Winter Wheat (25 page)

Many a time I have gone to bed with Mom still hard at work fixing turkeys and waked up hours later and found her still working. She wouldn’t let Dad help, but he never went to bed until she was through, even if she worked till two or three in the morning. He would sit in the next room and read and call out from time to time that she mustn’t do this another year.

“You get yourself something to eat and then you can help,” Mom said now.

There were soup and fresh bread Mom had made, and her own butter. After all these years, Mom still made her bread in round loaves. There was nothing so good. I was glad of this vacation, I thought, as I sat there eating. I missed Dad, though. Coming home was cut in half to find him away. I said so to Mom.

“He took idea to go. When he get all that money borrowed it go to his head. Next year when we don’t have no crop he’ll think a little,” Mom said darkly, pulling out a mess of bright-colored entrails from the big carcass in front of her. I watched as though I hadn’t seen all this a dozen times before.

“But we will have, Mom. Look at all the snow we’ve had already this year, and we put in more winter wheat this time!”

Mom shrugged. “We see.”

I don’t think I realized until that night how fast and deft Mom’s fingers were. They seemed to know every hollow of the turkey’s carcass. She would hold it up to the light and peer in and nod when she was through. When she laid the finished turkeys in a row on the table, hens in one line, toms in another, they were beautifully clean, the powerful legs crossed and tied, the big wings folded underneath, a string of red uncooked cranberries around each neck. Dad laughed at her for that, but I believe her customers liked it. She had her necklaces all strung and ready in a bag. Mom was systematic without thinking about it. I picked up one cranberry ring, half-expecting Mom to tell me to leave it alone as she always used to, but instead she said:

“Cranberries are awful dear this year!”

It was after two o’clock when we had the tags with the weight marked on them tied to each turkey. We piled the turkeys carefully in two big clothes baskets and a tin tub and set them out in the shed to keep cool. Mom scoured the table and the sink board and I did up the pans we had used. Then we sat down and had some coffee and another slice of bread. When we were through, Mom opened the kitchen door and let the cold air sweep into the hot kitchen till it was freshened of all its odors. She sniffed the air.

“Feel like chinook tomorrow. We better get them turkeys in early.”

11

I WONDERED
how many trips to town I had made like this, the day before Christmas! It began Christmas for me, and afterward, when all the turkeys were delivered and Mom had the checks and cash in her big black bag, we had lunch and did our Christmas shopping. The one afternoon was always enough for us. We only gave to each other. Dad sent money back home, I knew now. And always every year, a present came for me from Aunt Eunice. Next to the doll, the present I remember best was a pair of white gloves when I was seventeen. I wore them for the first time to Gil’s house.

Mom had the list of customers with their addresses in her own handwriting. It dawned on me today as I looked down on the notebook in her hands that Dad must have taught her to write too.

“You better watch the road!” Mom said. I straightened the wheels. I had got over too far looking at Mom’s handwriting.

“Did Dad teach you to write English, Mom?” I asked.

“Sure. While he get well, an’ on the boat. He don’t do so good learning Russian,” Mom said, laughing.

“I’ll take them in,” I said when we got to town. I had been proud the first year Mom let me take the turkeys from the truck to the houses and come back with the money. Mom liked the hard silver dollars best; the paper checks she cashed as soon as we got downtown. I used to wonder why so many of the women looked so hurried and had to hunt to find the money; they knew we would be there that day. One woman borrowed from her maid, and once a woman asked us to stop at her husband’s office to get the money from him.

“That’s it, the white house. Mrs. Harriman, she get seventeen-pound tom,” Mom read.

I thought of Gil as I went around the house to the Harrimans’ backdoor. They had a dog that barked, I remembered, but there was no dog there today. Maybe it had grown too old to bark.

Mom had been right about the chinook. The turkeys were soft now as I took them in. Sometimes they were frozen hard from standing overnight in the shed and in the open back of the truck.

“My! Are you Mrs. Webb’s daughter?” one woman asked. “I remember when you used to bring our Christmas turkey years ago. You had long blond braids!” I felt ten again.

