Winter Wheat (20 page)

“Oh, God, let him be alive!” I prayed once aloud, and as though in answer the wind flung a sheet of snow from the top of the drift clean in my eyes and my mouth. I couldn’t think or pray any more; I could only try to stick to the ruts and keep moving. Then I felt the poles of the cattle-crossing under the snow and I could stand up and follow wire again. I fell after I passed the sheep shed, but when I dug out I could see a light. I heard Shep bark and then was banging on their door.

The door was flung open by a man I didn’t know and I stumbled into the kitchen. Leslie’s grandmother was there.

For a minute I couldn’t talk. Someone pulled a chair out from the table for me.

“Why, Miss Webb,” Mrs. Harper said.

“You’ve frozen your face,” the stranger said, and he went for some snow.

“Robert Donaldson’s lost,” I got out.

“On a night like this!” Mrs. Harper said. She was pulling off my coat. The man came back and rubbed snow on my face. He took off my valenkis. My hands and feet ached. It’s queer with Robert on my mind that for a minute I seemed sunk too deep in my own body to do more than sit there, then I came to.

“He went out of the schoolhouse. I tried to find him. I couldn’t, so I came here.” The pain in my feet and hands and my face was so bad it was hard to talk.

The man brought me a cup. “Here, drink this first,” he said.

“Miss Webb, this is my son Warren, Leslie’s father. He just got here about three hours ago. He came to surprise Leslie. He wanted to start out for the school, but when he heard the radio he give it up.”

“Leslie’s all right,” I told him. Then I drank the hot coffee he gave me. It was what I needed.

“Do you have a telephone? Can you reach Donaldsons?”

“Mathew, you try. Maybe you can get them,” Mrs. Harper said. Old Mr. Harper had been there all the time. I just hadn’t noticed him before.

My hands and feet didn’t ache so much now, so I could move closer to the heat, but I shielded my face. Mr. Harper turned the handle of the phone and shouted into the mouthpiece. After what seemed ages he turned around to us.

“I got the operator in town. She’ll get it through.” It was awful to hear him shouting: “He’s likely froze to death by now. Ed Donaldson’s boy, yep . . .”

“How are your hands now? Do you think more snow would help?” Leslie’s father asked, partly, I think, so I wouldn’t hear his father.

“Oh, they’re all right. I’ve got to get started back. There’ll be enough snow on the way back to put on my hands and face,” I said, trying to smile.

“You can’t go back tonight,” Mrs. Harper said.

“No, you stay here. I’m going,” Leslie’s father said.

“I can’t stay. I’ve left seven children there alone. I’ve been away three hours now,” I said.

He looked at me a moment. “All right. We’ll get started,” he said.

I had some more coffee and Mrs. Harper found some dry mittens and a scarf for me. We set out while the old man was still shouting over the phone. I was thankful to have young Mr. Harper with me. He looked very big in his old fur cap and heavy coat.

The trip back was just as bad. It seemed colder. There is no easy way in a blizzard. He had to crawl to follow the ruts as I had before. I was so tired I stumbled and fell and he had to help me up. I could have gone to sleep in a moment and never minded the cold. I must have rested more than a minute one time, because I heard him yelling at me. He helped me on my feet again and stood in front of me so I could get my breath. His body kept off the wind and snow.

“I’m okay,” I said after a little.

“Lady, you’ve got what it takes,” he said. He had to shout it to make me hear. His words warmed me, so I crawled along a little faster.

“How are your eyes?” he yelled, but I couldn’t answer him in that wind.

It seemed hours before we found the school fence. We leaned against it to rest again.

“We can cut across now,” he said, helping me through a drift. The snow was so deep we didn’t save any time. Once I thought I could make out a darker mass that was the teacherage, but a gust of snow blew in front of my face again and I couldn’t see a thing. I couldn’t make it much farther. I slogged through the snow with my eyes almost frozen shut and almost fell on Mr. Harper. He was bent over shoveling snow with his hands. I knew he had found Robert. I felt it through my body.

It took us a long time to make the little distance to the schoolhouse, although I don’t suppose it was a hundred yards. We had to lay the body down on the stoop so Mr. Harper could get the door open. We laid it gently, but I could feel the sound it made, as heavy as stone.

One lamp was out, the other turned down low. The schoolroom might have been a chapel. Three boys were lying on a blanket on the floor by the stove. Someone was wrapped in a coat in my desk chair. One child ground his teeth in his sleep; another turned restlessly. A gentle sound of breathing filled the room. It was warm and they were all safe. Raymond sat up and I spoke to him quietly.

