As we drove we could see how the grain that was untouched by the hail was coloring up fast. The kernels shelled out of the sheaf when you rubbed them. They tasted sweet and hard between your teeth, the way your life should taste to you in the morning when you wake up and at noon when you’re hungry and again at night when you’re through for the day—only mine didn’t, I thought, and spit the grain out of my mouth.
“We ought to get started combining about Monday,” Dad said. “The hail wouldn’t have had to hold off much longer to make us a crop.”
We listened to the Grain Market Broadcast each noon now as we had listened last August.
“This is your Grain Market Broadcast for today: Spring and Winter up four . . . Repeating . . .” The news of the hail and the heat and the lack of rain in the Northwest had reached all the way back to the grain markets of the cities. Wheat was up. The price was good this year. They needed wheat in Europe. War needs wheat always. But we would have so much less to sell this year.
“One dark Northern Spring . . . eighty-two.”
But it hadn’t been like that. Mine had been one tender, happy spring, too beautiful to last.
“One dark hard Winter . . . eighty-three.” The words sounded like a melancholy prophecy of what was ahead.
“Durum, Flax, and Rye . . . no change.”
“Minneapolis futures for September . . .”
There wasn’t any Minneapolis future for me, I thought. Maybe I could borrow the money for school, but what if we had a crop failure the next year? Dad and Mom said nothing about my going away next month. Were they worrying about it, too?
But in the morning the worry slipped from me. I went out after breakfast and looked across the country. Gil should see it now, I thought, and a kind of hard anger came with my thinking of him. Anyone who loves beauty, I told myself, would be blind if he couldn’t see it here now. The wideness that Gil had thought was depressing was here, but it was beauty, too. The deep-yellow grain, laid against the fallow strips, was beautiful beyond anything you could think of. The damage of the hail didn’t show from here. There isn’t anything prouder than a field of ripe grain. It makes you stand a little taller so you can see farther across it.
Mom and I were putting up chickens. It was blazing hot in the kitchen with the fire roaring in the range, and the dishpan in the sink was piled with dishes. We’d been working outside so much the house was just a place in which to sleep and cook. Dust would be thick on everything in the front room, but we didn’t have time to go in there anyway. Mom’s face glistened with sweat, but it didn’t look heavy or dull. She likes this time of year for all the work is hardest.
Dad came by and called to me to come and ride over to the elevator with him.
“Go ahead,” Mom said, and I went like a child.
We drove out of our way to look at the Yonkos’ wheat. It was no heavier than ours. Afterward, when the wheat is all cut and sold, the difference between what you get and what you expected strikes in on you, but while it is standing in the fields you don’t think of that.
Even Bill Bailey at the elevator had a new briskness. His busy time was just starting. Ranchers came to the elevator like cattle to a water hole. Nobody had time to lean against the wall and talk or play pinochle in the office. They had to get right back. Gotham showed its reason for being: carloads of grain were going out of Gotham every day now, bound for all parts of the world. We had a reason for being, too. Maybe that’s what everybody is after. Mine had been Gil this spring. Now it was getting in the wheat. After the wheat . . . I didn’t know.
“Hurry up, Ellen. We want to get right back,” Dad called. There was a kind of importance in the sound of his voice. I wished it could be that way all the time.
We must have gone a mile before Dad reached into his pocket and brought out a letter for me in Gil’s handwriting. He gave it to me without taking his eyes off the road.
“I didn’t know whether to give it to you or not,” he said.
I didn’t want to read it there with Dad sitting beside me, watching, but I couldn’t not read it, either. It was postmarked “Tampa.” I tore off the end of the envelope and the “Dear Ellen” in his handwriting made me weak and shivery as though I’d had a sunstroke.
“Dear Ellen,
“I can’t go on without writing you. I have not heard from you since June. That must mean that you are angry or hurt. I wrote as I did because I feared we didn’t have enough in common to build a happy life together. Won’t you write me and tell me that you understood?
