Winter Wheat

by Mildred Walker

  “Yeléna don’t try hard enough to keep him,” Mom was saying. I stood still listening, then I knelt down, leaning against the slope of the side of the coulee that was covered with wet grass. The room was lighted. I looked in and saw Mom lifting the blue print dress over her head. I couldn’t keep from looking at her wide shoulders and big bosom. She looked younger in her cotton slip. She sat down on the side of the bed and started taking out her hairpins. Dad stood leaning against the closed bedroom door, smoking.

  “I see him look at Yeléna like he think pretty much of her.” Mom gave a quick backward shake and her heavy hair came down in dark braids on her shoulder. She looked pretty, or maybe what she had said about Gil warmed me. “She could keep him if she try,” Mom muttered.

  Dad finished his cigarette. I watched him walk over to the dresser to rub the end into the ash tray.

  “Not Ellen,” Dad said. His voice had a tight sound to it. Mom turned around so fast on the edge of the bed her hair swung back from her shoulder. I could just see her face as she turned toward Dad, and it was white and her eyes blazed.

  “I know what you think. You say to yourself Yeléna don’t think to trick him into staying like I trick you! It’s long time to think that, Ben Webb!”

  Dad said nothing. He wasn’t even looking at Mom and she went on in a fast, angry voice.

  “I know, she won’t never pretend to her young man she was going to have baby like I do. No, you want her like your sister to sit in parlor and drink tea and never let him touch her hand!” Why didn’t Dad say something? I ached with waiting for him to speak.

  “You liked your Russian girl to love you; you liked to lie with her an’ put your head on her shoulder. Then when you get order to go home you say good-by. You say you come back when you get job an’ can take care of me. . . .”

  I could hardly believe it was Mom talking so fast, with Dad standing there with his eyes on the cigarette stub in the ash tray.

  “Nice girl wait to see how much money you get; if you can build big house. Nice girl wait till you come back.” Mom’s voice had a taunt in it. “I never care what money you get; I can work myself. I know sure you forget when you go back and don’t come for me. I love you so much I can’t stand to see you go. I tell you lie . . . one little lie in all these years, Ben Webb.”

  “Anna, for God’s sake don’t go back over that. I don’t hold it against you.” His voice sounded as though it hurt him to speak, as though he wished she would stop. “I was to blame. You were right in a way; I probably never would have gone back, but that’s all over long ago. I brought you back home and when you weren’t happy there, didn’t I come out here because you wanted to?”

  “You want to get your Russian girl out of your old town; that wasn’t for any love.” Mom’s voice was quieter, but it was cold.

  I couldn’t look into that little square room at them. I was ashamed to have my own eyes see them or to listen any longer. I crept back to my room and climbed in noiselessly. My own breathing sounded loud to me in the stillness. I lay down on my bed, but Dad’s words followed me and I raised up on my elbow to hear them.

  “Well, Anna, if that boy’s made Ellen unhappy, we’ve got paid back for our sins,” Dad said, and his voice was older and sadder than I had ever heard it.

  I stared into the darkness of my room and thought over what I had heard.

  After a while, I heard Dad’s steps going barefoot across the kitchen floor, past my door into the front room. I heard the old couch creak. Dad was going to spend the night there. It seemed to me that hate and hopelessness filled our house to suffocation. Maybe Gilbert had felt that hate between Mom and Dad. Maybe that was what drove him away from me, because I had seemed part of it. All these years Dad and Mom had lived together, pretending to be fond of each other, even having me, when all the time they had hated each other.

  I wanted Gil more than ever. I wanted him to take me away from here, back where we had been so happy.

  Then I came back to what I had just heard. Little bits fitted in together: the way Mom was angry that time when Dad went back to his home; the way she had taken the doll Dad’s sister sent me and put it away. She had said it was too fancy to play with on a ranch. Dad’s calling Mom Anna Petrovna, sometimes in fun, but sometimes when he was angry with her. What I had overheard was the reason for the bitterness that I had so often felt between them.

