Winter Wheat (11 page)

“What a country!” Gil said.

I stepped gingerly out on the mud, but I went down to my ankles.

“Where you going?” Gil said.

“To make mud pies!” I don’t know what made me flippant. I was sorry the next moment. “Gil, you’re all ready for the train, there’s no use in your getting muddy too.” I squshed through the mud to the side of the road. I had to lift my full skirt carefully over the wire fence. I jerked at the little low bushes. They were hard to pull out. I looked back at Gil, expecting him to come after me anyway. He was trying the motor again. The roar didn’t seem powerful out here, just useless. I called to him to stop, but he couldn’t hear me. I pulled so hard at the bush it came over with me. At the fence I got one of the rotten fence posts loose. I came back to the truck and spread the bushes and the log in front of the back wheels. Then I pulled the blanket from around Gil’s bag and laid that in the mud. I was dirty and my hands were scratched, but I didn’t care. I came around to the door.

“Now back slowly,” I ordered. “Slowly!” I yelled again as Gil started up too fast. The big wheels threw up the mud like water. A soft, wet chunk hit my hair. Then one wheel was on the rotten fence post. I tried to hold the blanket out straight. The geranium fell out of my hair in the mud.

Gil let the motor stall. He hadn’t given it enough gas at the right time. It made me mad.

“Let me get it out, Gil.” Gil moved over. I slid in and backed the truck hard until I felt the wheels take hold and the rear end rise a little. Then I shifted like lightning and drove full-power ahead. I let out a yell. If we slued off the edge we were done for, but we couldn’t ever get out if we didn’t give her everything she had. The truck plunged ahead like a sheep coming out of the sheep dip. I didn’t dare slow down. I kept her going. I felt triumphant. In the car mirror I could see the blanket lying in the mud, chewed to ribbons. I didn’t care; let it stay there. I bet Gil’s suitcase was thrown around, too.

When we were out on the dry road, Gil said:

“Good for you!”

I was so hot I pushed my hair back from my face, muddy hand or not. I looked down at my feet.

“I’m a mess!”

“If you’d been driving in the first place, you wouldn’t have been stuck,” Gil said. I had wanted him to tell me I wasn’t a mess or that he loved me anyway.

“Oh, I might have. That’s a regular sumphole.” Gil was angry because he’d got stuck. We drove a long way in silence. “When we get to town, I’ll buy some new shoes and stockings and a new dress,” I said.

“I’ll pay for them,” Gil said. Tears filled my eyes so I could hardly see where I was driving, but I kept my voice cool.

“Oh, I’d be getting them anyway,” I said, but I wanted to stop the truck and put my face against Gil and cry. I wanted to say: “Gil, what’s happened? Where are you? Gil, I’m sorry I got the car out of the mud. Oh, Gil, I love you, don’t you see?”

We came into town and it was only a little after three. I tipped the mirror down so I could see myself. I looked awful. Six hours was all I’d have of Gil. He’d go away then and never come back. He wanted to go now, and he was uncomfortable because he was trying to explain to me. But he wouldn’t have to explain. I’d act as though everything were all right between us.

“Gil, I’m such a mess, I’ll go in and buy a dress and stockings and shoes. It won’t take me long. Then I’ll go to . . .” I was going to say “to the station rest room to change,” but Gil would squirm at that, so I said “the hotel.”

When we were in front of the store Gil said: “I wish you’d let me buy these things for you. After all, it was my fault, I mean . . .” I was glad he fumbled a little for his words.

“No, thanks,” I said again.

It was lucky I had the money for the piece of machinery. I don’t believe anyone ever bought a dress and shoes and stockings faster. I didn’t waste any time explaining to the salesgirl why my dress was muddy, either. I bought a dress that made me think of the city, all black, and black sandals with soles so thin they couldn’t stand anything like mud. On the way down through the store I bought a black turban to wind around my head, a big flat black purse, and gloves. When I came out of the door of the store Gil was sitting in the truck just as I had left him.

“Did you see the mud on the wheels?” Gil said when I got in. “The stuff’s like clay.”

“Gumbo’s bad, all right,” I said.

“I’ll get you a room,” Gil said when we walked into the hotel. He went up to the desk and I could see he was uncomfortable, but I didn’t care.

“I’d like a room for this young lady to change in. We ran into some mud coming in.” He laughed a little while he talked to the hotel clerk.

“I’ll say she did,” the clerk said. “You came through pretty good yourself.” That made Gil angry. I could see him flush. He wrote my name on the ledger while I stood there like a child. I couldn’t help thinking how it would be if he had written Mr. and Mrs. G. H. Borden.