It took us till nearly one o’clock to get them all delivered. It was good to see the clothes baskets and the tub empty. We had a good many checks, so we went right to the bank and Mom cashed them. I had two monthly checks for teaching uncashed too. I started to deposit them in the savings account I had opened in September, then I decided I’d buy a new coat for myself. I looked at Mom in her old black coat standing at the cashier’s window. Mom needed a new coat, too.

I told her at lunch. Mom’s eyes sparkled.

“You and Ben, you go crazy when you get money. I don’t need no coat. You buy new coat for yourself.”

“I am going to, but you need one too. It will be my Christmas present.” It was a wonderful feeling to have money of my own to spend.

We went up to the coat department. It was nearly empty. Most people don’t leave their Christmas shopping till the day before Christmas. The coat I bought for myself was a polo coat with big pockets and lapels that I could turn up. I put it on and walked up and down over the green carpet past the long mirrors. Mom sat on an imitation white leather chair, and watched me, nodding approval. Mom liked it because the salesgirl showed her the original price slashed down a third because it was so near Christmas.

“Why you do that the day before Christmas?” Mom asked.

“I guess to tempt someone. Most people are home trimming their tree today.”

I liked the coat because I thought Vera would approve of it. I wondered where she was this year, and what she would think of me teaching at Prairie Butte. I walked past the mirror again and pretended I was hurrying down the mall to meet . . . well, if not Gil, someone.

And then I got Mom to try on a coat.

“No, too tight. I can’t move my arms,” Mom said, swinging her arms to show the saleswoman. She tried another, a black with a fur collar.

“What kind a animal you call it?” Mom asked, holding up the collar. When she heard it was dyed skunk she wouldn’t have it. Each time when she took off a coat she reached for her own old one, till I took it and held it.

Then Mom saw a red one on the rack with a gray squirrel collar. I saw the saleswoman thought it was too young for Mom, but she had already put it on. She walked over in front of the glass and for the first time in my life I saw she must have liked clothes, too. Mom smoothed the soft fur cuffs with her hand.

“You like it, Yeléna?”

“Yes, I believe I do,” I said, looking at Mom in a new way. It’s hard for a daughter to realize that her mother could be still young. Mom wasn’t fat, she was just big, I thought critically.

Mom let me pay for it finally. We argued back and forth while the saleswoman went to have the buttons set over.

“All right,
Yólochka
, you pay,” Mom said.

I made Mom wear it out and we took her old coat in the box. We bought a hat, too, but it took time. The hats looked silly above Mom’s wide forehead. She sat in front of a glass, her face expressionless. A hat with a veil bothered her and she pushed the veil out of the way. I saw how her eyes kept resting on the red coat.

“It’s the color of the cranberries we put on the turkeys, Yeléna,” she said.

The hat we bought was dark-red felt. The saleswoman hunted in a big drawer until she found a piece of gray fur to match the collar on the coat.

Mom nodded. “We take that,” she said. “You sew the fur on good.”

It was becoming. I was ashamed that the red had seemed too young to me too, at first. Mom was seventeen when Dad married her. She was only forty-one now.

“Ben like red,” Mom said while the saleswoman was gone. I turned away from the silly smile on her face as she looked in the mirror. “I might go in to town to meet your father’s train when he come back.” She wanted him to see her in her new coat and hat. I squirmed inwardly, it seemed so pathetic to me. I felt years older.

We went to a man’s store and bought a new sweater for Dad and house slippers, the sweater from Mom and the slippers from me.

“Crops must have been good out your way,” the salesman said as he wrapped up the gifts.

Mom’s face closed up tight. “Crops was bad out our way,” she said, and the young man made no more attempts at conversation.

We went to the grocery store and Mom bought all kinds of things she didn’t buy ordinarily—powdered sugar and nuts and candied fruits and a tin of caviar and a jar of pickled herring. I sat in the truck outside, but I could see Mom through the big glass window of the store. It didn’t seem like Christmas with the chinook melting all the snow and the children going past bareheaded. The road home would be a mess.

