Plainsong

Honey, Maggie Jones said. Victoria. Listen to me. You're here now. This is where you are.

A girl is different. They want things. They need things on a regular schedule. Why, a girl's got purposes you and me can't even imagine. They got ideas in their heads you and me can't even suppose.

Here was this man Tom Guthrie in Holt standing at the back window in the kitchen of his house smoking cigarettes and looking out over the back lot where the sun was just coming up.

You’re going to die some day without ever having had enough trouble in your life. Not of the right kind anyway.

Often in the morning they rode out along the tracks on Easter and took their lunch and once rode as far as the little cemetery halfway to Norka where there was a stand of cottonwood trees with their leaves washing and turning in the wind, and they ate lunch there in the freckled shade of the trees and came back in the late afternoon with the sun sliding down behind them, making a single shadow of them and the horse together, the shadow out in front like a thin dark antic precursor of what they were about to become.

You understand? If you can read you can cook. You can always feed yourselves. You remember that.

This ain't going to be no goddamn Sunday school picnic.

The evening wasn’t cold yet... But the air was turning sharp, with a fall feeling of loneliness coming. Something unaccountable pending in the air.

You don't deserve it, he said aloud. Don't ever begin to think that you do.

The shaggy saddle horses, already winter-coated, stood with their backs to the wind, watching the two men in the corral, the horses’ tails blowing out, their breath snorted out in white plumes and carried away in tatters by the wind.

Don’t you have any scars? Inside. Do you? Of course. You don’t act like it. I don’t intend to. It doesn’t do much good, does it?