Great Plains writer Ian Frazier invites response when he
says, “There’s an idea of the Plains as the middle of nowhere, something to be
contemptuous of. But it’s really a heroic place.” In earlier civilizations, poets
and writers recorded epics about courage and grace. Author Kent Haruf takes
that challenge to heart to produce a novel recounting the understated goodness
and resolve of people who gain collective strength from the lonely landscape
they consider home. The title fits both structure and setting of this
not-so-gentle exploration a rural community in eastern Colorado.
Initially, plainsong meant a simple musical form used in the
early western church. Listen to a Gregorian chant to understand this
uncomplicated structure relying on melody unaccompanied by harmony. In one
form, it functions as a call and response, the technique Haruf uses to develop
his character-driven novel.
Who would imagine two crusty bachelor brothers living on a cattle
ranch 17 miles from town as the rescuers of an abandoned, pregnant 17-year-old
or adolescent boys left by their mother? Characters Maggie Jones and Tom
Guthrie are more likely champions, though they require aid to overcome
difficulty.
Despite dark and troublesome conflicts, Haruf offers help
for every need. None of the sympathetic characters faces hardship alone.
Nebraska writer Bess Streeter Aldrich words sum up the convoluted
relationships, “For though love has been ridiculed and disgraced, exchanged,
and bartered, dragged through the courts, and sold for 30 pieces of silver, the
bright steady glow of its fire still shines on the hearth stones of countless
homes.” As basic as an early plainsong, love answers need in this hard land.
Writing like a poet, author Haruf plays with his title. Readers,
like redtails riding thermals, soar along as theme and structure weave together
lives of flawed humans. As readers finish one page after another of his novel, evidence
proves Haruf knows this place some dismissively call The Great American Desert
or Flyover Country.
Haruf sings a song of The Plains. He knows its landscape,
icons, and rhythms. From the first, he establishes mastery of place: “. . .
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, the
increased reddening of sunrise along the steel blades and the tail vane above
the wooden platform.” Who hasn’t watched scarlet rays warm the cold metal of a
windmill?
Further into the work, he details a common ranching
experience.
“At last there was only the red-legged cow
left to test, the one their father warned them about. . . . She regarded the
two boys steadily as if she were some wild range animal that had never seen a
human on foot before. . . . They were afraid of her and didn’t want to be kicked.
. . . She dropped her head and whirled around, stubby tail up, stiffened, and
galloped across to the other side. . . . She faced them, her eyes
baleful-looking and her sides heaving. . . . She galloped into Bobby, knocking
him back off his feet before he could jump out of the way. He landed on his
back and bounced once like a piece of thrown stove wood wood. . . . He lay on
the trampled dirt look up at the empty sky, trying to breathe.” Ranch kids
across this region have left English teachers gripping red pens as they read
essays describing this archetypal struggle between youngster and beast.
Plainsong resonates with details that define place. Haruf
never misses the mark describing homes, streets, ranchland, red cedars, and
solitude. At the end, he pulls the piece together with a familiar scene.
“The two women came out onto the steps of the
porch in the evening with the light behind them burning in the kitchen, visible
through the open door, backlighting them. . . Their dark hair was damp and
their quiet faces were flushed from the hot kitchen, from the cooking. . . . The
women looked . . . farther out toward the barn lot and work corral where the
three men stood at the fence, each with a booted foot crooked on the bottom
rail, an elbow slung over the top rail, comfortable, talking. . . . Now the
wind started up in the trees, high up, moving the high branches.
This novel is a hymn to place: a vanished inland sea turned
expanse of grass and sky broken by occasional signs of human occupation. It’s a
story of uncommon grace, the kind about which South Dakotan Kathleen Norris
writes, “If grace is so wonderful, why do we have such trouble recognizing and
accepting it. Maybe it’s because grace is not gentle or made-to-order. It often
comes disguised as loss, or failure, or unwelcome change.”
Haruf’s unlikely heroes have found such grace.
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