Winter Wheat (29 page)

3

IN
a couple of weeks’ time it seemed natural to have four at the table, to hear Leslie call Mom and Dad Aunt Anna and Uncle Ben, and to hear him ask grace before meals. Every noon Mom would stand outside the kitchen door or watch out the window to see Leslie come running up the road from school. More often now we heard his high, shrill little laugh. He always thought the pigs were funny and the gobbling of the turkeys, and he never could get Dad to tell him enough stories about when he was a boy. Whenever we couldn’t find him we knew where to look—in the combine. There was a big tarpaulin over part of it that he called his tent, and that was his retreat.

When a letter came from his father he brought it to me to read. Warren told Leslie all about the camp and what he did all day. At the end he said, “I miss you very much and I miss Miss Webb. I hope you’ll both write me soon. Love, Dad.” When I gave Leslie back his letter, he ran to put it in his bureau drawer. I wondered what he was thinking.

But I was waiting for another letter, a letter from Gil. If Dad was away when the train came in, I pretended an errand at the store so I could go for the mail.

Tony Bardich was in the store when I went in one day.

“Hi,” he said, “I see in the paper where you left your teacherage because of sickness at home. I didn’t know any of your folks was sick!”

“Dad hasn’t been well,” I said. “I thought you’d be in the Army by this time,” I flung back at him. I didn’t wait to see what he would say. At least, the school board had kept their promise. I took my package and went on down to the elevator to get the mail.

I walked on the rails a way, the ground was so wet with melted snow. It was February now and as warm some days as April. The sun on the ramp was so bright I had to blink a minute when I went into the darkness of the elevator.

“Well, I expected Ben over this afternoon. I guess you just come when you know you’re going to get a letter, is that it?” Bailey said with a grin.

“Sure,” I said. I walked up to the little counter and looked at the pigeonhole above our name. There was a letter in it, a thick-looking letter. Bailey seemed so slow, stopping to fasten the half-door of the counter behind him, before he reached out for the envelope.

“Looks like you’re hearing from some soldier!”

“Thanks, Bailey,” I said, and slipped it in my pocket as though I got a letter every day. I went back out of the elevator, down the ramp, and across the tracks. I was out of sight of the crossroads before I took it out of my pocket. I saw the postmark and the word “Free” written at the stamp corner. “Wm. Richards, Lt. A.A.F.” was written in the other corner. The handwriting was strange.

I tore the envelope across one end and a little newspaper clipping fell out on the ground. I picked it up and read that first.

There was another loose sheet in the envelope. It was just a sheet torn out of a tablet, with a sketch, really a sort of cartoon on it—a drawing of a man sprawling in the mud with a silly little flower near his head. The man was smelling the flower and there was a broad smile on his face. Underneath was printed “It takes a fall in the mud to make you see a wild flower. G.H.B.”

Then I read the letter:

I folded the letter and the drawing and put them back in my pocket. January 10. I had written Gil the week after I got back from Christmas vacation. That was the first week of January, January 5 or 6. The letter had just reached there. He had never had time to write me. I would never know how he felt.

I took the letter out and read it again: “Gil seemed to think a great deal of you. He used to talk a lot about you. . . . I know your last letter was in his pocket.”

I went on home because there was nothing else to do. I felt the way I did when Gil went away and I was sure he wasn’t coming back. I had put him out of my life then; but that was last year when I didn’t know how deep my love went and that I couldn’t stop loving him. After he sent me the little water color I had known that he couldn’t stop loving me, either. Of course I knew how he felt. I clumped through the middle of the road, not bothering to keep on the hard edge.

“You got the mail, Yeléna! Your Dad and Leslie go over, too. Bailey say there was only mail for you,” Mom said as I came into the kitchen.

“Yes,” I said. I took the letter out of my pocket. I felt Mom waiting. “Gil’s a flyer now,” I said dumbly.