We laid Robert’s body on the floor beyond the desks. Mr. Harper struck a match and by that little flame we looked at Robert’s cold round face. I touched his hand. It was gripped around a cookie. He had his mackinaw and cap and earbobs on and his galoshes.

Mr. Harper touched me on the shoulder and I realized I was crying silently.

“It’s a good out for him, really,” he said. “Better than having to drag through life the way he was.”

I could only shake my head. Then I said the thing that haunted me: “He was so near. Why couldn’t I have found him? Why couldn’t I have kept my eyes on him when he was safe here? He sat right over there.”

“Don’t do that,” Mr. Harper said almost sternly. “Have a cigarette?”

I shook my head. I went into my room to get a quilt to cover Robert.

When we had finished, Mr. Harper said:

“Get me some hot water and I’ll fix a drink to stop your shivering.”

I got the cups and he added some sugar and the whisky he had brought with him.

“Thanks,” I said. The hot drink drove the chill from my body, but not from my mind.

I took the lamp and went from child to child. “Here’s Leslie,” I whispered. He had curled up in my desk chair. Mr. Harper came and stood looking down at him.

“He looks as though he’d had a hard day, doesn’t he?”

“I’m glad you came,” I said. “Leslie has been a little homesick, I think. He’s a serious little boy, isn’t he?”

His father’s face changed sharply. “Yes, I know he is. He’s had a hard God and a hard religion crammed down his throat since he was born. After his mother died I thought on the ranch he’d forget all that and be like other boys out here.” The light from the lamp in my hands deepened the lines in his face. “You must be all in. It’s only one-thirty and I’ll be here to keep the fire going. Why don’t you go in and lie down?”

I looked around the dark room. He seemed too big for the desks and seats except for Robert’s, but I couldn’t quite look at that. The benches against the wall were too narrow.

“Where will you sit?”

“Right here.” He picked Leslie up in his arms and sat down in the chair holding him. “He doesn’t think too much of me, but I’m glad to see him.”

“You can’t hold him all night.”

“Don’t worry about me.”

I lighted the other lamp and went on into my room. Mary Cassidy lay in the middle of the bed with fat little Sigrid wedged in between her and the wall and Mike’s head on her other shoulder. I put another chunk of wood in my airtight. I was wet through to the skin, so I changed all my clothes and put on the warmest things I had—some old woolen slacks Mom had made for me out of some trousers of Dad’s, to do chores in, and a flannel shirt and sweater. I pulled my rocker up to the stove and closed my eyes, but the wind tore suddenly out of the stillness. All the windows rattled and the draft shook my door in its loose catch. I was thankful to be inside; I hadn’t been sure I could ever make it to Harpers’.

6

I SAT
hunched toward the heat until I must have fallen asleep. When I woke I was stiff. It was still dark, but the blackness had bleached to a kind of greenish-gray. The night was over. The stove was only a little warm and I reached into the woodbox for another chunk and kicked open the draft. The three children on the bed never woke even when I slammed the lid on tight again. All this I did before I remembered. Then the heaviness came back into my mind. I felt Robert out there lying on the cold floor of the schoolroom, dead. At the same moment I heard voices in the other room. I opened the door to the schoolroom without stopping to smooth my hair.

The lamp was set on the floor in the back corner. The light spread out underneath the desks and down the aisles. I could see the dirt on the floor the children had tracked in that day. Someone was kneeling on the floor beside Robert. I could hear Mr. Harper’s voice and a woman’s. The children were still mercifully sleeping on the blanket by the stove. I was halfway down the aisle when Mr. Harper and Mr. Donaldson stood up. Then I saw Mrs. Donaldson, her broad face red with weeping. Mr. Harper lifted the lamp and Mr. Donaldson’s face stood out of the dark, so meek and thin. Their shadows sprang across the ceiling.

“I can’t tell you how terribly I feel . . .” I said. My voice stuck in my throat for an instant.

“She don’t look to me as though she’d hurt herself any looking for him,” Mrs. Donaldson said to Mr. Harper. “I always thought from the first time I seen her she was too young.”

“No, no, Minnie, that don’t do no good,” Mr. Donaldson said.

