Mr. Echols had a way of saying things that stayed in your mind. In our first class he told us we were the voice of a new America learning and growing and becoming articulate in the sheltered places of the earth, while out beyond, a death struggle was going on for us and for learning. It made me think of our house in the shelter of the coulee. It can be as still and quiet as a church outside the kitchen door and above the coulee the wind will be roaring and driving the tumbleweed in front of it at fifty miles an hour.
I wondered anxiously what Mr. Echols would say to my theme. “For the first theme I want you to choose your own topic,” he had said. “Write about something you know or something you think or believe, but for heaven’s sake don’t let it be anybody else’s idea and don’t write me how it feels to be in a Nazi concentration camp or in a submarine, because I’ll make a pretty good guess you haven’t been there.” He was always saying funny things like that.
I wrote about Wheat. I’d had a letter that day from Dad saying John Bardich, whose land touches ours on the east, was selling his wheat now for 70 cents a bushel. “It’s a pity we didn’t hold some of it back. But that’s the way with the wheat business,” Dad ended.
That started me off. I wrote: “The pioneers who came West in the seventies in search of gold were no greater gamblers than the prosaic-looking ranchers planting wheat on the dry-land farms. They gamble with the weather that it will be neither too dry, nor too hot, nor too wet, nor too cold; that the wheat will not be destroyed by hail or grasshoppers; and when at last they have the ripe wheat cut and stored they gamble with the market that wheat will be selling for enough money to pay for all the summer’s work.”
I stopped writing and thought about Bill Bailey, who runs the Excelsior Grain elevator and knows a great deal about wheat. He can tell whether it has smut or rust or garlic in it, or why the top of the sheaf is empty or what is the best seed to plant. Bill Bailey likes to talk, and he says, “If you know a man’s wheat over a few years you’ve got a pretty good line-up on the man himself.” In harvesttime he sits at the center of things, in his little office in the elevator, and sees the ranchers driving in with their loads of wheat. Sometimes they stand parked in line till midnight. Bill Bailey can see them coming all day. There is nothing to hinder his view from his little window. I wondered if the ranchers far back on the prairie roads don’t make him think of ants.
I went on writing: “I love the wheat and I hate it. I love the green blades of winter wheat in the spring. They show through the snow on the ground and make the only bright color in that winter world of grays and blacks and whites. I love the spring wheat that always seems trying to catch up with the winter wheat. It is like a person without much education or background trying to measure up with a person who’s had years of both. The beardless wheat always seems to me like a young boy, and the shaggy bearded wheat like an old man.
“When the wheat is an even ripeness, the color of the crust of the fresh-baked bread it will go to make, and the wind sings across it, I love it so I could sing too, just to look at it. My mother says the wind in the wheat makes her think of the wind in the forests of northern Russia, only this is a sharper, thinner sound. When I was a little girl, I used to lie on my back in the field of wheat where my mother and father were working and play I was in a forest. The trees of wheat reached high above me and the wind sang in their tops; only my forest was golden instead of black like Mother’s forest. Perhaps mine was the forest of the sun and hers was the forest of the night.”
I could have gone on and on. I wanted to tell about harvesting and riding the combine when you feel as proud as a king on a chariot at the start of the day, but you can’t feel and are like a piece of the machinery itself by the end of the day. But I liked the sound of the words I had just written: “forest of the sun” and “forest of the night.” So I stopped there. It’s funny that you can put down some words on a tablet and have them leap up from the page and carry you with them. I felt like the woman in the fairy story who baked the gingerbread boy that came to life.
I knocked on Mr. Echols’ door and opened it. He was sitting behind a littered desk. His eyes looked so sleepy when he glanced up I thought maybe he couldn’t remember my name.
“I’m Ellen Webb,” I told him.