  Maybe Mom had loved Dad as I loved Gil. If I could have held Gil some way—but Dad was right; I knew I could never have lifted a finger or spoken a word to keep him. A feeling of shame, deep in myself, crept out for Mom. If she had really loved him, she couldn’t have done that.

  Suddenly, she wasn’t Mom; she was Anna Petrovna, someone strange whom I hardly knew. And he wasn’t Dad, tired and tormented by shrapnel; he was Ben Webb, a strong, healthy young soldier.

  How could they ever have stood it out here all these years where they were shut in together?

  “I should think people would go stark, raving crazy out here,” Gil had said. “I should think they’d end by hating each other.”

  And I had said: “Why should they, Gil? Look at Mom and Dad!” I turned wretchedly in the bed and I saw how the shade hung crookedly. Gil had seen that while I had lain on the porch and been happy.

  I heard Mom moving around in the next room. She opened the door of her room and crossed the kitchen.

  “Ben, don’t sleep there. You’ll be all lamed up in the morning.”

  I lay still, hardly breathing, straining my ears to hear what she said.

  Dad gave a kind of groan that hurt me. “It’s a funny thing, Anna, how a little circle hangs on a big one. If there hadn’t been a war, we wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t be a physical wreck. Ellen wouldn’t be eating out her heart, maybe.”

  Dad’s voice wasn’t angry. He was standing outside the row, now, looking at the whole field.

  “Yeléna’ll get over it,” Mom said in a voice so low I had to lean out of bed to hear her.

  I wanted to go in there and tell her I wouldn’t get over it, that I hated all of this that Gil had despised. I hated her being a Russian peasant and Dad being sick so much. I hated even myself for being so big and tall and strong and simple.

  I heard the couch creak. Dad was going back to bed. I listened to each sound. Mom was turning out the light. They must be lying there, side by side, now. How could they?

  Slowly the thing I didn’t want to know bore in on me like the awful rising heat at harvesttime. People made messes of their lives and then they had to live with them. Life didn’t turn out right because you expected it to. There had never been any real love between Mom and Dad, For a little bit, I forgot Gil, thinking of them.

  10

  AFTER that night, I began to watch Mom and Dad, wondering what they were thinking. We all watched each other, sitting across the oilcloth-covered table from each other. I could feel Dad’s eyes on me. I could feel him wondering how badly I felt. When Mom and I were quiet too long, he talked. He invented errands for me to do in Clark City, but I made excuses. I’d rather stay home, I said. Why didn’t he and Mom go?

  Maybe there was one good thing about it; I thought about Anna Petrovna and Ben Webb as much as I thought about Ellen Webb and Gil Borden. I could feel the weight of their lives weighing on my own. Sometimes, up on the rimrock, I would look far off and try to separate their lives from mine. They had nothing to do with me, I told myself.

  I was free in myself, in my own body and mind. I would look at Mom and think how my hair was as light a yellow as the wheat and my eyes were gray and my body was slim. I would notice coldly how red Mom’s neck was below the strong, black hair. I would hear Dad’s cough and look at the tired lines in his face and think how unwearied I was after a whole day’s work outdoors. But it didn’t do any good; we were all bound together.

  There were two letters a couple of days after Gil left, one addressed to Mom. She opened it and made out most of the words. It was very polite, thanking her for her gracious
hospitality, saying what a new experience it had been for him, saying how he would always remember her hot borsch. Every word hurt me. It seemed insincere, because he hadn’t appreciated Mom.

  There was a letter for me. I couldn’t make myself read it for a long time. I looked at the ending first.

  “Always, Gil.”

  I took it with me down to the barn and climbed up in the seat of the duckfoot to read it.

  “Dear Ellen,

  “First, thank you for all you did to make my visit such a pleasure. It was all so new to me and made me realize how limited my life has been.

  “I want to be very frank and honest, because you are yourself. I have thought a great deal about us. I am afraid that we are too separated in background and interests and ways of looking at things to be happy together. You are a little like your country and I feel a sense of strangeness with you as I did in that wide desolate country. I didn’t want to say this while I was there, to spoil our time together. I felt the best way was just to leave as I did. I shall always remember how lovely you were standing there in the station as the train pulled out.

