Plains Song (2 page)

We do not use that word—
nobility
—much anymore; we are more likely to use words like
empowerment
or
marginalization.
Cora's nobility has something to do with the ability to bear up without complaint, to take her life as it comes to her, and to regard it as God-given. If you were an ambassador from the future and arrived on her doorstep to tell her that she is a victim, she would be horrified, or more likely, would simply
not know what you are talking about. Cora's responses to her own life are complex but uncomplaining, and they reflect a feature of common existence two or three generations back among women (and men) living her sort of life. We now know the damage that was done with such silences, the abuses and injustices that they covered up. What we are more likely not to acknowledge now is the power of such silences. “Although urged to cry out by Mrs. Kahler, Cora made no sound.”
That's
Cora.

The novel's irony is that its subtitle is
For Female Voices
. Well, yes and no. The female voices in
Plains Song
often express themselves by their silences, an expressive, ongoing, sometimes lifelong silence.

We should not always think of silences as sinister or as necessarily harboring a wound that needs to be exposed to air. Sometimes silence is a sign of pure wonderment, of quiet, absorbed attention. In the unfolding of this story, Morris's characters are largely divided into two groups: those who keep silent and those who are somewhat more articulate or (in the terms the novel sets for itself) noisy. The fact of Cora seems to bring forth her opposites, first with her sister-in-law, Belle Rooney, and then with Belle's daughter, Sharon Rose. Cora's own daughter is quiet, as is a later (and very eerie) character, Blanche, who is all eyes. At the end of the novel, Sharon finds herself among people whose purpose in life is to make speeches. Counterpointed characterization is very much at work here. Belle, who comes from another part of the country, talks all the time. She teaches Cora's daughter, Madge, to talk. “Cora,” the narrator observes, “hoped that such speech would come slow to Madge, but even the chickens might learn it if they heard enough of it.” From silence we move slowly and maybe reluctantly to expression, to conversation, and to music. But we never leave those silences behind. They infuriate Sharon, who thinks of this refusal to articulate as characteristic of dumb beasts. But those silences are at least half the novel, and Sharon ends up speechless herself in the novel's concluding section.

What I have been saying about the characters in this novel
also applies to the novel's own manner and to its unusual mode of presentation.

You will notice as you read through
Plains Song
that the writing avoids standard interior scene construction, by which I mean prolonged dialogue between two or more people, interspersed with moments of action. Defined by an absence of conversation, by its characters' refusal to speak at length, the novel also brushes off moments that in most contemporary fiction would be highlighted, underlined, and prolonged. Any and all romances in
Plains Song
take place, for the most part, behind the scenes, and if the novel's characters feel love, the novel does not let too much of that love become visible on stage. There is a remarkable tact at work here, particularly in the reflections on the relationship between Sharon and Lillian Baumann, all the more powerful because not fully glimpsed.

Major characters die suddenly, but their deaths are, more often than not, inserted into the middle of paragraphs, and the voice does not rise to emphasize the importance of the event. There is a refusal here to make events larger than they are. The narrative is rigorously anti-inflationary. If you are not paying attention, you might miss some or all of it. When catastrophe strikes, the voice remains even-tempered, as if it were watching these events at a distance or through a mirror.

This narrative is laconic to a fault, but it is amazingly, beautifully eloquent within the terms that it sets itself. Also, because it refuses to overstate anything, the voice is trustworthy in whatever it brings to your attention. The author, through his characters, is telling you exactly what he knows to be true and what he is sure of, no more and no less. After a while, given all this evidence, the reader thinks,
Yes, it must have happened in exactly this way. This is a world.

Some readers may find themselves bewildered to encounter so uninflected a story, as if the narrative itself has learned a thing or two from Cora. We are so accustomed to over-the-top expressions of feeling, to high publicity disclosures of personal matters, and to the general gratuitous invasion of public life by inflated emotions and events that an immersion into a privacy as profound as the kind experienced by
the characters in this novel may at first seem slightly off-putting. We are used to having dramas raised to a higher, noisier pitch than this—any soap opera has more
overt
drama than this book does. But what you gain in drama you lose in self-possession and dignity and nobility, and finally you may lose the sense of wonder altogether.

I need to stop at that word, one of Morris's favorites.
Wonder
. One of his other novels was titled
Cause for Wonder,
and in another late novel,
Fire Sermon,
the protagonist, a boy who is pushing through his early adolescence toward manhood, discards a casual understanding so that he can experience wonder instead. “Already he was old enough to gaze in wonder at life.”
Old enough
, the sentence reads, not young enough. Wonder, despite what people may say about it, is an attribute of maturity, not of youth. Teenagers are often more blasé than old people are. You cannot feel wonder until you give up some of the customary ways of seeing and understanding common events. It is better to come back to them free of knowingness and clichés. You experience a sense of wonder when a familiar thing, something you thought you knew, starts to feel strange and makes your hair stand on end. In
Plains Song
the strange mixes very closely with the familiar, like that door propped up against that wall. When Cora's husband, Emerson, dies, she realizes that in her soul he has been a stranger to her all her life, and she was to him—this after several decades of living with him.

