Eventide - Couverture rigide

They came up from the horse barn in the slanted light of early morning. The McPheron brothers, Harold and Raymond. Old men approaching an old house at the end of summer. They came on across the gravel drive past the pickup and the car parked at the hogwire fencing and came one after the other through the wire gate. At the porch they scraped their boots on the saw blade sunken in the dirt, the ground packed and shiny around it from long use and mixed with barnlot manure, and walked up the plank steps onto the screened porch and entered the kitchen where the nineteen-year-old girl Victoria Roubideaux sat at the pinewood table feeding oatmeal to her little daughter.

In the kitchen they removed their hats and hung them on pegs set into a board next to the door and began at once to wash up at the sink. Their faces were red and weather-blasted below their white foreheads, the coarse hair on their round heads grown iron-gray and as stiff as the roached mane of a horse. When they finished at the sink they each in turn used the kitchen towel to dry off, but when they began to dish up their plates at the stove the girl made them sit down.

There's no use in you waiting on us, Raymond said.

I want to, she said. I'll be gone tomorrow.

She rose with the child on her hip and brought two coffee cups and two bowls of oatmeal and a plate of buttered toast to the table and then sat down again.

Harold sat eyeing the oatmeal. You think she might of at least give us steak and eggs this once, he said. On account of the occasion. But no sir, it's still only warm mush. Which tastes about like the back page of a wet newspaper. Delivered yesterday.

You can eat what you want after I'm gone. I know you will anyway.

Yes ma'am, probably so. Then he looked at her. But I'm not in any rush for you to leave here. I'm just trying to joke you a little.

I know you are. She smiled at him. Her teeth were very white in her brown face, and her black hair was thick and shiny and cut off neat below her shoulders. I'm almost ready, she said. First I want to feed Katie and get her dressed, then we can start.

Let me have her, Raymond said. Is she done eating?

No, she isn't, the girl said. She might eat something for you though. She just turns her head away for me.

Raymond stood and walked around the table and took up the little girl and returned to his seat and sat her on his lap and sprinkled sugar on the oatmeal in his bowl and poured out milk from the jar on the table and began to eat, the black-haired round-cheeked girl watching him as if she were fascinated by what he was doing. He held her easily, comfortably, his arm about her, and spooned up a small portion and blew over it and offered it to her. She took it. He ate more himself. Then he blew over another spoonful and gave that to her. Harold poured milk into a glass and she leaned forward over the table and drank a long time, using both hands, until she had to stop for breath.

What am I going to do in Fort Collins when she won't eat? Victoria said.

You can call on us, Harold said. We'll come see about this little girl in about two minutes. Won't we, Katie.

The child looked across the table at him, unblinking. Her eyes were as black as her mother's, like buttons or currants. She said nothing but took up Raymond's calloused hand and moved it toward the cereal bowl. When he held out the spoon she pushed his hand toward his mouth. Oh, he said. All right. He blew over it elaborately, puffing his cheeks, moving his red face back and forth, and now she would eat again.

When they were finished Victoria carried her daughter into the bathroom off the dining room to wash her face and then took her back to their bedroom and changed her clothes. The McPheron brothers went upstairs to their rooms and got into town clothes, dark trousers and pale shirts with pearl snaps and their good white hand-shaped Bailey hats. Back downstairs they carried Victoria's suitcases out to the car and set them in the trunk. The backseat was already loaded with boxes of the little girl's clothes and blankets and bedsheets and toys, and a child's padded car seat. Behind the car was the pickup and in its bed, together with the spare tire and the jack and a half dozen empty oil cans and dry wisps of brome hay and a piece of rusted barbed wire, were the little girl's high chair and her daybed, its mattress wrapped in a new tarp, all of it lashed down with orange binder twine.

They returned to the house and came out with Victoria and the little girl. On the porch Victoria paused for a moment, her dark eyes welling with sudden tears.

What's the matter here? Harold said. Is something wrong?

She shook her head.

You know you can always come back. We're expecting you to. We're counting on it. Maybe it'll help to keep that in mind.

It isn't that, she said.

Is it because you're kind of scared? Raymond said.

It's just that I'm going to miss you, she said. I haven't been gone before, not like this. That other time with Dwayne I can't even remember and I don't want to. She shifted the little girl from one arm to the other and wiped at her eyes. I'm just going to miss you, that's all it is.

You can call if you need something, Harold said. We'll still be here at the other end.

But I'm still going to miss you.

Yes, Raymond said. He looked out from the porch toward the barnlot and the brown pastures beyond. The blue sandhills in the far distance low on the low horizon, the sky so clear and empty, the air so dry. We're going to miss you too, he said. We'll be about like old played-out workhorses once you're gone. Standing around lonesome, always looking over the fence. He turned to study her face. A face familiar and dear to him now, the three of them and the baby living in the same open country, in the same old weathered house. But you think you can come on? he said. We probably ought to get this thing started if we're going to.
Raymond drove her car with Victoria sitting beside him so she could reach into the back and tend to Katie in her padded chair. Harold followed them in the pickup, out the lane onto the gravel county road, headed west to the two-lane blacktop, then north toward Holt. The country both sides of the highway was flat and treeless, the ground sandy, the wheat stubble in the flat fields still bright and shiny since its cutting in July. Beyond the barrow ditches the irrigated corn stood up eight feet tall, darkly green and heavy. The grain elevators in the distance showed tall and white in town beside the railroad tracks. It was a bright warm day with the wind coming hot out of the south.

