Over the past two weeks, my book thoughts have been peopled with the characters in Plainsong the book we’re now discussing in the 2016 Spring Read for HPPR’s Radio Readers Book Club. We’ll be moving on to the second book soon, and when we do, I’m going to miss the characters in Holt.
For certain, I’ll miss the McPheron brothers – Harold and Raymond -- two old bachelors in boots, jeans, canvas chore jackets and caps with flannel ear flaps pulled down tight. When we met them, their noses were dripping and their eyes were bleary and red from the cold and the dust generated by the cattle milling about the corral in which the brothers stood.
It was high school teacher and guidance counselor Maggie Jones who took us into the bachelor brothers’ kitchen. It was orderly in a sense -- stacks of Farm Journals and old newspapers lining the walls. Every chair in the room seemed to be filled with greasy pieces of machinery –cogwheels, old bearings, shank bolts – except for two – one for each brother placed opposite one another at the well-worn pine table at which the brothers ate and read.
Maggie had come to request that the brothers provide a home for a young, pregnant teenager. The brothers were discomforted to say the least. Harold spoke in shock, telling his brother Raymond that a girl’s got purposes the two of them couldn’t even imagine . . . “They got ideas in their heads you and me can’t even suppose,” Harold said in dismay.
Of course, the girl herself, Victoria, had her concerns as well. Maggie had described the old brothers as rough around the edges, gruff and unpolished but also as good as men could be. They don’t talk much, so we had to learn of their goodness through what came after that first day, warm in a cluttered kitchen.
We saw Harold and Raymond reach beyond their generation, change their decades’ old routines and attempt to engage Victoria in conversation in what had to be my favorite passage in the book. I won’t spoil the plot for you by reading bits of their conversation here, but I hope you’ didn’t miss the poignant effort the two old guys made at expressing their concern – like two old hens fretting and worrying, seeking to make things right.
Things weren’t all sweetness and light in Haruf’s Holt, Colorado, but if you’ve ever taken a ride in a pickup amid old papers and sales receipts, fencing pliers and hot wire testers as dirty coffee mugs slide back and forth on the dash board as you head into town for lunch, I hope you rode along with someone like one of the two unlikely heroes of Plainsong.
