Winter Wheat

by Mildred Walker

  That day the sameness of what we did bore into me. I thought of our lives and I wondered what gave them any meaning. When I had Gil to love there was meaning, but now there was none. How did Mom and Dad stand going on and on working to feed themselves and me? What was the use? The question was like a hole in my pocket. Nothing was safe there. But the combine clattered on behind the tractor and the wheat fell beneath the sickle and the grain poured into the truck, on and on, up and down the strip, leaving the sun-bright stubble in a wider and wider swath. My eyes smarted from the heat and my skin crawled with the bits of straw. I couldn’t see any beauty today. Last year I had worked like this, but I had been thinking about college. I hadn’t wondered about meanings to things. I had to lower the reel again. The wheat wasn’t good in here. The flow of grain out of the spout wasn’t a full liquid stream, it was scanty and thin.

  “If we get seven bushels to the acre out of this we’ll do well,” Dad said when we stopped for lunch. “It’s the poorest crop we’ve had in five years.”

  Mom nodded. “It’s bad.”

  “Well, it’s better than thirty-three. Remember that year?”

  Mom shook her head. Dad turned to me. “That year the drought was so bad, Ellen, that some of the Swedes got a Lutheran minister to come out and hold a service to pray for rain. Everyone around here went except Anna.”

  Mom made a moue of contempt with her mouth. “We have good wheat as any. Your father can’t make up his mind to go or not. He get there for last song.” Mom’s face was sly and her eyes were bright with making fun.

  “Maybe that’s what saved us!” Dad retorted, laughing. It was good when they laughed at each other. Dad went over to gas up. Mom and I still sat on the ground against the combine. The grasshoppers kept up an incessant machinelike noise, and yet it seemed quiet.

  “Mom, do you ever pray?” I asked. This summer I had grown bold at asking questions.

  “Sure, I pray,” Mom said. She was tying her handkerchief back on her head.

  “But do you believe it helps? I mean, you pray for rain and good crops and it doesn’t do any good.”

  “I don’t pray for those. We take what we get. I don’t bother God for that. I pray for something hard once and I get it, long time ago in Russia.”

  “For what, Mom?” I asked softly.

  “I pray your father get well. Then I pray to have you. I don’t ask things all the time, like in your father’s church.” Mom stood up as though that was enough of such talk. “You drive the tractor this afternoon. I take combine.”

  “But, Mom . . .” I wanted her to stay.

  “What, Yeléna?” Mom stayed impatiently. I had to ask quickly what was in my head without thinking how to put it.

  “You never taught me to pray.”

  Mom’s brows lowered over her eyes. “Your father and I, we pray different. We don’t teach you. When you feel it, you will pray.”

  I thought of that Easter Sunday when we almost went to church. I thought of Mom’s giving me the icon and how cross it made Dad.

  “Do you pray now, Mom?”

  Mom looked way off beyond me. She sounded cross. “We won’t get done if we don’t start. Your father go back with load already.”

  But all that afternoon I thought of Mom’s praying for Dad to get well. She must have loved him then. It was terrible to think of love dying out like wheat pinched off by the drought. I wondered once if it would have done any good if I had prayed to keep Gil. Then I looked up at the endless blue sky reaching way beyond the pale outlines of the mountain, over the stubble and the wheat. It seemed too big to pray to. We three looked too small and unimportant down here on the ground. And there were the Yonkos and the Bardiches and the Hakkulas and the Halvorsens, all out threshing too. If we were all saying prayers, one of us asking for one thing and someone else asking for the very opposite, we would sound like the hungry squealing of the pigs.

  Running the tractor was monotonous; it left you too much time to think and we still had another week of threshing ahead of us. Suddenly, I wished we were through.

  The night we finished the threshing I didn’t get started to the elevator with the load till nearly ten. From the road I could see there were plenty of trucks ahead of me, lined up waiting their turn. It didn’t matter. Tomorrow we could sleep late. We could take it easy for a day.

  It was a clear moonlight night with the Northern Lights spreading a white tent again over a part of the sky. Threshing was pretty well done around Gotham. As far as you could see there was no wheat, only bare stubble and freshly turned earth where they’d started drilling already for the new winter wheat.

