Winter Wheat (15 page)

“Aren’t you going to the fair?”

Dad shook his head. “Comes at the wrong time for me this year.”

Tony Bardich was in back, but he didn’t say anything. A year ago I’d have wanted to go to the fair, but this year I didn’t care. I guess that’s a sign of growing up.

“Want to go some day this week, Ellen?” Dad asked.

“Nope,” I said. “They’re all alike.” I thought of Gil writing that about commencement. Gil had known commencements all his life; I had known State Fairs. Then I stood up and kicked at the dirt with my foot. I wasn’t going to think of Gil any more, but I thought of what Dad had said. “He can’t get you out of his mind.” I was glad of it.

It was good to get started. We took our places like old troupers, Mom in the tractor and I running the combine. Later we’d change off. Dad stood on the combine to see that it was running smoothly. He’d come alongside with the truck as soon as there was enough grain cut. He’d get a load and then take it back to shovel into the storage shed. The shoveling was the hardest work. Mom and I took a hand at it sometimes, but Dad didn’t like us to.

Now the sickle was flashing back and forth, shearing off the grain that bent beneath the reel. The noise of the machinery, the look of the tractor, the sight of the stream of wheat falling out of the elevator spout into the grain bin, were all so familiar it might have been last August or the August before that. I wondered how many Augusts would find me here threshing the wheat. I didn’t care much; I just wondered.

We were out in the field, almost dead-center. The big combine seemed like a ship out on a sea, just as it had when I was fourteen and Dad bought our first combine. I lowered the reel to get a clump of wheat that grew shorter than the rest. There was a small patch of poor soil in the field. I knew it well enough, like a mole on my own face.

An airplane flew over our heads, one of the Army planes from the new air base in Clark City. The pilot waved and I waved back. When he was right over us I couldn’t hear his motor because our own was so loud. But when he got off away I could hear him. His plane disappeared and made me feel as though we were standing still in the field.

I tried to keep my mind on the chains and rollers, to look at the wheat falling out of the spout and think how lucky we were not to have to bind and shock the wheat before we threshed. I could remember taking a nap against a shock of wheat when I was a little kid and Mom and Dad were both working in the field.

I wondered about Mom driving the tractor. She had a blue cotton handkerchief tied over her head today—that was all I could see, and the square look of her shoulders. I pulled the cord that ran from the combine to the tractor and had a sheep bell on it. I couldn’t hear the bell back here, but Mom could hear it right back of her. She slowed down and looked around to see what I wanted. I shook my head and smiled at her and waved to go on. Mom got it. She knew I just wanted to see her turn around. Her face lighted up. She liked all this: that it was the first day of threshing and that we had good weather and that we were all three here working. I liked it, too. I pointed over to Dad. He was coming behind with the truck, watching to see that the truck came just parallel. His hat was pushed far back on his head and his face and neck were red. He drew alongside and yelled. Mom nodded and turned back to her driving. That was all, but somehow it made me feel good. I pushed the lever that sent the shining wheat emptying into the truck.

We stopped at noon and ate by the combine that gave the only shade in all that blazing sun. Mom had a thermos of cold milk that tasted best of all. And then we were back at it.

The heat deepened. I could feel the platform of the tractor burning through the rubber soles of my old tennis shoes. Everything I touched was hot, even through my heavy work gloves. All the freshness of the morning was gone. The smell of grease and gasoline enclosed me, shutting out the air. The cloud of chaff and dust settled down on us. Particles of the straw stuck to my sweating neck and arms. I kept my eyes on the shrinking size of the standing wheat and the widening desert of stubble, hard and bright and shining like sticks of bamboo. I tried to think of girls working in factories that were close and hot and filled with the stench of grease and steam, of soldiers fighting in tropical countries, but everything was unreal except the strip of wheat and the millions of little grains falling into the truck, falling so fast in the sun they looked like a piece of cloth woven of dark and light gold. Straw crept into my sneakers and gave the heat needles to prick at the soles of my feet. The sun was turning the rimrock pink. It must be after six. My eyes came back to the wheat in front of me just in time. I almost missed a low place. The hail had cut a wide swath in here we hadn’t seen. It had been hidden before by the waving wheat. It hurt to see the reels come up without bending wheat between them. Drought years the wheat is like that, scanty and moth-eaten over a whole field.

When I heard the loose sound of broken chain cutting through the noise of the combine, I pulled the cord to tell Mom to stop and signaled to Dad. Dad was with me in a minute. He was clever with machinery. A rancher almost has to be. It was a pity to have something go wrong now when we were trying to finish the field before dark. I hadn’t known I was tired, only hot, but now that we were stopped I felt my tiredness. My hands were cramped. I climbed down on the ground and the crunching stubble under my feet was a relief after the steel platform. I wiped my face and went over to tell Mom what was wrong.

The stillness was heavy after the steady noise we had lived with all day. My voice sounded squeaky speaking out in it. Mom looked tired.

“We haven’t got much more to do,” she said.

“All right, Ellen,” Dad called. “I’ve fastened it with a piece of haywire. I think it’ll hold till we finish this.”

It was hard to start again. Four times across would do it. I measured with my eyes.

The wheat looked gray by the time we finished. We left the combine and the tractor there in the field and drove back to the house in the truck. Now we’d have to get supper and bring in the cows and milk them and drive a load of wheat over to the elevator.

“That wasn’t a bad start,” Dad said.

“How long it take you to fix the chain in the morning?” Mom asked.

“Oh, half an hour. If that’s all that goes wrong this time I won’t do any kicking.” Dad was in good spirits.

“You let Yeléna drive the truck to the elevator,” Mom suggested.

“We’ll see,” Dad said. Our house looked little and dark as we drove up to it.

“You go help your father get the cows. I fix supper,” Mom said quietly to me. “He’s tired.”

Walking across to the barn, I looked back at the bare kitchen windows, sprung suddenly to light. Mom was standing in front of the stove. She was tired too, but it was Dad she thought of. Maybe, all these years she had been trying to make up to him for . . . for tricking him. Always, even when I had worked hard all day, what I had heard that night was there in my mind.

Dad had the three cows we milked already in.

“Want a milkmaid, Dad?” I said.

“Oh, no, you go up and help your mother with supper. She’s had a hard day.”

I hesitated a minute, then I went back up. We didn’t talk much at supper. We were too hungry and too tired. Dad let me take the grain to the elevator. Nobody was ahead of me and I could empty it right away.

“Wheat’s running a little light this year,” Bailey told me. “‘Tisn’t as good as it was last.”

On the way back I went around by the Halvorsens’ reservoir. It was dark now at eleven o’clock. No danger of anyone seeing me. The water was warm as a bath and so hard I could feel the edge between my fingers, but it felt good on my skin. I lay on my back and floated so I could see the stars. Once a bird flew over me as though it had meant to land on the water and, startled by my white body under the water, darted up again. I could hear the soft flutter of its wings close to me. All the tiredness in my back and legs washed out of me. I didn’t feel like Ellen Webb, at all, just light and free. When I put on my clothes again they hardly touched me. I carried my light feeling all the way home.

The house was dark again when I came around the hill, but Mom called out to me. I undressed in the dark and went to bed on the glider. I don’t remember when the glider stopped swinging, I went to sleep so fast.

13

THE
days went by like wheat sheared off by the sickle, shredded into minutes and quickly lost sight of in the constant stream flowing out of the spout into the grain bin. I lost track of them. One day the johnny bar broke and so we were held up while Dad fixed it. One night it rained and we couldn’t start till the middle of the next afternoon. Dad took the big water barrels to fill them with water and Mom did the washing we hadn’t done on Monday. I helped Mom fill and empty the tubs, but it was awful to be in the house after being in the fields every day. I felt too closed in, and the house was hot and steamy.

“You don’t see young people your own age, Yeléna,” Mom said.

“I don’t mind.”

“You grow old too soon. No use moping no more for that boy.”

“I’m not moping. Please let me alone, Mom,” I said quickly, and then I was sorry. Mom didn’t say another word all morning, but I felt she was still worrying about me as she sat on the tractor seat driving up and back the next afternoon.

That day the sameness of what we did bore into me. I thought of our lives and I wondered what gave them any meaning. When I had Gil to love there was meaning, but now there was none. How did Mom and Dad stand going on and on working to feed themselves and me? What was the use? The question was like a hole in my pocket. Nothing was safe there. But the combine clattered on behind the tractor and the wheat fell beneath the sickle and the grain poured into the truck, on and on, up and down the strip, leaving the sun-bright stubble in a wider and wider swath. My eyes smarted from the heat and my skin crawled with the bits of straw. I couldn’t see any beauty today. Last year I had worked like this, but I had been thinking about college. I hadn’t wondered about meanings to things. I had to lower the reel again. The wheat wasn’t good in here. The flow of grain out of the spout wasn’t a full liquid stream, it was scanty and thin.

