Winter Wheat (2 page)

PART ONE

1

SEPTEMBER
is like a quiet day after a whole week of wind. I mean real wind that blows dirt into your eyes and hair and between your teeth and roars in your ears after you’ve gone inside. The harvesting is done and the wheat stored away and you’re through worrying about hail or drought or grasshoppers. The fields have a tired peaceful look, the way I imagine a mother feels when she’s had her baby and is just lying there thinking about it and feeling pleased.

It was hot, though, like a flash-back to July. I was glad we weren’t cooking for harvest hands. There wasn’t any fire in the stove and everything was spick-and-span because I had just washed the dinner dishes. Mom was out having another look for the turkeys that were always wandering off. Dad was lying on the couch in the other room waiting for the noon broadcast of wheat prices to come on. We had to sell our wheat this month and not hold it over; that is, we did if I was going to the university that fall. It might go higher along toward Christmas, but we couldn’t wait for that.

The house was so quiet I could hear Mom calling the turkeys down by the barn. Dad told Mom not to bother, they’d come back by themselves, but Mom worried if anything was lost or left unlocked.

“When I’ve got something, I take care of it,” she always said.

I washed some cucumbers while I was waiting. They were bright-green and shiny in the water. I used to play they were alligators when I was a child. Then I fenced them in with my hand and poured off the water into the kettle on the stove. When you have to carry every drop of water you use half a mile, you don’t throw away any.

And then it began. I knew before Dad turned it up. The voice of the man who announces the wheat prices is as familiar to me as Dad’s. It’s different from anybody’s voice around Gotham—more like one of those city voices that broadcasts the war news. That voice touches us here, and all the ranches spread out over the prairies between the Rockies and the Mississippi. It touches all the people in Clark City, thirty miles from here, who live on the ranchers, even though they try to forget it.

“Here is your Grain Market Broadcast for today: Spring and Winter . . . up two.”

I could add two to yesterday’s price, so I didn’t have to hear any more, but I listened out of habit and because I love to hear it.

“One heavy dark Northern Spring . . . fifty-two.” The words came so fast they seemed to roll downhill. Nobody ever calls it all that; it’s just spring wheat, but I like the words. They heap up and make a picture of a spring that’s slow to come, when the ground stays frozen late into March and the air is raw, and the skies are sulky and dark. The “Northern” makes me feel how close we are to the Rockies and how high up on the map, almost to Canada.

“One dark hard Winter . . . fifty-three.”

It’s just winter wheat to the people who raise it, only to me it means more than that. It means all the winter and all the cold and the tight feeling of the house in winter, but the rich secret feeling I have, too, of treasure in the ground, growing there for us, waiting for the cold to be over to push up strong and green. They sound like grim words without any comfort to them, but they have a kind of strength all their own.

“Durum, Flax, and Rye . . . up one.” The broadcast ran on. Mom came in while I was standing there listening.

“Wheat’s up,” I told her.

Mom nodded. She stood there untying her bandanna and I watched her as though I didn’t know her face better than my own. Mom’s is a quiet face with a broader forehead than mine and dark brows and eyes and a wide mouth. She doesn’t show in her face what she thinks or feels—that’s why people in Gotham think she’s hard to know—but when she laughs, the laughter goes deeper down in her eyes than anybody’s I know.

I look more like Dad. He is tall and thin and has light hair and blue eyes and his face shows what he thinks or feels. Mom is square and stocky with broad shoulders and hips. It’s just as well that I am more like Dad in my body. I like being slender and straight. I am strong like Mom, though, and I like working in the fields better than in the house.

Dad clicked off the radio and came out to the kitchen. “Well, we’ll go over and tell Bailey we’re going to sell. Fifty-three is good enough. Come on, Ellen, you can drive me over.”

I took off my apron and was running across to the barn for the pickup before Dad had taken his hat from behind the door. I felt so excited I couldn’t walk soberly.

Glory, it was hot! I had the doors of the truck tied open with a piece of rope so the air could rush through, but it felt hot enough to scorch my bare ankles, and the heat of the engine came up through the rubber soles of my sneakers.

You can’t see the elevator till you get past our place. There’s only one in Gotham, but it stands up from the crossroads like a monument. That and the railroad station are the only things to let people know Gotham’s a town.

“I feel I’m going for sure, Dad,” I told him.

“You bet you’re going,” Dad answered. “The war spoiled college for me, all but one year. Nothing’s going to spoil it for you. Might’s well drive way in. It’ll keep the car from burning up.”

So I drove the truck up the ramp inside the high shelter of the elevator. That’s fun. Dad says that’s the way covered bridges feel back East where he comes from.

