I always studied in the library, never in my room at 1112. There was a table in the corner between two long windows where I usually worked, but if I sat with my face toward the window I kept looking out, studying the weather the way we do at home. If I turned toward the door, I watched people coming in and out. But I learned to look at the window and think about what I had been reading, too.
It was in October that I met Gil. I saw him sitting at a table halfway across the room. I watched him when he went over to the encyclopedias against the wall. I met his eyes and looked away. Finally, I turned my chair toward the window. It was better to be distracted by the weather than to keep glancing up at some boy. But after that I always looked to see if he was there when I went in.
One day I went over to the lib. after Mr. Echols’ class to work on the next assignment. Mr. Echols wanted us to write autobiographies. “Begin with your family. Make me see them with your eyes, then make me see you growing up, your town, your house, your religion, your school.” It must be interesting, I thought, for him to know all about each one of us sitting there in his classroom.
I thought it would be easy. Things I wanted to say sprang into my mind all the way over to the lib.: I would tell how the warm, melting breath of a chinook felt after days of dry cold; how it felt to pull the harrow or drive the combine; how it felt when a cloudburst struck after weeks of hard bright heat and I stood out in the open and let it drench me; how hail felt, too, when I ran out in it to get the chickens all in. I wanted to bring my whole world and set it down on paper.
But now, sitting in front of a pad of empty paper, it wasn’t easy. “Begin with your family,” Mr. Echols had said.
I started in: “My father and mother are very different. My father came from a small town in Vermont.” I knew that town almost as well as Gotham. I could describe some of the people and the house where Dad was born, he had told me so much about it. The house was three stories tall and had a long two-tiered porch. I knew just how the parlor looked with its horsehair and walnut furniture and I knew Dad’s room when he was a boy. His windows looked out into green maple leaves that sometimes woke him in the night with the noise they made, louder and more scary than the sound of the aspen leaves by the creek, Dad said. There was a big picture of the Day of Judgment that scared Dad, too. He told me that when I said I wished we had more pictures in our house and he said it was better to have none than the kind that scared you.
Dad’s father was the principal of the high school and I think Dad stood in awe of him as a boy. He died while Dad was in the Army. When Dad went back with Mom only his mother and sister were there. I felt I knew a lot about Vermont, too. Dad so often talked about it—how different it was from Montana. Trees grew easily there, the way they do here in Minnesota, and there were picket fences and neat garden plots and all the houses were painted and every village had a church with a white spire on it.
Dad used to tell me about skating parties and corn roasts and the fun they had in the high school where his father was principal. Once he was telling about home and Mom looked up from the knitting she was doing and said:
“And the womans in that town would see a murder done better than have dust in their parlor. They are afraid of what their neighbors don’t do, too.”
Dad stopped talking about Vermont and went outside.
“Go get to bed,” Mom said sharply to me. That came back now more clearly than the stories Dad had told me.
I didn’t know much of anything about Mom’s town. I hardly knew what she looked like as a girl, except that Dad had a candy box of old snapshots: of the boat he went to England on, and the one he sailed to Archangel in, and pictures of other soldiers and the snow in Russia, of towns that looked half-buried in snow and groups of Russians with funny hats. One of them showed Mom in a dark dress with a bandanna over her head. There was a big black coffeepot in front of her as though she had just put it down, and she had a snowball in her hand and she was laughing. Mom was seventeen then, she told me. “The soldiers always laugh and joke and make fun,” Mom said. “Your father always had something fun to say. The day they bring him to Seletskoe all shot up and bleeding he can make jokes.”
Some of the fun had gone out of him in Montana, it seemed to me, the way so many dry years have taken the moisture out of the soil.
I knew Mom’s family were very poor and she was the only girl in a family of five brothers. “I have five uncles, Mom. Will I ever see them?” I asked one time.
“Four was killed in last war,” Mom said, “and one go to be a priest.”
“Are my grandparents living, Mom?” It seemed as though a little part of me must be in them. I wanted to know about them in order to know more about myself, the way you do when you look at your baby pictures and listen to things you did before you can remember.
“They was both killed,” Mom said. I couldn’t have been more than eight when Mom told me about them. We were thinning beets in the garden; Mom was always more talkative outdoors.
“Killed, Mom?” I couldn’t believe it. Children in Gotham had their grandparents living with them. How could mine have been killed?
“My father try to keep his pigs from robber soldier. The man shoot him and burn our house. My mother burn to death.”
I stared at Mom. Even to a child my mother didn’t hide things or make them seem better than they were. I saw in her face that she could see it all just as it was.
“Did you see it happen?” The question almost stuck in my throat and yet I had to ask it.
“I see my father shot, then I run for help. When I come back the house is burned, and my mother dead. It was in winter.”
I remember how still it was out there in the garden, and since that day I have always known how red are the veins of the beet leaves and how like soft green leather the leaves themselves.
“What did you do, Mom?”
“My brother and I live in old shack for while. Then he go to be priest. I help nurse wounded soldiers. Move your hands faster. See, like this!” Mom was through talking, but all afternoon as we worked down the hot rows I thought about my grandmother and grandfather, part of me, killed. I remember wishing they could know that I was here.
I wished even now that they could know I was here in college, sitting in this big room at a polished table writing about them. But the paper in front of me was still empty except for two sentences: “My father and mother are very different. My father came from a small town in Vermont.” I began now purposefully. I would start with their meeting.
“My father was sent to Archangel in the last war. In a way, I think it must have been the most important happening in his life. Before the war he had had one year of college and expected to go right on and finish. That spring he enlisted and that summer he sailed for England. While his transport was in the harbor in England, the order came that sent him to Russia.”
