Winter Wheat

by Mildred Walker

  “I’m going to ask Dad, Mom,” I said firmly.

  Suddenly, the radio snapped off in the middle of a sentence. We could hear Dad going back to the couch.

  “Anna!” he called, and I could feel the tiredness and pain in his voice. “I guess I’ll have this poultice changed.”

  I sat alone on the porch. After a while I went up on the rim rock where I could think about my own plans, but it was no use, my mind was filled with Mom and Dad. When you feel sorry for your father and mother it makes you feel older than they are. Even the line of the rimrock looked stooped and tired, and the house below it seemed lonely. I wasn’t free to do what I wanted.

  I went over to see Mr. Henderson and told him I’d take the teacherage. They were so thankful to get a teacher at such late notice I didn’t even have to meet with the committee or sign a contract. Mr. Henderson said they only wanted me to promise not to leave for some defense job before the school term was over and not to go off and get married.

  “I don’t suppose we have any right to ask a pretty girl like you to promise a thing like that these days,” Mr. Henderson said with a smile.

  I said I could promise not to do either. When I came back, I told Dad I’d decided to stay home and teach this next year.

  “Well, if you don’t like it, remember, you don’t have to stay,” Dad said easily.

  “I promised I’d stay,” I said. I hadn’t really believed I wouldn’t be going back to school until now, but Dad seemed relieved, I thought. It hurt that he didn’t insist on my going back to school.

  Dad was too sick to drive over to the teacherage with us. The redness had spread all up his leg. I took turns with Mom changing the hot packs. Dad had been feverish some of the time, and irritable. Mom bossed him gruffly and paid no attention to his complaining, but she seemed to grow more stolid and quiet. We took turns seeding the winter wheat, so one of us could be at the house with Dad.

  One afternoon I couldn’t stand it any longer. Dad lay on the couch with the hot soaks on his leg and his foot in an old bedroom slipper. I was packing my clothes in the bedroom. The house was full of an empty stillness.

  “Dad, wouldn’t you like me to read to you?” I asked desperately, wanting to fill the room with some thoughts besides our own.

  “I wouldn’t mind,” Dad said, “but I’ve read all the magazines.”

  “Maybe I can find some old magazines in the shed you haven’t read.”

  “There’s a box of books in that closet in the shed. I guess, though, it would be more trouble to get in to them than it’s worth. The box is nailed shut.”

  I carried the box into the living room and got a screwdriver and a hammer.

  “They used to be on the bookshelves in my bedroom in Vermont. When we came out here I never bothered to unpack them.”

  “But why? I don’t see how you could help it, Dad.”

  “Oh, they’re mostly boys’ books. I worked so hard that first year I couldn’t stay awake long enough to read anything at night, and my hands felt too big and rough to turn a page.”

  “But later on, in the winter?”

  “I know, but I’d turned my face against books,” Dad said. “What’s in there?”

  There was a copy of Emerson’s Self-Reliance and a Plutarch’s Lives in the same binding I had seen in the university library and A Tale of Two Cities and a ragged copy of Black Beauty. I opened the cover and saw Dad’s name printed in big awkward letters. I had never seen anything before that had belonged to him when he was a boy. I looked at it a couple of minutes. There was a Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations that said on the flyleaf “Awarded to Benjamin Oliver Webb for perfect attendance at the First Congregational Sunday School.”

  I turned over a Child’s History of England and The Pathfinder and a Bible. On the flyleaf of the Bible was written “To my son, Benjamin Oliver Webb, with my love and prayers, from Mother.”

  “Are there more books of yours back . . . in your old home, Dad?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes, at least half of them are mine; half belong to Eunice, of course. Eunice teaches school, you know.”

  I could count on one hand the number of times I had heard Father mention his sister. I wished he’d go on. “Does she like books, Dad?” I asked.

  “I guess so; I don’t remember her reading much when we were children. She teaches English, though.” Dad gave a little laugh. “She’s head of the department in the school where my father was principal.”

  He didn’t say any more. I took out the last book. It was called Household Gems.

  “Did you like poetry, Dad?” I asked wonderingly.

  “I should. I used to have to learn a poem every week to say Friday if I was called on in school. We could pick out our own.”

  “Why don’t you ever recite any of them?”

  “Well, I still can. Listen:

  “By the rude bridge that arched the flood,

  Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,

  Here once the embattled farmers stood

  And fired the shot heard round the world.”

  We both laughed. “I remember learning ‘Invictus,’ too, My father thought that was the greatest poem ever written.”

  I hunted through until I found it. You could almost pick out the poems Dad had learned by the marks on the pages.

  “The pack is getting kind of cold, Ellen.”

  I took off the towels and put them in hot water again. We kept the hot boric solution standing on the stove these days. The redness was going down, but the shrapnel sore was still angry and hard.

  “I’d like to take a knife and cut the skin all the way down and get the stuff all out once and for all, and then sew it up and have a clean wound,” Dad said. “That’s hot enough!”

  I lifted the towel to let it cool a little. I think I had done this since I was ten. Dad let out his breath in a long sigh.

  “There, read something now.”

  I had the book open at “Invictus.”

  “Out of the night that covers me,

  Black as the Pit from pole to pole,

  I thank whatever gods may be

  For my unconquerable soul.

  “In the fell clutch of circumstance

  I have not winced or cried aloud,

  Under the bludgeonings of chance

  My head is bloody, but unbowed.

  “Beyond this place of wrath and tears

  Looms but the horror of the shade,

  And yet the menace of the years

  Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

  “It matters not how strait the gate,

  How charged with punishments the scroll,

  I am the master of my fate:

  I am the captain of my soul.”

  It made me uncomfortable reading it aloud, it was so desperate and solemn.

  “My father used to quote that,” Dad said, and went off into his own thoughts.

  I wondered if Dad saw how the poem fitted him. His marrying Mother and coming out here in spite of the shrapnel wounds that laid him up all the time—that was pushing against Fate. He was cross and peevish often when he was laid up, but he didn’t complain much, and it never occurred to him to give up and sell the ranch and do something easier. I wondered why his soul wasn’t unconquerable. It made me feel good to be sitting here in the middle of the afternoon reading poetry aloud to Dad. I felt as though all my life I had been waiting to do just this.

  I turned the pages and read a line here and there to myself. I read a long poem by Walt Whitman.

  “There was a child went forth every day,

  And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became,

  And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part of the day,

  Or for many years . . .

  “The early lilacs became part of this child,

  And grass and white and red morning-glories, and white and red clover, and the song of the phoebe-bird,

  And the Third-month lambs and the sow’s pink-faint
litter, and the mare’s foal and the cow’s calf . . .

  “The field-sprouts of Fourth-month and Fifth-month became part of him,

  Winter-grain sprouts and those of the light-yellow corn . . .

  “His own parents, he that had father’d him and she that had conceiv’d him in her womb and birth’d him,

  They gave this child more of themselves than that,

  They gave him afterward every day, they became part of him.”

  These words startled me. They might have been written about Mom and Dad and me. This minute here with Dad’s old books and the poems that had thrilled him was part of him that he gave me and was now part of me. First Mom gave to me and then Dad gave to me. Only that night when I had learned about the hate between them had they ever taken away—but then they had taken away so much.

  I put the books on the table that stood against the wall. Gil might have felt more at home if he had been able to look over and see them.

  “Can I take them to the teacherage with me, Dad?”

  “Sure. I might just look over the poetry book again.”

  When we were getting supper that night I told Mom about getting out the box of books.

  “Why did you ever leave them out there all these years, Mom?”

  Mom was frying potatoes and she had to talk above the sissing sound.

  “All his folks was always propped up with books; your father don’t need ‘em.”

  “But, Mom . . .” and then I let it go at that.

  PART TWO

  “The seed haunted by the sun never fails to find its way between the stones in the ground.”

  —ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPÉRY, Flight to Arras

  1

  PRAIRIE BUTTE lay eighty-five miles northwest of us. Mom drove me over on Friday. We had the back of the truck full of bedding, towels, clothing, and canned goods. I had to supply my own food. The county furnished wood and furniture and school supplies.

  We drove along, silent with our own thinking. I glanced at Mom. She was watching the endless, flat, treeless plains, warm and sunny the first week of September, but so bare. There was no expression on her face. She had always said how like Russia this country is, not up near Seletskoe, but farther south where they grew wheat—only they have more snow in Russia and there are no chinooks to break the cold.

  “It’s more bare here than down around Gotham,” Mom said.

  But there were little jack pines growing out of the rocky ground and the sagebrush grew in bigger clumps here. There were no wheat ranches, mostly sheep. The ground was nibbled so close it looked like my old coat with the nap worn off. The last six miles were foothill gravel and full of rocks.

  “The mud won’t be bad out here in spring,” Mom said.

  We could see the butte from which the school took its name. It thrust up out of the ground like some earthwork made by children. I would climb up there some day.

  “There is your school, Yeléna!” Mom said suddenly.

  It was only fifteen miles from Prairie Butte and six miles from the highway. I don’t know why I stared at it so hard or why it scared me a little. Teacherages are the same everywhere. I have seen them all my life; this was in better repair than many.

  There was the usual long boxlike building painted gray, standing alone in the shadow of the butte, with a line of windows on each side. The last two must be my room where I was to live. Two smokestacks rose up out of the roof: one for the stove in my living quarters, one in front for the schoolroom. In front of the school stood the empty flagpole. In back of the school were the two outhouses.

  You look at a place where you’re going to live differently from any other place. It is almost as though you look at yourself coming out the door or peering out the window. Your mind goes so far ahead of your eyes.

  When I went over to see Mr. Henderson about the teacherage, his wife said:

  “It won’t be bad, dear, just like the summer pasture farm where the girls in Norway stay alone in the summertime. I liked it. I’d gather wild flowers and do hardanger work and dream. You’ll have plenty of time to dream about love up there.”

  I thought as we walked across to the teacherage that Mrs. Henderson had spent only the summers in her saeter. I was going to spend the winter here, and I felt as chilled as though the wind were already rushing across the plain to flatten itself out against the schoolhouse and the butte.

  I turned the key in the door. Flies banged drowsily against the dirty windowpanes. The school board had put the place in order but a good cleaning wouldn’t hurt it any.

  “The roof don’t leak,” Mom said. Her voice sounded too loud in the empty room.

  A door at one side of the wall back of the teacher’s desk opened into a second room where I was to live. It didn’t lack for furniture. There was an oil stove as well as a small sheet-iron heating stove, an iron bed, a dresser, a table, one rocker, and one straight chair. A cupboard on the wall with a faded cretonne curtain across it held some dishes. A frying pan and two saucepans hung on the wall under the oil stove. Four pictures of Clark Gable were tacked on the wall by the dresser, one of Walter Pidgeon and Franchot Tone over the bed. On the rack under the table lay a pile of Photoplay Magazine. A bright-patterned linoleum rug covered the floor.

  I had to do something. I started tearing the pictures of the movie stars off the wall.

  “I go see where you get your water,” Mom said. “It is better when you get a good cleaning. I can stay overnight and help clean up.” I saw her looking at the rain-streaked windows.

  “Oh, no. It’ll be something for me to do. I can take my time about it; I have until Monday.” I wanted her to go before the creeping feeling of depression overwhelmed me.

  We went to work to bring in the canned goods and provisions that were to last me most of the winter. I’d get home sometime in October and again at Thanksgiving and Christmas, but I didn’t plan to go back and forth often. The jars of fruit and chicken and our own beef and vegetables filled the cupboard. I had to pile the single-portion cans on the floor against the partition.

  “I can lie in bed and decide what I’ll eat before I get up,” I said, trying to make a joke of it.

  “You eat right,” Mom said sternly. “I make up the bed, anyway.” She turned the thin-looking mattress and made it up with the sheets and blankets we had brought. On top she put the quilt Father’s mother had made. I was touched at that. Then she brought up from the box of bedding the old icon and the little wooden shelf that belonged in my room at home.

  “You have to have something you are used to,” Mom said, crossing herself as she turned from hanging the icon.

  When I saw Mom driving away after supper with eighty-five miles to go I felt deserted. I sat down on the wooden stoop and looked at the sunset over the butte and the empty twilight. If I had been able to see a thicket of aspen against the soft endless sky it would have helped, but there was nothing but the shabby earth rolling off under the slack wires of the fence that marked the school land from the prairie, and here and there a lonely, twisted jack pine. For the first time in my life I knew what Gil meant by the emptiness. I had taken it in with my mind before, but I had not felt it in my throat and my stomach. The emptiness surrounded me and swept over me until I was nothing.

  I put my mind on Mom driving home. Would she be thinking about me, worrying about whether I was lonely? Mom always drove fast when the road lay straight across the prairie, holding the wheel tight as though it were the wheel of the combine. I thought of this summer when she and Dad and I had lived so closely together. I had listened to all they said, trying to find more than the words, scorning and pitying them by turns. At least I was alone now with my own life.

  I went in through the schoolroom, trailing my hand over the desks as I passed, and lighted the lamp on the table in my room. It made a round yellow light but smelled of kerosene and the singed bodies of dead flies, and left the corners of the room in deeper shadow than before. My throat felt so dry I spoke out loud.

&n
bsp; “Well, Ellen Webb, how’re you doing?”

  The sound of my own voice spilled out into the stillness around me like a drop of kerosene in a pail of water. It refused to dissolve and mingle, but held its own so long I could keep hearing it.

  I had never been afraid of being alone or of the wideness of the earth and the sky. I stood there by the lamp, looking fearfully off beyond the circle of the light into the shadowy dark of the schoolroom. Its empty desks were lined up like little ghosts. I hesitated to make any sound. I would turn out the light and get on the bed and cover up. I looked for the little icon, but it was lost in the shadow.

  I saw the pail of water Mom had brought and I went over and lighted the kerosene stove. I had to stoop down and tease the flame along the wick. I got out soap and rags and changed into jeans and a shirt. I moved quietly, afraid of making a noise.

  When the water was hot I carried it into the schoolroom and went back for the lamp. I began at the front and scrubbed the floor, moving the lamp as I went along the boards. By the time I got to the fourth desk I tried whistling. I whistled the tunes the jukebox in Pop’s Place used to play.

  “You’re doing fine, Ellen Webb,” I said out loud when I went to empty my pail, and I threw the dirty water with a flourish on the moth-eaten grass and into the wide, soft darkness. But the splash made so tiny a sound in all that stillness that I knew I lied. I wondered if I could stand it here all fall and all winter and all spring.

  2

  BY Monday morning I had lived through two whole days alone. The nights had been endless. I kept waking and raising on one elbow to listen, but there was not even the sound of the wind. I think the stillness itself woke me. I slept best after it was light and I didn’t get up until ten on Sunday, to cheat the day. That was the longest day I had ever known.