Winter Wheat (28 page)

PART THREE

1

WE
turned off the highway at our place near noon. All the way I had pictured Mom and Dad. They would both be home, waiting to hear the noon broadcast of the grain market. When Mom heard the truck she would come to the window and look out above the geraniums.

“Let me explain to them. I’m responsible for the whole thing,” Warren said, almost like a young boy bringing a girl home late.

“Oh, no, I’ll tell them. I’ll wait till you are gone.”

But Mom came across the yard as we drove in. Her head was tied up in a white dishtowel. She had on an old coat of mine that didn’t quite come together in front and some canvas gloves.

“Yeléna, what is wrong?” she asked when she saw us.

“I had trouble with the school board, Mom. I’m not going to teach the second term. Warren brought my things home for me.”

“It wasn’t her fault at all, Mrs. Webb,” Warren said.

Mom’s face was heavy with thinking. “You bring everything home?”

“Yes, everything.”

“Just put them things all on the porch. Yeléna, you can get them from there.” Mom went ahead to take off the old blankets that covered the glider in winter. “Your father’s down to Bailey’s,” Mom threw back over her shoulder. She didn’t ask anything more. The things piled in the truck looked dreary as we started to unpack them. I took up a box of things: the icon, my water color, Dad’s books. Because there was so much to say that we didn’t say we worked twice as fast at unloading the truck.

“Mom, Warren’s leaving for the service Saturday. I invited Leslie to stay with us this week end before I knew that. I thought he could come anyway. Warren can bring him in when he goes and then we can take him back.”

“Sure,” Mom said. “Mr. Harper, you bring him.” I was grateful to her for the warm tone in her voice.

“Warren’s family are moving into town. He’ll be going there to school,” I added, because there didn’t seem much to talk about.

“Don’t the little boy want to stay here right along? Town is no place for boys,” Mom said. “We need a boy ‘round here.” Mom looked from me to Warren. I could almost follow her thought in her face. Her eyes narrowed a little and were bright and almost shrewd.

“Well,” Warren said, “that’s awfully good of you, I . . .” He was embarrassed. I felt him looking at me.

“I’m afraid he might be lonesome if he stayed here,” I said.

“Not out here,” Mom said so positively that Warren laughed and I had to smile. “Pretty soon now we get those baby chicks. He can go to school in Gotham. That’s where Yeléna go when she was little.”

“But, Mom, Warren’s family want Leslie, and anyway he likes living in town.” I heard my own voice sounding irritable, and I said more gently, “But you would like having a boy here, wouldn’t you?”

Mom paid no attention to me. “What do you say, Mr. Harper?”

“Ellen?” he asked. “You don’t want Leslie here underfoot.”

For a minute I didn’t, and then I thought of Leslie offering me his eagle feather.

“Of course I would. Would your family let him come?”

“I think they would like to have him here. Mother is so old, and they’ll only have a little place in town. I would want to pay his board of course, and . . .”

“Oh, he can help so much as his living cost,” Mom interrupted. I busied myself picking up the odds and ends that were put in the truck loose. “We see,” Mom was saying when I came back to them. “I talk to Ben. When you come we settle that.”

Warren wouldn’t stay for dinner. I didn’t urge him.

“You’re sure this is all right with you, Ellen? You must be fed up with the Harpers, father and son.” His face had a comical expression, as though he weren’t quite sure that he wouldn’t be scolded.

“Don’t be silly. It will be fun to have him here if he really wants to come. Tell him he can bring his feather collection.”

His face lighted. “Thank you, Ellen.”

Now that I was home, I wondered if I had been too hasty in leaving my job without a fight. I felt a little self-conscious walking back to the porch with Mom standing there.

“You better open up your room and let it warm up first,” was all Mom said. “You can take these things in the front room.”

I picked up my suitcase and my old jacket from the glider and took them in. The kitchen seemed hot and steamy. The front room hadn’t been put in order yet this morning and a last night’s newspaper lay in a heap by Dad’s couch. The radio was on too loud. I turned it off before I heard whether the wheat was up or down. I didn’t care. I had never noticed until now how low the ceiling was above my head. I opened the flimsy door into my room and the cold air of the closed room was like a wall against me. How could you be homesick coming home? And yet I was. For a minute it didn’t seem to me that I could ever fit into living here again. It felt too small.

“Here, you have something to eat first,” Mom said. She poured a cup of coffee and brought out some bread and cold pork.

