Winter Wheat (6 page)

“What you talking about?” Mom was scattering fresh straw in the stall and a wisp of straw was caught in her hair. I looked up at her and thought how pretty she was.

“About Dad. I think it would have been so much better for him if he’d been a teacher. That’s what he always meant to do, he told Bailey one time,” I said brashly.

“Did he say that? How long time?” I was too young and stupid to get the change in Mom’s face right away. I saw it afterward, though.

“Oh, last month sometime. I don’t see why he didn’t go back to school.”

“His mother and sister was afraid to death they don’t have enough to go on live just as easy as always. They love that house like first son. No, they don’t want to help.”

“But why didn’t they want to, Mom? They must have been hateful.”

“No,” Mom said slowly. “They don’t like him to bring back poor Russian girl who don’t talk much and don’t dress right. I see now; I don’t then. I hate them. I don’t know then what Ben want to do. I can’t stand it there. He want to go far away. I want to have just a little land. He hear you can take homestead, so we come out here.” Mom shrugged. “He like it here.”

“Oh, I know he does,” I said quickly, wanting now to comfort Mom. I had seen the change. “It’s only sometimes in the winter when he doesn’t feel good that he talks that way. In the spring he loves it.”

Mom nodded. That was one of the times when I felt like a parent to her. And I have not asked questions so brashly since.

But you couldn’t write all this into a biographical sketch. My knowledge of Mom and Dad was made up of such little things, things felt more than known. I came back to the few sentences I had actually written and went on boldly:

“My mother and father fell in love, although my mother could speak only a few words of English. They were married by the Captain of my father’s company and when the ice loosened its grip on the harbor at Archangel my mother sailed with my father to America.” I set a period with a flourish. “Loosened its grip” had a proper, bookish sound. I skipped over the return to his home in Vermont in a sentence and wrote of their taking a homestead in Montana, “where I was born three years later.”

I had told their story in eight sentences, but it had taken me all afternoon. I had to run to be at the cafeteria on time.

By seven-thirty I was back at the same table. I had thought it would be easy to write now, but it wasn’t. I kept remembering certain happenings in my childhood, down to the silliest detail; but they weren’t the kind of incidents you tell. I could only seem to compose terrible trite sentences like “My early childhood on the ranch was the usual happy life lived by children in the country, although it may seem bare in the telling.”

But how could I tell about those days when I’d run up to the top of the rimrock because I had to be closer to the sky? Ever since I was seven or eight I have done that, or run out across the flats. I couldn’t stand still or walk soberly, because I felt something exciting was going to happen. Sometimes the wind gave me that feeling, sometimes the first bleak day of fall, always spring and the first green pricks of wheat, and always threshing time.

I have looked at Mom often and felt that she didn’t expect anything exciting to happen. I think Dad used to, we are so much alike, but he has given up expecting it now, so I try not to show how I feel.

All I wrote was: “I did not really know the difference between work and play. Work on a ranch is interesting to a child: driving the horses and later the truck or tractor, making butter or filling sausage cases. It doesn’t matter much what you are doing, except the things you really hate, like washing dishes and cleaning house.

“I had toys. Dad bought most of them. He hardly ever came back from town, when I hadn’t gone along, without a stuffed animal or a monkey I could wind up or a new book of paper dolls. But I was fondest of a painted wooden picture, less than a foot high, that Mom put in my room on a high corner shelf. Set back from the frame was a solemn face with round cheeks and deep-set eyes. I liked best its hands that met finger tip for finger tip with each one distinct and perfect, even to the fingernail. The paint had mostly worn off; only a faint tinge of blue still remained. The wood was so smooth it felt almost soft when I stood up on a chair to touch it. It wasn’t a toy at all, but an icon that had hung in Mom’s house in Russia. She found it near the ashes after her home was burned. I had it near my bed and used to talk to it without making the words, just looking over at it now and then.”

I did not write of the uncomfortable feeling I had about the icon. When I had diphtheria at six, Mom hung the shelf in my room and put the icon on it and a saucer beneath with a lighted wick floating in oil. I lay in bed watching the little flame. When it grew dark outside, the flame on the wick made a secret glow in the room. As soon as Dad came home from town I called him to come and see it, but instead of liking it he was angry.

