Winter Wheat (3 page)

3

I SHALL
never get over the pleasure of waking on a train, even if I should travel all my life. But that first morning, somewhere in North Dakota, I felt unreal. I had an upper berth and couldn’t see out, but there was plenty to see in the berth itself. I lay still and looked at the cunning little lights at either end and the hammock where I’d laid my clothes the night before, the bell with the sign under it, “Please call porter for ladder before attempting to climb down.” I smiled at that, after all the scrambling and jumping I had done all my life. The jump from our roof to the ground that I made often was higher than the distance from the berth to the aisle. I could land like a cat, anyway.

I liked the berth being open over my head, and wondered if I wouldn’t feel a little as though I were in a polished coffin in the lower berth with the shiny wood closed over my head. The smooth motion of the train was exciting. I lay still to feel it more. I was on my way. It had begun. I knew I had been waiting for this since the night when I was eight and Dad had gone away on a train. He had left the cold and the darkness and the cow waiting to calve and the house lonely and huddled under the coulee and I had felt deserted. This time I was going off myself and leaving all that behind.

Then I could lie still no longer, and I sat up so fast and so straight it’s a good thing I was in an upper berth. I dressed as swiftly as at home. Every single thing I put on was, for the first time in my life, completely new. A little of the “new-dry-goods” smell of J. C. Penney’s store clung to my rayon lingerie. My new rabbit’s-wool and rayon dress prickled as I drew it down over my shoulders. I am too warm-blooded to wear wool in September, but the saleslady told us that was the best thing to go away to college in. It was I who told her I was going to college. I wanted to tell everyone. Mom stood by with that silent and secretive look on her face that she always has with strangers.

The dining car was more glittering and wonderful than I had imagined. The tablecloths were so long they came to within a foot of the floor. The flowers I had seen through the windows of diners were there, and they were real.

The waiter pushed my chair in for me at a table with three empty chairs. I picked up the menu and ordered the same things the folks would have had hours earlier: prunes and oatmeal and toast and coffee. Then I realized I could have had anything from strawberries or melon to sausages or ham. But I wouldn’t change my mind with the waiter standing beside me. I looked out the window as though I wasn’t interested in food.

We were going through North Dakota. The mountains had disappeared. A field of wheat stubble came almost to the rails. I wondered if they’d had a good crop. North Dakota didn’t do as well as Montana this year. That was what had helped to raise the price for us. It was queer to look at fields and know nothing about them. There was a poor-looking ranch house, and I could tell by the iron bed moved out against the back wall that it was so hot inside they couldn’t stand it to sleep there hot nights. There wasn’t even a windbreak planted around the shack. Then the shack was out of sight just as I’d begun to know it. Why should I try to know it? But it was queer to look at ranch land and not care about it. We ran through a station without stopping. Next to the station was a grain elevator that looked like ours at Gotham.

The waiter was seating a young man across from me. He looked like the men who came out from the Flour Company offices to the grain elevator. I realize now that I thought that of any man who wasn’t a rancher or a cowboy.

“Good morning.” He smiled at me. “On your way back to school?”

“Yes,” I told him.

“What year?”

“I’m just beginning.” I hated to admit it, so I asked him a question. “Are you in the university?”

“Used to be. I’m going back to Minnesota to join the Army. That’s where my home is.”

“Why did you go West?” I’m getting over that habit of just asking people the questions that pop into my head.

“To see my girl. She lives in Idaho. Where do you live?”

“Gotham, Montana.”

“Oh”—he nodded knowingly—”I imagine that’s quite a place.”

“Seventy-five people, counting all the ranchers. It’s on the Great Northern road. The train came through there at eight-ten last night. Didn’t you look out?”

“I’m afraid I didn’t. Did I miss much?”

“Well, no,” I had to admit, and I could see he thought I was funny.

The head waiter brought two girls about my age to our table.