“I know how you must feel.” I tried again. “Robert must have slipped out when the children were bringing their dishes in to me. He had brought me his dishes and I gave him those cookies. That was the last I saw of him. None of the children saw him go and they were all here together. He’d been making a paper chain for our Christmas tree.”

I went over to his seat, and more by feeling than sight I found it. He had pasted seven rings together. I gave it to Mr. Donaldson. He held it in his hands as though it were precious to him.

“You know what the night was like, Mr. Donaldson,” Mr. Harper said. “She went all the way to our place to get word to you. You saw the road!”

“That was nothing. The terrible thing about it is that all the time Robert was so near,” I said.

Mr. Harper covered Robert’s body again and he and Mr. Donaldson carried it out. Mrs. Donaldson wept loudly in her handkerchief. I held the door. I could see how Mr. Donaldson’s shoulders bent under the load. Perhaps they had always bent a little under that load. It was no longer snowing and the wind was not so strong. Donaldson’s sled stood down by the mail post and the deep cuts of the runners looked like trenches. His two big horses were blanketed.

While the two men were gone I wanted to say something to Mrs. Donaldson. She was sitting on the last desk weeping. Two of the boys had wakened and were staring at her.

“Mrs. Donaldson, I do feel I am to blame for Robert’s death. I’ll resign the teacherage if you think I should.”

She looked up from her handkerchief and for a moment her face was exactly like Robert’s.

“I don’t care what you do, Miss Webb. That’s up to the other folks if they want to trust their children to you. I haven’t any more children.” And she burst out crying loudly.

There wasn’t anything more to say, and I had to get some breakfast started for the other children.

Sigrid and Mike woke up while I was stirring the cereal, and roused Mary Cassidy. They looked tousled and rumpled from sleeping with their clothes on, but they were in high spirits because they had slept all night in the school.

“Who’s that, Teacher?” Mike asked, pointing at the icon in the corner.

I heard Mary Cassidy trying to shush him. “That’s Teacher’s Jesus, Mikey,” and she made the sign of the cross quickly. Sigrid stood up on my bed in her stockinged feet to look at it with wide Swedish eyes.

The children were awake in the other room too. One moment it had been quiet with a sleepy half-dark over the room, the next it seemed as though there were at least twenty children. I heard the door slam and saw that Leslie’s father had come back in. I went over to the doorway. The children stared. Leslie was the last to waken. He was twisted up in his blanket, so I went over and took it off. He sat up stretching.

“Look, Leslie, look who’s there!” I said in a low voice. I expected him to run to his father; instead he stood back against me.

“It’s my father,” he said wonderingly.

“Yes, he came to see you,” I whispered. “Quick, go give him a hug.”

Leslie leaned harder against me. “He drinks,” he said in a low voice that was strangely unchildlike.

“He came through that terrible blizzard to see you, Leslie. Go on, quick!” I tried to push him forward, but from across the room Mr. Harper had seen it all. It would be hard not to see the quick drawing-back in Leslie’s thin little body. “Children, this is Leslie’s father.” They stared. The older children smiled.

“I’m glad to see you all safe and sound,” Mr. Harper said. He came up to Leslie and held out his hand.

Leslie put out his, but he didn’t offer to go to him. It was a pitiful thing to see. I stepped a little in front of them. Mrs. Donaldson had begun to cry out loud again. Mr. Donaldson stood beside her, leaning on the window ledge.

“Children, I didn’t find Robert when I went out last night. I went all the way to Harpers’ for help. Leslie’s father was there and he came back with me. Just a little way from the school, under the snow, we found poor Robert. He was frozen to death.”

The children were so still that I heard Leslie just behind me catching his breath. Mrs. Donaldson’s crying grew louder. It was a terrible sound for children to hear. I hadn’t meant to say all this, but I thought the children should know. I found it hard to go on. Raymond was looking down at his feet. Mary had her arm around Mike. The room was only half light; the flame of the lamp was still bright yellow. The snow came above the middle sash of the windows on one side and all of them were frosted so we couldn’t see out. Yet in the dim light each child’s face seemed dreadfully clear to me. I noticed Nels’s square face drawn into a heavy scowl and Raymond La Mere’s, blank and stoical.

“I have some breakfast ready for you just as soon as you wash your faces and hands. Raymond, the water is warm in this pail. You help them get washed. Hurry! Mr. Donaldson is going to take you all home.” I sounded as matter-of-fact as Mom could have.

