Winter Wheat

by Mildred Walker

  Sunday afternoon, I set out from the teacherage and walked about three miles until I saw a ranch house, but I didn’t go up to it. I saw two boys running across to the barn and I knew they must go to my school, but the sight of them made me shy away. I wanted to meet them at school first.

  There would be seven children in the Prairie Butte teacherage, Mr. Henderson said. They came from four families. I had only taught a week in the practice school. I hadn’t come to know the children at all. When I got back to the schoolhouse, I took out my notebook from the class in teaching methods and reread the notes, but I remembered how often I had thought of Gil in that class. Sometimes, if I walked across the campus to the library after it I caught a glimpse of him. I hadn’t thought I would ever use these notes. Along one margin I had figured out the days till Gil would be in Montana. I drew a harsh line through the pathetic figuring.

  I was through breakfast by seven this morning and had two sandwiches made for my lunch. When my bread was gone I’d eat crackers, I decided.

  “You can make bread and dumplings or muffins. What’s the matter with you?” Mom had said. “You got a oven.” But I doubted if I’d bother to bake just for myself.

  The schoolhouse was clean. The sun and air had taken out any closed-up stale smell or odor of the soap and water, but it was so bare. I wished I had brought over some of Mom’s geraniums for the window sills. I did pick a bunch of feathery sage and put it in a pickle jar under Lincoln’s picture. I looked at the picture of Lincoln longer than I ever had before. He had known small wooden dwellings and bareness too, I thought. I would like to write that to Gil, but I wasn’t writing Gil. Lincoln’s eyes seemed to look across the desks through the opposite window. I raised the green shade so he could see the faint rim of mountains beyond the butte.

  I had polished the windows. The shades gaped at the sides and had been used so long they looked like relief maps and let in light through all their cracks. Some schoolhouses have curtains at their windows, but I liked seeing out across to Prairie Butte. The sky was so wide it filled the whole upper sash. I would leave the windows bare, like Mom’s kitchen windows.

  I still had an hour before I could hope to see any of my children. I sat at my desk, facing the wide-open door and the oblong of prairie, and waited. I picked up a pencil to have in my hand so I’d look busy, and I must have pinched it tightly, because my fingers grew stiff. I pulled a piece of paper to me and wrote on it as though I were going on with my biography for Mr. Echols:

  “Ellen Webb began teaching September 4, 1941, and taught continuously at the Prairie Butte teacherage for the next thirty-five years.” Then I scribbled it out so hard the pencil went through the paper. I’d never do that. Next fall I’d be back at the university. I’d study this year and keep up. I wouldn’t be like Dad, leaving my books boxed up in the shed.

  I looked up suddenly and saw the boy standing silently on the porch looking at me. He had come up without my hearing him. I wondered uneasily how long he had been there watching me.

  “Hello,” I said. “You’re the first one.”

  The boy smiled slowly. There was something queer about his smile. He reached up and got his cap off.

  “H’lo,” he answered, and his voice was too heavy for a child’s. It had no tone in it.

  “Come in,” I said.

  He must have been fifteen or sixteen. He looked too big for this school.

  “I’m early. Ma said I’d be early. I ain’t never been late,” he said like a five-year-old. He had a queer disjointed walk, hunching one shoulder ahead of the other. His head looked too big for his body. He was half-witted. I sat still behind my desk as though it were a fortress. Mr. Henderson hadn’t told me one of the seven pupils was feeble-minded.

  He took the biggest desk at the back of the room by the window. It must have been made especially for him. The seat was knocked together carelessly out of old boards. There was a horrible likeness between the look of the boards that didn’t quite join and the look of the boy’s shoulders and feet. It was like a cruel joke. He slid into his seat with a loud thud and smiled foolishly at me.

  “What’s your name?” I asked, speaking loudly, as though he were deaf.

  “Robert.”

  “Robert what?”

  “Robert Donaldson.” He beamed as though this were something he was sure of.

  “My name is Miss Webb.” I went over and wrote it on the blackboard and erased it and wrote it again because my writing went downhill. “Can you say Webb?”

