Winter Wheat (23 page)

“That’s not so,” I said quietly. “Give him more time. You don’t have any idea how the life of his mother and father affects a child.”

I had never meant to tell anyone about Ben Webb and Anna Petrovna, but I told Warren Harper, whom I hardly knew. He sat holding his tall glass in his hands, his eyes very bright and sympathetic, his face a little flushed and his hair rumpled from the way he ran his hand over it. I guess I told him because I had just been home and it had all hit me so hard, and because of Leslie. I didn’t know whether he took in all I said or not, but he listened. His eyes hardly left my face. I told him about Gil’s leaving and how I came home and overheard Mom and Dad. I didn’t seem to mind his knowing about Gil.

“That was pretty thick,” he said. “I suppose Leslie overheard us plenty. No wonder a kid gets to hate his parents.”

“Oh, I don’t hate Mom and Dad. If anything, I hate . . . I guess I hate the war. Things wouldn’t have happened just this way except for the last war. And now there’s another war.”

“It’s not the war. People do the damnedest things without wars,” he said thickly.

I couldn’t get him to leave before eight o’clock. We had sat there over three hours. When we left I made him let me drive. He was quiet so long I thought he must have fallen asleep, but he was wide-awake, staring out at the road ahead of us. I liked driving, but it’s lonely with someone so sunk in his own thoughts. The world was black and white and cold. There was nothing soft or indistinct or tender about the night.

I drove all the way to the teacherage and turned the car around. He had spoken only once; that was when I got out of the rut and then landed back in it.

“Not bad!” he said.

“I hope you get home all right,” I said when I got out of the car. “And I don’t know that I blame Leslie,” I added brutally, but partly because I was annoyed that I had talked so much.

He didn’t say a word. The car stood there for a few minutes, then I heard him driving off. The most he could do was to run in a snowbank and have to walk home.

9

I LIKED
waking in my room at the teacherage. Everything was just as I had left it. I looked across at Prairie Butte as though it were an old friend. I hadn’t stopped to make a fire in the schoolroom stove last night, so I built one before I was dressed, and opened all the drafts. I went over and wrote on the board “This is December 8, 1941.”

The La Mere boys came first, kicking their old horse into a gallop. Francis waited to tie the horse, but Raymond rushed in ahead to say:

“Gee, Miss Webb, I’m fourteen. I might get in the war yet, if it lasts long enough.”

I heard Francis and Nels arguing outside before they came in.

“My dad was in the last war, I guess he knows,” Nels declared.

“Miss Webb, we’re going to beat them Germans and Japs now, ain’t we?” Mike Cassidy asked me, his blue eyes shining.

Leslie Harper was late. We were lined up at attention saluting the flag when I saw him running along the road. He slipped into his place while we were singing “Oh, say can you see . . .” Every eye this morning was fixed on the flag floating at the top of the flagpole, very bright against the white of the wide snowy plain. I wondered if the sheepherder saw it there, flying in a kind of no man’s land between the butte and the rimrock.

When we broke up to go into school, Leslie came up to me anxiously. His thin face had bluish shadows under his eyes, and he was still out of breath from running.

“Miss Webb, I’m sorry I’m late. I had to walk this morning. My dad wanted to take me but I wouldn’t let him.”

“I see, Leslie. But if you’re late, you’ll have to stay after school, you know.”

“Oh, yes, I know,” he said almost proudly, as though he welcomed the penalty. There was a hardness back of Leslie’s delicate little face that wasn’t like a child’s.

Whatever subject we studied that day came back to the war. At noon we ate our lunch with the war news coming over the radio. Two of the boys amused themselves by drawing Japanese and American airplanes in battle on the blackboard.

I noticed Leslie wasn’t eating any lunch.

“Please, Miss Webb, I don’t feel good. I’d rather just drink some water,” he insisted when I asked him about it.

“How about a cup of hot soup, Leslie?” But he was firm.

The third grade was doing multiplication when I saw Leslie slide off his seat onto the floor.

“Jiminy, Miss Webb, he’s fainted!” Mary Cassidy said in a hoarse excited whisper.

I picked him up and carried him into my room and laid him on my bed. When I put cold water on his face, he opened his troubled gray eyes with a little moan. I put the soup on to heat and left him there while I gave the others something to do. But when I took the soup to him he turned away his face.

“Please, no, Miss Webb, I can’t. I promised God I wouldn’t.”

“Leslie, what is this business of not eating and bringing God into it?” I asked a little sternly.

He sat up cross-legged on my bed with very bright eyes. “Promise you won’t tell, Miss Webb?” he asked dramatically.

“No. I won’t tell,” I said. He leaned a little forward and spoke in a whisper.

“Miss Webb, my father went to town yesterday and when he came back he’d been drinking. I promised God I wouldn’t eat until he promised to stop.” His face shone with an unhealthy glow.

I had to leave Leslie until school was dismissed, then I came back and sat down beside him.