“I’ll just put all you college people together,” he said. A warm glow spread through me. It happened so fast I don’t really know who introduced us, but in a few minutes we all knew each other’s names; maybe it was Bill. Bill Rand his name was. The girls were seniors. The one named Kay laid a cigarette case with her name in raised gold letters by her napkin. She opened it and her fingers were long and tapering with polish all the way down, like an advertisement. She passed it around the table. When I didn’t take one, she said, “Don’t you smoke?”

I told her I’d emptied out too many ash trays for Dad. They laughed as though they thought that was a funny reason, but they didn’t know that the days the ash stand by Dad’s couch filled way up were the days when he was so gloomy and silent and the shrapnel hurt so that Mom would have to put hot packs on the places. Sometimes when the wind blew all day he would lie and smoke one cigarette after another and not say much of anything.

The other girl was Marge. She wore a thin black dress that made my wool one feel more thick and hot. Her lips were the same shade as her fingernails and they weren’t any of the shades at the Rexall Drugstore where I bought mine. It was so much fun listening to them I didn’t look out the window once. It was as though the train were the whole world.

But when we finished breakfast, the girl with the handsome cigarette case said, “Let’s go into the club car.”

I didn’t say anything at first; I thought of Dad not wanting me to go tourist and Mom saying, “That extra money would be nice to have in your pocket when you get there.” I spoke right out. “I’m on the tourist sleeper. I don’t believe I can use the club car.”

“Sure you can with us,” Marge said. “When you’re on your way to college, the train’s your apple. You can do everything but sit in the engineer’s lap and they won’t say a word.” That’s the way I felt, too, free and lucky. I wondered if the middle-aged people on the train didn’t envy us.

The club car was a wonderful place of tan and red-purple curtains and chairs and carpet. There were mirrors at unexpected places and lamps and a writing desk and a radio. The air was clammy-cold like the root cellar in the side of the hill at home or the movie in Clark City.

“It smells and feels like the inside of a movie theater,” I said, and wished I hadn’t because the others laughed and I didn’t feel with them for a minute.

“You’re an original,” Bill said. I didn’t like that.

Later in the day, we played bridge. They asked me if I played. I said that I’d played cribbage and pinochle mostly, but Dad and I had played contract a few times with Bill Bailey and his wife at the elevator.

“The elevator?” Kay asked.

“The grain elevator. The Excelsior Milling Company runs it,” I explained.

“Wait till you see the huge elevators in the Twin Cities. When you see them, you’re practically having your first quiz,” Marge said.

“Baby, can they look gray of an early morning after Christmas vacation!” Kay groaned. I wouldn’t be going home for Christmas vacation, but I didn’t mention that.

“I’ll never forget the time . . .” Marge began. I loved hearing them talk. It was a different kind of talk. I felt part of it because I was going to college too.

We were in the very tip end of the train where it’s all glass and separated by a glass wall from the other passengers, who were reading the magazines and newspapers. I looked in at them and thought how sober they looked. I couldn’t help thinking, either, how Dad would have loved to be sitting there talking about the country with some other man.

“Did you know Tim Murphy?” Marge asked Bill, and then they were off, talking about people I had never heard of before. But I didn’t mind. I had always liked listening to Dad tell of the people he grew up with in his town in Vermont. I felt I knew them. When he’d start, Mom would never listen. If it was in the evening when Mom was knitting, her needles would go faster and faster and then she’d go out to tend to something outdoors, as though she didn’t want to hear. Mom hardly ever told about people in her town.

In the shining lavatory I was a little shocked at the way the girls spread all over the place, as though there were nobody else on the train. They scattered powder and used so many of the cunningly folded towels I had been so careful of. I tried to act more as they did, as though we owned the train.

“Is your hair natural or do you use a bleach?” Marge asked when I was combing my hair. I had to laugh.

“It’s natural. Dad says it’s the color of a scoured pine board.”

“Are you a Swede? Your name doesn’t sound it.”

“My mother’s Russian, but my father’s from New England,” I said. “He has light hair.” I had that feeling I have had so often at school that it was sort of queer to say my mother was Russian, but that saying my father was from New England made up for that. I had got that feeling from Dad. I think he felt that way. He seemed not to like to mention Mother’s being Russian. I used to wonder how they had ever come to marry. He must have loved her very much I thought then.

