The Dailiness of It

McMurtry had suggested we meet in Archer City, which I’d assumed meant the bookshop, but instead he drove me out to a hay barn on what had been his family’s place — a pole barn with a corrugated roof and a dirt floor and enough leftover bales stacked against the north wall that the whole structure smelled like August even though it was early March and the wind outside had an edge to it that made you check your coat buttons. He’d brought three folding chairs and a cooler with Dr Peppers in it, and he set everything up in the rectangle of light that came through the open bay doors, and when I said it was cold he said, “It’ll warm up when she gets here. Arguments generate heat.”

Proulx arrived in a rental car that was too small for her and that she parked at an angle suggesting she’d stopped caring about parking around the same time she stopped caring about small talk. She got out, looked at the barn, looked at the pasture beyond it, looked at the sky, and said, “The grass is wrong for this latitude.”

“Bermuda,” McMurtry said. “My grandfather planted it in ‘38 because somebody told him it would hold the topsoil. It held the topsoil and killed everything native within fifty yards.”

“That’s a story right there.”

“It’s not the story we’re here for.”

She accepted a Dr Pepper without comment and sat down and crossed her legs and looked at me and said, “Tell me about the family.”

I told her what I had. A homesteading family — husband, wife, children — settling land in the last decades of open claiming. The Cather structure: immigrant or near-immigrant labor building a world from grass. The Wilder themes: the family as the smallest unit that can survive, the seasonal cycle governing everything, the practical inventory of daily life — what you eat, what you burn, what you fear at night when the wind changes. I said I wanted the story to live in the dailiness. Not the catastrophe. Not the dramatic failure. The accumulation of ordinary days that are each, individually, survivable, and that together constitute something no one would choose if they could see it whole.

“Dailiness,” Proulx said, tasting the word. “That’s the part no one writes. They write the blizzard. They write the grasshopper plague. They write the baby’s grave. Nobody writes Tuesday. Nobody writes the afternoon when nothing went wrong and nothing went right and the woman looked at the man across the table and neither of them had anything to say and neither of them needed to say anything and the silence between them was not comfortable and not uncomfortable but simply the sound of two people who had been reduced to function.”

“I wouldn’t say reduced,” McMurtry said.

“What would you say?”

“Refined. Stripped to what matters. There’s a dignity in it. Two people at a table who don’t need to perform for each other because survival doesn’t leave room for performance.”

“That’s a generous reading.”

“It’s the reading I grew up with. My parents sat at that table.” He pointed vaguely at the pasture, at the direction of a house I couldn’t see. “They sat across from each other every evening of their married life and most evenings they didn’t say ten words between them. And that wasn’t emptiness. That was a marriage that had been weathered down to its load-bearing walls.”

Proulx looked at him with something I hadn’t seen from her before — not warmth, exactly, but a kind of attention that was adjacent to warmth. “Load-bearing walls. That’s good. That’s what I want in this story. A marriage that’s been reduced to structure. Not romance, not resentment, not even partnership in the way we’d use the word. Structure. He does this, she does this, the day works because both of them do their half, and if either one stops the whole thing falls.”

“But there has to be something else,” I said. “Something beyond function. Otherwise it’s just a machine.”

“Why?” Proulx said. “Why does there have to be something else? We’re so trained to demand the interior — the feeling beneath the action, the unspoken thing, the hidden tenderness. What if there isn’t one? What if the tenderness is the action? What if the woman who heats water for the man’s hands when he comes in from splitting wood in February — what if that IS the love, not a symbol of the love? What if there’s nothing underneath it because it’s not a surface?”

McMurtry leaned back and the folding chair creaked in a way that made us both look at it. “Annie, you and I agree more than either of us is comfortable with. I’ve been saying that for years. The tenderness is in the gesture. I just want the story to know it’s tenderness. You want the story to refuse to name it.”

“I want the story to trust the reader. Heat the water. Describe the steam. Describe his hands — cracked, bleeding at the knuckles, the skin so dry it’s almost white. Describe the moment he puts his hands into the basin. The reader who can’t find the tenderness in that isn’t the reader I’m writing for.”

“Fair enough. But there’s a risk. If you strip everything to gesture and object, you lose the people. They become hands and basins and steam. They become a woodcut. I want flesh. I want the man to have a name and a history and a stupid joke he tells every time he kills a chicken. I want the woman to have a song she hums when she doesn’t know anyone’s listening — not because the song means something, but because she’s a person who hums and that’s as real as the cracked hands.”

I said I wanted both. I said it and immediately felt the insufficiency of it — the lazy triangulation of someone who doesn’t want to choose. But McMurtry nodded, and Proulx didn’t object, and that silence felt less like agreement than like a shared recognition that wanting both was easy and achieving both would be the actual work.

“Tell me about the children,” McMurtry said. He’d been eating sunflower seeds from somewhere — I hadn’t seen him produce them — and spitting shells into a Dr Pepper can with a precision that suggested long practice.

