Winter Wheat (9 page)

“You see, I’ve never . . . been swept along by any one drive . . .” Gil was trying so hard to make me understand I sat still with my eyes on the shallow creek water. “Most fellows are; it used to bother me. 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 who you were. I had to know you. I watched you all those days almost afraid you’d spoil yourself, someway—oh, you know, powder your nose or have runs in your stockings or . . .” He laughed and I saw he had colored like a girl. “You probably think I’m crazy, but you were so lovely I wanted you that way. 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.”

“Why, Gil!” His words sounded like poetry. He had never opened so much of his mind to me before.

“And then after I knew you, I found I was in love, really and deeply. Mother noticed the difference right away. Do you see, Ellen?”

I watched his long, straight fingers breaking a stick into little bits and laying them in a tiny heap. I was so happy I didn’t want to speak. Gil’s fingers left the little pile of sticks. I lifted my eyes and met his that are brown and sometimes sad. He drew me into his arms. The little shallow trickle of water under the thin shade of the willows seemed almost to stand still. I could see the sky mirrored in it. I looked at these things thinking I could come and look at them any time and hear Gil’s words.

“I don’t know why it’s so easy to talk to you, Ellen—things I couldn’t say to anyone else.” He laughed.

“That’s being in love,” I said.

“You know, do you?” Gil teased.

“Yes, I know,” I told him soberly, for it was the truth.

After a while I folded up the picnic things and we walked over to the truck. “I’m glad we stopped there,” Gil said, “so we could be alone for a little.”

“Yes” was all I said, but of course that was why I’d brought the lunch.

“Don’t you want me to drive?” Gil asked.

“Okay. It’s fun. You have more power under you than you have with a regular car.”

Gil drove so easily in the city. I had always liked to watch him and I’d admired the way he slides a car into a narrow parking place, but he wasn’t used to the truck and he looked so funny sitting up straight on the seat and frowning. We drove off with such a jerk that I laughed at him.

“Stop that!” he shouted at me over the roaring he made with the starter. “There! After all, I had to get the feel of it.”

“After all!” I mimicked him, but I loved seeing his hands on the steering wheel. I reached over and laid my hand on his knee and we drove that way into Gotham.

“That’s the elevator where the post office is,” I told him. “Where your letters come.”

I waved to Mr. Peterson on the store steps and I saw him call something in to his wife. Everybody in Gotham would know by tonight that I was seen in the truck with a stranger driving me. I wondered how soon the Bardich girls would make some excuse to come over.

“How far are you from Gotham?” Gil asked.

“Only a mile by the road. We’re just in the next coulee.”

“Coulee?” Gil didn’t know even the names of things out here.

“Kind of a gully, a cut in the land. In spring a little creek runs along the floor of the coulee, that’s why there are trees there. When Dad came out from Vermont he hated the wind, so he built his house in the coulee. There, Gil! There’s where we turn.” I’ve always loved having the road to our ranch turn toward the mountains.

Across the bright green of a field of winter wheat you could just see the chimney and a piece of gray roof that was our house.

“Where? What are you looking at?”

“Our house—turn right by this post. The road dips, you better shift.” Gil shifted with such a grating I knew the folks would hear it. I felt the dip in the road happily all through me, as you do a place you know. “Drive on to the barn; we’ll put the truck in later.”

Dad came out to meet us. He was dressed in his town suit for Gil. I introduced them and we walked back to the house.

“Where’s Mom?” I had expected her to come to the door.

“She’s right there,” Dad said. He was busy talking to Gil. “Well, if this is your first trip West you’ll find you have to revise a good many of your preconceived ideas. I know when I came out here . . .” Did Dad always use such big words?

I went in the house ahead of them. Mom was in a clean print dress. “Come and meet him, Mom,” I said.

Dad had taken Gil around to the front door that opened right into the front room. We never used it. The stoop was sort of high and the walk led up to the kitchen door.

There seemed to be wide spaces between us: Dad and Gil coming in the front door, Mom not quite in the doorway from the kitchen, I between. “Mom, this is Gil.”

Gil came over to her and bowed in that easy graceful way he has. Mom shook hands with him, not smiling, her eyes looking so steadily at him.