We must have been about two miles from home when Mom put a little book in my lap. “There,
Yólochka
, it is yours.”

“Why, Mom!” It was a black bankbook like my own.

“I put all the turkey money to you. Two hunderd eighty-four dollar, for school next year.”

“But, Mom!” I couldn’t say any more.

“Sure, why not?” Mom said. “You buy me this coat, don’t you?”

The road was soft where we turned off the highway. I had to tend to my driving. It was dusk when we came to Gotham, a soft warm dusk, almost like spring. We drove with the windows rolled down and I could hear the water running in the culvert when we came to our place. No one had been there to turn on the yard light. I liked the house under the darker ridge of the coulee with the dark fringe of trees above the roof. I shut off the lights and the ignition and we sat there a second in the truck. The wind stirred past us and smelled sweet, of moist dirt and stable smells and some freshness I couldn’t name. It was chinook weather for Christmas Eve.

“Ben’ll miss being home,” Mom said.

“I’ll do the milking,” I said quickly. “I’ll be right ready.” I slipped on my jeans and an old shirt and the boy’s work shoes I wore around the ranch when it was muddy. After I’ve been to town these things feel good.

Mom had hung away her new coat and hat, but she was just sitting by the table. Usually, she was so busy the minute we got home from town. She sat idle like that only when she was thinking out some problem.

“Yeléna, it would be good for you to marry. You’d do good on a ranch. How you like this Mr. Harper?”

“Oh, Mom, for heaven’s sake, I hardly know him.” I let the milk pails clatter together as I went out. I was angry at her for trying to plan things out for me like some old country mother.

It was late to milk the cows, but we had left them in the corral all day with hay to eat. With the chinook melting the snow, the ground of the corral was soft and soppy. I slipped the wooden bar on the gate and talked to the cows as I went in. The yard light reached way over here, so I could see well enough. I led them into the barn one by one. We milk three, and have enough for Bailey and for Peterson at the store.

The light bulb in the barn was mirrored in the cows’ big dark eyes. I’m out of practice, but I like milking. May turned her big head and looked at me and I could see myself perfectly reflected in her eyes. She was easy to milk. The milk poured down evenly into the pail. I gave May a pat on the flank and set the pail on the shelf where it was safe and moved to Belle. The cows’ names were May and Belle and Dunya. Dad had named the first cow they had on the ranch Dunya after a girl they knew in Russia to tease Mom, and we had had one by that name ever since.

The wide door stood open. I could hear the cows chewing at the hay and the sound of the milk in the pail. I thought how strange a way it was to spend Christmas Eve. Last year I had been with Gil. We had gone downtown and had dinner and danced. Carolers sang carols in the dining room and Gil paid them to sing certain ones for me. They stood by our table and sang “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen” and “Noel.” Gil held my hand under the table. I had thought that I would spend all the Christmas Eves of my life with him. I moved over to Dunya, but in my thoughts I was back with Gil. I remembered Christmas Day and Christmas night last year. I remembered how happy I was.

I turned the cows back out through the corral and heard Dunya’s bell as she led the way down to the coulee bed. Their big hoofs made a sucking sound as they picked them up out of the mud. I stopped to pull down hay for the horses and turn off the barn light. From the wide barn door I could see the yellow lights from the kitchen and the dark top of the tree above the house roof. Patches of snow jumped out of the dark, whiter than they were by daylight. There was a dripping sound of melting icicles. Nothing was like Christmas Eve. I wished I could stay out here and not go back to Mom’s questions, but I took the pails of warm fresh milk and went back up to the kitchen.

Mom had changed her dress and had supper set out on the table. She had a fat red candle from some other Christmas in the center. When I came in she looked in the pails to see how much milk I had.

“Good,” she nodded. I think she would have said no more about Warren Harper or my marrying, but I didn’t wait to see.

“I still love Gil, Mom,” I said. I might as well tell her.