“Hi!” I called out to Bailey. He’s the one who runs the elevator. Mr. Mathews was with him. Mathews is the inspector from the Excelsior Milling Company. Dad leaned against the wall of the office, talking to Mathews and Bailey about the heat. It seemed a long time to me before he said:

“Well, I thought I might as well sell. It isn’t going much higher.”

“Nope, it ain’t,” Bailey said. “Mathews and I were just sayin’.”

“I doubt it,” Mr. Mathews said kind of carefully.

“This girl’s going to college on that wheat money, so I guess I’ll take it now,” Dad said. “It’s up to you, Bailey, to keep the price of wheat up so’s she can stay there.”

I sat down on the running board of the truck while the men were talking, because it was cooler. All of a sudden, a swallow flew out of the shadowy corners way up in the roof. It made a quick shadow on my face as it swooped past. A swallow flying always makes me feel cool. Then I felt Mr. Mathews looking at me and that made me hot again. I had on my oldest pair of jeans rolled up almost to my knees and a white polo shirt that was maybe a little tight. I snapped my fingers at Bailey’s big tiger cat so he’d look at her instead of me. The cat’s too lazy to move usually, but this time she yawned and stretched and came over to me. Dad was talking. He loves to talk, and I suppose it’s hard on him that Mom says so little. Dad isn’t a rancher naturally. He’d be happier, I think, if he had done something else.

“No, sir, most folks are changing over to winter wheat, but I’m going to stick to raising both. I had a hundred acres in spring and it gave twenty-five bushels, but of course you take more of a risk. Year before last, I only got ten bushels to the acre. Winter wheat you plant in the fall and you don’t have to worry so much about moisture, but my wife’s the one that holds out for planting some spring too.”

I stood up, spilling the cat off my lap. I’d heard all that so many times before. But I liked hearing him say “my wife” that way, as though he was proud of Mom’s judgment. The people in Gotham, Dad too sometimes, act as though Mom weren’t quite . . . quite equal to Dad. It hurts me. I stood leaning against the wall idly reading the calendars and notices posted there: “No Smoking.” “This Elevator Does Not Sell Clean Seed”—that means the seed you buy there for planting may have weeds in it and you can’t come back and blame them for it. There was an advertisement of Karmont wheat that Dad says was developed especially for me because it has Russian and American parents, too—from Kharkov and Montana. He calls me Karmont, sometimes, to tease me. A big fly-specked placard read “Heavy Northern Spring . . . Dark Hard Winter”—the words are like something you know by heart, something you know without learning. They have a deep solemn sound . . . I couldn’t explain it to anybody. Suddenly, it seemed to me as though those words I had always known—”Heavy Dark Northern Spring . . . Dark Hard Winter”—held in them all my living here.

“Ellen, you go ahead. I’m going to stay and have a game,” Dad said. He and Bailey and Mr. Mathews went inside the little office.

“Okay. I’ll leave the pickup for you. I’ll walk back,” I told him.

I stepped out of the shadow of the elevator and the sun seemed to wrap around me and press down on my bare head. Mom says that’s the way you get sunstrokes, but I like it on my head. I like my hair brushing hot against my neck, too.

In two weeks, I thought, I’ll be far away from here—and I’d never been more than three hundred miles before. I looked at the corrugated tin sheds below the elevator where they store salt and oil and feed and thought how I used to slide down them. I’d just as soon right now, only the tin would be so hot it would blister my seat. I looked at the store. It didn’t do much of a business, because most people sent away for big mail orders. There was the cellar hole they dug one time for a community church, but folks didn’t agree and they didn’t have a crop that year, so they never finished it. I felt as separated from Gotham as though I didn’t even know it. I was so excited I could have run in spite of the hot day. Then I discovered something funny: my hands were ice-cold. I pushed them down into the tight pockets of my jeans. I had known I was going and yet, with deciding to sell the wheat today, I could feel it more.

2

UNLESS
there is company, and there seldom is, Dad and Mom and I sit in the kitchen in the evening. In the summertime, if one of the boys from Gotham comes to see me we sit out in the pickup.

That night Dad was reading the morning paper that gets to Gotham in the evening. Mom was ironing. I sat at the table with the plate and knife and fork pushed back so I had room for my tablet. I was figuring up my expenses again.

It was bright in the kitchen. Mom had a hundred-watt bulb on the one cord that hung down from the ceiling. It was so bright you couldn’t look at it, but Mom liked lots of light. We hadn’t had electricity at the ranch so very long. Mom said all her life in Russia she had cooked and ironed and mended by the light of a wick in a bottle of kerosene, and she liked the feeling of being able to turn on the light the minute it got dark and have it shine on everything. She didn’t like the shades pulled, either. Our house was like a lighthouse for people coming up past the coulee.

“If I get the job in the cafeteria,” I figured out loud, “that’ll leave only my room and books and railroad fare, besides my tuition.”