“Always,
“Gil.”
I stuffed the letter in my pocket. I felt he didn’t want anything changed, but he wanted to be sure I wasn’t angry so he could feel right with himself. “Won’t you write me?” What would I say if I wrote him? “I loved you but you didn’t love me enough.”
Suddenly, Dad reached his arm around me.
“Oh, Dad,” I whispered.
“I know, Karmont,” he said gently.
Dad didn’t say anything against Gil—that wouldn’t have helped any. But I could feel how much he loved me. I handed him the letter and took hold of the wheel so he could read it. He folded it and handed it back to me.
“He can’t get you out of his mind.”
“Like a duty,” I said. “Something you feel you should have done and didn’t.” Then I thought of Dad and Mom. Dad must have felt Anna Petrovna was a duty. He could have gone off and left her; instead he had taken her back to his home. He had come to depend on her, but I didn’t believe he had ever loved her.
“Could a man come to love a girl if in the beginning he felt it his duty to?” I was ashamed after I had asked it.
Dad was slow in answering. “Don’t let any man think of you as a duty, Ellen,” he said very soberly. “You don’t want Gil back because he feels obligated.”
It seemed to me that he had as good as said that he hadn’t loved Mom. I felt the kind of coldness I used to feel as a child, even in the truck with the engine throwing up heat in our faces and the sun beating down on us. I tore Gil’s letter into pieces and dropped them over the car door.
We took the combine out of the shed that afternoon. That starts the threshing the way setting up a Christmas tree begins Christmas. I get as excited over one as the other. Dad went right to work on it, oiling and cleaning out straw and seeds and dust. I put on old jeans and covered my head with a cap and got underneath to put grease in all the little grease nipples. It looks so complicated from underneath it makes your head ache to try to understand it. As I crawled out I saw the shadow of the combine laid out on the hard gumbo of the yard as clear-cut as a photograph.
We were one of the first ranches around Gotham to get a combine, the first of the small ranches, that is. Mom kept coming out to watch us and look at it. Every rancher’s wife is proud of the combine; it does the work of so many men that there aren’t any big threshing crews to feed any more. Mom’s so proud of it that when anything happens to it she acts as though it were a hurt child. Mom and Dad and I can thresh the wheat in ten or fifteen days by ourselves if the weather’s any good. We used to be cooking and setting tables and washing dishes at harvesttime. Now we can be in the field all day.
Dad had the combine ready Saturday night. He could have begun Sunday. Way over to the west we could see by the cloud of dust rising from their combine that the Yonkos had started. But Mom said it was bad luck to start on Sunday. Dad laughed at her for that, but it was hard to go against Mom when she said something so firmly with her lips set.
Mom made bread and pie and cake; we wouldn’t have much time to cook next week. There was such a festive air in the house that I said to Dad, “You’d think Mom was getting ready for company.”
And Mom said: “I am. I got The Harvest here.” Mom says quaint things like that with a different twist to them that gives them a foreign sound, but it’s as much the thought behind it as the words themselves that make it sound foreign. She doesn’t think like anyone else.
; Monday I was up at five. I knew Mom had been up long before that. By six we were down at the field. The combine was all ready to go, but there was too much damp yet on the wheat. It has to be bone-dry if the wheat is going to come out clean. It was hard to wait. We were kind of quiet and excited. Mom went back up to the house to do something. Dad fussed with the combine and the tractor. I sat against the fence and chewed a stalk of wheat and watched the morning grow wider. It was cool now, and in less than half an hour it would be like a furnace.
The Bardiches came by on their way into town to the fair. Jake Bardich yelled at Dad:
“Aren’t you going to the fair?”
Dad shook his head. “Comes at the wrong time for me this year.”
Tony Bardich was in back, but he didn’t say anything. A year ago I’d have wanted to go to the fair, but this year I didn’t care. I guess that’s a sign of growing up.
“Want to go some day this week, Ellen?” Dad asked.