Mom made a snorting sound and tipped the pail of warm milk to fill the pitcher for our supper. I took off my sweat shirt and washed my hands at the sink.

Mom muttered crossly, “Why you let him go, then, first time you get mad?”

12

THREE
days after Christmas the wind changed again. It blew from the northwest and the temperature dropped so low the bare ground looked cold and naked. It was good to see the snow powdering the frozen earth. The cold made me think of the blizzard and losing Robert. My thoughts always seemed to move close to the weather. We couldn’t do much besides feed the stock. I sat by the stove and read. We listened to the radio a lot. Mom was so interested in war news she wouldn’t miss one broadcast.

We had a letter from Dad:

I read the letter aloud to Mom. She sat still to listen. I wondered if Dad were trying to make Mom feel good. He must have remembered so much more than the way Mom let the windows bang! It was odd that he wrote it to both of us and signed it “Ben.” But it was true that this winter he had become Ben to me more than Dad, just as Mom had become Anna Petrovna.

His gifts came. Bailey made a special trip to bring them to us. There was a big box of candy and a new leather pocketbook for Mom. He sent me two pairs of nylon stockings. The candy lay on the table in the kitchen where Mom could admire it. Mom loved gifts.

“Ben send it way from there!” Mom said several times. “He spends money!” There was a note of grudging admiration in her voice.

We were sitting by the stove in the front room one late afternoon, five days after Christmas. Mom was knitting. I was reading. Since I had told her about Gil, there had been a little coolness between us—not coolness so much as separation. Talk didn’t come so easy.

We both heard the train go through Gotham. I thought how the train would stop only long enough for the mailbags to be thrown off and a few people would look out the windows with bored disinterest. I wished vaguely that I were on it, the way you think about being on a plane when it flies over your head out in the field, or the way you wish it were cool in July when you know it can’t be. It wasn’t more than a quarter of an hour later that we heard someone call. I went out to the porch and there was Dad walking across the yard, carrying his bag.

“Ben Webb! You come!” I heard Mom say.

“Of course I came.” He kissed Mom, then he put his arm around me. “Ellen, I wish I could have taken you with me.” I couldn’t remember ever having seen him kiss Mom before.

“Why didn’t you tell us when you were coming, Dad? We’d have gone into town to meet you.”

“Yes, Ben, you should tell us!”

Dad laughed. “I got through before I thought I would, so I just took the first train and came. Where’s some coffee? I haven’t eaten anything since breakfast.”

Mom was busy in a minute making fresh coffee.

“Did you have a good time, Dad?” I asked. I thought how well he looked in his “city clothes.” A pleasant air of strangeness seemed to attach to him.

“Well,” Dad said slowly, “I don’t know, but it was a satisfaction.” He looked over at Mom. “Anna, I’m sorry, but I couldn’t have done anything else.” I knew he couldn’t have said that to her before he went away.

Mom was poaching an egg. She kept her eyes on the edges of the white, lifting them gently with her knife.

“I’d say it was worth it even if we didn’t have a good crop this year,” Dad added.

“If we lose the combine you don’t feel so good,” Mom muttered, sliding out the egg.

A hopeless feeling rose in me. I felt that Mom must have given me all the turkey money because Dad had given Aunt Eunice money.

“I’ll always feel good about it,” he said quietly, and I knew he wouldn’t mention it ever again. He turned to me. “I hated to miss some of your vacation, Ellen. Your Aunt Eunice was pleased to know you were teaching. I told her how you enjoyed those old books. She’s sending you some of my father’s. She says she is going to leave the house to you some day, Ellen.” Dad didn’t look at Mom. He was busy buttering his toast.

“Oh, Dad,” I said. I thought how Gil could come and see me there some day.

“Yeléna’ll have this ranch some day,” Mom said.

When Dad came to his cigarette, I brought him his presents. He put on his sweater and slippers. Mom seemed to forget all her resentment in her pleasure at seeing him.

“That’s good sweater, Ben, better than your old one,” she said.