“Leslie, do you really want to help your father?”

He nodded.

“Well, you won’t do it this way.”

“But his soul is lost, Miss Webb, unless he repents.”

I took a long look out the window at the patient face of the butte and the blue sky.

“You don’t know about things like that. You’re only a little boy. Even your mother didn’t know. God wants you to love your father. He doesn’t want you to try to teach him.” Leslie’s solemn eyes hung on my face. I felt uncomfortable. “You sit up now and drink this soup and then go home and don’t say anything about this morning to your father.”

“But I can’t eat. I promised.” He buried his head in the pillow.

Even Mom could be no more stubborn than this. I left Leslie there by himself and went outside. I took the shovel and cleared wider paths to the mailbox and the cistern. At four o’clock the western sun was weakening in strength, trading its brave yellow for tinsel pink and lavender that colored the sky but had no warmth. The empty flagpole no longer made a zigzag shadow on the tumbled snow of the playground. The snowman the boys had made and perched on one of the swings had a rakish lurch. Someone had taken a blackboard eraser and inserted it in the wide face for lips. The nose was a stub of wiener from someone’s lunch and the eyes were two pieces of charcoal from the stove. I traipsed way across to the only jack pine that grew near the teacherage and broke off a bunch of pine needles to use as mustache and a fringe of hair. I glanced up toward the window of my bedroom and saw a quick movement at the window. Leslie had been watching me.

“Come on and help me build a fort,” I called to him. I went ahead without waiting for him, not knowing just what I’d do next. When I heard the door open I didn’t look up. “If we get a big enough wall we can have a snowball fight tomorrow noon,” I said, pushing up the snow.

He came over slowly and stood a minute watching me. I felt his eyes on me, but I was too busy to look at him. Then he started in. I wondered how he could work so hard when he had had no lunch. We made a wall of snow that stretched about seven feet from the flagpole toward the school. I stood up straight to look at it.

“Gee, lookit how long it is, Miss Webb!” Leslie called. His clear high voice carried way across the empty plain. I threw a snowball at him that broke into fluff on his cap, and ducked down behind the wall. He gave a shrill little laugh that echoed against the side of the schoolhouse.

“Watch out!” he called and threw, but the snowball hit the steps of the porch. I sent one back that struck the snow wall.

“I’m sending that one right back at you, Miss Webb!”

“I’ve got to get some ammunition ahead,” I said, kneeling behind the wall to make a few snowballs. When I stood up I saw Leslie’s father leaning on the mailbox post watching us.

“Hello,” I called.

“Hello,” he answered. Leslie saw him and stopped making snowballs.

“May I play?” Mr. Harper asked.

Leslie didn’t look up, His lower lip set against his upper.

“Sure,” I said.

“I shan’t,” Leslie answered. “I’m going home now.” He started off down the road, a dogged, stubborn little boy.

“Well, I’ll be going on home too.” Warren Harper smiled and his whole face gentled. “What would you do?”

It was almost dusk, a cold wintry grayness that made it easy to speak out.

“I’m not sure, but you might try giving up drinking for a while,” I suggested. “He’s so lonely and really frightened of his hate. It separates him from the rest of the children, too.” Then I added, “Hate always isolates you, doesn’t it?”

“Well, thanks. I wish I were sure it would help.”

The country is so wide here at the teacherage a single human being tramping along the road looks small and insignificant. Warren Harper was a tall man, six feet at least, but his shoulders drooped a little. The growing dark made his hat and clothes one color as he went along the road. I felt a kind of pity for him, going to try to make friends with his own son.

The next morning Leslie came in with the Cassidys. I saw his green tin lunch box with the others on the bench by the door. I knew each one’s lunch box now. The blue one with the flowers almost scratched off was Mary’s. The black one with the jammed corner used to belong to old Mike Cassidy when he worked in the smelter. Old Mike was lamed in an accident, so he had come out to farm the homestead he’d taken when he first came to Montana. I missed the round red box that used to be Robert Donaldson’s.

Leslie looked more rested. He waved his hand frantically in history class. I saw him shoot a paper wad at Sigrid’s back and held my tongue.

“When you finish your lunch you can have a snowball fight over my snow wall,” I promised them.

“Who built the wall, Miss Webb? It’s a good one,” Francis asked.

“Leslie helped me after he got through staying after school.”

“I bet Mr. Harper helped,” Mary piped out. I looked at her quickly.

“No, it was all finished when he came by for Leslie,” I said, but I saw Mary roll her eyes at Nels.

Leslie opened his lunch box and ate as eagerly as any of them.

We practiced for the Christmas play in between classes. It was snowing again today, “a flour-sifter kind of snow” Mary Cassidy called it.

“No, that’s Aunt Rhody picking her old white geese,” Nels said.

After school the children stayed a little later to practice the carols. I sat on one of the desks nearest the stove and the children perched like sparrows near by.