I went upstairs in the elevator and followed the boy down the corridor without a word. I thought of that other time when Dad and Mom and I stopped here. The rooms had been done over since then; they were very modern now, but I hardly looked at the room. No one ever took a bath and dressed faster.

Gil was sitting in the lobby in front of the elevator when I came down.

“I feel better,” I said and started to pull on the gloves as though I hadn’t seen the quick change of pleasure in Gil’s face as he stood up. Then I saw the price mark was still on the gloves and started picking it off with my nail.

“Ellen, you look like the first time you came to dinner at our house.”

I sat down on the arm of the chair and looked across the room in the wall mirror. I didn’t look as though two hours ago I’d been dragging a fence post along the road.

“Then it’s a good thing I got muddy,” I said.

“I should have been the one,” Gil said. It still bothered him that I had got the truck out.

“Don’t be silly. My dress will wash.”

“Do you know, Ellen, you are the most unbelievable person. You change with whatever you put on.”

“No, I don’t, really,” I said. “I’m just the same whether I have on jeans and an old shirt hanging out or this outfit.” We went over to a corner of the lobby and looked out the big front window of the hotel onto the main street. We were by ourselves over there. A big fern and an aquarium shut us off from the rest of the hotel.

“Ellen, there are so many things we haven’t talked about yet,” Gil began. I could see how hard it was for him.

“Yes,” I said.

“I realize how much I’m asking you to change your whole way of life when you marry me. I didn’t know before.”

I waited. What was a “way of life” but being with a person you loved?

“I mean, seeing how you love the ranch, and how differently you’ve been brought up from the way I have, makes me wonder.”

He had almost said it. I waited so hard I could feel my heart pounding. I looked over at him and loved him so much I was afraid he could feel it. Something had made him afraid to love me, I knew. I believe he really wanted everything to be the way it had been before.

“Wonder what, Gil?” I said gently.

“Whether you’d be happy, living with me.”

But he couldn’t doubt that. He was afraid about himself—whether he’d be happy with me. I could see how wretched it made him, how ashamed, but I wouldn’t say anything to help him.

“Ellen! Why don’t you say something?”

There were so many things to say, but I mustn’t say the wrong thing. When you love someone you ought to be able to talk to him without testing your words.

“Ellen?” Gil didn’t like silences. The silence became strange, like another person standing beside us.

“You know I would be, Gil. I’m not like that.”

“I know you aren’t, Ellen,” Gil said. He reached out and held my hand tight. He couldn’t tell me. I was unhappy for both of us.

“Let’s go, Gil. Let’s have some fun before you go. It’s almost six o’clock.”

“Why don’t you come back and stay overnight at the hotel, here, after the train goes?” Gil suggested. “Your mother wouldn’t worry, would she?”

“Oh, yes, she’d worry,” I said. “But if I were there in the morning early, it would be all right. Perhaps I will.”

I thought of that hotel room, the beds without any footboard and a silly print on the wall of some flowers that never grew in the earth. I couldn’t think of anything worse or lonelier than coming back here after Gil had gone. If Gil had loved me here, it might be different, but Gil was afraid to love me. I wondered as we walked across to the dining room whether if Gil had wanted to stay here with me tonight, I would have stayed with him.

It was a little early for dinner, but the doors were open. The waitresses stood in starched patience waiting by the empty tables. We had a table for two under a shaded light. I studied the big menu, but I didn’t take any of it in. If Gil had said even one little word, if he had shown he wanted me, I knew I would have loved him with all my body and my heart.

“Sherry to begin with?” Gil asked.

“Yes,” I said. “That will seem like being at your house with your mother and father.”

Gil smiled. When it came, I held the thin-stemmed glass in my fingers. I thought how big my hand looked.

“To us!” Gil said. We had said that with cokes in Pop’s Place. Then it had always seemed exciting and gay. I tried to make it seem that way again, but I felt as though this was the end of the world.

I was quiet at dinner. Gil was talkative. He was relieved that he was going so soon. I watched his hands, long and carefully cared for and shapely. Maybe I loved them because they were so different from any hands I had known. Mine were like farm horses, strong and well fed, but Gil’s were like fine saddle horses—the kind they showed at the County Fair now that people in Clark City were taking up riding.

It was quarter of nine when we finished dinner.

“Let’s go some place to dance,” Gil said as we came out.