“And if you don’t like working in the cafeteria, you needn’t,” Dad said, almost angrily, putting down his paper.

“That wouldn’t be much to do,” Mom said. They’re often like that. And then I try to turn them both the same way.

“Oh, no, I won’t mind that,” I said. “That’ll be fun.”

I drew a line under the figures. At the top stood “railroad fare” and just seeing it there made it hard to keep my mind on anything but going. Tomorrow . . . tomorrow night at this time I’d be on the train.

“You go ahead and do what you want, Ellen, and if you want to join a sorority you do it. Have yourself a good time. If we should have a bad year and not be able to send you the whole four years, you’ll have had your year, anyway. I remember how I felt when I was in college.”

He meant to make me feel good and free; he couldn’t see that he put fear in my mind at the same time. If they did have a bad year! It was like a drop of temperature in the middle of a summer’s day; you begin to worry about hail striking. I looked over at Mom. She was folding a shirt on the ironing board, buttoning the little buttons down the front. But I could see by her lips she didn’t like Dad to talk that way.

“You’d always rather eat to bursting one meal than spread it out over two,” she told Dad. “If she take care, her money’ll go longer.”

I made little marks on the page. I felt pulled two ways again. I have since I was a child. I love Dad’s way of talking that makes him seem different from other ranchers. He’s lived here twenty-three years, but he still says “back East where I come from.” He’s the one who gets excited when I do about spring coming or a serial running in the magazine we’re both reading, but it’s what Mom says that I depend on. When Mom used to say “Don’t worry” about my pet chicken or dog or new calf, it always got well. Dad is always talking of going some place, not now, but next year, maybe. Mom seems to think of nothing farther away than today or perhaps yesterday or tomorrow morning.

Mom folded the ironing board and put it inside their bedroom that was just off the kitchen. She carried in the freshly ironed clothes. Dad went back to his paper. When Mom came back she took beans from the cupboard to soak for tomorrow. Dad always said Mom could make all the dishes he’d had back in Vermont as well as though she were a New Englander herself, instead of a Russian. All of a sudden, I realized that tomorrow when those beans would be ready to eat I’d be going away. It gave me a funny feeling.

“I’ll be taking the train tomorrow night,” I said aloud, more to hear it myself.

“We can drive you into town in the afternoon,” Dad said, dropping his paper on the floor.

“There’s no need to go to town; she can catch the train at Gotham just as well. We haven’t nothing to take us into town for,” Mom said.

“Well, we don’t have to decide tonight,” Dad said, but I knew he wanted to go into Clark City. It wouldn’t be so flat as just seeing me go off on the train from Gotham. My going away was hard on both of them; they were so different—and I was part of them both. It made me uncomfortable to think of leaving them.

While I was getting ready for bed in my room that’s off the front room, I saw how it would be if I left from town. We’d go in right after dinner and go around to the stores, Dad going one way and Mom and I another. Dad would probably have his hair cut at the barbershop and stop in the bank and meet someone he knew to talk to. Then we’d meet at the big store on the corner and go to the cafeteria for supper. The train stops ten minutes or so at the station in town and there are other people and excitement and you have time to wave from the platform and then again from your window by your seat. We went to the station in Clark City to see the Goodals off when they went back to Iowa.

If I left from Gotham, we’d just drive down in the truck and wait till the train came. It only stops long enough for you to get on and you hardly have time to taste the flavor of going away.

I sat on the bed in my pyjamas with my arms around my knees. I couldn’t keep from thinking of that time Dad went back East. I tried to, and then I just sat still and looked straight at it. Sometimes that’s better than working so hard to keep from looking at what’s in your mind.

Dad went all the way back to Vermont when his mother died. It was in November and it was already dark when the train came through Gotham. Even now, I could feel how cold and dark it was. I held Mom’s hand. Dad was so dressed-up he seemed strange. He had gone to town and bought a new dark suit and a hat and gloves, not work gloves or warm gloves, but soft gray ones that made you feel gentle to touch them. Mom didn’t like it. We stood there without saying anything until Dad told Mom to remember to call Mr. Bardich, our neighbor, if the cow didn’t calve tomorrow.

“I’ll manage,” Mom snapped back.

“I wish you could go, Anna,” Dad said to Mom, “and we could take Ellen.”

“I don’t want to go,” Mom said, and the tone of her voice hurt to hear. I could feel more than the night coldness around us; I could feel Mom and Dad drawing away from each other. I wanted to say something to bring them together. Dad mustn’t go this way, but I couldn’t say anything.

Then I heard the train and the big round beam of light cut through the darkness like a harrow turning the dark earth. It shone hard on our faces, making them look queer and unreal.

Dad was going.