Mr. Donaldson and Mrs. Donaldson and the two youngest children sat squeezed together on the front of the sled. Back of the seat on boards lay Robert’s body, wrapped in blankets. Mr. Harper and the other children sat on the sides of the sled. No one spoke. Some of them wore things of mine to keep them warm. Mrs. Donaldson had my hot-water bottle at her feet. It wasn’t going to be easy to get through those drifts.

“Miss Webb, I don’t want you to think we hold anything against you,” Mr. Donaldson said to me. “We don’t know what Robert was thinking. One time at night he got up and wandered out and I didn’t find him till near morning.” He stopped and looked off across the snow.

“Thank you, Mr. Donaldson,” was all I could say.

“Don’t you want to close the school and come over to Mother’s for the night, Miss Webb?” Mr. Harper asked.

“No, thank you,” I said, but I dreaded staying there. I stood at the window and watched them out of sight. It didn’t take long for them to disappear, the drifts were so high.

The schoolroom was a sorry place: dishes were left wherever the children had finished eating. The blankets, dirty from boots and wood ashes, were draped over desks or piled on the floor. In my bedroom the bed was a disordered heap of bedding. The two dishes in which I had cooked all the cereal I had stood on my bureau. There was the soup Robert had spilled on the desk. The lamp was still burning, but the flame was colorless now. I blew it out and sat down on the unmade bed and stared. Maybe I would try to sleep first. I leaned back and switched on the radio. The nine-fifteen broadcast was half over:

“. . . one of the worst blizzards in recent years. There were seventeen lives lost in Montana and stock loss was heavy; fifteen hundred head of sheep went over a bank into Deep Creek, five hundred sheep piled up and smothered each other on Willow Creek. A sheepherder was lost on Black Leaf. From the Prairie Butte teacherage one of eight pupils, Robert Donaldson, wandered off into the snow and was frozen to death. Near Glendive, Montana, two small children were found frozen to death in a fence corner, three hundred yards from their home. . . .”

The radio rattled on. Hearing it like that made last night seem unreal, something you heard about someone else.

I worked hard cleaning the place, and it took me all day. I washed the floor and the blackboards and the dishes. I cut out green paper trees and pasted them on the lower window panes that were still frosted solid. It was hard to make the paste stick. Late in the afternoon, I plowed through the snow to get a little jack pine that grew back of a rocky outcropping. I set it in a pail of water on Robert’s desk at the back of the room. I wanted the room to look different when the children came back to it.

It was still snowing the next day. I looked out early in the morning and I knew there wouldn’t be any children at school, so I turned over and covered my head with the quilts and tried to go to sleep. But I couldn’t. After a while I got up and dressed and made myself some breakfast. I wished now I had left the cleaning until today.

When I went outside, the falling snow shut me into that closed space in front of the schoolhouse. I couldn’t see the sky or the rimrock, let alone the mountains. My eyes kept hunting out the exact spot where we had found Robert. There were no tracks in the fresh snow, but still I knew where it must be, because we came up from the fence, a little to the left of the mailbox. I stood there figuring it all out, as though it mattered now. It seemed more horrible than it had yesterday.

To get away from that place in the snow I went back inside. But in the schoolroom my eyes kept wandering over to Robert’s desk. I went into my room and closed the door. I looked at the books on my shelves and I didn’t care what was in them. I just sat there staring out at the snow.

It gave me a queer feeling to realize how long I had sat there with my hands idle in my lap, like old Mrs. Maki, who sat in a rocker by the stove in her kitchen with no one bothering about her all day. What was happening to me? Mom had a funny saying in Russian that she used to mutter under her breath about anyone she thought wasted time brooding over his troubles. She said it was from the Bible and the priest in her village taught it to her. The English of it is:

“A fool folds his hands together and eats his own flesh.”

I broke away from the trancelike feeling and snapped on the radio. The tinkle of a piano fell on the stillness of my room like the tinkle of breaking glass. I lay back on the bed with my hands under my head. The snow fell to the music if I looked long enough.

“Here is your Grain Market Broadcast for today.” I looked at my watch, but I had forgotten to wind it. Anyway, I knew by the broadcast that it was near noon.

“Spring and Winter . . . no change. Repeating . . . Spring and Winter, no change. Durum up 2, Flax . . .”

Mom and Dad were probably listening to it, too, and Bailey and the Bardiches and the Petersons, though they had no stored grain to sell this year. I felt closer to Gotham and home hearing it. Then, as though Mom were there to tell me, I started to get my lunch.