We went to the Bijou, a funny little place in the basement of the biggest movie house, but it had a four-piece orchestra. There was only one couple there, it was so early. The orchestra played everything we ever liked. They played “Tomorrow Is a Lovely Day” over twice. I was happy while we danced. I didn’t look at the time. And then it was twenty after ten. We took a taxi to the station. Gil hardly had time to kiss me good-by. It was easy, after all. He stood on the platform, bareheaded, waving his hat as the train pulled out.

“It’s been wonderful, Ellen,” he called.

“Yes,” I called back. I watched until I couldn’t see him any longer.

The taxi-driver who brought us down wanted to take me back. He said the gentleman had paid for the trip back to the hotel. I said no, I wanted to walk back. I took off the turban on my head and carried it in my hand. The truck parked out in front of the place where we went to dance looked big and friendly. I climbed up in the seat and slipped off the black high-heeled sandals and put on the muddy white ones. It was good to hear the engine. The big wheel was something to take hold of. I left her in second gear all the way out of town so she’d make more noise. I don’t know why. When I came beyond the town where the road stretched out into distance, I shifted into third. She ran as quietly as a kitten purring.

There was nothing on the road. I could let her out. I went the first ten miles like a streak, then the dark sky with the stars scattered as carelessly as sagebrush across it calmed me and I slowed down. The air was cool for June. All month, June had meant Gil coming. Now Gil was gone. He had come loving me and something had happened to change him. What was it? I didn’t know. I tried to think about it driving along in the empty night.

I passed the place where the alders and willows shielded the creek bed. That was where Gil had said, “I was afraid you’d spoil yourself someway.” But how had I?

I came to the place where we’d been stuck on the way out and I blamed that mud for my losing Gil. I put my foot on the accelerator and rode through recklessly. The ruts grabbed at the wheels like one of those crazy cars at the fair, but the truck came through. It just took a little more drive than Gil gave it.

I thought of Gil standing on the train platform. He had kissed me as though he loved me, hadn’t he? Everything was all right. There’d be a letter for me day after tomorrow—but underneath, I knew.

I came to Gotham. The truck lights lit up the grain elevator and the gasoline station and caught the tracks of the railroad. Above the dark shoulder of the coulee shone an aura of light. I swerved off the main road a little faster than I usually took it. The unpainted box of a house and a barn and a shed stood out ugly and bare in the glare of light. There were lights, too, in the uncurtained windows. The folks were still up.

9

I HATED
to go into the house. I meant to tell them right off that we weren’t engaged any more, that I had lost Gil. It seemed a worse failure than if I had failed at college. Dad would be eager to talk. He had enjoyed having Gil here. When I opened the screen door, I noticed how it sagged on its hinges and how narrow the doorway was. The bright light was hideous.

“Well, did he get off all right?” Dad asked.

“Yes,” I said. I knew how Mom felt when she doesn’t want to be talked to.

“I liked him, my dear,” Dad said. “Whenever you young people are ready, you can have my consent.” His tone of voice started goose flesh along my arms. “He shows considerable background,” Dad went on. His tone of voice gagged me.

Mom was making cottage cheese. I saw her coldly, with Gil’s eyes. She wore a bright-blue print dress she had never bothered to have fitted. It bloused around the belt, making her look bigger than she was. It was warm and her hair was pulled back into a tight knot. She must have been outdoors, because there was mud on her shoes and her legs were bare. Once, I thought she looked at me almost fearfully. It would be a queer thing if Mom should see what had happened, and not Dad.

I looked at the gaudy calendar on the wall in the kitchen, at the sepia copy of “The Sower” that Dad had bought one time in one of his moods of liking the ranch, at the plush tied-and-dyed scarf on the table and the imitation-leather davenport. Tonight the bright light slid across the shiny linoleum, making more vivid the blue leaves of the printed design. For the first time in my life the frank ugliness of the house struck me full in the face. It made me almost sick. I wanted to run away and hide.

“Where you get that dress?” Mom asked. It was so long ago since this afternoon I had forgotten I had a new dress. I had forgotten for a moment that I’d spent all the money for the combine part on it. I might better have worn my muddy dress and said good-by to Gil when we got to town.

“Oh, we got stuck in that sumphole a mile beyond Heath’s turnoff. I got myself covered, so I bought a new dress in Clark City, because we were going to the hotel for dinner.”

“You buy new shoes, too?” Mom asked, looking down at my mud-caked white ones.

“Good for you,” Dad approved. “Didn’t Gilbert think that was a pretty fair hotel for a town that size?”

Mom’s hands were still. I could feel her eyes looking at me under her heavy black brows. “Can’t he get the truck out himself?” she asked.

“Oh, I didn’t have much trouble, and he was all clean for the train,” I said lamely. “I’ve got to go out and bring in my things.”