“Don’t bring my child up with such idols, Anna!” he called out to Mom, and he blew the flame out.

“Don’t take it away; I love it.” I started to cry. Then I remember Mom coming in and lighting the wick again, her eyes thin and her mouth tight.

“What have you got in your church a child can see?” Mom asked in a voice that was so cold and scornful it was like ice cracking in the water bucket.

“Please don’t take the picture away,” I begged, and Dad didn’t say anything more. Mom took the saucer away next day and never lighted a flame again, but the icon has always been in my room ever since.

I began writing again. “All the animals on the ranch were mine, or I felt them so. The cows, the team of horses that I rode bareback whenever I wanted, all of the series of dogs; only the sow I never laid any claim to nor the tom turkeys that always looked too bloody to me with their bright-red wattles. I think I have never been lonesome.

“We went to town often, but seldom on Saturday, when most of the ranchers went. I had a feeling that Father didn’t like it when the streets were filled with ranchers in clean work shirts, the little tags of their tobacco bags dangling out of one pocket, the color of their faces and necks giving away their occupation. Yet people must have told easily that we were ranchers. Dad always wore his best suit and a city hat, never the broad-brimmed Western hat. He carried cigarettes in a case that I was never tired of watching spring open at the pressure of a thumb. He wore oxfords instead of high shoes. Perhaps they couldn’t tell Dad was a rancher unless they looked at his hands, but he had Mom and me along.

“Mom wore a plain cotton print in summer, a dark wool dress in winter. She bought it in “The Big Store.” She never liked a hat on her head and never looked quite right in one. She never wore gloves in summer, and her hands were the color of the red-maple furniture you see in furniture-store windows; only her hands had fine lines of black that no amount of washing with the vegetable brush at the sink could quite take away, and her nails were always worn down at the finger tips. She was big-boned and solid, with broader shoulders than Father’s. Her lips of themselves were—Why do I put it in the past tense?—her lips are now red and full, and there is color on her high cheekbones. Her face is so calm and still it stands out from the animated or worried or cross faces of the town women, hurrying by on their eternal shopping. I guess I was thinking, too, of the contrast with women I had seen on the streets downtown in Minneapolis.

“For years I was a slim child with pale-yellow pigtails to the waist of my clean starched dress. I never wore a hat unless it was winter, and I wore socks and oxfords that Dad took pride in buying.

“Every time we went to Clark City Dad and I stopped to have our shoes polished at the Greek shoeshine place. I think it was one of the high spots of the trip for Dad. He would sit there, reading the paper he had bought, and feel like a city man.”

I held my pen still, remembering all those trips: the trip to the grocery store and to the hardware store or to the McCormick-Deering store for a piece of machinery, the briefer trips to “The Big Store” for some needles or thread or cloth. Usually we separated and Dad dropped into the lobby of the hotel to talk to someone. Mom and I went together, Mom walking along the aisles of the store, scarcely looking at the things that didn’t interest her, I hanging back as we went past the perfume counter, the fine soaps, then the pocketbooks and gloves and stockings. And yet, I really only wanted to look at them; I didn’t covet them; they would only have been a clutter around home.

I remembered the time when we did go to town on Saturday, the Saturday before Easter. All the women in Gotham had gone to town and bought new clothes to wear to church Easter Sunday. In the beginning, Dad had not intended to go. But Saturday came off so warm the winter wheat showed bright apple-green. We had left the breakfast dishes and gone outdoors to work. Dad set off with the drill to do some seeding. I was feeding the chickens and Mom was somewhere below the barn when all of a sudden Dad came back.

“Anna!” he called at the top of his voice.

I heard Mom answer and then I saw her running.

“Anna, tomorrow’s Easter!”

“I know.”

“Let’s go to town today.”

And instead of saying no when there was so much to do and everything, Mom laughed. “You want a Easter hat?”

“Well, you can’t work all the time.” Dad often said that to Mom. He tired before Mom did.

We drove into town that morning and had lunch at a restaurant. When we came out we stood together on the sidewalk the way ranchers do in town. Dad took out a five-dollar bill and gave it to me.

“Here, Ellen, go buy yourself a new Easter dress.”