“Yes, I know. Won’t you sit down, Miss Webb?” He was hunting in the pile on his desk for my theme. I saw it before he did, telling it by the way I’d turned the corners down to fasten it together. He picked it up and looked at it as though it were something strange he had never seen before. I wondered if he had even read it. The sun came in palely across his desk. The sun is always pale here, never out-and-out bright as it is at home. I could smell the heat in the radiators and outside I heard someone calling.
Mr. Echols was turning over the pages the way you do a newspaper you’re not going to read through. He came to the last one.
“‘The trees of wheat reached high above me and the wind sang in their tops; only my forest was golden instead of black like Mother’s forest. Perhaps mine was the forest of the sun and hers was the forest of the night.’”
It sounded terrible when he read it aloud. I felt my face going red. He took off his glasses.
“Very interesting, the way you see the land. Do you . . . Are you fond of Montana? I take it you come from there.”
“Yes,” I said. “I’ve always lived there.”
“You don’t have cattle?”
“No, we have a dry-land wheat ranch.”
“Do you want to go back and live there?”
“I love it there, but I can’t live there, because I want to be a . . . a linguist.” Our Spanish teacher in high school called it that.
Mr. Echols took up his pipe. He looked at me while he lighted it. I could feel how hard he was trying to look into my world, into Gotham, Montana. He couldn’t know how different it was. I felt so safe from being looked into. I wondered if that was the way Mom felt sometime when people looked at her and wondered what she was really like.
“That’s very interesting,” Mr. Echols said. “Do you speak any other language now?”
“Not really, but I can understand some Russian and some Yugoslav and I can speak some Spanish and French.” I hated to admit how little I knew. “Languages are easy for me, though,” I added.
“Have your family always been ranchers?”
“Oh, my father isn’t naturally a rancher; he just took the ranch after he was married.”
“He comes from some other part of the country—or was he born in Montana?”
I couldn’t help smiling a little. “Almost everybody around Gotham came from some other part of the country.”
“That’s odd, isn’t it? Where do they all come from?”
Looking out of the window of Mr. Echols’ study I could see Gotham spread out; There were the Yonkos and the Bardiches, they were both Yugoslav and the best wheat farmers around. Next to us were the Halvorsens; they were Norwegians and the Hakkulas were Finns. Mr. Peterson, who ran the store, was a Swede, and there was one family of Germans and Bill Bailey was from Iowa and the Whalens from Missouri.
When I’d told him, Mr. Echols said, “Is there any real unity of feeling with such a mixture?”
I had to laugh. He should see them. “No,” I said, “not very much. We live mostly to ourselves.”
“But don’t you have a church and a grange?”
“They never got the church finished. The store is pretty small. I guess the grain elevator is the center of things. But we’re only thirty miles from Clark City; that’s our big town, with over thirty thousand people. That’s where I went to high school. I went in on the bus every day.”
I guess he couldn’t picture it very well. He sat there trying to think how it would be. Then he said, looking at me as though he was trying to make me out:
“What nationality is your father? I take it that your mother is from Russia.”
“Yes,” I said. “But my father came from Vermont.”
“Very interesting.” I c
ould see that he was wondering how they ever got together. Then he looked at his watch and leaned across the desk to hand me my theme. “Go on writing about what you know, your own part of the country—what you think, what you feel.”
He had put an “A” on my theme, and underneath in a little scrimped handwriting I was to come to know very well, “Freshness of viewpoint,” which seemed kind of meaningless.
I ran all the way to the library to see if Vera was still there. She wasn’t at the lib., so I walked on back to the rooming house. It was like Indian summer and there were a few leaves on the pavement that crackled like a piece of paper when you stepped on them. At home the cottonwood tree by the coulee would be all yellow and the aspens in the windbreak turning copper. The sage would be tall and whitish and tough-rooted if you tried to pull it up. Mom’s asters would be purple and pink and red and white all along the front of the house and down the path to the fence. My eyes were glued so tight to home I almost didn’t see the maple tree in a yard I was passing. It had leaves as red as apples. There was a kind of windbreak around the yard, only cut very low, that was new to me. Most of its leaves were gone, but it had red berries. I found out later that it wasn’t a windbreak at all but a barberry hedge.