“If we get seven bushels to the acre out of this we’ll do well,” Dad said when we stopped for lunch. “It’s the poorest crop we’ve had in five years.”

Mom nodded. “It’s bad.”

“Well, it’s better than thirty-three. Remember that year?”

Mom shook her head. Dad turned to me. “That year the drought was so bad, Ellen, that some of the Swedes got a Lutheran minister to come out and hold a service to pray for rain. Everyone around here went except Anna.”

Mom made a moue of contempt with her mouth. “We have good wheat as any. Your father can’t make up his mind to go or not. He get there for last song.” Mom’s face was sly and her eyes were bright with making fun.

“Maybe that’s what saved us!” Dad retorted, laughing. It was good when they laughed at each other. Dad went over to gas up. Mom and I still sat on the ground against the combine. The grasshoppers kept up an incessant machinelike noise, and yet it seemed quiet.

“Mom, do you ever pray?” I asked. This summer I had grown bold at asking questions.

“Sure, I pray,” Mom said. She was tying her handkerchief back on her head.

“But do you believe it helps? I mean, you pray for rain and good crops and it doesn’t do any good.”

“I don’t pray for those. We take what we get. I don’t bother God for that. I pray for something hard once and I get it, long time ago in Russia.”

“For what, Mom?” I asked softly.

“I pray your father get well. Then I pray to have you. I don’t ask things all the time, like in your father’s church.” Mom stood up as though that was enough of such talk. “You drive the tractor this afternoon. I take combine.”

“But, Mom . . .” I wanted her to stay.

“What, Yeléna?” Mom stayed impatiently. I had to ask quickly what was in my head without thinking how to put it.

“You never taught me to pray.”

Mom’s brows lowered over her eyes. “Your father and I, we pray different. We don’t teach you. When you feel it, you will pray.”

I thought of that Easter Sunday when we almost went to church. I thought of Mom’s giving me the icon and how cross it made Dad.

“Do you pray now, Mom?”

Mom looked way off beyond me. She sounded cross. “We won’t get done if we don’t start. Your father go back with load already.”

But all that afternoon I thought of Mom’s praying for Dad to get well. She must have loved him then. It was terrible to think of love dying out like wheat pinched off by the drought. I wondered once if it would have done any good if I had prayed to keep Gil. Then I looked up at the endless blue sky reaching way beyond the pale outlines of the mountain, over the stubble and the wheat. It seemed too big to pray to. We three looked too small and unimportant down here on the ground. And there were the Yonkos and the Bardiches and the Hakkulas and the Halvorsens, all out threshing too. If we were all saying prayers, one of us asking for one thing and someone else asking for the very opposite, we would sound like the hungry squealing of the pigs.

Running the tractor was monotonous; it left you too much time to think and we still had another week of threshing ahead of us. Suddenly, I wished we were through.

The night we finished the threshing I didn’t get started to the elevator with the load till nearly ten. From the road I could see there were plenty of trucks ahead of me, lined up waiting their turn. It didn’t matter. Tomorrow we could sleep late. We could take it easy for a day.

It was a clear moonlight night with the Northern Lights spreading a white tent again over a part of the sky. Threshing was pretty well done around Gotham. As far as you could see there was no wheat, only bare stubble and freshly turned earth where they’d started drilling already for the new winter wheat.

The motion of the truck fanned the hot air into a little breeze. By the store where last June’s mud hole was dried into hard ruts the truck bumped so heavily I could feel the load I had on behind. It’s a pity that you go through the same motions and work for a poor crop as for a good one.

I stopped at the store and bought a bottle of pop. There were only a couple of people there. Most folks were over at the elevator.

“Well, I s’pose you’ll be going back East next week or so,” Mrs. Peterson said.

“I may not be going back this year,” I said.

“That’s too bad. It ain’t been a very good year anywhere around here. I heard you folks got hailed out some places.”

“We didn’t do so badly,” I said. I knew it was my father in me. He didn’t like to admit bad luck.

Mrs. Peterson’s face crinkled up so it looked like a mouse’s. “I guess you’re thinking of marrying that Eastern fellow that was out here to see you?”

“No,” I said. “He’s in the Air Force.” I went out of the store leaving half my bottle of pop standing there on the counter.

I drove the truck into the line. If Dad had been there, he would have got out to talk, but I stayed in the cab. I was getting so I didn’t talk any more than Mom did. The other drivers were in the elevator, watching other ranchers’ wheat, or outside where it was cooler, telling jokes, talking politics, smoking. Two men standing near my truck were drinking beer out of bottles. I could smell it on the hot night, along with the dusty grain and the sweaty odor of the men themselves and of my own body and clothes. I was no different from the rest.