  The motion of the truck fanned the hot air into a little breeze. By the store where last June’s mud hole was dried into hard ruts the truck bumped so heavily I could feel the load I had on behind. It’s a pity that you go through the same motions and work for a poor crop as for a good one.

  I stopped at the store and bought a bottle of pop. There were only a couple of people there. Most folks were over at the elevator.

  “Well, I s’pose you’ll be going back East next week or so,” Mrs. Peterson said.

  “I may not be going back this year,” I said.

  “That’s too bad. It ain’t been a very good year anywhere around here. I heard you folks got hailed out some places.”

  “We didn’t do so badly,” I said. I knew it was my father in me. He didn’t like to admit bad luck.

  Mrs. Peterson’s face crinkled up so it looked like a mouse’s. “I guess you’re thinking of marrying that Eastern fellow that was out here to see you?”

  “No,” I said. “He’s in the Air Force.” I went out of the store leaving half my bottle of pop standing there on the counter.

  I drove the truck into the line. If Dad had been there, he would have got out to talk, but I stayed in the cab. I was getting so I didn’t talk any more than Mom did. The other drivers were in the elevator, watching other ranchers’ wheat, or outside where it was cooler, telling jokes, talking politics, smoking. Two men standing near my truck were drinking beer out of bottles. I could smell it on the hot night, along with the dusty grain and the sweaty odor of the men themselves and of my own body and clothes. I was no different from the rest.

  Nurmi Maki sneezed so many times it was like a clock striking. Each time he seemed to say “Jerushlem.” Somebody laughed. Then Nurmi blew his nose so loud it was worse than the sneezing.

  “Dammit, always have hay fever threshing time. Seems like I can’t never stand it. Got a boy’s the same way,” Nurmi spluttered.

  “You old pig, Nurmi, I thought you was blowing a trumpet,” Minnie Bruhl called out to him. I hadn’t seen her before. She talked as loud as a man and swore worse. Klaus Bruhl died the first year I was in high school and she was running the ranch alone. She had three or four children that Bailey said were wild as coyotes. When she stood in front of the headlights I thought I’d never seen an uglier-looking woman. Her gray hair was straight and bobbed unevenly, as though she’d done it herself. Her red face was big-boned and disfigured by two large bristling moles by the corner of her mouth and she had a tooth gone in front. She wore bib overalls that were too tight front and back.

  I sat back listening to tag ends of the men’s talk. I could see the truck on the elevator tilt and hear the sliding sound of the grain that was like the pound of a heavy rain, then the special creaking sound of the platform legs.

  “Good years or bad, I always say wheat in the elevator’s same as money in the bank,” Norman Olsen declared.

  “That’s not saying what you’ll get for it, though,” someone else said.

  Chuck Henderson came over to talk to me.

  “I been deferred till the wheat’s in. I guess I’ll have to go now, pretty soon,” he told me. I looked at him, wondering what kind of a soldier he’d make. I couldn’t think of him as anything but a rancher.

  “Are you glad?” I asked, thinking it would be good to have your life taken in charge, to be sent some place
and know you couldn’t do anything about it.

  Chuck looked almost embarrassed. “Oh, I suppose I’ll like it all right when I get there. But I’d just as soon stay here, too. How’d your wheat thresh out?” he asked, as though he didn’t want to talk any more about the war.

  “Fair,” I said. “Nothing extra.”

  “Same here. Gosh, it’s been hot threshing.”

  Minnie Bruhl came back to her truck and stood there, hands on her hips, waiting.

  “Say, she can take my place. She’s probably in a hurry to get home to her kids,” Chuck said, and went over to speak to her.

  “Why, damn you, Chuck Henderson, I can wait my turn same as the rest. I ain’t askin’ nor takin’ no favors and I ain’t since Klaus died.”

  Her voice was loud enough to be heard all over the place. Somebody laughed. Chuck walked back to me looking as though he wished himself out of sight. Minnie Bruhl followed over.

  “I didn’t see you had a girl you wanted to wait with. I mighta known it wasn’t my beauty you was after.” She laughed as loud as she swore.