I love the fall. I loved it even here, where there was no clear distant view, and no mountains and so much rain. I ran into the house and up the stairs feeling as though I had something rich and lovely and both pockets full of it.
We were both on the third floor, Vera near the bathroom and I halfway up the hall. I knocked on her door but there was no answer. But just as I started to go on I heard her crying. The door wasn’t locked, so I walked right in and said “Hello.”
Vera was lying on the bed. She had come home and put her hair up in pin curls, and if there is anything a girl can do to make herself look more pinched and homely I don’t know what it is. She wiped her eyes with a wad of tissue before she answered.
“I’m sorry. I couldn’t stay over there. I didn’t go to chemistry lab, either. I just came on back here.”
I sat down on the arm of the chair and looked at her, trying to understand how she could crumple up like that. She was for all the world like a bum lamb that’s going to die; there wasn’t anything to work on. Her face didn’t look unlike a sheep’s face as it was now. She must have felt this way all week, the room was in such a mess. I picked up the clothes thrown on the chair where I was sitting and hung them in the corner behind the cretonne curtain. I guess it was my silence that made her turn over to look at me.
“You aren’t mad at me, Ellen, are you?”
“Of course not. Look, I don’t work at the cafeteria tonight. How about getting dressed and we’ll go some place to eat.” I didn’t want to much, but I couldn’t leave her like that.
She started to cry again and dab at her face with tissue. “You don’t really want to. You’re just being . . . kind.”
And then I had to tell her in five different ways that I was crazy to. She got up finally and began combing her hair while I sat watching her. Suddenly she laid down her comb and said, “You’re pretty, Ellen.”
I stared at myself in her mirror harder than I ever had before. I saw that my hair had a soft shine to it, but that was because I had just washed it, and I had good color because of my fast walk home. For the rest, my gray eyes and too-high cheekbones and wide mouth were so familiar I couldn’t tell.
“See, you even think you are! I’m not. Nobody would turn and look at me twice.”
Then I got sick of such talk. “Don’t be a goose, Vera. How can you worry about whether you’re pretty or homely when people are worrying about whether they’ll be living tomorrow!” I sounded to myself exactly like Mom. There was the time Mrs. Yonko’s daughter sat in our kitchen talking about how poor they were and Mom turned on her.
“You don’t know nothing about poor!” she had said in a cold hard kind of a way. “Wait till you live on black bread and cabbage three year and be glad to get it! During war we don’t have that some time.” Mom’s eyes had seemed to see way beyond us.
“Tell us about that time, Mom,” I had begged. I was about twelve then. Mom closed up tight and the fierceness went out of her; but it comes to my mind when I read about poverty. Mom never wasted anything, and she’d urge Dad or me to eat the last piece of anything left on the platter till Dad used to get angry. Dad never liked having pigs, but Mom had to have them. “They eat cheap,” Mom used to say, “and they sell good.”
Vera was pretty when she was all ready and we had left that terrible sloppy room behind. She had on a red corduroy dress and some red shoes to match and a white lambskin jacket. Her lips matched her dress and the beanie she wore on the back of her head. She didn’t have any stockings without runs, so I loaned her a pair of my white knit socks with the red and black border.
“Gee, they look hand-knit,” she said.
“They are. Mom made ‘em.”
“Pretty hot! They’re like the real peasant stuff over at the ski shop.”
“They are peasant stuff,” I said. I thought of Mom coming in from the barn in her big galoshes and her hair tied in a bandanna. I suppose she must have been a peasant girl when Dad met her. I knew Mom hadn’t had much regular education. She could read a little and write a little, but Dad wrote me mostly. Sometimes Mom tucked in a little note. I think she didn’t want him to read them. But always they told more in a sentence than Dad’s long ones.
“Gus Johnson was over help your father with post holes. He is real hay-maker.” Which was Mom’s way of saying he was a hard worker . . . or she would write “Your Dad don’t talk much. Wind is bad.” And I could see the whole long day with Dad sitting miserable and silent by the stove.