I was glad to get out of the searching glare of that room and Mom’s eyes. I took the box with my muddy dress and the fragile-looking black sandals and went back into the house. Mom had said something to Dad. He looked up at me anxiously.

“Gil won’t be coming back,” I said, and my lips drew down so I could hardly get the words out.

Dad straightened up in his chair. “Why, the . . .” he began.

“He say so, Yeléna?” Mom asked.

“No,” I said, “but I know. We’re too different from each other. . . .”

“Oh, young people have fallings-out . . .” Dad began.

I couldn’t stand to listen. “No, that isn’t it. We . . . he isn’t in love with me.”

“Come here, Ellen,” Dad said gently, holding out his arm. I felt his tenderness. I knew he wanted to comfort me and I didn’t want to hurt him, but I couldn’t go to him. I didn’t dare speak. I didn’t want them to feel badly about me or to blame Gil. I shook my head. I felt my eyes sting. I was afraid they would see them. There was no hiding anything in that terrible light.

“You’re all in. Go get to bed,” Mom said. She knew I wanted to be alone. I felt grateful to her.

I went in and closed the door of my room and undressed in the dark. But the room was too small. It had held Gil just a little while ago. I took out the collapsible screen and climbed out the window as I had done dozens of times before. I ran up the side of the coulee in my pyjamas. The clumps of sage were still wet from the cloudburst, but the ground was already dry. I sat up on my ridge.

I couldn’t think clearly. I could only go back over things: the way Gil had sat silent up here and then had said, “How did your father happen to marry your mother?” and then as though he felt that was too abrupt, “I mean, when she spoke Russian and he spoke English I should think it would have been so difficult.”

I thought of his hands at the table and the fine slender look of his wrist. I loved his hands and I loved him. I hadn’t thought how our ranch might strike him, the bareness and ugliness of it. It ought not to have mattered, something in me said, but I crowded it down underneath. It didn’t help any to blame him. I should have talked to him about it—made him see that I was separate from the ranch. I had been away to college. I was more like Dad, I could write and tell him.

Maybe I was all wrong; maybe he had meant what he said on the platform at the station. He had kissed me. He was looking forward to next year. . . . All these things I told myself, but I didn’t believe them. It’s hard to lie to yourself when you’re alone at night under the sky.

Ever since spring I had counted on Gil’s coming, his being here with me. I had never thought how it might turn out. All the plans we had talked, all the times he had told me he loved me, crumbled into so much dust. The wind could blow it away like topsoil. Then, as though to save even the dust, my mind went back to things we had done together in school: walking down the mall together, dancing, Gil telling me I was beautiful. I didn’t believe it, but I loved his telling me.

“Gil, do you wish I were little?” I had asked.

“You’re wonderful as you are, Ellen,” he had said.

I had had some idea of running off up here to cry by myself, but I didn’t, any more than I did on the way home. I looked up to see the Northern Lights in the sky, as though that were what I had come up here for. They were like ropes, pulling the whole pale tent of sky toward the center. They moved as I watched. One rope came free of the canvas. It was green, and there was a yellow rope. Then the white tent billowed over them again. Any other time I would have called out to the folks to come and look.

I went back down the hill by my game trail that ran past Mom and Dad’s room.

“Yeléna don’t try hard enough to keep him,” Mom was saying. I stood still listening, then I knelt down, leaning against the slope of the side of the coulee that was covered with wet grass. The room was lighted. I looked in and saw Mom lifting the blue print dress over her head. I couldn’t keep from looking at her wide shoulders and big bosom. She looked younger in her cotton slip. She sat down on the side of the bed and started taking out her hairpins. Dad stood leaning against the closed bedroom door, smoking.

“I see him look at Yeléna like he think pretty much of her.” Mom gave a quick backward shake and her heavy hair came down in dark braids on her shoulder. She looked pretty, or maybe what she had said about Gil warmed me. “She could keep him if she try,” Mom muttered.

Dad finished his cigarette. I watched him walk over to the dresser to rub the end into the ash tray.

“Not Ellen,” Dad said. His voice had a tight sound to it. Mom turned around so fast on the edge of the bed her hair swung back from her shoulder. I could just see her face as she turned toward Dad, and it was white and her eyes blazed.

“I know what you think. You say to yourself Yeléna don’t think to trick him into staying like I trick you! It’s long time to think that, Ben Webb!”

Dad said nothing. He wasn’t even looking at Mom and she went on in a fast, angry voice.

“I know, she won’t never pretend to her young man she was going to have baby like I do. No, you want her like your sister to sit in parlor and drink tea and never let him touch her hand!” Why didn’t Dad say something? I ached with waiting for him to speak.