  He stuttered over the “W” and then brought the name out in a burst.

  “Good. Can you tell me what grade you are in, Robert?”

  “Four,” he said proudly.

  “And how old are you?”

  He looked down at his hands and frowned. I could hear a truck coming toward the school. Someone shouted. Robert looked up as though to see if I were waiting.

  “Five, ten, fifteen,” he said. His voice had a flat sound.

  He clasped his hands at his desk and smiled vacantly. With a sense of fleeing I went on out to watch the other children come.

  “Hi, Mary, there she is!” I heard one shrill voice scream out, but anything was better than that toneless voice and empty smile.

  When I faced my schoolroom at quarter of nine I had eight children, representing five families who lived somewhere in the shallow bowl of land between Prairie Butte and the low rimrock. I picked up my record book to write down their names.

  “Mr. Henderson told me there would be only seven,” I said, feeling more comfortable if I was talking.

  “He’s new!” a little girl with black braids announced, pointing across the room at a pale-looking boy in the second row. “He’s just moved back here,” she went on.

  “What is your name?” I asked the boy.

  “Leslie Harper.” He stood up to answer, and his lips pinched together nervously when he finished a sentence. “I moved here from Detroit, Michigan. I was in the third grade last year—you can see my report card.” The whole class stared at him.

  I started a little speech about the pleasant time I hoped we would have and how much I hoped we were going to learn. I felt like someone other than Ellen Webb.

  “We have a chapter of the Bible and the Lord’s Prayer and America’s Creed first thing in the morning an’ we raise the flag and sing ‘The Star-spangled Banner,’” the boy named Nels Thorson interrupted. The other boy sitting beside him laughed out loud. Mary Cassidy became convulsed and hid her face in her arms. Suddenly Robert began to laugh as though he had just sensed the joke. The laughter trickled out of his open mouth in a slow thin stream. Then the class began to laugh at him. I quieted them sharply.

  “Today we’ll skip the usual exercises, because we have so much to do,” I began again.

  At noon the children ate outside on the gravelly ground in front of the stoop. I made a cup of tea hurriedly on my stove and went out to watch them. I saw how the new boy, Leslie Harper, seemed to sit by himself on the corner of the step, but he was watching the big boys play marbles on the ground. Robert came over and sat beside me. Once I found his vacant eyes on me, his cheeks bulged out with the big bites he was taking. I looked away with relief to the swing, where the wiry little Cassidy girl was swaying, pumping herself up so high the chains screeched.

  “Don’t you have no radio, Miss Webb?” Nels Thorson asked me. He had won the marble game and rattled the marbles in the pocket of his jeans.

  “No, Nels, I’m sorry, I don’t.”

  “You oughta have one. Miss Barnett, our last year’s teacher, had one. She used to let us listen to the war news at lunchtime and sometimes if we got through we could hear the three-o’clock quiz program. Gee, she had a swell one, eight tubes. Her boy frien’ gave it to her.”

  “Maybe after Christmas I’ll bring one back with me,” I said. “Is Miss Barnett teaching this year?”

  “Nope, she got married,” the dark-haired La Mere boy said. “Her boy frien’s a mechanic in the Air For
ce. He’s a sergeant. She showed us his picture.”

  I looked at my watch. The time was up, but Robert was still chewing slowly.

  “Don’t mind him. Miss Barnett just let him come in when he got through. His folks ain’t going to send him any more after this year.”

  Robert could hear all Nels said, but he seemed to pay no attention. It made me uncomfortable.

  “We can wait a minute or two. Are you almost through, Robert?”

  He smiled and began packing what was left in his lunch box.

  “Feed it to the birds, Robert,” Mike screamed at him. All the children talked louder when they talked to him. “Here, give it to me.” Mike snatched the leftover sandwich out of his hands and broke it up on the ground.

  “Gee, you wait’ll you see the magpies. Sometimes there’s ten or twelve,” Mike told me.