We went to the Beanpot because that’s the most popular place near the campus. It has a big fat beanpot out over the door and they serve a full dinner for 65 cents, which is 20 cents more than you’d have to pay at the cafeteria. It was nice to sit down at a table and order, but to save my life I couldn’t help noticing each plate that went by to see the size of the helpings. That’s what working at the cafeteria does for you. The food did taste different. The steam table does things to food in spite of how clean and shiny the metal dishes are. We ended with a serving of chocolate pie topped with whipped cream and Vera smoked afterward while I had a third cup of hot black coffee.
Then I remembered Mr. Echols this afternoon.
“Vera, what do you want to do after college?”
“Get rich,” Vera answered, so fast it took my breath away. “I’d like to be a dress-designer in Hollywood and make pots of money.” Her face didn’t look so thin. “I’d have a penthouse apartment that was really beautiful with a bedroom in gray and dusty pink and a bathroom opening out of it in Dubonnet with a square gray bathtub.”
I thought of the messy bedroom she had at 1112 and the bathroom down the hall that was always draped with washing and the washbasin littered with bobby pins and broken pieces of soap.
“What do you want to do?” Vera asked.
“I want to be able to talk different languages and go and live in foreign countries for a while. Last year when I took Spanish I knew I wanted to do something with languages.” I couldn’t explain to Vera that I’d always wanted to talk Mom’s language. There are English words that don’t quite fit the Russian ones. Mom says something in English and doesn’t look satisfied sometimes, as though the English words didn’t really say it, like my name that she calls Yeléna. The Bardich girls won’t let their mother and father talk Yugoslav together; they want them to be American, but I don’t feel that way. Mom’s Russian is something precious of her own that she brought from Russia when she came, like her icon.
“How would you make a living doing that?”
“Oh, I’d translate and interpret for people or be a correspondent.” But I wasn’t very sure about it.
“You don’t want to go back to Montana, do you? I’m never going back to Iowa if I can help it.”
“I wouldn’t
mind going back for a while. I may teach a year or so after college. I’m taking enough education this year so I’ll have my certificate.”
“For heaven’s sake! My folks want me to teach school back home, but I’d starve to death rather than go back to that dump and teach kids.”
We walked up Third. Two boys on the porch of a fraternity house whistled at us.
“Do you know any boys in school?” Vera asked.
“Nope, not one,” I said, though the boy in history class had asked me to go to a movie Friday night.
“All the nice ones go for girls in sororities.”
“You can get in next year, maybe,” I said, thinking if we had a bumper crop maybe I could, too.
“If I’m asked, you mean,” Vera said.
And then we cut across the campus and there was room to smell the rotting leaves and the night air. I forgot Vera. My spirits rose like a partridge startled out of the brush. I had never been inside so much in all my life as this last month and a half. I hadn’t known how cooped-up I had been.
When we came to the door of the rooming house and climbed the three flights of stairs, the narrow hall crowded in on me. I thought of the feeling of space on top of the rimrock back of our house at home and the wind in the aspens in the creek bed. I undressed in the dark and lay in bed with my face turned toward the open window, but the lighted windows of the house next door blocked my view, and there was no wind stirring.
5
I HAVE reason to remember the library. Now of all the buildings on campus it is the clearest in my mind. I remember the shallow feeling under my feet of the steps leading up to it, and the weight of the front door, and the worn marble stairs inside. I know each room with its subdued shuffle of papers and feet, the smell of books that is different from the smell of periodicals and papers, and the sound of the light switching off in the stacks and the tinny tread of feet on the steel stairs of the stacks. I remember the sun across the study tables, the sun of that spring shining through green and the paler sun of that winter whitened by snow. I remember the feeling of excitement at ten o’clock when half the lights in the reading room were turned off as a warning of closing time, and I would go down and meet Gil.
Winter Wheat Page 4
