Plainsong

Ike and Bobby arrive home to find their father’s truck absent from the driveway. They listen carefully for their mother, trying to determine whether she has left her room: “She has to eat sometime” (31), Ike insists. They eat cookies and drink milk quietly before going outside again to see the family’s two horses, Elko and Easter. While Bobby waits, Ike tries to corral the horses into the stalls in the barn. When the horses are in the stalls, the boys brush and saddle them, riding them out along the train tracks “going to the west away from town” (32). 

When Victoria leaves the café, she feels “something unaccountable pending in the air” (33). She arrives home to find the door locked. Victoria rattles the doorknob and pleads with her mother to let her in. After a despondent moment sitting alone on the porch, Victoria decides to leave. Wandering through the town, she arrives at Maggie’s house and knocks at the door. Maggie invites Victoria into the house so they can talk.

Victoria tells Maggie about her boyfriend and the time they spent together “parked out on a dirt road five miles north of town” (35). She is reluctant to reveal the boy’s name as “he’s not the fathering kind” (35).