  “If you have any trouble with the pack rats under the floor, Miss Webb, I’ll set you a trap and then I can empty it when I come. You won’t have to bother with it,” Raymond La Mere told me as we went back to the schoolhouse. “I’ll help you with the fire, too.” I could see that Raymond, as the only sixth-grader, was the head of the school.

  A half-hour before school should end, I closed my book. “That’s enough for today. I think we’ll have a story, an old story many of you have heard, and then tomorrow I’m going to ask you to act it out, so I want you to listen very, very closely.” I sounded to myself like the demonstration teacher at the practice class. “Let’s see . . .” I looked out the window trying to think of a story simple and dramatic enough to act out. I don’t know why, but I thought of Gil on the rimrock at home.

  “How many would like to hear the story of Bluebeard?”

  “Aw, tell us a war story,” Mike Cassidy cried out.

  “Yeah, don’t you know no spy stories, Miss Webb?” Francis La Mere begged.

  “No, not this time. Now listen: Once upon a time, near the city of Baghdad,” I began, “there lived a very wealthy man who had the terrible misfortune to have a blue beard.” I could see the children settling down. Sigrid Thorson’s mouth was wide open. Raymond La Mere’s fine dark eyes were intent on my face. Robert was drawing on the piece of paper I had given him. I saw the black-and-white magpies fly past the open door. They were coming for the lunch crumbs, but none of the children noticed them.

  “When Bluebeard had to go away on a long journey he gave his wife Fatima the keys to all the chests and rooms of the palace, telling her that everything was hers. But he gave her one key that opened a little closet on the gallery and told her never to use it, and that if she disobeyed him something very terrible would happen to her.”

  “Our father don’t like our mother to use the car keys when he’s away, neither,” Sigrid Thorson said.

  “Shut up!” her brother said sharply.

  “But so great was Fatima’s curiosity . . .”

  “What’s curiosity?” Mike asked.

  “. . . she took the little key and put it in the lock and slowly turned it. When she opened the door it was all dark inside, and then she saw that the floor was covered with blood.”

  One of the children caught her breath. The only sound in the room was the noise of Robert’s crayon on the paper. It was fun seeing these children so spellbound. Even Robert left off crayoning and watched me. I came to the place in the story where Fatima cries out “Sister Anne, Sister Anne, do you see anybody coming?”

  “And Sister Anne said, shaking her head, ‘I see nothing but dust blowing and the green grass growing.’” I made my voice hopeless and dreary and I looked out the window as I said it. I’m afraid I was thinking again of Gil on the rimrock.

  There was a sudden frightened scream. It was the new boy, Leslie Harper. He put his head on his desk and hid his face in his arms. The other children were too startled to make any sound.

  “Why, Leslie.” I went down to his desk. “Don’t be frightened, it’s only a story.”

  “Oh, please, Miss Webb, please let her see something besides . . . besides the grass and the wind. I can’t stand it.” He hid his face again. I sat down on the desk of the vacant seat behind Leslie.

  “Listen to the rest of the story.”

  “Does it turn out all right?” he asked in a smothered voice.

  “Yes, it turns out all right,” I promised, going on with the story: “‘Sister Anne, Sister Anne, do you see anybody coming?’”

  “‘I see,’” replied Sister Anne, “‘a great cloud of dust that comes this way.’”

  “‘Are they my brothers?’”

  “‘Alas, no, my dear sister, I see a flock of sheep.’” I felt Leslie’s hand against my knee and slipped my own down to hold his.

  “Then Bluebeard bawled out so loud he made the whole house tremble: ‘Naught will avail. You must die!’ and he was on the very point of cutting off Fatima’s head when two horsemen galloped into the castle, not even dismounting . . .”

  “Like the Lone Ranger,” one of the children squealed.

  “Lone Ranger! Lone Ranger!” shouted Robert, banging on his desk.

  “And whipping out their swords they ran them through Bluebeard’s body and his poor wife was saved.”

  “And then what?” Mary Cassidy demanded.

  “And then she had all of Bluebeard’s money and married the man she loved.”

  “And lived happily ever after?” Leslie asked.

  “Yes, they lived happily ever after,” I said. He smiled faintly at me and pulled his hand quietly away.