Dad has a picture taken in the harbor and one of himself leaning over the railing and waving. He says he’d never had an ache or pain then. He’d even won his letter for track freshman year. I had studied that snapshot a long time. It seemed so good to see Dad well. I’ve never known him when rain or cold didn’t set his shrapnel wounds to hurting and make him cough.
“The American troops were sent to Archangel to keep the Germans from gaining control of the railroad and the new Russian government from seizing the Allied ammunitions.”
I knew all about that; I had heard Dad talking to Bailey over at the elevator. “Damn-fool expedition!” Dad had called it. “The Armistice was signed less than three months after we got there, but the port of Archangel was frozen up tight as a prison. You ought to see it! We don’t know what cold is here. Cold fog everywhere. They told us what to do to keep from frostbite. One of the boys, a little fellow from St. Louis, insurance salesman he was, was so afraid he’d freeze his face he kept making faces every few minutes and it nearly drove us crazy. We’d bellow at him, ‘Stop doing that!’” Then Dad and Bailey had laughed and Dad had lost his tired l
ook. I’ve heard Dad tell how the very morning the Armistice was signed, while some of the men were still at breakfast, the Bolshies came out of the woods in a regular attack formation. “Armistice or no armistice, that’s when I got filled with shrapnel!” Dad had said.
Bailey shook his head. “Don’t they know what’s going on in the rest of the world?”
“Russia’s a world by itself. They were mad at each other and they didn’t want us up there, so they kept on fighting.”
I loved hearing about their escape over a trail through the woods. Some of Dad’s stories Mom didn’t like, but she liked the part about the soldiers being brought into the little village where she lived. That was where she took care of Dad.
I tried to put it down in the biography, but I couldn’t get in so many things. When we had Mom’s hot red borsch Dad would say sometimes, “This is the stuff your mother filled me with to make me well.”
“That was poor stuff, not like this,” Mom would answer. “You’d had so many of those cold apple pies and salt-pork meals you don’t know good soup from bad.” Sometimes I felt Mom wasn’t joking when she said things like that. She didn’t like anything about Dad’s home.
“Did you fall in love with each other right away?” I asked just last summer when Mary Bardich got married.
Mom went on knitting without looking up. Her face went blank the way it can do when it shuts down over something. I looked at Dad. Dad was busy getting his pipe to draw.
“I mean,” I said in the funny little silence that had spread until it was big, “wasn’t it hard with Mom speaking Russian and you English?”
“We didn’t find it difficult,” Dad said kind of formally.
“He can say ‘bol,’ pain, and ‘hurt,’ and ‘water’ in Russian,” Mom said, “and ‘What is your name?’” She looked at him and laughed a little.
“Kak vashe emya,” Dad said like a child saying his lesson.
“You could say ‘rest now’ and ‘eat it up’ and ‘you will feel better,’” Dad said, as though he had forgotten me and was talking to Mom. And I could see suddenly how it must have been through those few words. I think I began wanting to know different languages then.
“And ‘mne holodno,’ remember?” Mom asked, hugging herself as though she was shivering cold.
“I remember the day you said ‘cold’ in English,” Dad said.
“And how you try to teach me English,” Mom said.
“You learned very fast,” Dad admitted.
“That was easy!” Mom said, as she says about planting a whole field or cooking for harvest hands or even digging stones out of the field.
I sat there in the library, chewing the end of my fountain pen while I tried to sort out what was important in the story of Dad and Mom. I remembered one time I had heard her admit that a thing was hard. Judy Bailey was getting married and going to Illinois to live. I was helping Mom with the washing and I said I bet it would be hard meeting her husband’s family the first time.
Mom lifted the dripping clothes out of the hot suds with a stick. “It is hard,” she said. “Everything is different when I go to your father’s town, everything!” She made a gesture with the stick and dripping clothes that showed how wide the difference was. “They don’t eat same as I do—house, clothes, church, everything different. They don’t even think same. That was hard.”
“You weren’t there long, though, were you?” I asked.
“Long enough!” Mom said, and her face was dark and heavy. “They was glad to see me go. We come out here.”
I asked Dad once, when he was talking about Vermont, how they happened to come off out here, and Dad’s face looked almost as though he didn’t know either, but he said:
“I wanted to go to the other end of the earth just then and your mother wanted to live on a farm. So we homesteaded. Sort of last-call pioneers.”
I heard Dad talking to Bailey one afternoon in winter when it started to grow dark at three o’clock and it was so cold in the elevator Bailey kept the door into the office closed. They both sat there with their feet on the airtight stove. I think they’d forgotten me.
“If anyone was to tell me when I was seventeen that at forty I’d be ranching it out here in Montana I’d have told him he was crazy,” Dad said. “At seventeen I was hesitating between being a lawyer and teaching. My father wanted me to be a college professor. He taught in Andover for a year before he became principal of the high school at home. And I was leaning that way. I’d have liked to teach history.”
“And then the war threw the monkey wrench into all your plans, eh?” Bailey said. “You could have gone on and taught anyway, couldn’t you? It would be a long sight easier than raisin’ wheat in this infernal country.”
“No, I couldn’t,” Dad said shortly. “I was married and had a child on the way. My father was dead by that time. Not a chance!” He got into his heavy sheepskin and the cap Mom had knit him that came way down over his ears, and the mittens. “Good night, Bailey. Come on, Ellen.”
There was one day when Dad was sick and had to lie on the couch all day. Mom and I were cleaning the barn, and some of my thinking and wondering came out in a question.
“Mom, couldn’t Dad have gone back to school? Wouldn’t his mother and sister help him and you could have found some position?”
“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 th
e 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.
Winter Wheat Page 5