“You liked your Russian girl to love you; you liked to lie with her an’ put your head on her shoulder. Then when you get order to go home you say good-by. You say you come back when you get job an’ can take care of me. . . .”

I could hardly believe it was Mom talking so fast, with Dad standing there with his eyes on the cigarette stub in the ash tray.

“Nice girl wait to see how much money you get; if you can build big house. Nice girl wait till you come back.” Mom’s voice had a taunt in it. “I never care what money you get; I can work myself. I know sure you forget when you go back and don’t come for me. I love you so much I can’t stand to see you go. I tell you lie . . . one little lie in all these years, Ben Webb.”

“Anna, for God’s sake don’t go back over that. I don’t hold it against you.” His voice sounded as though it hurt him to speak, as though he wished she would stop. “I was to blame. You were right in a way; I probably never would have gone back, but that’s all over long ago. I brought you back home and when you weren’t happy there, didn’t I come out here because you wanted to?”

“You want to get your Russian girl out of your old town; that wasn’t for any love.” Mom’s voice was quieter, but it was cold.

I couldn’t look into that little square room at them. I was ashamed to have my own eyes see them or to listen any longer. I crept back to my room and climbed in noiselessly. My own breathing sounded loud to me in the stillness. I lay down on my bed, but Dad’s words followed me and I raised up on my elbow to hear them.

“Well, Anna, if that boy’s made Ellen unhappy, we’ve got paid back for our sins,” Dad said, and his voice was older and sadder than I had ever heard it.

I stared into the darkness of my room and thought over what I had heard.

After a while, I heard Dad’s steps going barefoot across the kitchen floor, past my door into the front room. I heard the old couch creak. Dad was going to spend the night there. It seemed to me that hate and hopelessness filled our house to suffocation. Maybe Gilbert had felt that hate between Mom and Dad. Maybe that was what drove him away from me, because I had seemed part of it. All these years Dad and Mom had lived together, pretending to be fond of each other, even having me, when all the time they had hated each other.

I wanted Gil more than ever. I wanted him to take me away from here, back where we had been so happy.

Then I came back to what I had just heard. Little bits fitted in together: the way Mom was angry that time when Dad went back to his home; the way she had taken the doll Dad’s sister sent me and put it away. She had said it was too fancy to play with on a ranch. Dad’s calling Mom Anna Petrovna, sometimes in fun, but sometimes when he was angry with her. What I had overheard was the reason for the bitterness that I had so often felt between them.

Maybe Mom had loved Dad as I loved Gil. If I could have held Gil some way—but Dad was right; I knew I could never have lifted a finger or spoken a word to keep him. A feeling of shame, deep in myself, crept out for Mom. If she had really loved him, she couldn’t have done that.

Suddenly, she wasn’t Mom; she was Anna Petrovna, someone strange whom I hardly knew. And he wasn’t Dad, tired and tormented by shrapnel; he was Ben Webb, a strong, healthy young soldier.

How could they ever have stood it out here all these years where they were shut in together?

“I should think people would go stark, raving crazy out here,” Gil had said. “I should think they’d end by hating each other.”

And I had said: “Why should they, Gil? Look at Mom and Dad!” I turned wretchedly in the bed and I saw how the shade hung crookedly. Gil had seen that while I had lain on the porch and been happy.

I heard Mom moving around in the next room. She opened the door of her room and crossed the kitchen.

“Ben, don’t sleep there. You’ll be all lamed up in the morning.”

I lay still, hardly breathing, straining my ears to hear what she said.

Dad gave a kind of groan that hurt me. “It’s a funny thing, Anna, how a little circle hangs on a big one. If there hadn’t been a war, we wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t be a physical wreck. Ellen wouldn’t be eating out her heart, maybe.”

Dad’s voice wasn’t angry. He was standing outside the row, now, looking at the whole field.

“Yeléna’ll get over it,” Mom said in a voice so low I had to lean out of bed to hear her.

I wanted to go in there and tell her I wouldn’t get over it, that I hated all of this that Gil had despised. I hated her being a Russian peasant and Dad being sick so much. I hated even myself for being so big and tall and strong and simple.

I heard the couch creak. Dad was going back to bed. I listened to each sound. Mom was turning out the light. They must be lying there, side by side, now. How could they?

Slowly the thing I didn’t want to know bore in on me like the awful rising heat at harvesttime. People made messes of their lives and then they had to live with them. Life didn’t turn out right because you expected it to. There had never been any real love between Mom and Dad, For a little bit, I forgot Gil, thinking of them.