  When the others trooped out Leslie waited behind.

  “I’m sorry I cried,” he said, “but I couldn’t stand it . . . about the dust blowing and the green grass growing, I mean.”

  “Why, Leslie?”

  His small peaked face twisted as though he were going to cry again.

  “That’s the way it does here, and I hate it.”

  “Have you never been here before?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “I was born here, but my folks moved away right afterward. My father used to live here. My mother’s dead.”

  “Where does your father live?”

  “He’s in Detroit. He left me with my grandmother and grandfather. We live over that way. There’s my grandfather, now.”

  Leslie ran out of the schoolroom. I followed to see an elderly man driving up in an old Ford truck filled with pine knots.

  “How d’you do,” he called out to me. “After a while this boy’ll learn to walk home, but his grandmother’s afraid he’ll get lost. It’s only two miles.” Leslie waved to me as they drove off. I watched until they were out of sight, then I stood awhile stupidly staring at nothing but the green grass growing.

  3

  I WORKED hard at teaching fractions and interest and reading and spelling and yet all the time, underneath, my life seemed to be reaching out like the roots of a cottonwood tree after water. The days fell into a pattern: The Part before School, then School and The Part after School and The Long Evening. I was glad to hear the children arriving in the morning, and every afternoon I had a little dread of the sudden stillness that settled down on the teacherage when they left.

  At three-thirty we marched out into the yard and sang “America” while two of the boys lowered the flag. Leslie Harper was chosen first, because he was a new boy. Leslie would hold the folded flag carefully across his flat little chest and march in to put it away.

  “The pole looks kind of lonesome when the flag gets down, don’t it, Miss Webb?” Leslie said once.

  The children were seldom in a hurry to get off. Raymond would bring in wood for me. Francis, not to be outdone by his brother, would bring a fresh pail of water. Some of the children had a swing before they left. I lingered outside with them as long as they stayed. But all of a sudden they were gone. The Part after School had begun.

  With a little sinking feeling I realized that today was Friday and I was alone again. I went back into the schoolroom. Somebody always forgot something: a lunch box or a hair ribbon or a
cap. Today there was Nels’s slingshot over on the window sill and I could see a half-eaten apple in Mike’s desk. There was the faint smell of hot dirty hands in the room, and I recognized the scent of the musterole Sigrid’s mother had put on her chest. I opened the windows and let it air out. Soon it would be too cold to do that.

  Nels Thorson’s father had brought a truckload of wood this morning, big chunks of fir and poplar, and dumped it at the corner of the schoolhouse.

  “There, Miss Webb, that oughta see you to Christmas. It’s January and February that’s the worst months,” he told me cheerily.

  Today I wished it would rain or snow, or the wind would blow hard. Then I would be glad of the snugness of the teacherage and open my books and get to work, but this placid, pitilessly clear fall weather made me feel like a fly held in a drop of honey.

  “I must wash my hair,” I said aloud, trying to pretend to a great busyness. “I must hurry so I can dry it before the sun goes down. This schoolroom needs a good cleaning,” I told myself as I went down the aisle. “I have all those arithmetic and spelling papers to mark. But what are eight papers?” my mind sneered. “The blackboards need washing. I must make a pattern for those paper turkeys. The children can cut them out and paste them on the windows.” But I went into my room and sat down on the bed.

  Time filled the room and lay across the empty prairie and pushed against the window. There was so much of it that it had pressure and weight. But it was empty. Somewhere there were people who didn’t have time enough, who forgot time and themselves.

  I wanted to get away from here, to go home and pack my clothes and go back to the city to college. I would work, oh, how I would work, and be busy and hurry! I thought of the hurry down the mall to eight-o’clock classes, and it seemed the thing I wanted most in the world.

  When it was five o’clock I started to get my supper. I opened a can of corned beef and cut thin slices, and opened a can of green beans. I heated a potato left from yesterday and made tea in the pot with the broken nose and cut a piece of Mom’s fruit cake for dessert. I laid it all out on a napkin on the narrow table by the window. I was hungry.