I sat down at the table in the kitchen, but I wasn’t hungry.

“What happen?” Mom asked.

It seemed so hard to go back over all that. I began at the beginning. Mom nodded from time to time. I told her about Warren’s coming in the middle of the night.

“He had been drinking and he didn’t want to go home. You see, on account of Leslie . . .” It was hard to explain why a grown man should be afraid of a little boy. I wasn’t sure she understood what I was trying to say about Leslie, but Mom said suddenly:

“I know. Your aunt was like that. Wine was something of the Devil, so was anything Catholic. Your dad was brought up like that.”

It was easier than I had thought it would be. “So I left. I couldn’t go on teaching there after they had thought the worst things about me.”

“No,” Mom said. “You do right. We need you here in spring. If we have early spring we can get started pretty soon now.”

I had most of my things put back in the drawers they had come from. The icon was back in the corner and a few of the books on my dresser. It didn’t take long. I went back out to the kitchen. Mom was chopping cabbage on the table.

“Yeléna, did Mr. Harper ask you to marry him?”

I was so surprised at her asking like that that I had no other answer ready. “Why, yes, he asked me,” I said. “I told him I couldn’t.”

Mom nodded. She went on cutting cabbage with hard chops against the wooden bowl. “I guess he like his little boy come here.” Mom left out more of her little words than usual.

“If Leslie likes it. His grandparents are quite old,” I said, thinking about them. “He’s a strange little boy, very religious.”

Mom stopped her chopping again to say: “I see Bardiches’ tiger cat over here looking for mice around the barn. I think she maybe have kittens. You tell Tony we like one.” Mom smiled as though to herself. I marveled at how simple she was. She thought she could make any child happy with a new kitten, and she thought she could make me want to marry Warren by having Warren’s boy here till I grew so fond of him I didn’t want to let him go.

“I guess I’ll go down and meet Dad,” I said.

I put on the old sheepskin hanging by the door and set out in the wind. I was almost glad of the wind. I didn’t feel still or calm, myself. I walked in front of Peterson’s store. Let them wonder why I was back home; I didn’t care. Then I cut across the road to the elevator.

When I ran up the ramp to the elevator I could hear the radio going in Bailey’s office. The door was closed to shut out the cold. I stood still a minute to hear the light spattering sound of grain sifting out over the top of the full bins. The wooden joists high up creaked as though the elevator were alive and had a voice. Someone had figured a sum in pencil on the cardboard sign tacked by the door. “One Dk. Hard Winter,” I read, but it didn’t give me any feeling of courage.

I knocked on the door of the office, and when no one answered I turned the knob. Bailey and Dad must have gone somewhere together. The cribbage board was out on the counter by the window, and a deck of cards. The radio was going full-blast. A voice sang “I’ll be down to get you in a taxi, honey, Better be ready at half-past eight . . .” I turned it down until the voice was only a whine, no louder than the sound of the wind. The room was like an oven. It was a snug little place in winter. The wind blowing against the tall frame walls made it seem even more of a refuge. I sat on the counter where I used to climb up as a child. I used to think it was like a watchtower in here, the windows gave on such a wide sweep of country.

The ground was half covered with snow, half bare, but the mountains showed way at the edge, beyond our place and Bardiches’ and Halvorsens’. I was tired of winter and bareness. I wished it were spring. I tried for a minute to think how all this would look when it was warm again, but I couldn’t. It scared me a little. What if when you were old you couldn’t remember what it had been like to be young? You could tell yourself what it had been like. . . .

“My hair used to be yellow. I had the fairest skin, I was slender then, as slender as an aspen tree. . . .” That was the way women loved to talk about themselves when they were old. But maybe it would be like talking of spring. I could tell myself how it was then: “The wheat is green in spring, every other strip, and the sky above it is a bright blue. The low hills are green, too, for a month or so, and the prairie flats are blue and yellow and pink with shooting stars and crocuses and lupin. New sage grows in the palest green clumps and the road is still muddy.”

But I couldn’t see it. I could only see the bare late-winter look of the country.

I was disappointed not to find Dad. I wanted to see him first alone. I wanted to tell him, without Mom there, how I had come to leave Prairie Butte. But when I came home Dad was there in the kitchen, reading.

“Well, Ellen, it’s good to have you home. I didn’t like having you off out there in that God-forsaken spot.”