“Well! I wonder can he run a plane better than the truck!” Mom stood there in the kitchen with her arms on her hips, laughing.

I went on into my room and closed the door. I looked at the yellow-green water color tacked up by my mirror and I told myself that Gil would never see the sun like that again, but I didn’t really believe it. I looked at the cartoon again. He must have drawn that after my smug little letter from the teacherage.

I took out the photograph of him, but he was looking past me in it. The thread of his cigarette smoke went up heartlessly. He hadn’t loved me then, or been in the Army or learned to fly. All that must have changed him. I had only heard from him twice, and I hadn’t kept those letters. I had torn them to bits in a rage. Why hadn’t I written him sooner? Why had I been so slow to know I loved him? That was the trouble with this country out here; it is so far away, so slow, there is as much time as there is sky.

I heard Leslie’s voice and Dad’s. I pushed Gil’s picture into the drawer, and the cartoon, but I carried the letter and the clipping in the pocket of my shirt like a secret. I wished I had been married to Gil, so I could go out and tell Mom and Dad and they would let me have my grief. Now if I told them they would be glad that was over with. But it wasn’t, and they wouldn’t understand. They didn’t know what love was, I thought with scorn and pity.

In the kitchen Mom was dishing up the meat and dumplings. There was a warm good smell of food. Leslie was drying his hands and talking excitedly to Dad about the water standing on the field across the road.

“It was really melted today and there was real live ducks on it, Uncle Ben. You know, with black heads and white on them!”

“Look at you, Yeléna. Are you going to eat in those clothes?” Mom asked me.

I had forgotten about the way I looked. Only in harvesttime did we eat in our work clothes. Even Mom always changed into a clean housedress. Dad said he couldn’t eat if he smelled dust in his clothes and I think Mom was proud of it in him. I looked down at my heavy work shoes that were gray with dried mud, and the ragged hems of my jeans.

“That’s right,” I said. “You sit down and I’ll be back in a minute.”

“I guess the mail make you lightheaded,” Mom said.

In my room I stripped off my clothes and sponged with cold water from the pitcher, then I dressed for Gil. Gil used to like my light-green sweater and the gray skirt. I used to wear it last year in the library. I brushed my hair and fastened it with a black velvet bow and did my lips. I hadn’t bothered since I came home.

“Just last year at this time, Gil,” I whispered. I looked in the mirror and I looked pretty even to myself, pretty for Gil. I had a foolish notion—I pretended I was already married to Gil.

Then I went back out to the table.

“That’s better!” Mom said.

“Oh, Ellen, you look nice,” Leslie said with his mouth full.

Dad looked at me and I could see that he liked having me dressed up, but they didn’t know why I looked so different.

I talked all through dinner. I told them I’d seen Tony Bardich and what he said about reading in the paper that I was back home because of sickness in the family. “I told him you hadn’t been well, Dad.” I saw Leslie’s eyes on me, but that wouldn’t tell him anything.

Mom made a sound of contempt in her throat. “That Tony should keep his nose in his own cabbage field!” she said, and Leslie burst out into a giggle.

“Does he have a big nose, Aunt Anna?”

It was a funny thing, I wasn’t sad. I felt elated, as though nothing really could touch me because of my secret. In a strange way I felt I was close to Gil.

After the dishes Mom said: “You and Leslie better write his dad tonight. He’ll be worrying, off in Army like that.”

“All right,” I said, and I got out a pad of paper and a pencil for Leslie. “Come on, Leslie, you sit here.” I drew up a chair for him at the kitchen table.

Leslie came, but he sat back against the chair. “Couldn’t you write him, Ellen?”

“Oh, I’ll add a note, but he wants to hear from you. You’ve only written him one little short letter.”

Leslie picked up the pencil, but his lips were set in a sulky line.

“
DEAR DAD,
” he printed. “
I AM FINE. I SAW WILD DUCKS TODAY DOWN ON THE FIELD WHERE THERE IS LOTS OF WATER.
”

“That’s all I can think of,” he said.

