Plainsong - a haunting melody of life in a small town

Kent Haruf defines plainsong as “any simple and unadorned melody,” and the description aptly captures the essence of his novel by the same name. This simple slice-of-life glimpse at a year in a small Colorado town is more cotton sheets than embroidered tapestry, but the sheets are soft with wear and dried on the clothesline with scents of the outdoors clinging to the fabric.

Reading “Plainsong” is like moving to the town and slowly learning the people and the peculiarities of the community. Rather than fleshing out the background and filling in all the gaps, Haruf simply tells the story and lets the reader paint the story canvas in various ways based on what can be seen, touched, tasted, and smelled.

As in real life, various characters move in and out of focus and then back again.

Tom Guthrie has his hands full when his wife takes to her bed leaving him to care for two young boys, Ike (age 10) and Bobby (age 9). Guthrie works as a teacher along with Maggie Jones who is caring for her aged father. Jones enlists two elderly, bachelor farmers (Raymond and Harold) to take in one of her students, Victoria Roubideaux, who is pregnant and has been kicked out of her house by her mother. The two old guys don’t have a clue what to do with a pregnant teenager, but they are willing to give it try.

Over the course of a year, the characters deal with life and with problems that spring up. Guthrie refuses to doctor up the grades of an athlete at the school and then his boys are harassed. The father of Victoria’s baby shows up. She runs off to the city with him but finds that this is not an ideal situation. There are no right and wrong answers here—just common folks dealing with what life tosses out and adjusting as needed. In the course of this living, the various characters occasionally cross paths as would be expected in a small town. The young boys help out on the farm as the cows are dehorned and sorted by which are with calf and which aren’t.

All the characters seem real and are likable both when making good and bad decisions. It’s easy to imagine the two old farmers putting their heads together and determining that it would be a good idea to buy some baby stuff for the mother-to-be. When the pregnant teen takes off without a word, they are sad rather than angry. They miss Victoria and wonder if they did anything to run her off.

This story probably would not work with a less skilled writer. There are no big ah-ha events in the book—simply a series of small moments of importance for those involved. But, the tales are told in such a soft and lyrical way that the characters seem like neighbors and their stories become important. Though a depressed mother moving out and leaving her little boys may not have earth shattering consequences globally, such a happening certainly impacts on those directly involved.

Here is a sample from one of the chapters about Ike and Bobby and a visit to the city to visit her over the holidays:

“At the end of the week they woke one night in the dark and discovered that their mother wasn’t in the room. They opened the door and went out into the living room. No lights were on, but the curtain was drawn back from the glass balcony door and the lights of the city came in through the glass. Their mother was sitting on the davenport with a blanket wrapped around her. Though she was awake, so far as they could see, she wasn’t doing anything.”

Rather than trying to explain what can’t really be explained, the author simply deals the cards and shows those in play at the moment. It would be hard to capture the melancholy of the mother, but the observations of her boys speak volumes. It would seem that a mother could pull it together and be there for her children when she doesn’t seem to have anything else to do, but that is not always the case. Life goes on. But, the journey is more difficult.