“Dad!” I screamed, jumping up and down. Dad lifted me off the ground to kiss me and held me so tight I could feel how he loved me. Suddenly, all of me rushed out to him and I loved him so much I forgot all about Mom and the sharp, hard sound of their voices a few minutes ago. I felt then, at eight, how much Dad and I are alike.

The train was rushing toward us. Over Dad’s shoulder I watched it come. It was going to take him away.

“Dad, please take me with you,” I sobbed in his ear.

I felt his soft gloved hand on my cheek.

“I won’t go away without you next time,” he whispered, and set me down. He picked up his bag. I wanted him to kiss Mom; I had never seen him kiss her. But he didn’t.

“Good-by, Anna Petrovna,” he said, looking at Mom. I had never heard him call her by two names before.

“Good-by,” Mom said, standing still, without smiling.

Then he was gone and the crossroads were darker than ever. The train light shone on the high window in the top of the grain elevator for a moment and then that too was dark. We got into our old Ford and Mom drove back to the house. My throat ached all the way. The name Dad had called Mom kept saying itself in my ears: “Anna Petrovna, Anna Petrovna.” I wanted to ask Mom about it, but it was tied up somehow with that bitter cold sound of their voices.

Our house seemed lonely when we came back to it. It seemed to be hiding under the coulee. I went with Mom to put the truck in the barn that was bigger than the house. I think Mom was prouder of our barn than the house, anyway. We walked back to look at the cow that was going to calve. She was just a big light blob in the dark, waiting. I had thought she was exciting this morning, but now she seemed sad, too.

The wind blew when we walked across the open space to the house and I couldn’t help shivering with the cold. Inside the house it was warm, but empty.

“Bring your nightgown in here and I heat you some milk,” Mom said.

I drank the milk sitting on a stool in front of the stove. It tasted good, but the lonely ache in my throat was still there. I picked up my clothes and hung them neatly behind the stove and put my cup on the sink board. Mom was fixing oatmeal for tomorrow morning.

“Good night, Mom,” I said almost timidly, standing beside her. She seemed wrapped around in a kind of strangeness. Then she turned around and drew me to her. The front of her dress was warm from the stove. I felt the comfortable heat through my gown. She laid her hand against my face and it felt rough and hard but firm. I dared ask her something I wanted to know.

“Mom, was that really your name—what Dad called you?”

Her voice sounded surprised. “Why, Yeléna, you know that; Anna Petrovna. You know I am born in Russia, in Seletskoe.”

“Yes, but I didn’t know your other name,” I said.

“Anna Petrovna Webb.” She pronounced it slowly. “Once I think what a funny name Ben Webb is!” She laughed. Her laugh was warm and low like our kitchen, and comfortable. The house seemed natural and right again.

“Mom, can I sleep in your bed with you while Dad’s gone?”

“Yes,
Yólochka moya
.” Mom called me her pet name for me, and I was comforted. It meant small pine tree. “Pine trees are strong trees, Yeléna. You should see the great black forests in Russia,” she used to say.

But now that I am grown I feel the wall of strangeness between them, more than when I was a child. I wondered how they would get along without me.

Dad went past my window and I could smell his pipe. Mom was in the kitchen still.

“Anna, come outside and get a breath of air,” Dad called to her. I heard the screen door close sharply.

“The windbreak’s stirring like it rain tomorrow.” Mom’s accent makes what she says sound final.

I slipped my feet into my sheepskin slippers and went out as I was, in my pyjamas, my hair loose around my face.

“What are you doing out here?” Dad asked gruffly but as though he was glad I had come.

“It’s hot inside,” I told him. It was good to be outside. The heat seemed to bring the sky down close. It was not dark even at ten o’clock. The stars were faint. Over against the house the shoulder of the coulee was darker than the sky, cutting the air from the earth. I followed the sharp line a long distance. That was the way tomorrow would cut my living here from the rest of my life, I thought unhappily, but with a kind of prickling of excitement in me. I lifted my eyes to the sky, where the lighter darkness was all of one piece. The sky drew me as it always had, making me feel light and airy. I left Mom and Dad there and ran in my slippers up the side of the coulee.

The top of the tree that makes shade by our kitchen door comes even with the ridge of the coulee. In the daytime I can see far off to the mountains. I have the whole sky to myself. I did what I used to do. I lay down flat on the ground where I could smell the sagebrush close to my face and see every star in the sky. The earth was warm and hard under me. I rolled over on my side and looked down at our house. Mom and Dad were sitting there on the bench. Somehow, I felt sad looking at them down there. I almost didn’t want to go away and leave them. I ran back down the hill to them, like a child.

“Well,” Dad said, “young lady, if you’re going to leave us tomorrow . . .”

“Yeléna, go get to bed,” Mom said shortly; she pronounced the “Ellen” differently, the Russian way, Yeléna.