I went over to him, but I felt Mom holding her spoon in the air above the saucepan to watch me, and I felt big and awkward standing by Dad. I couldn’t say anything. Mom had told him anyway. Dad put his arm around me and drew me closer to his chair. I stood there just long enough so I wouldn’t hurt his feelings, then I drew away.

“Come back like a bad penny, Dad,” I said. “I guess I better change my shoes, they’re wet.”

“Like a lucky piece, you mean,” Dad retorted. “Your mother’s got some baked beans for supper. You came the right night, Ellen.”

They tried so hard to make me feel welcome; it made me feel more strange.

2

THERE’S
something that hurts about a thing broken off before it’s finished, whether it’s a job or a branch of a tree or a row of wheat. It bothered me to be home this way. I thought of the teacherage there waiting for me. I wondered if it would stand idle and empty so long that the pack rat that lived under the floor would bore a hole through.

Mom had agreed that I couldn’t have stayed after they had talked that way about me, but Dad fretted about it to himself, I think, because he would say something now and then.

“When I think about the way they treated you, I’d like to go to Prairie Butte myself,” he said one day.

“Oh, I think Mr. La Mere and Mrs. Cassidy and maybe Mr. Thorson were sorry at the end.”

“I guess Mr. Henderson told them plenty!” Mom punched her bread dough as though it were one of the school board.

I had known that Mom and Dad would stand back of me, but I was grateful that they didn’t blame me or doubt me.

Saturday morning I said: “I’ll give Leslie my room. He’ll go to bed earlier than we do, so he’ll need a room to himself.” Mom nodded as though that went without saying. “I can sleep on the couch,” I said. “Are you sure you want to take Leslie to board, Mom?”

“Sure. We can use the little money he want to pay. It please Mr. Harper to have him here.” Mom had made up her mind.

I was helping with dinner when Leslie and his father drove into the yard. I stopped to wash my hands while Mom went right out. I knew Dad was in the barn and would see them too. I don’t know why I hung back so.

Leslie climbed out first. I saw how the wind seemed to blow against him. His thinness showed up as he stood there. His hair needed cutting. He took off his cap and then it was so cold he pulled it on again. I saw Dad shake hands with them both. Warren was smiling, but I had the picture of him in the schoolroom still in my mind. It didn’t seem to fit.

I couldn’t delay any longer. Mom and Leslie were walking back to the house. When I stepped outside Leslie ran to me and put his arms around me.

“Miss Webb, I brought my feathers and everything!” he said. I hadn’t expected him to be so glad to see me. I felt better about his coming. I went over to speak to Warren.

“Hello, Warren.”

“Hello, Ellen. You don’t know how happy Leslie is to come.”

I felt Leslie’s hand squeezing mine. “I’m glad your mother and father were willing to let him come,” I said.

I took Leslie into my room and helped him arrange his feathers on the table by the window. It was strange to have him here. We opened his suitcase and took out his things: overalls and socks and shirts and underwear, little-boy things. He had the drawings he had made at school and a rock and a bag of marbles and his mother’s big indexed Bible and some pamphlets and the picture of his mother wrapped up in a pyjama top.

We set dinner in the front room. It was dark enough at four o’clock so we had to turn on the light. The bulb in its green paper shade shone down on chicken pie and candied sweet potatoes and Mom’s rolls. When Mom wants a meal to be especially nice, she cooks the kind of thing Dad likes best. The light shone, too, on the sterling silver spoons and all the knives and forks that were plated silver from the dime store. Gil had made me aware of these things now for the rest of time. I wondered how soon I would hear from him. Surely he would write. I had expected a letter by now. I had thought he would rush to write me as I had hurried to write him.

Mom enjoyed seeing Leslie eat. Dad and Warren talked the war together.

“The Thorsons are moving into town too, Miss Webb,” Leslie looked up to say. “I guess they aren’t going to get a new teacher for the rest of the year. There’s only the La Meres left, and the school board’ll pay their fare into Harwood. Dad says it’s because they couldn’t find anybody good enough to take your place, Miss Webb. Miss Webb, couldn’t I please call you Ellen the way Dad does?”

“Surely you can if you want to, Leslie,” I said. I felt Mom looking at me and my face blushing.

“Ellen, can I please go outside? That’s all I can eat, honest.” Leslie asked me questions as though he were still at school.

“Of course, but stay around. Your father will be leaving in a little bit,” I said.

I think we lingered at the table because Warren had to go right afterward. Dad was doing most of the talking, as he had when Gil was here. I had minded it then. Now I didn’t care. I got up to take off the dishes and empty their ash trays and then I came back to sit with them, only half-listening to what they said.