“We loved our presents, Dad,” I said.

“I wonder you had enough money to get home on, Ben,” Mom said, her eyes bright again with fun.

“You should see Mom in her new coat, Dad!” I made Mom go and put it on and the hat and her new pocketbook.

“Well!” Dad said. “Doesn’t she look fine, Ellen!” Mom blushed and her face seemed to open and be alive. I looked at her, too. She was . . . why, she was really handsome!

“Stand up there beside her, Dad. You both look so dressed-up!” I said like a doting mother. Dad put his arm around her and they beamed.

“You make yourself foolish, Ben!” Mom said, and moved away.

“Well, I’ll go out and see how you two managed the place,” Dad said.

“Not in good clothes,” Mom warned.

A half-hour later we were all outdoors. Dad, in his old clothes, rode one of the horses up to see about grass on the other side of the coulee. Mom had tied her bandanna over her head and was out looking for the few turkeys she had kept over. I went out, too, in back of the house against the hill.

“You go with your dad, Yeléna,” Mom called. “Go ahead!”

I climbed up on the other work horse, just as I was, and rode after Dad. The wind blew my hair and ruffled the horse’s shaggy winter coat.

Warren drove into the yard the last day of my vacation. I had dreaded his coming. Mom had kept wondering why he didn’t come.

“I thought Mr. Harper was going to bring his little boy some day?” Mom said one night as we were doing the dishes.

“He was probably busy,” I said. “I hope he doesn’t come.”

“Why don’t you bring your little boy?” Mom asked him as soon as she saw him. Warren smiled.

“Well, he had a cold. I’d like to do it a little later, if I may.” His face was reddened by the wind and he seemed to smile more. He fitted so easily into our kitchen, talking to Dad and Mom. I was glad he had come, after all.

Warren stayed for dinner and he and Dad talked about the war. Their talk shut me out. It was a good thing I wasn’t a man, I thought. I didn’t see how wars would ever stop so long as they filled people like Mom and Dad with such fervor. Mom listened to every word. When they talked about Russia she interrupted with a boastful laugh.

“Germans don’t know Russian winter. They freeze like flies!” I felt that her voice sounded cruel and I hated it. “They can’t get Russia
ever
, I don’t think!” she added, and the cruelty in her voice had changed to something else, something that vibrated in my own ears and made me proud.

But I didn’t mind leaving. I was used now to the coming home and going back to the teacherage. It made a pattern. If you can see the pattern in your days, it’s easier, I thought, looking down from a rise in the road on the pattern of fields spread out below Gotham: strips of stubble against plowed strips, faintly tinged with green and bordered by the faraway mountains striped with snow. The late afternoon sun glinted on the thin covering of snow and polished the shining stalks of stubble. It sparkled on the mountains so we could hardly look straight at them. A warm quietness seemed to hold the whole valley. I thought how Warren was becoming part of that pattern.

We drove through Clark City without stopping and beyond it again to the open country that was clean and bare and wide.

“Oh, I feel good!” I said out of my mind.

“I feel that way when I’m with you,” Warren said. “You never seem restless or worried or striving for something.”

“Not today anyway,” I said. “Tell me about your Christmas. Did you have fun with Leslie?”

“I really did. He went every place with me, up to the sheep camp and into town and over to Lewistown. We stayed overnight in a hotel and Leslie loved that. I went over to see about selling the sheep. They’re too much for Dad with me going in the Army. The folks are going to move back into town.”

“What have you heard from the Army?”

“The Engineering Corps takes me as a lieutenant. I leave next Saturday.”

“That’s so soon,” I said. I hadn’t thought of his going right away.

“It wouldn’t have seemed so when I first came out here, but it does now.”

“How does Leslie take it?”

“I believe he likes the idea. He acts almost proud of me.” Warren smiled as he said it.

“That’s fine. I knew he’d change toward you if you were here with him and . . .”