“Isn’t it Christmasy, Miss Webb?” Leslie said, hugging his knees, his eyes wide and clear. I nodded and sounded my tuning fork for “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” I caught Sigrid’s rounded childish tones and Raymond’s, newly turned to bass. Mary Cassidy sang with a sweet swinging rhythm that carried all the others.

I looked beyond them out the windows where the sky and the snow were merging into one soft gray light. I almost held my breath. I had the feeling I had had long ago when we had come home from the concert and I had climbed up on the gatepost and heard Mom singing as she covered the tomato plants. It was a feeling of happiness.

I sat there watching them put on their wraps to go: Francis struggling with that rusted zipper on his jacket, Sigrid coming to have her long red scarf wound around her cap and over her mouth, Raymond rushing out as always bareheaded in his thin leather jacket yet never seeming to catch cold. These things had come to be so familiar that they were dear to me.

Leslie came up when he was ready to go. “Miss Webb,” he said in a low voice, “Dad said he’d try. He says he don’t like making promises but he means just the same thing by it.” Leslie’s eyes shone with a triumphant gleam that broke the spell for me.

“I’m glad, Leslie,” I said. I started to say something more, that if he would just let his father feel that he loved him it would help more, but I didn’t. What did I know about love? I was born of unlove. I couldn’t hold Gil’s love. I didn’t watch the children go off as I usually did, but began straightening up the schoolroom. The snow beyond the windows seemed tiresome and endless to me now.

Saturday morning I was mopping the schoolroom floor—I had on jeans and an old shirt and my hair hung down every which way. I was singing the Russian hymn I know, one that Mom used to sing. I don’t think it was meant to be sung to work, but it fitted the thrust of my mop. I heard a whistle and my name called out. I stepped over my mop pail and opened the door. Leslie and his father stood there with skis in their arms.

“Hello,” Warren said. “We brought a pair for you. Come on and help me teach Leslie.”

“I don’t know how either.”

“Fine! We’ll all learn.” It was good to see Leslie jumping up and down.

My eyes met Warren Harper’s. Leslie ran ahead of us and threw snowballs at his father and chased the dog. His cheeks were red from the cold and he looked almost robust in his heavy jacket and snow pants.

“We have to walk up here about a mile and then there’s a good hill to learn on. I was up here last week when I took supplies to the sheep camp,” Mr. Harper said.

We walked quite a way before he said, “I went in to see about applying for a commission last week.”

“What about your job?” I asked.

“I wrote my boss last week and said I was going in the Army. It makes more sense than anything else for me.”

“You’re like Dad,” I said.

We came to the little slope and put on the skis.

“Those were Mother’s,” Leslie told me. “She had them when she lived out here.”

“Did she like skiing?” I asked.

“Yes,” Mr. Harper said shortly.

All the time we were skiing he was shouting directions first at Leslie and then at me. He was having fun now and his face looked younger.

“Oh, that was awful. I’m afraid I’m hopeless,” I said. The first couple of times I stayed upright but the last time I took a terrible sprawler. “Stop laughing at me!”

He was laughing so hard he could hardly help me up. “If you could have seen your face! You knew you were going to fall and you looked so indignant. Do you think you could call me Warren? It’s hard to say ‘Miss Webb’ every time I pick you out of a snowdrift!”

“I think I could,” I said. “Do call me Ellen.”

“Look, Miss Webb, see me!” Leslie called.

“You know you’ve seemed so much older until today,” Warren said.

“I’ve felt old this fall, ten years older than I was last year at school.”

“That’s not good.”

I shrugged the way Mom does. Sometimes I catch myself with some of her mannerisms and some of Dad’s big words. “I can’t help it.”

“I felt a hundred when I came back from Detroit,” Warren said, “but then I’m seven years older than you are.”

“How did you know how old I am?”

“I guessed,” he said, laughing. I don’t know why I should have thought of it then, but I remembered how Mary Cassidy had looked over at Nels Thorson and I stopped laughing.

I went back to the Harpers’ for dinner. Old Mrs. Harper was rushing around the kitchen, but she let me set the table and help. We ate in the kitchen and it was comfortable and like being home.

“Were you born here?” I asked Warren.

“Right here in this house, in the room off’n the kitchen,” Mrs. Harper said. “I remember how the wind blew. I’ve thought maybe that was why he was so strong-willed and set on having his own way. We’d only been out here ‘bout a year. We’d oughta stayed where we was in Wisconsin.”

“It’s a long sight better climate here,” Mr. Harper said. “We set out to raise wheat in the first place, but we had two crop failures an’ I said that was enough of that. Wheat’s too big a risk.”

“How about lambs, Dad?” Warren teased. “Wait’ll we get cattle on the place.”

“My father raises wheat,” I told old Mr. Harper. I had a funny feeling of pride as I said it. “We didn’t have much of a crop this last year, but with all this snow the winter wheat ought to do well next year, he thinks.”