coming.
    Mama. Don’t do this.
    She looked all around. Houses and bare trees. She slid down onto the porch in the cold, lapsing back against the chill boards of the housefront. She seemed to fade away, to drift and wander in a kind of daze of sorrow and disbelief. She sobbed a little. She stared out at the silent trees and the dark street and the houses across the street where people were moving about reasonably in the bright rooms beyond the windows, and she looked up at the movement in the trees when the wind sighed. She sat, staring out, not moving.
    Later she came out of that.
    Okay, Mama, she said. You don’t have to worry. I’m gone.
    Slowly a car went by in the street.