Plains Song by Wright Morris Page B

could do holding two pails of water. Holding nothing at all, a man could fall and break his leg. It put Emerson in mind of a Burlington caboose. All winter long, when the trees were bare, he would have no choice but to look at it. Every morning he would look at it, then say to Cora, “You think they plan to live in it?” The easygoing, patient side of Emerson was based on what he found to be customary, but a house that sat up on concrete blocks looked to him like something on a flatcar. He wished it was. He wished he could wake up and see it was gone.
    A further affront was the notions that Orion had picked up somewhere about farming. He wanted no more chickens, since Cora had them, than he would need to keep a few fresh eggs on the table. Milk and cream he would get from Cora, so he wouldn’t need cows. The only way you would know he was living in the country was the whine of the pigs when he fed them, and the smell they made when the wind died down. He kept so many pigs he had to buy swill and cart it from Battle Creek in a wagon. Behavior like that so disturbed Emerson he would talk at night. It was not to Cora, so she never knew if it was in his sleep, or awake and to himself. The discovery, which hemade by chance, that Orion planned to enlarge the basement with the house already built above it was a thing so strange and imponderable to Emerson he could not find words to describe it. No, it stumped him. Standing before Cora, his gaze averted to the window that looked toward Orion, he would lift the front plate on the range and spit a gob on the fire that would crackle the corn shucks. That’s how he felt, and that’s all he could do to relieve his mind.
    Before the windows were screened, or the porch built at the front, Belle Rooney’s father came up from the Ozarks with three hound dogs in the seat of his buggy. The sad-eyed bitch of the three was about to litter. Mr. Rooney talked freely, with gestures of his hands, but Cora found it hard to understand him. Her feeling was that Belle’s people were gypsies. He proved to know nothing to speak of about pigs or farming, but he had no objection to the people who did it. He lived on what he shot and the fish he caught, and he and Orion went hunting up the Elkhorn to shoot a few wolves and collect the bounty. They didn’t see any wolves, but they brought back to Belle a baby raccoon which the hound bitch seemed willing to suckle. It disturbed Cora to think that such a sensible dog didn’t know its own kind. After Mr. Rooney left, Emerson caught the coon at the back of the stable with one of Cora’s chickens. Orion had the option to shoot it himself or take it back up the Elkhorn where he found it, which he claimed he did. It was during this summer that Cora worried what might rub off Belle onto Beulah Madge.
    It turned out that Belle liked to make her own candles, and burned them more than she did the lamp. If Cora went over with a pan of biscuits, or a plate of fresh butter, she might find Belle running around the house barefoot, like a child. Her hair looked as if it might have birds nesting in it, and it worried Cora that she might have mites, and give them to Madge. It was also her custom, now that she had a few of her own, to let the chickens have the run of the house, as well as the hounds. A more irksome problem was the bitch, Lou, and her puppies, which she nursed in a box behind the range. If Cora spoke to Orion, he would put his head to one side and laugh. Something loose in his own nature seemed to be at ease with a girl like Belle. Nor was she any different when she proved to be pregnant and found it harder to hold and fondle Madge. As her breasts swelled, and her blouse gaped unbuttoned, it shamed Cora to admit what she was thinking. If left alone, she feared Belle would give her breast to Madge. Sensible as Cora was, she suffered the superstition that the wildness in Belle’s nature might be there in her milk,