“How exciting!” Marge was saying. “Where on earth did your father ever meet her?”

“In Russia. My father was with the Polar Bear expedition during the war.” I finished my hair and brushed off my dress. It took too long to explain.

“How perfectly thrilling!” Kay echoed in the same tone. Both girls talked so much alike I wondered if I would talk like them by next year at this time.

“Well, if the war keeps on, I’m certainly going to get in it somehow. I’d love to have a war romance,” Marge said.

“And marry some English commando,” Kay suggested.

We went along the narrow polished little aisle to join Bill for lunch. I had never thought of Mom and Dad as being part of a war romance.

The day on the train was the shortest day of my life, and the most idle. We had dinner together again. I spent more for it than I meant to, because Bill was writing down our orders and he came to me last. The other girls were ordering fried chicken, so I did too. I wondered what the diner has to pay a pound for them. We sold some of ours last week at 37 cents.

Afterward we went back to our end of the club car. The light was fading out of the sky. The rails stretching on forever beyond our train were the only point of brightness against the pale blur of the rolling fields. The porter came through and turned on the little lights and they made it seem more luxurious than ever. I was glad we wouldn’t get off till ten-thirty. We’d sort of run out of talk and just sat there, listening to the radio. I began to watch the country. It was different. The ranches—farms they were here—came closer together, the houses were larger, even the barns were all painted. Trees, not just windbreaks, grew easily in the dooryards. Smaller fields were neatly fenced, as though wood was easy to get. Sometimes a river flowed across a field. There were no irrigation ditches and no dark strips laid to fallow.

“We’ve been in Minnesota for ages, you dope! We’ll be in the Twin Cities in three more hours,” Kay was saying.

Brilliant flame sprang out of the dark. Against a sagging wire fence three figures raked up the weeds and brush and tossed them on a bonfire. The figures were dull and lumpy: a man and a woman and a child. Only the tin clasps on the man’s suspenders gleamed bright. The woman’s arm was outlined in red. The firelight touched the towhead thatch of the child. Somehow, it made me catch my breath. It was so familiar. It was beautiful, too—red fire against the wide soft dusk and the figures touched with red. I had never stood outside and seen it before.

Perhaps Dad and Mom would be burning the weeds at home tonight. I had been the towheaded child when they used to do it, holding my hands out to the fire and then running away from the heat, screaming when the flames went very high. The tight windows shut out the sharp smell of smoke and the burning grass, and the ice cakes underneath the car somewhere shut out the fierce heat, but I couldn’t help breathing more deeply to try to catch it.

Sometimes we had guarded a bonfire like that in the evenings when the Great Northern train passed through, all lighted up and unreal as a picture on a railroad calendar. I had seen the rich inside of the train and the little lights and the people facing each other in the club car or eating in the diner or the drawn curtains where Dad said the beds were. I hadn’t known then how much more brilliant our bonfire must have looked to the people in the train. Something sharp rose in my throat, and a hurting loneliness.

“Someday, you’ll be riding in there,” Dad had told me, “eating a steak in the diner and never looking out to see the little dark town you go through.” I think he always wanted to be on every train he saw. He never quite liked belonging in a little dark town like Gotham, and he was always reminding me of my separateness from it, almost from Mom, too. All day I had forgotten them; I had had such a good time with Kay and Marge and Bill. I came back to them now.

There wouldn’t be much to do today. Dad would care for the stock and go over to talk to Bailey at the elevator after a while. Mom would wash the curtains and blankets in my room, probably, and make it clean to close up until I came back to it again. When she was through in the house she’d go out and work around the chicken house. She kept it as slick as some people in Gotham keep their own places—or she’d work in the garden. She always kept busy. But they’d miss me. Supper would seem lonesome. I could feel their missing as though I were right there with them missing someone else. I wonder if a child can feel like a parent to her own parents. I do sometimes.

I tried to think of last night. It was just last night. Dad had called to Mom to come out. I thought of them sitting there on the bench together. They were happy in their way; they were just so different, I told myself.