“Yeléna, you get some wine before Mr. Harper goes,” Mom said. “Get the dandelion wine.”

Mom made two kinds of wine, dandelion and raisin. The dandelion was a beautiful color. It was too bad Mom put it in a brown bottle and the only wineglasses we had were bright-green. I took it in to the table to pour it.

“Well, Warren, here’s good luck to you! I wish I were going with you,” Dad said.

“
Na zdorozye!
” Mom said, which is Russian for “Your health.”

As we lifted our glasses I met Warren’s eyes. He was pleased by the little ceremony. Then for an instant I held my breath. I saw Leslie’s horror-struck little face looking in at us through the window. He must have come to see how soon Warren was leaving, and he had seen us with our glasses raised.

“Warren, Leslie was there at the window!”

“Tell him to come back in. Here, I get him,” Mom said, but I was already on my way to the porch. As I opened the door Leslie ran past.

“Leslie!” I called. “Come here—we’re just wishing your father good luck.” But he kept on running without turning his head. “Leslie, your father’s going now. Come and say good-by,” I called again. He could hear me easily, but he didn’t turn his head. He disappeared inside the barn.

“What on earth struck him?” Warren asked beside me.

“The wine, I guess. He saw us drinking.”

Warren’s face showed his exasperation. “There’s no use chasing him then.”

“He’ll come when he hears you start the car,” I said. We went back in, but the moment was spoiled. Dad and Mom drank their little glasses of wine standing. Warren held his by the stem. “I know how good it is, but I guess I won’t drink it. You tell Leslie, sometime.” He looked embarrassed. I carried out the glass and emptied mine into the sink with it. Mom and Dad couldn’t understand what it was all about, I could see. I heard Warren talking to Mom about Leslie’s board and his pen scratching as he wrote a check.

“He’ll be fine, don’t worry none,” Mom was saying as they came out to the kitchen.

Dad had gone out to the barn to find Leslie but I saw him coming back alone. Warren went out to speak to Dad. Mom and I stood at the window watching them.

“He’s going now, Ellen. You better go say good-by,” Mom said.

I picked up my jacket and went out. I walked up to them slowly so they would be through talking.

“Not many people would treat me like this after I was the cause of Ellen’s losing her job. I can’t tell you . . .” I heard Warren say.

“Well, it can’t be helped. Folks in little towns are a suspicious lot,” Dad said. His voice that sometimes seemed slow to me sounded kind.

“I had been celebrating or I wouldn’t have been so thoughtless.”

“Forget it now,” Dad said. Then he saw me. “There’s Ellen. I’ll take another look for the boy.”

“I’m so sorry that happened, Warren. I’m sure I can explain it to Leslie.”

“It won’t be easy. I told your mother if he’s sullen or unmanageable just to take him in to my parents. It does kind of wipe out what progress I made with him, doesn’t it? Anyway, it’s a wonderful thing for him to be here.”

“The folks are going to be glad to have him. I may go in town and get a job, and he will keep them from getting lonesome.”

“You’d rather be teaching. You don’t like it back home here, I could see at dinner.”

“It’s all right. I’ll like it when there’s work to do. Just now, while it’s so cold, it’s dull.”

We stood there awkwardly. The wind blew so that I pulled my coat around me tightly.

“Here, put your arms into it,” Warren said, and I minded him.

“I hope you do like it in the Army,” I said finally. “I guess you will. Dad sure did.”

“I’ll like it all right.”

“Leslie is proud of your going.”

Warren’s mouth twisted a moment. “I don’t know. He seemed different the last few days, stuck to me tighter than a bur, but he hasn’t said anything about hating to see me go.”

“But he does,” I insisted. I couldn’t stand to have Warren go feeling like this about Leslie. I looked over at the barn and even up on the rimrock, hoping to catch a glimpse of him.

“Ellen, I know I talked the worst rot the other night. I don’t know just what I said. I drank too much in town and instead of feeling hilarious I kept getting lower all the way back home. I got to thinking about what I’d meant to be when I was a kid and where I was . . .”

“Don’t do that,” I said, as sharply as though I were speaking to the school children. “I’ve forgotten it by now.”

“You’re better to me than I deserve. Well, I’ve got to go. Ellen, would you write me once in a while?”

I didn’t like seeing him so humble. “Of course,” I said. “You’ll want to hear about Leslie. He’ll be writing you, too.”