  “Always, Gil.”

  I crumpled the letter into a hard ball, then I opened it up again and tore it into pieces so no one could ever read it. I didn’t let myself think; it would hurt too much. I went up to the house and saw that Mom had left her letter on the table, but she had gone out to the chicken house. I put it in the stove. I couldn’t stand looking at myself or the house. The smell of a soup bone simmering on the stove nauseated me. Outside I could see Dad running the harrow over the fallow strips. I walked down there and told him I’d do it.

  Dad looked at me and his face was full of questions, but he didn’t ask any of them. I saw that he was a little afraid of me, and that made me feel more separate from him than ever.

  “All right, I’ll go to Bailey’s and get the gas for the truck.”

  I felt it a relief to have Dad gone. I watched him going slowly back to the house; then I had the sky and the hard clumpy earth to myself. I started to put on Dad’s gloves he had handed me, but I stuffed them in the pocket of my jeans instead. Why should I care how my hands looked? I didn’t care if I got burned with the sun or if I drove back and forth all day in a deadly monotony of rows, with the harrow dragging after me across the field like my own unhappiness.

  I didn’t go up to the house for lunch and Mom brought a pail of lunch and some milk down to the fence. I wished she hadn’t. I wished she would let me alone.

  “Your Dad an’ me eat up at the house,” Mom said.

  I ate it and I noticed how thick the crusts were and I thought with anger how I had cut the bread so thin for Gil.

  We had more rain that June, but not enough. Mom watched the sky anxiously. Dad complained about it and discussed it with anyone who stopped at Bailey’s. All he thought of was the land and crops and weather, I thought critically. No wonder that Gil was bored when he was here.

  Chuck Henderson was home helping his father. I used to go places with Chuck. He was going to the University of Montana. He came over one night and asked me to drive to town to a movie. I could feel Mom and Dad behind me, wanting me to go.

  “Why don’t you go ahead, Ellen?” Dad urged. A hard anger burned inside me. I had trouble keeping my voice pleasant.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll just get my coat.”

  “Wear that black dress you get,” Mom said.

  “I’m all right as I am,” I said, and put my coat over my cotton dress. I ran my comb through my hair in front of the kitchen mirror and put on some lipstick. I didn’t bother to look very closely, but even in that quick glance I could see my face looked dull.

  Chuck was nice enough, but I wasn’t interested in him. He was taking agriculture and coming back to help his dad on the ranch. He talked about school and the football games and the girls down there. I didn’t listen very hard. I was feeling the road going by, the same road Gil and I had driven over. It seemed to belong to us. I saw the light in the La Rouche shack and felt the mud suck at the wheels in the place where we were stuck. Why hadn’t I sat still in the truck and wrung my hands and acted scared? But I knew it wasn’t my getting the truck out that mattered. It was something bigger than that and harder to understand.

  “When does school open down there?” Chuck asked.

  “The seventeenth,” I said.

  “Why don’t you switch to Missoula? That’s where you ought to go,” Chuck said.

  “Oh, I’ll finish where I started. They have a good language department there; that’s what I’m majoring in,” I said, but it seemed a long time ago that I had been interested in studying.

  “Language! You mean French and Spanish . . . not me!” And then Chuck came back to the weather and ranching. I thought of Gil talking to a girl about crops.

  “. . . We may get a good summer after all. Dad says there’s nothing to keep us from having rain for a week steady. I’m going to own a place of my own someday and believe me, it’s going to be partly irrigated. The day of the farmer praying to God for rain while his crops fry up is over. . . .”

  I couldn’t keep my mind on what he was saying. All I could think of was driving to town with Gil. I looked at Chuck’s hands on the wheel and thought of Gil’s.

  We went to a movie and sat and watched a play about two sisters. One stole the man the other sister loved. That was different: to have someone else take your man. That was different from having him change and cool and no longer love you because of something in yourself.