When Dad had gone on down the street I handed the money to Mom to put in her big pocketbook for me. She pushed it off. “Keep it yourself, your father want you to buy with it.”

Without a sound my day broke into pieces, pieces with sharp cutting edges. I didn’t want any new dress. I only wanted to be in my jeans and old shirt at home. Mom was hurt because Dad hadn’t given her the money.

“I’ve got to go in hardware store and buy new ax handle,” Mom said. “Your Dad’ll never think. Go on, get your dress.”

Wretchedly I walked into the store where dresses were sold. Nothing drew me as it usually did, not even the long sheer silk stocking on a shapely glass leg. I watched some women coming in and hated them for the way they wore their clothes, and their trim ankles and shoes and the faint sweet smell as they passed me. I had been standing aimlessly against a counter by the front door. Suddenly I knew what I wanted. I went over to the stocking counter and said in a firm voice:

“I want a pair of silk stockings like those on that glass leg.” When the clerk asked what size I said, “A big size, about as large as you sell,” thinking of Mom’s legs as I often saw them in the row ahead of me when we worked in the garden.

“Those are three dollars,” the clerk told me, and I could see she doubted whether I could pay for them.

“I’ll take them,” I told her. Then I gave her the five-dollar bill and had two silver dollars back.

“Are they for a gift? I could wrap them with tissue paper for you.”

I didn’t want them to seem anything special. I said, “No, just everyday.”

I walked straight from the stocking counter to the perfume counter, where I had never had time to linger before. It was hard to know what to ask for. The salesgirl was unlike anyone I had ever seen outside a magazine.

“What scent do you have that smells Russian?” I asked.

“Russian? Let’s see—we have Cuir de Russe. That’s Russian leather.”

“I’d like to smell it.” The whiff seemed to penetrate back of my eyeballs. My eyes watered. “I’ll take two dollars’ worth,” I said.

The lady at the counter gave me a bottle so tiny it didn’t look as though it could cost more than a quarter, but I paid her. Mom still has the bottle on her dresser, along with a picture of Dad in his uniform and a hand-painted pin tray with “New York City” written on it. The perfume bottle is still half-full.

“You get your dress?” Mom asked when I found her. She had the ax handle in her hand.

“No, I bought these for you.” I thrust the paper sack and the little package at her and took the ax handle. I busied myself with an assortment of screws. Mom was so quiet I had to look at her. Her face was different. It wasn’t as firm as usual.

“Yeléna, your Dad won’t like it.”

“He gave it to me. It’s mine.” But I wasn’t anxious to see him and have him ask me about the dress. He did ask me, and I said I couldn’t find one I liked so I bought something else I wanted. He whistled and smiled. Dad never was stern or angry with me—only at life and the weather and his own illness.

“What did you buy?”

“Some perfume and stockings,” I mumbled. Mom was in the back seat arranging parcels.

“So you had a hankering for perfume and silk stockings. You’re growing up. Nobody would think it to see you in your jeans. What do you think of that, Anna?”

Mom didn’t answer and Dad let the matter drop. He had another idea. Easter had gone to his head.

“Why don’t we stay overnight and go to church on Easter like civilized people?”

I held my breath.

“We’ve got the stock to take care of,” Mom said doggedly.

“They can wait. We’d be back by two o’clock. It would do us good. We haven’t been to church since . . .”

“Since we went with your mother,” Mom said. That was before I was born, I was busy figuring to myself. Church wasn’t part of our living. But I wished Mom hadn’t said that. It was suddenly too close to breathe easily, even though we sat in the truck on the main street. Dad started to drop the idea and close up and then he didn’t.

“As I remember, you were a good Greek Catholic once. We don’t want Ellen not to know what the inside of a church looks like.”

The air cleared. That was the most exciting trip we had ever made to town. Mom and I bought nightgowns in Montgomery Ward’s and we packed them in a little straw suitcase Mom carried her parcels in. We stayed at the hotel where Dad often sat and talked in the lobby, a big glittering place that awed Mom and me. We had a room I can see now. The carpet went from wall to wall. The furniture was big and shining, with a full-length mirror in the door. There was a bathroom between the rooms, with the first big white bathtub I had ever used.