  “Are you through threshing, Mrs. Bruhl?” I asked, to get her off Chuck.

  “Cut the last piece tonight. Tony Bardich came over and threshed for me, him an’ Jake. They eat more’n any men I ever fed in my life and Klaus was a good hand to eat, too.” She started to laugh and broke off in the middle to turn on the scrawny little girl who climbed out of her truck and came over.

  “I told you you’d have to go to sleep and stay if you was going to come with me tonight. That kid tags me every place I go,” she complained to us.

  The child stood beside her mother as though her words made no impression at all. Chuck handed her a stick of gum.

  “Damn you, whaddya say?” Minnie Bruhl asked the child and then without waiting to hear her muttered “Thank you” started talking to Chuck about combines.

  “We got the best wheat we’ve had since Pa died. An’ we’re goin’ to have our own combine one of these days,” the little girl piped out suddenly.

  “Can’t you keep your mouth shut?” Minnie demanded, without seeming angry at all. “If Klaus coulda seen the wheat we had this year he’da pulled through his pneumonia. The year he died the crop failed. He died before we had the damned stuff in.” Her voice changed. It was almost tender. “I’d give a lot if he could see it this year.”

  The man ahead of Chuck’s truck was through and Chuck went to drive his up the ramp. Minnie Bruhl went back to her truck.

  Driving back home with the empty truck rattling loosely behind me, I tried not to think of Minnie. I couldn’t stand any more disappointment and sorrow, even in someone else. A wave of sadness—for the whole world, I guess—came up in me. But I couldn’t get out of my head how different Minnie’s voice had sounded when she was talking about Klaus. He was a big, hard-working German who never said much. It was strange to feel Minnie’s love for him, but I had. There was meaning enough in the threshing for her, I thought a little enviously, but not for Mom and Dad or me.

  14

  AND so the threshing was done. When I woke the next morning the sun was hot on the porch.

  “Mom, what time is it?” I called.

  Mom came out with her coffee cup. “After ten. Your father sleep till eight. He is gone down to Bailey’s.” She sat down on the porch step in the bright sunshine and poured her coffee into her saucer. I had seen her do that so many times before but I liked watching her. It annoyed Dad, so she drank from her coffee cup at the table, but when we were alone she liked it best that way. I used to try it when I was a child but the coffee always ran down my chin.

  Mom’s hair was still down her back in two thick black braids. She looked younger than she was. I could almost see how she must have been as Anna Petrovna.

  “You’re pretty, Mamushka,” I said lazily, calling her by the name she had taught me when I was a child.

  Mom made a little face and brushed my compliment away with her hand.

  “Don’t talk such nonsense, Yólochka.” I had that queer feeling I have, sometimes, with Mom that we were both talking Russian even though we had said only two Russian words.

  “Mr. Henderson was here last night while you are gone. He says do you want Prairie Butte teacherage? The teacher they got is leaving. Too lonesome for her, fifteen miles from Prairie Butte movies. They pay ninety dollar a month and give you wood and school stuff.”

  “But, Mom!” I was so startled it was like having cold water thrown at me. I sat up straight. “Who told Mr. Henderson I wanted a teacherage?”

  Mom’s face was, of a sudden, so stolid I felt shut out. We looked at each other across the porch as though we were strangers and spoke a different tongue. She was Russian; I was not.

  Mom took her hairpins out of her pocket and began pinning up her braids.

  “I guess they need teachers bad now. Mr. Henderson, he knows you have your teaching paper.”

  “What did Dad say?” I asked coldly. Of course Mom must have asked Mr. Henderson about a job for me.

  “I don’t talk to him yet. He’ll say borrow money and go to school.”

  I knew how Mom felt about putting a debt on the ranch. Ours was one of the very few around Gotham that was clear. One time when I had complained that even the Bardich girls had a piano in their house Mom had said furiously, “You tell them you have no piano but your ranch is paid for.” That was what Mom cared for more than my going back to school. She set her coffee cup and saucer on the porch and I noticed how the saucer was stained from the coffee.