“I’m not sure how many. Two, maybe three.”

“Three,” Proulx said. “You need three because one of them has to die.”

The sentence landed in the barn like a hay bale dropped from height. McMurtry didn’t flinch, which told me he’d been thinking the same thing.

“One child dies,” Proulx continued. “Not dramatically. Not in a fire or a flood. In the ordinary way children died on homesteads — a fever, a bad well, a cut that goes septic. And the family absorbs it. That’s the word. Absorbs. They don’t overcome it, they don’t process it, they don’t grieve in any way a modern reader would recognize as grief. They bury the child and the next day they do the work because the work doesn’t stop and the season doesn’t stop and the animals need feeding and the well needs drawing whether your daughter is in the ground or not.”

“The silence after the death,” McMurtry said, and his voice had gone somewhere lower. “That’s the heart of it. Not the death itself. The morning after. The way the mother sets three places at the table out of habit and then takes the third plate away and washes it even though it’s clean and puts it back in the shelf. That gesture — setting the plate and removing the plate — that’s a whole novel in two motions.”

“Don’t make it a novel,” Proulx said. “Make it a sentence. One sentence. She set the plate and took it back. If you linger on it, you sentimentalize it. If you pass through it at the speed of the day — the way a day passes through a woman who’s still working — the reader feels the weight you didn’t put there.”

I asked whether the child’s death should be the center of the story or one event in the accumulation. Whether it was the turning point or just another day that was worse than most days.

“It’s both,” McMurtry said. “That’s what makes it devastating. It’s the worst day of their lives and it’s also a day with chores. The cow still needs milking. The fire still needs banking. The worst day of your life and the most ordinary day of your life are the same day, and nobody tells you that beforehand, and afterward you can’t explain it to anyone who hasn’t lived it.”

Proulx stood up and walked to the bay doors and looked out at the grass — the wrong grass, the Bermuda that had eaten everything native. The wind was moving it in a way that looked like breathing.

“I keep coming back to Wilder,” she said, without turning around. “Not the myth. The inventory. The way she catalogs what’s in the pantry. Six pounds of flour. Two pounds of sugar. Salt pork. Dried apples. Coffee. You read that list and you know exactly how far they are from starvation. It’s not a metaphor. It’s arithmetic. And the arithmetic is the story. How many days until the flour runs out. How many miles to the nearest mill. Whether the creek will freeze before or after the last wagon gets through.”

“The arithmetic of survival,” I said.

“Don’t give it a name like that. Don’t elevate it. It’s just counting. A woman counting what she has and dividing it by the days until something changes. That’s the narrative engine. Not plot. Not conflict in the way workshops teach it. Inventory. A woman taking stock of what’s left and deciding what gets eaten today and what gets saved and who gets the bigger portion and who pretends they’re not hungry. Every one of those decisions is a sentence in the story. Every one of those decisions is an act of love that doesn’t know it’s love.”

McMurtry smiled. “You just said love.”

“I said it doesn’t know it’s love. That’s different.”

“Annie, love that doesn’t know it’s love is the most McMurtry thing you’ve ever said.”

She turned from the bay doors and looked at him and there was a moment that contained too much history for me to read — decades of mutual respect that had the texture of mutual irritation, the particular bond between two people who write about the same country from different altitudes.

“The seasons,” I said, because I was afraid the moment would curdle if I let it sit. “Wilder structures everything by season. Planting, growing, harvest, winter. Each season has its own dangers and its own tasks and its own quality of light. I want the story to move through at least one full year. Maybe more. Not as a chronicle — as a rhythm. The reader should feel the turning. Fall into winter into the terrible compression of February into the first break of spring when the ground softens and everything starts again.”

“February is when people quit,” Proulx said. “January they can handle because they’ve prepared for it. March they can handle because they can see the end. February is when the wood runs low and the food runs low and the daylight isn’t getting longer fast enough and the walls of the soddie start to close in and someone has to decide whether it’s worth burning the last chair to get through one more night.”

“Nobody burned chairs,” McMurtry said.

“Everybody burned chairs. They burned chairs and fence posts and dried cow chips and the covers of books and anything else that would catch. You burn what you have. When you’ve burned everything, you twist hay into knots and burn that. Wilder writes about it — twisting hay. Her father twisting hay all day to keep the fire going through a blizzard that lasted three days. His hands so raw from the hay that he couldn’t hold a fork. That’s not a metaphor. That’s a man destroying his hands to keep his children warm.”

“And that IS love,” McMurtry said. “Hands destroyed for warmth. That’s love in its most irreducible form. You can strip away everything — the words, the gestures, the tenderness, the song the woman hums — and what’s left is a man twisting hay until his hands bleed so the fire doesn’t go out. That’s the sentence at the bottom of the page. Everything else is commentary.”

