Free Plainsong by Kent Haruf Page B

girl three sheets of paper on a clipboard to fill out. She took them back across the waiting room to her seat and held the papers on her knees, leaning over them with her hair fallen about her face like a thick dark curtain, until she lifted it deftly in a motion familiar and automatic and settled it behind her shoulders. There were questions she had no answer to. They wanted to know was there cancer in the family, heart disease among her father’s people, syphilis in her mother’s relations. Altogether more than a hundred questions. She answered the ones she could, the ones she had some certain knowledge of, believing it would not be right to guess on the others as it might be if this were some test she was taking at school. When she was finished she took the clipboard and sheets of paper to the woman and handed them through the window.
    I didn’t know all of these, she said.
    Did you answer what you did know?
    Yes.
    Then take a seat. We’ll call you.
    She sat down again. The waiting room was a long narrow room with potted plants tied upright to sticks and set in front of the four windows. There were three other people in the room waiting too. A woman with a little boy whose face looked as yellow as tablet paper and whose eyes looked too big for his head. The boy leaned listlessly against his mother while she caressed the back of his head, and after a time he put his face down in her lap and shut his eyes and she smoothed her hand over his yellow sick-looking cheek while she herself stared blankly toward the windows. The other person in the room was an old man with a new pearl-gray felt hat that rode squarely on his head like a statement. He sat against the opposite wall and he was holding the thumb of his right hand forward on his knee. The thumb of that hand was wrapped thickly in white bandages and it stuck up like some kind of hastily wrapped exhibit in a freak show. He regarded the girl with merry eyes as if he were going to say something, explain to her all that had happened, but he didn’t. He looked at her, and no one said anything. Presently a nurse called the woman with the sick boy, and then she came back and beckoned the old man with the bad thumb, and after a while they called her.
    She rose and followed the woman in the white smock and slacks down the narrow corridor past a number of closed doors. They stopped at a scale and she was weighed and her height was taken, then they went into a little room where there was an examination table and a sink counter and two chairs. The woman took her pulse and checked her blood pressure and temperature, all without talking, and wrote the results of her findings in the file.
    Then she said, Now get undressed please. And put this on. He’ll see you in a minute. She went out and shut the door.
    The girl felt discommoded but she did what she was told to do. She put on the paper jacket that was open in the front, then she sat on the examination table with a paper sheet over her legs, both the sheet and jacket starkly white and scratchily uncomfortable to her, and waited and looked toward the wall in front of her at the picture of autumn trees growing up in some place that was altogether foreign to Holt, Colorado, since the trees were tall and dense and were of a species of hardwood and were colored so spectacularly that they seemed in the girl’s experience altogether unlikely if not impossible. Then he came in, the old man, the old doctor, stately and formal and elegant and kindly in a dark blue suit and wearing an absolutely white shirt with a maroon bow tie knotted expertly at his starched collar, and after he closed the door he shook her hand cordially and introduced himself.
    You saw me once before, she said.
    Did I? I don’t recall.
    Six or seven years ago.
    He looked at her closely and smiled. The eyes behind the rimless spectacles were lighter than his suit. His face was gray but his eyes were very lively. There were age spots at his temples.
    That’s a long