“Nope,” I said. “They’re all alike.” I thought of Gil writing that about commencement. Gil had known commencements all his life; I had known State Fairs. Then I stood up and kicked at the dirt with my foot. I wasn’t going to think of Gil any more, but I thought of what Dad had said. “He can’t get you out of his mind.” I was glad of it.
It was good to get started. We took our places like old troupers, Mom in the tractor and I running the combine. Later we’d change off. Dad stood on the combine to see that it was running smoothly. He’d come alongside with the truck as soon as there was enough grain cut. He’d get a load and then take it back to shovel into the storage shed. The shoveling was the hardest work. Mom and I took a hand at it sometimes, but Dad didn’t like us to.
Now the sickle was flashing back and forth, shearing off the grain that bent beneath the reel. The noise of the machinery, the look of the tractor, the sight of the stream of wheat falling out of the elevator spout into the grain bin, were all so familiar it might have been last August or the August before that. I wondered how many Augusts would find me here threshing the wheat. I didn’t care much; I just wondered.
We were out in the field, almost dead-center. The big combine seemed like a ship out on a sea, just as it had when I was fourteen and Dad bought our first combine. I lowered the reel to get a clump of wheat that grew shorter than the rest. There was a small patch of poor soil in the field. I knew it well enough, like a mole on my own face.
An airplane flew over our heads, one of the Army planes from the new air base in Clark City. The pilot waved and I waved back. When he was right over us I couldn’t hear his motor because our own was so loud. But when he got off away I could hear him. His plane disappeared and made me feel as though we were standing still in the field.
I tried to keep my mind on the chains and rollers, to look at the wheat falling out of the spout and think how lucky we were not to have to bind and shock the wheat before we threshed. I could remember taking a nap against a shock of wheat when I was a little kid and Mom and Dad were both working in the field.
I wondered about Mom driving the tractor. She had a blue cotton handkerchief tied over her head today—that was all I could see, and the square look of her shoulders. I pulled the cord that ran from the combine to the tractor and had a sheep bell on it. I couldn’t hear the bell back here, but Mom could hear it right back of her. She slowed down and looked around to see what I wanted. I shook my head and smiled at her and waved to go on. Mom got it. She knew I just wanted to see her turn around. Her face lighted up. She liked all this: that it was the first day of threshing and that we had good weather and that we were all three here working. I liked it, too. I pointed over to Dad. He was coming behind with the truck, watching to see that the truck came just parallel. His hat was pushed far back on his head and his face and neck were red. He drew alongside and yelled. Mom nodded and turned back to her driving. That was all, but somehow it made me feel good. I pushed the lever that sent the shining wheat emptying into the truck.
We stopped at noon and ate by the combine that gave the only shade in all that blazing sun. Mom had a thermos of cold milk that tasted best of all. And then we were back at it.
The heat deepened. I could feel the platform of the tractor burning through the rubber soles of my old tennis shoes. Everything I touched was hot, even through my heavy work gloves. All the freshness of the morning was gone. The smell of grease and gasoline enclosed me, shutting out the air. The cloud of chaff and dust settled down on us. Particles of the straw stuck to my sweating neck and arms. I kept my eyes on the shrinking size of the standing wheat and the widening desert of stubble, hard and bright and shining like sticks of bamboo. I tried to think of girls working in factories that were close and hot and filled with the stench of grease and steam, of soldiers fighting in tropical countries, but everything was unreal except the strip of wheat and the millions of little grains falling into the truck, falling so fast in the sun they looked like a piece of cloth woven of dark and light gold. Straw crept into my sneakers and gave the heat needles to prick at the soles of my feet. The sun was turning the rimrock pink. It must be after six. My eyes came back to the wheat in front of me just in time. I almost missed a low place. The hail had cut a wide swath in here we hadn’t seen. It had been hidden before by the waving wheat. It hurt to see the reels come up without bending wheat between them. Drought years the wheat is like that, scanty and moth-eaten over a whole field.