Warren hesitated with his hand on the car door. I think he wanted to say something more. “Wait, I’ll call Leslie again.” I ran way to the barn and called: “Leslie, please come. Your father wants to say good-by.” But there was no sign of him. I looked back at Warren standing by the car waiting.

“Never mind. Maybe it’s better not to say good-by. You tell him I’ll be writing,” Warren said. He didn’t shake hands or even say good-by. He just waved as he drove away.

I felt I really knew Warren better than I did Gil. Hearing him that night in the schoolroom when he was only half talking to me was like being inside his mind, feeling things the way he did.

As I watched him drive away I seemed to know how he felt, both glad and sorry, glad of a new life for a while and a chance to do something that seemed bigger and more urgent than just earning a living, but without much that was happy to look back on. And now he wouldn’t be able to forget how Leslie had run off just as he was leaving.

“Good luck, Warren!” I called, but Warren couldn’t hear me. I walked back to the barn to look for Leslie, but I went on thinking about Warren. I wondered what his life would be like after the war. Finally I gave up hunting for Leslie and went back into the house.

It was dark by five o’clock. I was just going out to milk when I heard Dad calling. He was coming up from the big shed where the combine stood, carrying Leslie. I held the kitchen door open for him and he carried him in and put him on my bed. I covered him up without waking him and we closed the bedroom door.

“You mean that little kid was so mad about the wine he ran off like that?” Dad said in the kitchen.

“Sure, you ought to know. Like your folks he is!” Mom slapped the dishcloth against the sink as she polished it.

We moved around the house quietly. We didn’t talk about him, but I guess we were all thinking about him or his father. Mom set out bowls of soup in the kitchen for supper about seven, and the house was quiet except for die clink of our spoons.

But we were all waiting for Leslie to wake up. It was close to eight when we heard the bedroom door open, and Leslie’s feet on the linoleum-covered floor. He stood in the doorway, his hair tousled, his face pale and white-looking in the bright light. He had rings under his eyes and there were dirt streaks on his face.

“You must be hungry. I get you some good soup,” Mom said.

“Sit right down here,” Dad said.

Leslie ate everything Mom gave him. When he was through Mom brought him some old funny papers. She always saved the old papers in the shed. Leslie smiled and said thank you and spread them out on the table. No one said anything about his father. We went back to what we had been doing.

At nine o’clock I said it was bedtime.

“Oh, Ellen! I have to read my chapter first.” Leslie hurried into his room and came back with his mother’s big Bible that was marked with different colored crayons and had many strips of paper sticking out between the pages.

“I’m on my way through it. I’ve got to Numbers, the thirty-third chapter.” He laid the big Bible on the table and opened it at the marker. We were so still we could hear the fire in the stove. Leslie moved his finger under the line he was reading. “Ellen, it’s all names. Could you help me?”

I came and looked down at what he was reading. His finger pointed out the line. “‘And the children of Israel removed from Rameses and pitched in Succoth,’” I read for him. He looked up beaming.

“I could say ‘and the child of the Harpers removed from Prairie Butte and pitched in Gotham,’ couldn’t I?” We were all smiling with relief.

I looked down the long list of Biblical names. “I think you could skip this part,” I said.

“Oh, no, Mother wanted me to read every word.”

“Here, Leslie, bring the Bible over here,” Dad said. “I used to read in the Old Testament when I was a boy.” Leslie: climbed up on Dad’s knees and leaned back against his shoulder. Dad read aloud; whether he knew how to pronounce the names or not, he never hesitated, but brought them out with a brave ringing sound of authority: “‘And they removed from Dibongad and encamped in Almon-diblathaim. And they removed from Almon-diblathaim and pitched in the mountains of Abarim, before Nebo . . .’” Once he looked above Leslie’s head at us and smiled. Leslie’s face had the intent listening look it used to have in the teacherage.

“Thank you, Mr. Webb,” he said gravely and carried the Bible back into his room. We could hear him undressing—his boots on the floor and then the sound of his belt buckle against the back of the chair. Suddenly we heard from the other room:

“Dear God in Heaven, bless the Webbs, and Grandmother and Grandfather, because they’re old. And give my love to Mother . . .” There was a long pause. I saw Mom lean forward. “. . . And bless the Army and Navy. . . . And may my dad feel the burden of his sins and fight temptation and the Devil. A-men.”

Mom crossed herself. Dad shook his head. I went in to open the window and tuck in the blankets.