Plainsong Read Online Free PDF

The people inside looked at her, a man and a woman, their heads turned in her direction.
    She pushed up from the porch and pulled her thin jacket tighter around her, over her thin body, her girl’s chest, and walked away from the house toward town.
    It was full dark now and it had turned off cold. The streets were almost empty. Once a dog came barking out at her from behind a house and she held out her hand to him. The dog stood back and barked, his mouth shutting and opening as though operated by a spring hinge. Here, she said. He came forward suspiciously and sniffed her hand, but as soon as she moved he began to bark again. Behind them in the house the front lights went on. A man appeared in the door and yelled Goddamn it, you get in here! and the dog turned and trotted toward the house and stopped and barked again and went inside.
    She moved on. She crossed the tracks once more. Ahead at Second Street the traffic light blinked from red to green to yellow, unmindful of the hour, blinking over the black, almost empty pavement. She passed the shadowy stores and looked in the window of the café where the tables were arranged all quiet and neat in rows and the Pepsi light on the back wall shone on the orderly stacks of clean glasses set out ready on the counter. She walked up Main to the highway and crossed it and passed the Gas and Go, the untended fuel pumps and the bright lights overhead, the attendant inside reading a magazine at the counter, and turned at the corner and came to a frame house three blocks from school where she knew Maggie Jones lived.
    She knocked at the door and stood blankly waiting. She was unconscious of any thoughts at all. After some time the yellow porch light came on over her head.
    When Maggie Jones opened the door she was in her bathrobe and her black hair was already disheveled from sleep. Her face looked plainer than it had during the day, less dramatic without makeup, a little puffy. The robe she wore wasn’t fastened or buttoned but had swung open in front when she had unlocked the door, revealing a soft yellow nightgown.
    Victoria? Is that you?
    Mrs. Jones. Could I talk to you? the girl said.
    Well honey, yes. What’s wrong?
    The girl entered the house. They passed through the front room and Maggie took up a throw blanket from the couch and draped it around the girl’s shoulders. Then for an hour they sat at the table in the kitchen in the silence of night, talking and drinking hot tea, while all around them the neighbors slept and breathed in and out and dreamed in their beds.
    The girl sat at the table warming her hands on the tea cup. Gradually she had begun to tell about the boyfriend. About the nights in the backseat of his car parked out on a dirt road five miles north of town where the road stopped at an old fallen-in homestead house, where there was an old gray barn and broken windmill and the few low trees were dark against the dark sky and where the night wind came in through the open car windows smelling of sage and summer grass. And the love then. She told very briefly about that. The scent of him close up, his aftershave, the feel of his hands and the urgency of what they did, then the quiet talking for a little while afterward sometimes. And always afterward, the ride home.
    Yes, Maggie said. But who was he?
    A boy.
    Of course, honey. But who exactly?
    I don’t want to say, the girl said. He’s not going to want it anyhow. He won’t claim it. He’s not that kind.
    What do you mean?
    He’s not the fathering kind.
    But he ought to at least take some responsibility, Maggie said.
    He’s from another town, the girl said. I don’t think you would know him, Mrs. Jones. He’s older. He’s a boy out of school.
    How did you meet him?
    The girl looked around the clean room. Dishes were set to dry in the draining rack on the counter, and there was an assemblage of white enameled cannisters ranged in a neat row under the shining cupboards. She drew up the blanket about her