When I heard the loose sound of broken chain cutting through the noise of the combine, I pulled the cord to tell Mom to stop and signaled to Dad. Dad was with me in a minute. He was clever with machinery. A rancher almost has to be. It was a pity to have something go wrong now when we were trying to finish the field before dark. I hadn’t known I was tired, only hot, but now that we were stopped I felt my tiredness. My hands were cramped. I climbed down on the ground and the crunching stubble under my feet was a relief after the steel platform. I wiped my face and went over to tell Mom what was wrong.
The stillness was heavy after the steady noise we had lived with all day. My voice sounded squeaky speaking out in it. Mom looked tired.
“We haven’t got much more to do,” she said.
“All right, Ellen,” Dad called. “I’ve fastened it with a piece of haywire. I think it’ll hold till we finish this.”
It was hard to start again. Four times across would do it. I measured with my eyes.
The wheat looked gray by the time we finished. We left the combine and the tractor there in the field and drove back to the house in the truck. Now we’d have to get supper and bring in the cows and milk them and drive a load of wheat over to the elevator.
“That wasn’t a bad start,” Dad said.
“How long it take you to fix the chain in the morning?” Mom asked.
“Oh, half an hour. If that’s all that goes wrong this time I won’t do any kicking.” Dad was in good spirits.
“You let Yeléna drive the truck to the elevator,” Mom suggested.
“We’ll see,” Dad said. Our house looked little and dark as we drove up to it.
“You go help your father get the cows. I fix supper,” Mom said quietly to me. “He’s tired.”
Walking across to the barn, I looked back at the bare kitchen windows, sprung suddenly to light. Mom was standing in front of the stove. She was tired too, but it was Dad she thought of. Maybe, all these years she had been trying to make up to him for . . . for tricking him. Always, even when I had worked hard all day, what I had heard that night was there in my mind.
Dad had the three cows we milked already in.
“Want a milkmaid, Dad?” I said.
“Oh, no, you go up and help your mother with supper. She’s had a hard day.”
I hesitated a minute, then I went back up. We didn’t talk much at supper. We were too hungry and too tired. Dad let me take the grain to the elevator. Nobody was ahead of me and I could empty it right away.
“Wheat’s running a little light this year,” Bailey told me. “‘Ti
sn’t as good as it was last.”
On the way back I went around by the Halvorsens’ reservoir. It was dark now at eleven o’clock. No danger of anyone seeing me. The water was warm as a bath and so hard I could feel the edge between my fingers, but it felt good on my skin. I lay on my back and floated so I could see the stars. Once a bird flew over me as though it had meant to land on the water and, startled by my white body under the water, darted up again. I could hear the soft flutter of its wings close to me. All the tiredness in my back and legs washed out of me. I didn’t feel like Ellen Webb, at all, just light and free. When I put on my clothes again they hardly touched me. I carried my light feeling all the way home.
The house was dark again when I came around the hill, but Mom called out to me. I undressed in the dark and went to bed on the glider. I don’t remember when the glider stopped swinging, I went to sleep so fast.
13
THE days went by like wheat sheared off by the sickle, shredded into minutes and quickly lost sight of in the constant stream flowing out of the spout into the grain bin. I lost track of them. One day the johnny bar broke and so we were held up while Dad fixed it. One night it rained and we couldn’t start till the middle of the next afternoon. Dad took the big water barrels to fill them with water and Mom did the washing we hadn’t done on Monday. I helped Mom fill and empty the tubs, but it was awful to be in the house after being in the fields every day. I felt too closed in, and the house was hot and steamy.
“You don’t see young people your own age, Yeléna,” Mom said.
“I don’t mind.”
“You grow old too soon. No use moping no more for that boy.”
“I’m not moping. Please let me alone, Mom,” I said quickly, and then I was sorry. Mom didn’t say another word all morning, but I felt she was still worrying about me as she sat on the tractor seat driving up and back the next afternoon.
Winter Wheat Page 15