In Holt they turned onto US 34 and stopped at the Gas and Go where Main Street intersected the highway. The McPherons got out and stood at the pumps, gassing up both vehicles as Victoria went in to buy them cups of coffee and a Coke for herself and a bottle of juice for the little girl. Ahead of her in line at the cash register a heavy black-haired man and his wife were standing with a young girl and a small boy. She had seen them walking at all hours along the streets of Holt and she had heard the stories. She thought that if it weren't for the McPheron brothers she might be like them herself. She watched as the girl moved to the front of the store and took a magazine from the rack at the plateglass windows and flipped through it with her back turned away as if she were not related in any manner to the people at the counter. But after the man had paid for a box of cheese crackers and four cans of pop with food stamps, she put the magazine back and followed the rest of her family out the door.

When Victoria came out, the man and the woman were standing in the tarred parking lot deciding something between themselves. She couldn't see the girl or her brother, then turned and saw they were standing together at the corner under the traffic light, looking up Main Street toward the middle of town, and she went on to where Raymond and Harold were waiting for her at the car.
It was shortly after noon when they drove down the ramp off the interstate and into the outskirts of Fort Collins. To the west, the foothills rose up in a ragged blue line obscured by yellow smog blown up from the south, blown up from Denver. On one of the hills a white A was formed of whitewashed rocks, a carryover from when the university's teams were called the Aggies. They drove up Prospect Road and turned onto College Avenue, the campus was all on the left side with its brick buildings, the old gymnasium, the smooth greens lawns, and passed along the street under the cottonwoods and tall blue spruce until they turned onto Mulberry and then turned again and then located the apartment building set back from the street where the girl and her daughter would now live.

They parked the car and the pickup in the lot behind the building, and Victoria went in with the little girl to find the apartment manager. The manager turned out to be a college girl not unlike herself, only older, a senior in sweatshirt and jeans with her blonde hair sprayed up terrifically on her head. She came out into the hallway to introduce herself and began at once to explain that she was majoring in elementary education and working as a student teacher this semester in a little town east of Fort Collins, talking without pause while she led Victoria to the second-floor apartment. She unlocked the door and handed over the key and another one for the outside door, then stopped abruptly and looked at Katie. Can I hold her?

I don't think so, Victoria said. She won't go to everybody.

The McPherons brought up the suitcases and the boxes from the car and set them in the small bedroom. They looked around and went back for the daybed and high chair.

Standing in the door, the manager looked over at Victoria. Are they your grandfathers or something?

No.

Who are they? Your uncles?...

"Beautifully crafted and moving . . . Holt, Colorado [is] a town as fully realized and richly imagined as Faulkner's Jefferson, Mississippi." --Bill Marvel, Dallas Morning News

"[Eventide] possesses the haunting appeal of music, the folksy rhythms of an American ballad and the lovely, measured grace of an old hymn . . . Mr. Haruf's understated prose, combined with his emotional wisdom and his easy affection for his characters turns [the novel's] events into affecting drama. In mapping the postage-stamp-size world of Holt, he has limned the loneliness of the people there and their resilience and capacity for hope."--Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

"There's a decency that shines in the very accuracy with which [Haruf] describes the ordinary. Scene after scene, from cattle auction to back-booth seduction . . . flows by us as clear as spring water, proof that truth, like virtue, has its own reward."--Michael Harris, Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Eventide is admirably austere: Haruf handles even potentially explosive scenes with delicacy." --Margaret Quamme, Columbus Dispatch

"[Haruf] makes average people in fictional Holt, Colo., interesting, much like legendary Texas writer Horton Foote, [and] finds beauty and sadness in everyday life." --Kathy Harris, Fort Worth Star-Telegram

"Eventide is a lovely novel, all the more for its uncomprimising realism, its eschewing of the magical pallative of happy endings, its recognition that decency carries its own unique rewards."--Joan Mellen, Baltimore Sun

“Highly charged and compassionate . . . Every action in Holt casts a long shadow, and the gist of Haruf’s story is what happens when those shadows touch . . . Haruf’s writing draws power from his sense of character–its limitations and its possibilities–and how it propels action.”–New Yorker

“A kind book in a cruel world...[with] honest impulses, real people and the occasional workings of grace.”--Christopher Tilghman, Washington Post

"Haruf is a master of evocative description, [and his] lyrical style, which has been compared to that of Hemingway and Chekhov . . . quickly infects the reader with its own peculiar rhythms, to the point at which putting down the book and returning to real-world conversation is jarring. Most important, there is Haruf's spirit, which suggests that people unrelated by blood can and must form families, that a simple act of goodwill can occur even when it seems impossible."--Gail Pennington, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"Haruf's prose style emerges from behind [his] cast with a sober, homespun beauty . . . With Eventide, [he] has made them a permanent addition to the literary map of this country."--John Freeman, Milwaukee Journal-Star

