Plains Song by Wright Morris

“What a woman needs is one thing, but what a farm needs is another.” She had been too startled to reply. He spoke as if he saw her right there before him, at the door to the porch. She thought he meant to go on and she waited, hushed, while he tossed a dipper of water at the bugs cluttering the screen. Somewhere in the barn, or behind it, she heard the moaning caterwauling of the cats. Their piercing ear-splitting shrieks no longer dismayed her. How well she had come to understand it! Nothing known to her had proved to be both so bizarre and so repugnant as the act of procreation, but she understood that it was essential to its great burden of meaning. In the wild, cats shrieked. In the bedroom Cora had bitten through her hand to the bone. Dimly she gathered that Emerson, in speaking as he did, wanted her to know that she had failed him. What a farm needed was sons. She had borne a daughter, to be fed and clothed, then offered on the marriage market. Who would be there to run the farm as they grew old? Nothing in Emerson’s nature assured her that he would not repeat the first experience, but the passage of time, the consoling rut of habit, had dulled the terror and anxiety she had once felt. He did not move toward her. He did not caress or strike her. He lay awake with his thoughts or he slept, or he snored, as if they had reached an understanding. Was she right in thinking he had spoken as he did to relieve her of the burden of his expectations? They were heavy within her. They weighed her down more thanthe child. Had he spoken to her as he did so that she would feel free to go back to bed, or so that she would share a burden too great for him to bear alone? She didn’t know. It sometimes seemed to her she knew him less than if they had never met. Nevertheless, what had happened, or what had not happened, took on for her the importance of a religious ceremony: her feet seemed nailed to the floor, she could neither rock the chair nor rise from it. This awesome, aching silence would be broken by Emerson, scratching himself inside his underwear, then seeming to forget what time it was and taking the clock from the range to wind it, saying aloud, “Why, dang, I already done that,” and proceeding upstairs.

The fall harvest was so abundant the temporary house was converted to a grain shed to store it. The doors were locked shut and the grain was shoveled through the stovepipe hole in the roof. Sacks of corn were stored in the loft of the barn and the upstairs bedrooms, attracting the mice, for which Cora set traps. More often than not these creatures proved to be so clever they set off the traps and ate the bait. Curious to observe the little thieves at their work, Cora lay awake, wide-eyed, her gaze fastened on the traps in the hallway. The mouse that set themoff proved to be Orion. She heard him whispering and actually encouraging the mice. He would make scratching sounds on the floor to bring them out of their holes. Cora felt neither affection nor compassion for creatures that took from her what was rightfully hers. A mouse caught in the house, a rabbit in her garden, or a coon in her storm cave was an offense to her nature. Against the forces aligned against her she felt, like Emerson, there were no truces. If for a day or a night she faltered, they made measurable gains.
    With his share of the crop Orion bought a saddle horse, a new Winchester rifle, and took off for the Ozarks. Even Cora was dismayed by such flaws in his nature: was he a hillbilly or a farmer? After three weeks he might have returned empty-handed if he had not had an accident while hunting. Stalking deer, Orion had crawled through a dense tangle of poison oak. Lacking experience with it he scratched, and the infection spread to all parts of his body, including his scalp. A local girl, Belle Rooney, immune to the poison, was wonderfully efficient in caring for him. Cora knew nothing of all this until they appeared, with his horse