“Pleased to meet you,” she said heavily. I wished she would smile.

“We had a delicious luncheon,” Gil said. “And Ellen let me drive the truck home. You know, I have always wanted to drive a truck since I was a little boy.”

“Trucks they make now is easy to drive,” Mom said.

“Sit down over here,” Dad urged. “Have a cigarette?” I wanted to run and get an ash tray or matches, but I knew they were already there on the plush scarf. Gil looked hesitatingly at Mom still standing in the doorway, then he sat down in the chair with the new slip cover.

“Yeléna, you sit down and visit,” Mom said.

“You come too, Mom. It isn’t time to get dinner.” I looked at my watch. It was only four. Mom sat on the straight chair by the door to the kitchen, I sat on the couch with Dad.

“The best time of year here is really fall,” Dad was saying.

“Oh, I love spring, too. I’m glad you came in June, Gil. Next time you’ll come in October. Look at these. I picked them this morning.” I brought him the bowl of shooting stars and harebells and crocuses.

“Do they grow in your garden?” Gil asked.

Even Mom smiled, and I laughed at him. “Oh, no, they grow wild right out on the prairie. I should have shown you some on the way out. We were so busy talking I forgot. Look, Gil, the crocuses make me think of your mother the first time I met her, all in kind of lavender-gray.”

“I see what you mean,” Gil said. But I wished I hadn’t said that. Mrs. Borden was different from Mom.

“I hear the people in your part of the country are talking war harder than we are here,” Dad was saying as though he were talking to Bailey at the elevator.

“Well,” Gil answered, “I suppose that’s natural. The farther east you go, the closer people feel to Europe.”

“I was younger than you, I guess, almost twenty, when I threw everything over and enlisted. Three months in Camp Devens . . .”

I was too excited to listen. I leaned over and smelled the sage I had put in a pitcher on the table at the end of the couch. Before dinner I wanted to take Gil out around the barn and up on the rimrock.

“. . . In the end I sailed with a Michigan regiment. Well, sir, we weren’t in the harbor at Liverpool more than twenty-four hours when we got orders to sail for Russia. Some folks think of hell as a fiery furnace, but I’ll tell you my idea of hell is a frozen God-forsaken village in Russia.”

I glanced over at Mom. She hadn’t said a word. Her face was still; all the expression was hidden. Her eyes were on Gil. I wished she would laugh, so Gil could hear her.

“You wouldn’t dare call the village where Mom lived that, would you, Dad?” I said, looking at Mom.

“That was the one I meant,” Dad said. “Even your mother thinks that, don’t you, Anna?”

“Winter is cold most places,” Mom said, without laughing.

Dad shook his head. “Not like that.”

I was afraid Dad was going to tell Gil all about Russia, then.

“I want to show Gil around a little,” I said. I tried not to see Dad’s disappointed expression. “I’ll be back in time to set the table, Mom.”

As we went through the kitchen the smell of the kettle of borsch was fragrant and warm. “That’s Mom’s famous Russian soup, Gil. Have you ever had borsch?” I had asked Mom to make it.

“No, I can’t say that I have. I’ve been to a smörgasbord,” he said.

“It’s very special. Dad doesn’t admit that he likes it, because they don’t make it in Vermont, but he does.”

We went out around the house. I wished the asters were in bloom against the gray clapboards.

“You don’t have much view with the hill so close, do you?” Gil said.

“No, not from the house, but I always run up here. See, I have a regular path up the side. Dad calls it my game trail. How’s that, Gil?” We stood on the top. “There’s no end to the sky up here, and see the mountains; that faint blue line over there, that’s the Main Range of the Rockies.”

Gil shaded his eyes. “‘Sister Anne, Sister Anne, what do you see?’”

I had to laugh. “‘Nothing but the dust blowing and the green grass growing,’” I quoted back from Bluebeard.

“Mother wouldn’t read me the story of Bluebeard because she thought it was so hideous, so when I found it myself I went all out for it.” Gil laughed.

“It was in a fairy book my aunt sent me from Vermont,” I said. “See, there are crocuses, Gil.” They were growing in the grass not more than a foot from us. “There should be cactus plants in bloom.” Then I found one. It was a pale amber and looked as though it were made of plastic. The blossom was as soft and smooth as the leaves of the cactus are prickly. “You have to get down close to see it.”