Nurmi Maki sneezed so many times it was like a clock striking. Each time he seemed to say “Jerushlem.” Somebody laughed. Then Nurmi blew his nose so loud it was worse than the sneezing.

“Dammit, always have hay fever threshing time. Seems like I can’t never stand it. Got a boy’s the same way,” Nurmi spluttered.

“You old pig, Nurmi, I thought you was blowing a trumpet,” Minnie Bruhl called out to him. I hadn’t seen her before. She talked as loud as a man and swore worse. Klaus Bruhl died the first year I was in high school and she was running the ranch alone. She had three or four children that Bailey said were wild as coyotes. When she stood in front of the headlights I thought I’d never seen an uglier-looking woman. Her gray hair was straight and bobbed unevenly, as though she’d done it herself. Her red face was big-boned and disfigured by two large bristling moles by the corner of her mouth and she had a tooth gone in front. She wore bib overalls that were too tight front and back.

I sat back listening to tag ends of the men’s talk. I could see the truck on the elevator tilt and hear the sliding sound of the grain that was like the pound of a heavy rain, then the special creaking sound of the platform legs.

“Good years or bad, I always say wheat in the elevator’s same as money in the bank,” Norman Olsen declared.

“That’s not saying what you’ll get for it, though,” someone else said.

Chuck Henderson came over to talk to me.

“I been deferred till the wheat’s in. I guess I’ll have to go now, pretty soon,” he told me. I looked at him, wondering what kind of a soldier he’d make. I couldn’t think of him as anything but a rancher.

“Are you glad?” I asked, thinking it would be good to have your life taken in charge, to be sent some place and know you couldn’t do anything about it.

Chuck looked almost embarrassed. “Oh, I suppose I’ll like it all right when I get there. But I’d just as soon stay here, too. How’d your wheat thresh out?” he asked, as though he didn’t want to talk any more about the war.

“Fair,” I said. “Nothing extra.”

“Same here. Gosh, it’s been hot threshing.”

Minnie Bruhl came back to her truck and stood there, hands on her hips, waiting.

“Say, she can take my place. She’s probably in a hurry to get home to her kids,” Chuck said, and went over to speak to her.

“Why, damn you, Chuck Henderson, I can wait my turn same as the rest. I ain’t askin’ nor takin’ no favors and I ain’t since Klaus died.”

Her voice was loud enough to be heard all over the place. Somebody laughed. Chuck walked back to me looking as though he wished himself out of sight. Minnie Bruhl followed over.

“I didn’t see you had a girl you wanted to wait with. I mighta known it wasn’t my beauty you was after.” She laughed as loud as she swore.

“Are you through threshing, Mrs. Bruhl?” I asked, to get her off Chuck.

“Cut the last piece tonight. Tony Bardich came over and threshed for me, him an’ Jake. They eat more’n any men I ever fed in my life and Klaus was a good hand to eat, too.” She started to laugh and broke off in the middle to turn on the scrawny little girl who climbed out of her truck and came over.

“I told you you’d have to go to sleep and stay if you was going to come with me tonight. That kid tags me every place I go,” she complained to us.

The child stood beside her mother as though her words made no impression at all. Chuck handed her a stick of gum.

“Damn you, whaddya say?” Minnie Bruhl asked the child and then without waiting to hear her muttered “Thank you” started talking to Chuck about combines.

“We got the best wheat we’ve had since Pa died. An’ we’re goin’ to have our own combine one of these days,” the little girl piped out suddenly.

“Can’t you keep your mouth shut?” Minnie demanded, without seeming angry at all. “If Klaus coulda seen the wheat we had this year he’da pulled through his pneumonia. The year he died the crop failed. He died before we had the damned stuff in.” Her voice changed. It was almost tender. “I’d give a lot if he could see it this year.”

The man ahead of Chuck’s truck was through and Chuck went to drive his up the ramp. Minnie Bruhl went back to her truck.

Driving back home with the empty truck rattling loosely behind me, I tried not to think of Minnie. I couldn’t stand any more disappointment and sorrow, even in someone else. A wave of sadness—for the whole world, I guess—came up in me. But I couldn’t get out of my head how different Minnie’s voice had sounded when she was talking about Klaus. He was a big, hard-working German who never said much. It was strange to feel Minnie’s love for him, but I had. There was meaning enough in the threshing for her, I thought a little enviously, but not for Mom and Dad or me.