"Haruf's storytelling at its best."--Jennifer Reese, Entertainment Weekly

"Eventide is a spare, delicate and beautiful book [that is] set in a world where an 11-year-old boy and an old bachelor rancher can both experience the wonder of a first kiss . . . Haruf has created another poignant meditation on the true meaning of family."--April Henry, Oregonian

"[Eventide] is a clear distillation of the writer's craft, a book that grabs you by the heart on the first page, refusing to release its grasp until the last . . . Just as day moves from late afternoon into night, Haruf's characters move inevitably toward, and through, personal challenge, [and] it is through these lives, both distinct and entwined, that Haruf quietly explores all that makes us human."--Robin Vidimos, Denver Post

"Haruf has once again demonstrated that he can push a tale featuring our Western landscape beyond romanticized cowboy myth into distilled reality."--Jenny Shank, Rocky Mountain News

"This hardscrabble story kicks up a dust cloud of melancholy that will sting even the most hardened readers' eyes. At the end of some chapters I was left wondering, Who in America can still write like this? Who else has such confidence and such humility?"--Ron Charles, Christian Science Monitor

"A stunning novel of brothers, land, grief, and redemption...The dry, cold air of Colorado's high plains seems to intensify the light Kent Haruf shines on every character in his masterful novel Eventide. He brings such grace and care to his examination of the ways we fail and, sometimes, help one another, that the end result is a book of hope, hope as plain and hard-won as Haruf's keenly styled prose.--Mark Doty, O Magazine

"This novelist writes with such unabashed wonder before life's mysteries, such compassion for frail humanity that he seems to have issued from another time, a better place."--Dan Cryer, Newsday

"Masterful... A full and satisfying novel complete unto itself [that] might be even more emotionally powerful than its predecessor . . ." --Karen Sandstrom, Cleveland Plain Dealer
 
"In creating a place whose people are tethered to each other by history and emotion as much as place, Haruf's work is now competing with Faulkner's Mississippi, Sherwood Anderon's Midwest, and Wallace Stegner's northern California."
--Mark Athitakis, Chicago Sun-Times

"Luminous . . . Haruf's uncanny ability to stay out of his characters' way is evident again in Eventide. What comes out of their mouths, whether it is kind, mean, ignorant, confused, intelligent or clouded by loneliness, is true and hard, spare as life on the plains . . . Eventide depicts a time, a place and its people so sincerely and so compellingly, with moments of such rare beauty, that the reader cannot walk away."
--Kathryn Eastburn, Colorado Springs Independent
 
"Like the lives he chronicles, Haruf's prose moves relentlessly forward, catching in his images the fierceness and sweetness of experience.
"--Mickey Pearlman, Minneapolis Star-Tribune

"Haruf is the author of some of the best fiction about American small-town and rural life being written today. As readers of Plainsong know, Haruf's taut, unsentimental storytelling and spare, graceful prose are capable of transporting the imagination to a deeper understanding of human responsibility and connection . . . Eventide offers many of the pleasures of Plainsong: a strong storyline, Haruf's wonderful, unadorned prose and several familiar characters . . . [But it ] takes on very different tonality and complexion from its predecessor. If Plainsong is morning or afternoon on the prairie, then Eventide is dusk; it is filled with a beautiful but somber light."--Alden Mudge, BookPage

"Melancholy truths set to gorgeous melody . . . Haruf sings the second verse of his moving hymn to life on America’s great plains.”
--Kirkus, starred review

"Haruf’s follow-up to the critically acclaimed and bestselling Plainsong is as lovely and accomplished as its predecessor. The aging bachelor McPheron brothers and their beloved charges, Victoria and her daughter, Katie, return (though Victoria quickly heads off to college), and Haruf introduces new folks–a disabled couple and their children, an old man and the grandson who lives with him–in this moving exploration of smalltown lives in rural Holt, Colo. Ranchers Raymond and Harold McPheron have spent their whole lives running land that has been in their family for many generations, so when Harold is killed by an enraged bull, worn-out Raymond faces a void unlike any he has ever known. His subsequent first-ever attempts at courtship and romance are almost heartbreaking in their innocence, but after some missteps, he finds unexpected happiness with kind Rose Tyler. Rose is the caseworker for a poor couple struggling so dimly and futilely to better their lives that it becomes painful to witness. Children play crucial roles in the novel’s tapestry of rural life, and they are not spared life’s trials. But Haruf’s characters, such as 11-year-old orphan DJ Kephart, who cares for his retired railroad worker grandfather, and Mary Wells, whose husband abandons her with two young girls, maintain an elemental dignity no matter how buffeted by adversity. And while there is much sadness and hardship in this portrait of a community, Haruf’s sympathy for his characters, no matter how flawed they are, make this an uncommonly rich novel."
--Publishers Weekly, starred review

 
From the Hardcover edition.