The table was cleared of dishes and the dishes laid in the sink, but there were stacks of Farm Journals and newspapers loaded up against the far walls, and greasy pieces of machinery-cogwheels, old bearings, shank bolts-were set out on mechanics’ rags on each of the chairs except the two that were placed opposite each other at the pine table. She looked in, the kitchen was more or less orderly. She went up the steps onto the porch and knocked again. Above the steps was a little screened porch, the mesh mended in places with white cotton string where it had been torn or poked through with something sharp. When she got out of the car a mottled old farm dog scuttled up to her and sniffed her leather boots and she patted his head and went through the wire gate up to the house and knocked on the screen door. Beside the house a few low elm trees stood leafless inside the yard that was closed in by wire hogfencing. She drove up the track to the old house set back off the road a quarter mile. Along the fenceline the snow was brilliant under the sun. When she turned off onto the gravel road small birds flew up from the roadside in gusts and blew away in the wind. Black baldy cattle were spread out in the corn stubble, all pointed out of the wind with their heads down, eating steadily.

Beside the blacktop there were patches of snow in the fallow fields, drifts and scallops wind-hardened in the ditches. Maggie Jones drove out to the McPherons’ on a cold Saturday afternoon.

His posthumous novel, Our Souls at Night, was published yesterday. He died in November 2014 at the age of seventy-one. Haruf’s honors include a Whiting Foundation Writers’ Award, the Mountains & Plains Booksellers Award, the Wallace Stegner Award, and a special citation from the PEN/Hemingway Foundation. The following is from Kent Haruf’s 1999 novel Plainsong which was a National Book Award finalist.

Plainsong goodreads