  Chuck put his arm inside of mine and measured our finger tips together in my lap. I let him. Why not? We went out of the movie and had hamburgers and I remembered the night after the concert when Dad bought them. I wished I were eight years old again. It isn’t good to wish you were a child; it’s like hiding your face in your warm collar out of the wind. When you lift it again, the wind seems twice as cruel.

  “Want to stop in at the Bijou?” Chuck asked. “I’d like to dance with you again.”

  “I’d just as soon,” I said. I had a sudden fierce desire to hurt myself. I even picked out the place where we had sat, Gil and I. I told Chuck to ask the orchestra to play “Tomorrow Is a Lovely Day.”

  We had cokes and danced. “You dance just as well as you used to,” Chuck said, “but you seem quieter. You didn’t use to be so quiet.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, but I couldn’t think of anything to say to him. I dreaded the ride home. I meant to let him put his arm around me going back, but when he tried to, I couldn’t stand it.

  “Don’t, Chuck!” I said, so sharply he was cross.

  At our gate Chuck said, “How about going to the dance at Sun River Saturday night?”

  “I’m sorry, Chuck, I can’t go.”

  “Well, if that’s the way you feel about it . . .”

  Then he drove off and I had to go into the house again and face Mom and Dad. I dreaded that. I felt them both sitting there watching me, looking to see if I had had a good time.

  “Hello,” I said. “You’re getting so you sit up late.”

  “Why didn’t you ask young Henderson in? He’s developed considerably,” Dad said, trying to be offhanded about it.

  “I didn’t want to,” I said and went into my room, and I could feel their silence through the thin wall.

  Until there was hay to be cut, I worked in the garden. Once a week I drove the truck down to fill the big barrel with water from the creek. It was almost a joy to attach the hose and spray the hard-packed gumbo. The water spread out over the hardpan surface like a map, peninsulas and islands of moisture creeping out farther. When the dirt was wet black I felt easier in myself; some tightness that had held me loosened.

  I used to like to run in wet black mud when I was a child. In summer the ground was always so hard; the roads that had been puddings of mud turned to dust that stuck in your throat and tickled your nose, and made your hair lie flat and lusterless on your head. Dust was what bodies of people and animals alike turned
into; it was part of death. But mud was elastic and springy; there was life in it.

  I remembered, one time in the spring, coming home from school with Judy Bailey and seeing Mom down by the fence. We ran across the field instead of going to the house first. When we came up to her I saw that Mom was barefoot. She had left her shoes way round by the gate. I didn’t mind until I felt Judy looking at Mom’s feet. I could feel her thinking right through her silly fat little head.

  Judy and I were walking on the stubble to keep our school shoes out of the mud. Mom was walking in the plowed fallow that was so soft that the mud squshed up between her toes.

  “Don’t your feet get hurt going barefoot, Mrs. Webb?” Judy asked.

  “Not where it’s soft,” Mom said. I was thinking how Judy would tell about it in a hateful, sly whisper to the girls at school. Then Mom laughed. “You girls, take off your shoes and stockings; run up to the house that way. It feel good!”

  “No, thank you,” Judy tittered. “I’ll have to hurry over home.”

  When she was gone, I went barefoot with Mom, not because I wanted to, but out of a kind of loyalty. We looked at the footprints we made in the mud. We set them together over by the firm edge, mine shorter than Mom’s then and not so broad.

  “You feel like it was spring through the bottom of your feet!” Mom said. “Feel?”

  Then I did feel it. Mom laughed at me. “We hurry up to the house an’ wash our feet before your dad come. He don’t like me barefoot.”

  On the porch steps Mom brought out a basin of warm water. “Wash your feet, Yólochka; they feel like new,” Mom said. She washed her own and put on the heavy men’s shoes she wore around the ranch. My own inside their heavy laced boots still kept that cool springy feeling.

  “They feel dancy,” I said. Mom laughed again.

  “That’s right, they do, Yólochka moya.”

  But today when I thought of that, I could feel Gil wincing at the sight of Mom and me going barefoot in the mud. I hurried with the watering, only to be through with it.