The light through the bay doors had shifted while we’d been talking — it was lower now, more orange, the kind of light that makes a dirt floor look almost warm. Proulx was back in her chair. McMurtry was down to his last Dr Pepper. I had pages of notes that I was already afraid I couldn’t honor.

“One thing,” I said. “The gap between what was imagined and what’s endured. That’s in the combination spec. The man and woman who came to this land with a picture in their heads — a house, a farm, a life — and the picture bears no relationship to what they actually build. How do I write that gap without making it tragic? Or do I make it tragic?”

“The gap isn’t tragic,” Proulx said. “Tragedy requires awareness. The gap is just the distance between the brochure and the dirt. The railroad companies printed brochures — ‘Rich Farming Lands! Mild Winters! Abundant Water!’ — and people believed them because they wanted to, and then they arrived and the land was alkali flats and the winters killed cattle standing up and the water was two hundred feet down if it was there at all. The gap between the brochure and the dirt is not tragedy. It’s commerce.”

“But for the family living in it—” McMurtry started.

“For the family it’s Tuesday. It’s every Tuesday. They don’t experience the gap as a gap because they never see the brochure and the dirt side by side. They see the dirt. Day after day, just the dirt. The brochure fades. The picture in their heads fades. What replaces it isn’t disappointment. It’s adjustment. They adjust their picture downward, inch by inch, until the picture matches what they have, and then they call it home. And that adjustment — that slow, daily, imperceptible lowering of expectations — that’s the actual story. Not the catastrophe. Not the child who dies. The Tuesday when the woman looks at the soddie and no longer remembers that she once imagined a house with glass windows.”

McMurtry tipped his Dr Pepper toward her. “That’s the coldest true thing I’ve heard in a year.”

“It’s not cold. It’s survival. Survival is the progressive abandonment of every expectation except the next meal. If that’s cold, then the whole frontier was cold, and the people who lived it were cold, and every warm memory they ever made was made inside a coldness that went all the way down.”

“But they made them,” McMurtry said. “The warm memories. The daughter’s birthday when they had nothing to give her so the mother made a doll out of a corn husk and a scrap of calico and the girl loved it — loved it the way children love things that are insufficient, which is to say completely. The night the father played the fiddle, or didn’t play the fiddle, played the harmonica, played something, and for twenty minutes the soddie was full of music and the wind outside was just wind and not the sound of everything trying to come in. Those moments happened. Inside the coldness. And the story has to hold them or it’s just a report.”

Proulx didn’t answer right away. She looked at the hay bales against the north wall and I had the sense she was counting them — an old habit, maybe, the inventory instinct she’d just been describing.

“Hold them,” she said. “But don’t protect them. Don’t set them apart from the rest. The music and the wind are the same scene. The corn-husk doll and the empty pantry are the same scene. If you separate the warmth from the cold — if you give the reader a warm scene and then a cold scene and then a warm scene — you’ve made a sandwich. Life on a homestead wasn’t a sandwich. It was everything at once. You’re cold and you’re laughing. You’re burying your daughter and you’re noting that the soil is good here, loose and dark, easy digging. Both things at the same time. The story fails the moment it asks the reader to feel one thing at a time.”

I closed my notebook. Not because I was done, but because I could feel the conversation reaching the place where more notes would dilute what I had. McMurtry stood up and stretched and his knees made a sound like someone stepping on gravel. Proulx stayed seated, looking at the bay doors, at the orange light that was almost gone now.

“What’s the title?” McMurtry asked.

“I don’t know yet. Something about seasons, maybe. What the season requires.”

“Don’t use the word ‘requires,’” Proulx said. “The season doesn’t require anything. It arrives and you answer it or you don’t.”

“What the season asks.”

“Seasons don’t ask.”

McMurtry put on his hat. “Let the story find its title. The worst titles are the ones you choose before you know what you’ve written.”

Proulx finally stood, brushing hay dust from her jacket. “One last thing. The ending. Don’t end it with the family leaving. Don’t end it with the family staying. End it in the middle of a season. In the middle of a task. The woman is doing something — hanging laundry, drawing water, something her body knows how to do without her mind — and the story stops. Not ends. Stops. The way a day stops when the light goes.”

She walked to her rental car. McMurtry walked me to my truck and said, “Don’t listen to her about the title. The title matters. But she’s right about the ending. End it in the middle of something. The reader will carry the rest.”

I drove out on the county road with the last of the light bleeding out behind me and I thought about a family in a house made of dirt, adjusting their expectations downward one Tuesday at a time, holding warmth and cold in the same hand because there was no other hand available. I thought about a woman who no longer remembers glass windows. I thought about a man twisting hay until his hands bled. I thought about Proulx saying love that doesn’t know it’s love and McMurtry smiling like he’d won something, and I thought maybe the story was already in that barn, in the hay dust and the wrong grass and the folding chairs and the sound of two writers disagreeing about whether tenderness needs a name.