Eventide - Kent Haruf [1]
The child looked across the table at him, unblinking. Her eyes were as black as her mother’s, like buttons or currants. She said nothing but took up Raymond’s calloused hand and moved it toward the cereal bowl. When he held out the spoon she pushed his hand toward his mouth. Oh, he said. All right. He blew over it elaborately, puffing his cheeks, moving his red face back and forth, and now she would eat again.
When they were finished Victoria carried her daughter into the bathroom off the dining room to wash her face and then took her back to their bedroom and changed her clothes. The McPheron brothers went upstairs to their rooms and got into town clothes, dark trousers and pale shirts with pearl snaps and their good white hand-shaped Bailey hats. Back downstairs they carried Victoria’s suitcases out to the car and set them in the trunk. The backseat was already loaded with boxes of the little girl’s clothes and blankets and bedsheets and toys, and a child’s padded car seat. Behind the car was the pickup and in its bed, together with the spare tire and the jack and a half dozen empty oil cans and dry wisps of brome hay and a piece of rusted barbed wire, were the little girl’s high chair and her daybed, its mattress wrapped in a new tarp, all of it lashed down with orange binder twine.
They returned to the house and came out with Victoria and the little girl. On the porch Victoria paused for a moment, her dark eyes welling with sudden tears.
What’s the matter here? Harold said. Is something wrong?
She shook her head.
You know you can always come back. We’re expecting you to. We’re counting on it. Maybe it’ll help to keep that in mind.
It isn’t that, she said.
Is it because you’re kind of scared? Raymond said.
It’s just that I’m going to miss you, she said. I haven’t been gone before, not like this. That other time with Dwayne I can’t even remember and I don’t want to. She shifted the little girl from one arm to the other and wiped at her eyes. I’m just going to miss you, that’s all it is.
You can call if you need something, Harold said. We’ll still be here at the other end.
But I’m still going to miss you.
Yes, Raymond said. He looked out from the porch toward the barnlot and the brown pastures beyond. The blue sandhills in the far distance low on the low horizon, the sky so clear and empty, the air so dry. We’re going to miss you too, he said. We’ll be about like old played-out workhorses once you’re gone. Standing around lonesome, always looking over the fence. He turned to study her face. A face familiar and dear to him now, the three of them and the baby living in the same open country, in the same old weathered house. But you think you can come on? he said. We probably ought to get this thing started if we’re going to.
RAYMOND DROVE HER CAR WITH VICTORIA SITTING BESIDE him so she could reach into the back and tend to Katie in her padded chair. Harold followed them in the pickup, out the lane onto the gravel county road, headed west to the two-lane blacktop, then north toward Holt. The country both sides of the highway was flat and treeless, the ground sandy, the wheat stubble in the flat fields still bright and shiny since its cutting in July. Beyond the barrow ditches the irrigated corn stood up eight feet tall, darkly green and heavy. The grain elevators in the distance showed tall and white in town beside the railroad tracks. It was a bright warm day with the wind coming hot out of the south.
In Holt they turned onto US 34 and stopped at the Gas and Go where Main Street intersected the highway. The McPherons got out and stood at the pumps, gassing up both vehicles as Victoria went in to buy them cups of coffee and a Coke for herself and a bottle of juice for the little girl. Ahead of her in line at the cash register a heavy black-haired man and his wife were standing with a young girl and a small boy. She had seen them walking at all hours along the streets of Holt and she had heard the stories. She thought that if it weren’t for the McPheron brothers