“I never saw a cactus growing before, either,” Gil said, but I felt he was being polite and wasn’t really interested.

I looked around the soft grass-covered hill at the yucca plants and the patch of shooting stars with a queer lost feeling, like you have in an exam when you can’t think of the answers. What was it I had meant to show Gil? I couldn’t think now. An empty silence spread between us.

Gil said: “How did your father happen to marry your mother—I mean, when she spoke Russian and he spoke English I should think it would have been so difficult.” But I saw that wasn’t what he meant. He meant how had Dad ever happened to marry Mom. I was suddenly hurt and a little angry.

“Why, he fell in love with her, I suppose,” I said, “and Mom learned English very fast.”

“Your father, though, must have had such a different kind of background.”

“Mother is always quiet with strangers. You have to know her awhile. She seems sober, but you should hear her laugh. And she loves fun and music. . . . She loves music the way you do, Gil.” All the time inside I was crying, “Please like her, Gil. Please see her as she really is.”

We sat there looking down on the roof of the house, not off toward the mountains at all. The screen door banged and Mom came out. We saw her walk across to the barn with a pail. She looked big and heavy except for her head and shoulders and the easy way she walked. I couldn’t say anything at all. I had meant to tell Gil how I always ran up here whenever anything exciting or sad happened, but I didn’t. I was afraid it might sound childish.

“Well, we better go back down,” I said finally. I ran down the path and it gave me the feeling it always does of plunging headfirst. “I dare you to run,” I said, trying to feel natural.

“Not I, Mrs. Bluebeard. I value my life.”

Dad and Gil sat out on the glider on the porch while we got dinner. I set the table in the front room. The cloth was shining white but it wasn’t very thick. I took a sheet from the bureau drawer in Mom’s room and laid it underneath for a pad. For the first time in my life I noticed how thick the plates and cups were; that they didn’t match. Only the dozen spoons that Dad’s mother had willed me were sterling. Then I was ashamed of thinking of things like that when Gil was here. The food would be so good, I told myself, no one would think of the table.

We sat at the table. Dad and Gil were talking about New England. Mom was silent. Was she always as quiet as this? The soup was hot and red.

“This is delicious, Mrs. Webb,” Gil said. I wondered if he would ever call Mom Mother easily.

I took out the soup dishes and brought hot plates to put in front of Dad. We had steak from our own beef. Mr. Hakkula came over to butcher for us, but Mom did as much as any man.

“I’ll tell you one thing, if the United States sends our boys over to Europe again, when they come back they’re going to want a changed world and they’re going to insist on getting it. We came back from the last war and accepted things as they were. That’s why we’re having another war.”

Dad looked younger when he was talking, even though his voice sounded a little oracular. I saw how Mom was watching him. Did Gil notice how big and dark her eyes were? I couldn’t keep my mind on what Dad was saying. I was aware of our hands on the white cloth—of Mom’s that were large and red and checked with black. I saw the broken nail on Mom’s finger as she cut her steak. Mom’s hands looked kind, but perhaps that was because I knew them putting on compresses for Dad, doing things for me. Dad’s were brown against the white cloth; they looked tired. I never noticed before that hands could look tired. I knew Gil’s hands better than any of our hands. I loved again their shapeliness, the wrists that were as slender as mine. I looked at my own hands. They were large like Mom’s and already roughened from the little work I had done outdoors, but I always forget to wear gloves and I don’t like the feeling of them anyway. Our hands, all moving, seemed to say things to each other. Gil’s hands didn’t seem to belong with ours. I put that thought away quickly as I got up to take off the dishes.

Once Mom held up her hand to make Dad and Gil stop talking. “There comes the rain; that’s good.”

“For the wheat,” I explained to Gil.

“You go on, now. I do the dishes,” Mom said when we were through. I hesitated. Dad and Gil could talk in the front room while I helped Mom, but I felt I’d been separated from him all during the meal. I wanted to be alone with him.

“Thank you, Mom,” I said. “We’ll take a little walk.”

We couldn’t walk far. It didn’t take much rain to stir the gumbo to a slick, slippery paste. I said as I would to any boy from school: