Winter Wheat (16 page)

14

AND
so the threshing was done. When I woke the next morning the sun was hot on the porch.

“Mom, what time is it?” I called.

Mom came out with her coffee cup. “After ten. Your father sleep till eight. He is gone down to Bailey’s.” She sat down on the porch step in the bright sunshine and poured her coffee into her saucer. I had seen her do that so many times before but I liked watching her. It annoyed Dad, so she drank from her coffee cup at the table, but when we were alone she liked it best that way. I used to try it when I was a child but the coffee always ran down my chin.

Mom’s hair was still down her back in two thick black braids. She looked younger than she was. I could almost see how she must have been as Anna Petrovna.

“You’re pretty,
Mamushka
,” I said lazily, calling her by the name she had taught me when I was a child.

Mom made a little face and brushed my compliment away with her hand.

“Don’t talk such nonsense,
Yólochka
.” I had that queer feeling I have, sometimes, with Mom that we were both talking Russian even though we had said only two Russian words.

“Mr. Henderson was here last night while you are gone. He says do you want Prairie Butte teacherage? The teacher they got is leaving. Too lonesome for her, fifteen miles from Prairie Butte movies. They pay ninety dollar a month and give you wood and school stuff.”

“But, Mom!” I was so startled it was like having cold water thrown at me. I sat up straight. “Who told Mr. Henderson I wanted a teacherage?”

Mom’s face was, of a sudden, so stolid I felt shut out. We looked at each other across the porch as though we were strangers and spoke a different tongue. She was Russian; I was not.

Mom took her hairpins out of her pocket and began pinning up her braids.

“I guess they need teachers bad now. Mr. Henderson, he knows you have your teaching paper.”

“What did Dad say?” I asked coldly. Of course Mom must have asked Mr. Henderson about a job for me.

“I don’t talk to him yet. He’ll say borrow money and go to school.”

I knew how Mom felt about putting a debt on the ranch. Ours was one of the very few around Gotham that was clear. One time when I had complained that even the Bardich girls had a piano in their house Mom had said furiously, “You tell them you have no piano but your ranch is paid for.” That was what Mom cared for more than my going back to school. She set her coffee cup and saucer on the porch and I noticed how the saucer was stained from the coffee.

“If I worked . . . I can have my job at the library again. Maybe I can get the cafeteria job back too. It wouldn’t cost much except my tuition and my train ticket. They have funds you can pay back after college. I wouldn’t have to borrow on the farm.” I looked straight at Mom. “The wheat brought something.”

“The wheat brought seven hunderd fifty dollar, not counting what seed and gas cost.”

“I don’t care. You can tell Mr. Henderson I’m going back to school. I’ll manage it some way.” I threw back the cover and stood up. I wouldn’t stay here.

Mom went on sitting on the top step of the porch. I was so angry for an instant I think I hated her. I thought of her scheming to make Dad marry her. Now she was scheming to have me stay here and earn my own living. What could she know about an education?

“It don’t hurt you to teach a year,” Mom said.

“I’d lose all I learned last year and I’d have to drop out of my class,” I burst out at her.

“If you don’t know what they teach you last year, no use to learn no more,” Mom said.

We didn’t talk any more about it. All morning I was really waiting for Dad to come home. When I saw him drive into the yard I ran out as I used to as a child.

“Hi, Dad!”

“Hello, Ellen.” He got out of the truck as though he were lame. “I had to go all the way to town. The man at the store said we were lucky to get through the threshing. He’ll have to order a new part.”

“Will it cost much?”

“Enough. He’s going to come out and see it first time he has business out this way.” Dad stopped to wash at the back door.

At the table I’d bring up the subject of school. We’d have it out there. I took the vegetables from the stove and carried them to the table. I felt somehow triumphant over Mom.

“How you feel, Ben?” Mom asked.

“Well, I’m glad we’re through the threshing. I’m going to lay up a few days.”

“What’s the matter, Dad?”

“Oh, I’ve got a place erupting on my leg again. It hurts so much it must be a big chunk,” Dad said. I could see for myself that he was in pain. The steam from the spinach suffocated me. I had a hopeless feeling—Dad was sick again.

“You get into bed and I fix poultice,” Mom said. She got up to put the flaxseed on the stove.

I might as well talk about going to school now as wait. Dad would be sick all tomorrow, maybe the next day. Dad pushed back his plate. He would be gone in the other room in a minute.

Mom turned the light on. It was still light, but not over the stove. The bright glare lighted up Dad’s face with the lines between his eyes and down from his mouth and the thinness of his cheeks. Mom’s face always looked darker in the bright light, darker-browed, darker-eyed than in the daytime. Even the fine black hairs above her mouth showed up. It must show me, too, sitting there stupidly between them. This was the way Gil had seen us, and I felt the color creep up in my face. Dad limped painfully in to the couch in the next room. Mom stood at the stove. I took my dishes and went over to the sink. Why did I see us like this, as though I were standing outside?

I did the dishes while Mom was putting on the poultices. I heard their voices but I didn’t listen to their words, and as soon as I was through I went out to the porch to escape from the smell of the flaxseed. I sat there thinking of what I would say. It was the peasant in Mom that made her afraid to borrow. That was foolish. I couldn’t stay here all winter.

Mom came out finally. “It’s bad this time,” she said in a low voice. “It start yesterday but he don’t want to say nothing till we was through threshing. Now it look bad.”

I braced myself against feeling sorry for Dad. “Mom, you did ask Mr. Henderson about the teacherage, didn’t you?”

“That Gil has made you foolish,
Yólochka
. Mrs. Peterson told Mr. Henderson at the store you said maybe you don’t go back to school. Henderson came out here while you was still at the elevator. You’ve had your mad for nothing.”

I had to believe her, but I was still angry that she cared so little about my going back to school.

“Will you let me borrow the money to go back?”

Mom didn’t answer.

“We borrowed money to buy the combine!”

“But we work for other ranchers till we got it paid back by fall.”

“Dad won’t want me to stay home and teach. You said so yourself. He always wished he’d gone on and finished.”

Mom didn’t answer. We were so still we heard Dad walking across the floor in his stocking feet. He had turned the radio on. The static is terrible in summer. He was trying for the war news. The pieces of the news came through the firecracker explosions. The war was miles and miles away. I hardly took in what I heard. I was waiting for the news to be over, then I’d go in and ask Dad.

“I’m going to ask Dad, Mom,” I said firmly.

Suddenly, the radio snapped off in the middle of a sentence. We could hear Dad going back to the couch.

“Anna!” he called, and I could feel the tiredness and pain in his voice. “I guess I’ll have this poultice changed.”

I sat alone on the porch. After a while I went up on the rim rock where I could think about my own plans, but it was no use, my mind was filled with Mom and Dad. When you feel sorry for your father and mother it makes you feel older than they are. Even the line of the rimrock looked stooped and tired, and the house below it seemed lonely. I wasn’t free to do what I wanted.

I went over to see Mr. Henderson and told him I’d take the teacherage. They were so thankful to get a teacher at such late notice I didn’t even have to meet with the committee or sign a contract. Mr. Henderson said they only wanted me to promise not to leave for some defense job before the school term was over and not to go off and get married.

“I don’t suppose we have any right to ask a pretty girl like you to promise a thing like that these days,” Mr. Henderson said with a smile.

I said I could promise not to do either. When I came back, I told Dad I’d decided to stay home and teach this next year.

“Well, if you don’t like it, remember, you don’t have to stay,” Dad said easily.

“I promised I’d stay,” I said. I hadn’t really believed I wouldn’t be going back to school until now, but Dad seemed relieved, I thought. It hurt that he didn’t insist on my going back to school.

Dad was too sick to drive over to the teacherage with us. The redness had spread all up his leg. I took turns with Mom changing the hot packs. Dad had been feverish some of the time, and irritable. Mom bossed him gruffly and paid no attention to his complaining, but she seemed to grow more stolid and quiet. We took turns seeding the winter wheat, so one of us could be at the house with Dad.

One afternoon I couldn’t stand it any longer. Dad lay on the couch with the hot soaks on his leg and his foot in an old bedroom slipper. I was packing my clothes in the bedroom. The house was full of an empty stillness.

“Dad, wouldn’t you like me to read to you?” I asked desperately, wanting to fill the room with some thoughts besides our own.

“I wouldn’t mind,” Dad said, “but I’ve read all the magazines.”

“Maybe I can find some old magazines in the shed you haven’t read.”

“There’s a box of books in that closet in the shed. I guess, though, it would be more trouble to get in to them than it’s worth. The box is nailed shut.”

I carried the box into the living room and got a screwdriver and a hammer.

“They used to be on the bookshelves in my bedroom in Vermont. When we came out here I never bothered to unpack them.”

“But why? I don’t see how you could help it, Dad.”

“Oh, they’re mostly boys’ books. I worked so hard that first year I couldn’t stay awake long enough to read anything at night, and my hands felt too big and rough to turn a page.”

“But later on, in the winter?”

“I know, but I’d turned my face against books,” Dad said. “What’s in there?”

There was a copy of Emerson’s
Self-Reliance
and a
Plutarch’s Lives
in the same binding I had seen in the university library and
A Tale of Two Cities
and a ragged copy of
Black Beauty
. I opened the cover and saw Dad’s name printed in big awkward letters. I had never seen anything before that had belonged to him when he was a boy. I looked at it a couple of minutes. There was a
Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations
that said on the flyleaf “Awarded to Benjamin Oliver Webb for perfect attendance at the First Congregational Sunday School.”

I turned over a
Child’s History of England
and
The Pathfinder
and a Bible. On the flyleaf of the Bible was written “To my son, Benjamin Oliver Webb, with my love and prayers, from Mother.”

“Are there more books of yours back . . . in your old home, Dad?” I asked.

“Oh, yes, at least half of them are mine; half belong to Eunice, of course. Eunice teaches school, you know.”

I could count on one hand the number of times I had heard Father mention his sister. I wished he’d go on. “Does she like books, Dad?” I asked.

“I guess so; I don’t remember her reading much when we were children. She teaches English, though.” Dad gave a little laugh. “She’s head of the department in the school where my father was principal.”

He didn’t say any more. I took out the last book. It was called
Household Gems
.

“Did you like poetry, Dad?” I asked wonderingly.

“I should. I used to have to learn a poem every week to say Friday if I was called on in school. We could pick out our own.”

“Why don’t you ever recite any of them?”

“Well, I still can. Listen:

We both laughed. “I remember learning ‘Invictus,’ too, My father thought that was the greatest poem ever written.”

I hunted through until I found it. You could almost pick out the poems Dad had learned by the marks on the pages.

“The pack is getting kind of cold, Ellen.”

I took off the towels and put them in hot water again. We kept the hot boric solution standing on the stove these days. The redness was going down, but the shrapnel sore was still angry and hard.

“I’d like to take a knife and cut the skin all the way down and get the stuff all out once and for all, and then sew it up and have a clean wound,” Dad said. “That’s hot enough!”

I lifted the towel to let it cool a little. I think I had done this since I was ten. Dad let out his breath in a long sigh.

“There, read something now.”

I had the book open at “Invictus.”

It made me uncomfortable reading it aloud, it was so desperate and solemn.

“My father used to quote that,” Dad said, and went off into his own thoughts.

I wondered if Dad saw how the poem fitted him. His marrying Mother and coming out here in spite of the shrapnel wounds that laid him up all the time—that was pushing against Fate. He was cross and peevish often when he was laid up, but he didn’t complain much, and it never occurred to him to give up and sell the ranch and do something easier. I wondered why his soul wasn’t unconquerable. It made me feel good to be sitting here in the middle of the afternoon reading poetry aloud to Dad. I felt as though all my life I had been waiting to do just this.