That may be why the focus of this novel, its focusing agent, shifts halfway through the book from Cora to Sharon. A malcontent from the moment of her birth, Sharon can see and express what many of the other characters cannot, because her distance from her own experience, her sense of being at one remove, makes her a perfect observer. Gradually, by force of character, she becomes the eyes and ears of the book, its expressive spy, its artist, toward whom the narrative naturally is drawn. If this book calls itself a song—and it does—then we should look for its musician, and that person is Sharon. The narrator reserves his greatest eloquence for her, and the resulting portrait is loving, exact, and utterly memorable. Sharon
becomes
the landscape that surrounds her. Here is one
description of her as she sits in a car: “The heat drone of the insects, the stupor of the food, and the jostle of the car seemed to blur the distinction between herself and the swarming life around her. Voices, bird calls, a movement of the leaves, the first hint of coolness in the air, were not separately observed sensations but commingled parts of her own nature. Her soul (what else could it be?) experienced a sense of liberation in its loss of self.” That's beautiful.

Through Sharon's viewpoint the reader witnesses many of the novel's crucial events, despite (or because of) the fact that Cora has tried to punish her into voicelessness and silence early on by slapping her palm with the back of a hairbrush. This event, Sharon's being slapped, is one of the novel's most important dramatic moments—the sound and feeling of that slap resonate all the way to the end. But the lesson of silence doesn't take with Sharon in the same way that it did with Cora, and Sharon's vocation is devoted to making sounds, to being productively enraged and finding a music for her life. And yet, near the end of the book, she realizes that she “had been Cora's girl.”

In this respect she fits a classic mode, the character who cannot go home again but, thanks to circumstances and loyalty and ties that cannot be broken, must do so anyway. Like Jim Burden in Willa Cather's
My Ántonia
or Miranda in Katherine Anne Porter's “Old Mortality,” Sharon must revisit the very place she did her best to escape, where the lives were half-submerged or unseemly or broken on one wheel or another. And near the end, when she finds herself in a museum in Lincoln, Nebraska, gazing upon stuffed replicas of the creatures that had once roamed the plains, it occurs to her, as it must also occur to the reader, that she has a personal museum of her own located in her head, filled with memories of extinct creatures whose forms of life have all but vanished. Although she is not one to give herself to the past, she is about to become one of those creatures.

The women in this novel trade in one kind of strength for another kind, and Sharon is the one to watch the transition, to be there when it happens. She moves from protest to a form of contemplation, a rapturous attention to a world of
phantoms. In a characteristic passage, “she felt withdrawn from the scene, as if she saw it through a window, or within the frame of a painting.” So
there
is our photograph again, bringing us to a scene and also keeping our distance from it.

The last thirty pages or so of this novel comprise some of the most beautiful and hair-raising prose that Morris ever wrote, and their subject is how a world is lost and other worlds are born in its place. They are written with heartbreaking restraint. In these passages Sharon is paying lyrical attention to what the world lays before her, as if every scrap contained a clue to what is no longer there. What she feels most powerfully is longing. Longing is a particular kind of desire that has lost its way, desire without a clear object. Longing creates search parties and then sends them out into the world without a specific thing to search for. Longing, I would say, is the governing emotion of this book, longing mixed with wonder.

The conventional novel—and Morris never wrote a conventional novel—begins with a situation that creates a set of questions that the novel then does its best to answer. Morris typically reversed the order. The reader will note that in
Plains Song
the story begins with assertions but ends with a flood of questions. Has there ever been another novel with so many narrative questions as this one? The last thirty pages are filled with them. They are a testament to the characters' ability to feel wonder, to gaze upon the world and simultaneously to pose a question without demanding an answer, to remain placidly in that condition.

Finally,
Plains Song
is a kind of cabinet of wonders, of things collected, including a green shed with white windows, with cobs inside pressed against the glass; a covey of pale gray doves on the dung-whitened ridge of the shingle roof; a cradle made from a wedge-shaped box used as a feeding trough; a small Axminster rug; new linoleum in the kitchen; a piano; a birthmark where nobody would be likely to see it; Cora and Emerson; Belle and Orion; Sharon; Beulah Madge; Ned Kibbee; and Sharon—among many others. It does little good
to list them. You have to go into this world, reader, and discover them for yourself.

The music of this plains song is marvelously counterpointed and breathtakingly complex. Do not be deceived by the title. As Morris knew,
plains
does not mean
simple.
One letter, creating a plural, changes everything.

PLAINS SONG

It is a curse in this family that the women bear only daughters, if anything at all.

“Let her nap,” said a voice. “She needs her nap.”

Cora does not need a nap, but she welcomes silence. Is the past a story we are persuaded to believe, in the teeth of the life we endure in the present? Even Cora Atkins, whose life is over? Her mind is sealed, like a tomb, but her eyes are open. The humiliations of age have won from her one concession: the nightcap she wears to conceal her baldness. Silken wisps of hair loop over the pulleys of her ears, the parts of her body
that have never stopped growing, but the dome of her head is smooth as a gourd. Chairs have been brought in for the visitors to sit on, but none resemble the woman propped up in the bed. Age has eliminated the frills of individual distinction. She looks old, as her grandchildren look young. She was never spry, comforting, or twinkling, and the young are reluctant to call her Grandma to her face. Nor do they raise their faces to her to be kissed. Not that she is cold, unloving, or insensible. She is implacable. Her talon-like hands lie before her, the right placed on the left, a scar blue as gun metal between the first and second knuckle, a seam on the flesh. How did she acquire it? It is said a horse bit her. For a farmer's wife that is not unusual. She had stood in the doctor's office, near the glare at the window where he had looked at her hand with the torn flesh, the knuckle bone exposed. “What happened?” he had asked. She had been speechless. Tobacco juice oozing at the corner of his mouth, her husband, Emerson, had said, “Horse bit her.” She had been both relieved and appalled. But she preferred it to admitting she had bitten herself.