  “If I worked . . . I can have my job at the library again. Maybe I can get the cafeteria job back too. It wouldn’t cost much except my tuition and my train ticket. They have funds you can pay back after college. I wouldn’t have to borrow on the farm.” I looked straight at Mom. “The wheat brought something.”

  “The wheat brought seven hunderd fifty dollar, not counting what seed and gas cost.”

  “I don’t care. You can tell Mr. Henderson I’m going back to school. I’ll manage it some way.” I threw back the cover and stood up. I wouldn’t stay here.

  Mom went on sitting on the top step of the porch. I was so angry for an instant I think I hated her. I thought of her scheming to make Dad marry her. Now she was scheming to have me stay here and earn my own living. What could she know about an education?

  “It don’t hurt you to teach a year,” Mom said.

  “I’d lose all I learned last year and I’d have to drop out of my class,” I burst out at her.

  “If you don’t know what they teach you last year, no use to learn no more,” Mom said.

  We didn’t talk any more about it. All morning I was really waiting for Dad to come home. When I saw him drive into the yard I ran out as I used to as a child.

  “Hi, Dad!”

  “Hello, Ellen.” He got out of the truck as though he were lame. “I had to go all the way to town. The man at the store said we were lucky to get through the threshing. He’ll have to order a new part.”

  “Will it cost much?”

  “Enough. He’s going to come out and see it first time he has business out this way.” Dad stopped to wash at the back door.

  At the table I’d bring up the subject of school. We’d have it out there. I took the vegetables from the stove and carried them to the table. I felt somehow triumphant over Mom.

  “How you feel, Ben?” Mom asked.

  “Well, I’m glad we’re through the threshing. I’m going to lay up a few days.”

  “What’s the matter, Dad?”

  “Oh, I’ve got a place erupting on my leg again. It hurts so much it must be a big chunk,” Dad said. I could see for myself that he was in pain. The steam from the spinach suffocated me. I had a hopeless feeling—Dad was sick again.

  “You get into bed and I fix poultice,” Mom said. She got up to put the flaxseed on the stove.

  I might as well talk about going to school now as wait. Dad would be sick all tomorrow, maybe the next day. Dad pushe
d back his plate. He would be gone in the other room in a minute.

  Mom turned the light on. It was still light, but not over the stove. The bright glare lighted up Dad’s face with the lines between his eyes and down from his mouth and the thinness of his cheeks. Mom’s face always looked darker in the bright light, darker-browed, darker-eyed than in the daytime. Even the fine black hairs above her mouth showed up. It must show me, too, sitting there stupidly between them. This was the way Gil had seen us, and I felt the color creep up in my face. Dad limped painfully in to the couch in the next room. Mom stood at the stove. I took my dishes and went over to the sink. Why did I see us like this, as though I were standing outside?

  I did the dishes while Mom was putting on the poultices. I heard their voices but I didn’t listen to their words, and as soon as I was through I went out to the porch to escape from the smell of the flaxseed. I sat there thinking of what I would say. It was the peasant in Mom that made her afraid to borrow. That was foolish. I couldn’t stay here all winter.

  Mom came out finally. “It’s bad this time,” she said in a low voice. “It start yesterday but he don’t want to say nothing till we was through threshing. Now it look bad.”

  I braced myself against feeling sorry for Dad. “Mom, you did ask Mr. Henderson about the teacherage, didn’t you?”

  “That Gil has made you foolish, Yólochka. Mrs. Peterson told Mr. Henderson at the store you said maybe you don’t go back to school. Henderson came out here while you was still at the elevator. You’ve had your mad for nothing.”

  I had to believe her, but I was still angry that she cared so little about my going back to school.

  “Will you let me borrow the money to go back?”

  Mom didn’t answer.

  “We borrowed money to buy the combine!”

  “But we work for other ranchers till we got it paid back by fall.”

  “Dad won’t want me to stay home and teach. You said so yourself. He always wished he’d gone on and finished.”

  Mom didn’t answer. We were so still we heard Dad walking across the floor in his stocking feet. He had turned the radio on. The static is terrible in summer. He was trying for the war news. The pieces of the news came through the firecracker explosions. The war was miles and miles away. I hardly took in what I heard. I was waiting for the news to be over, then I’d go in and ask Dad.