“. . . and stopped drinking. Well, I have. But a lot of his attitude is your doing.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You should hear him quote you.” Warren laughed. “The other day when we were coming back from the sheep camp, the wind was blowing so hard it took our breath away. He turned his back to it and shouted to me, ‘Miss Webb says God speaks to you through the country. Maybe the wind is God’s voice.’”

“Oh, that . . .” I said.

“Well, anyway, we stopped on the way back and listened to the wind. The sea has nothing on it for roar. I got the notion while we were listening that the wind in this part of the country, so far inland from water, is kind of a big dry sea, itself. Maybe it has as powerful an effect on the people who live in it as the sea has on people. You know, Conrad stuff.”

“Maybe,” I said. I hadn’t heard him talk in fancies before.

“It has a lot of things the sea has, really, except that it’s dry and the sea’s wet.” He laughed again. “But I didn’t bring Leslie along today because I wanted to talk to you, Ellen. What you said the other day about not wanting to love anybody was crazy and childish. You don’t mean that.”

I looked away from the road over to the east. I saw how the sun had gone from the whole side of the rimrock but for one little spot as big as your hand. It was strange how that spot lingered. If you were up there you could lay your hand against it and feel its warmth. Having someone love you was like that spot. You could lean against it and warm yourself, but when the sun left that place you would be cold again.

“Ellen, I can wait for you to come to love me. I used to be impatient about everything. I’ve learned a little. You should have seen me last week with Leslie.”

He stopped the car along the road and leaned forward a little holding the top of the wheel with both hands. He wasn’t looking at me, but down the road at the winter’s day that had about run out of light. It’s the worst time of day. I hated to have him looking at it without a spot of sun left along the rimrock or on the mountains. The mountains were the worst. They were blue-cold and fading. Maybe he didn’t notice them, he went right on talking.

“First, I thought I was too much older. My life has been pretty much messed up, and you should have someone as young as you are. But then I tell myself that we were meant to find each other, because it was all such a chance that I was home when you came to the house in the blizzard.

“I was anxious to meet you before that. Do you know what Leslie wrote me, Ellen?” Warren took a letter out of his pocket. He must have known it pretty well because the penciled writing was hard to read. “‘On the way home Miss Webb took my hand and we ran. She said she loved to run in the moonlight. I’m not afraid in the dark any more.’ Look how he spells moonlight—’munelite.’” He held it over for me to read.

I tried to remember how I had felt last year with Gil when he told me he loved me, but it hadn’t been like this at all. I hadn’t had to think. I had known long before Gil told me. That time and Gil and I seemed like something bright and gay and sunny, like morning. This was like the late winter afternoon, somber, almost dark, with the light going out of the sky.

“Warren, I’m afraid I still love Gil. I tried not to. I hated him some of the time last summer, but now I don’t.”

“Well,” Warren said after a long while, “you ought to tell him then. You ought to let him know.”

“I don’t think I can do that.”

“He’s in the Army now, you said?”

“Yes, he was down in Florida the last time I heard.”

“If I should ever meet up with him, I’ll tell him.”

“That wouldn’t do any good. He doesn’t love me.”

“And you’re still going to go on loving him?”

“I can’t seem to help it. It sounds dumb, doesn’t it?”

“Damn dumb to me,” he said.

Warren started the car and turned on the radio.

“I wish you would let me take Leslie home the week end you leave,” I said when we reached the teacherage. “It might make it easier for him to have something special to do.”

“Thanks. He’d love that.”

It wasn’t until the next morning that I noticed there was something in the mailbox. My mail is mostly all educational pamphlets or advertisements, but I went out to get it before I had breakfast. It was a flat package in brown paper and tied with string. Then I saw the writing on it. It was from Gil. He had had my letter, because he had sent this to Prairie Butte. I cut the string and opened it.

It was a water color on a sheet of drawing paper, fastened to a piece of cardboard. At first I took in only the colors: the greens and yellows Gil had wanted to paint that day when we stopped for lunch by the creek. There was a girl sitting by the bank under a tree, but her back was turned and her head was bent so you only saw her hair and the green shade on her skirt.