“You can write more than that. Tell him about playing in the combine and how you miss him, and ask him about the Army,” I prompted. It was easy to do tonight. I wanted Warren to have a letter from Leslie that would make him feel good. A letter was so important.

Leslie shook his head, then he picked up his pencil and began printing, “
DID YOU BRAKE YOUR PROMISE AGEN?
YOUR SON, LESLIE
HARPER.
” “There!” He handed it to me as though he knew I wouldn’t like it.

“Oh, Leslie, what a thing to say! You know that night when we drank to your father’s health? He didn’t drink any. He left his glass there, not because he thought it was wrong but because he didn’t want to make you feel bad.”

Leslie’s eyes seemed to study me and his mouth was as stern as any adult’s. I saw Mom looking at him.

“You mean you think my good wine I make from them yellow dandelions is bad?” Mom asked him.

Leslie nodded his head. He took his jacket silently and went outdoors. Mom made as if to call him, but I said: “He’ll be all right. Dad is out there.” I erased Leslie’s last sentence. “Send me a picture in your uniform,” I printed, making it look as much like Leslie’s as I could and I put in the word “love.”

Then I wrote a note to Lieutenant Richards thanking him for writing me. There was so much I wanted to ask him. Most of all, I wanted to write: “Do you think he loved me very much? What did he say about me? Did he seem happy the day he got my last letter?” But I couldn’t do that.

Mom thought I was writing to Gil. She didn’t like it, and clattered the cover of the soup kettle as she pushed it back on the stove.

After a while Dad came in with Leslie. Already Leslie stamped his feet on the step the way Dad did and wore his cap as steadily as Dad did his hat.

I was glad when the house was dark and I lay on the couch in the front room. I could give my whole mind to Gil. I went back to that first day in the library and all the other days. I saw Gil as plain as if he were there again and I remembered all kinds of silly little things: the way Gil dropped his whole hand in the pocket of his coat when he was talking and the slender look of his ankle above his long shoe and his hands. Always I could see his hands that were so warm and quick when he held mine and so perfectly shaped.

When we sat in front of the fire at his house Christmas night he had held my head against his shoulder, and I could remember how his fingers felt against my face. I let all the things we said run through my mind.

I have seen them lift the gate in an irrigation ditch and watched the clear silver water flow in. It was just like that with my thinking of Gil.

I thought how he used to say, “You’re like silver,” and the day by the creek, the green-and-yellow day: “I used to think I’d never really fall in love, and then I saw you that day in the library. I had to know you. I watched you all those days almost afraid to talk to you for fear you’d spoil yourself, someway . . . every day you were just the same. On a bright day all the sun would seem to center on your head and on a dull day your hair would give it brightness and you’d look cool and gentle and quiet and yet so alive, Ellen.” I thought of the time, too, in Pop’s Place when Gil said he’d never change about loving me.

I know how the dry gumbo feels when the water soaks into it. It can come alive and can breathe and it’s easy for it to push up the wheat. I felt that way with Gil’s words running through my mind.

And then I knew I had to go back over Gil’s visit here. I had to think of the day Gil went away. First I lay there not thinking about it and then I lifted the gate and let those thoughts flow through after the others.

The water wasn’t clear and silvery; it was dark and brackish, but it flowed as fast as the other. I thought of the way Gil had seemed to change out here. He was uncomfortable and quiet, and he kept asking how Dad had stood it here. I thought how he had said: “How do people stay in love with each other after years alone in these places?” Gil was so sensitive he could tell about Mom and Dad. He could feel their bitterness and hate.

He was right about that, but he was wrong in thinking it had anything to do with us, or that we would be that way. He knew that now; that was what the cartoon meant. He still loved me. He had my letter with him in his pocket. He knew I loved him. I couldn’t have stood his not knowing. If he was frightened, if he had time to think when he crashed, he knew.