Mom wrote: “Your Father want to see you. He says you are for away as last year in Minnesota. He is still down sick. Can you come home Saturday. I meet you in Clark City. Anna.” Mom always signed her name that way, even to me.
When the children left that day I got out the letter and read it again and I decided to go home. The bus went past the highway about 10:30. If I started early enough I could walk the six miles to the highway easily.
It was a good feeling to lock the teacherage and know that I’d be away overnight. I was on the road by seven Saturday morning. I wore Mom’s valenkis; they didn’t make my feet look any smaller, but they kept them warm. I didn’t carry anything with me. I had old clothes at home. The sky was still dark and the snow stood out white, as though the two were wrong side around, the sky where the ground should be. The gentleness had given way to cold again.
I reached Harpers’ place by eight. Even before I got to their gate I could see a man moving around there. He was too big and straight for old Mr. Harper. I moved over to the outside rut of the road and made up my mind to go by quietly. We had told each other a lot about each other for a first evening’s visit. I thought it would make me feel strange and half-embarrassed to talk to him again.
But Warren Harper saw me and came out to the road. The country is bare enough so you can see a person a mile away. He stood at his corral gate as though he were uncertain, then I guess he remembered my black bandanna with the red fringes.
“Hello, Miss Webb,” he said as soon as I was near enough.
“Hello,” I said. “The snow’s packed down good.” But I kept right on walking.
“Where are you going?”
“Home for the week end. I can’t stop,” I said, and then thought that he hadn’t asked me to.
He leaned comfortably on the top rail of the fence as though it were summer. “Going to walk all the way to Gotham?”
“Oh, no, I’m catching the bus on the highway.”
“Six miles, as cold as it is today! What do you want to do, freeze your face again?”
“It isn’t bad when you’re walking. Father’s sick. I wanted to go home this week end.”
“I can see how you might anyway. Come on in a minute and I’ll drive you home.”
Leslie and Mrs. Harper were not up yet. Only Mr. Harper was in the kitchen.
“Father, I’m going to town to put in a claim for the insurance on those sheep,” Warren said. “We lost about five hundred in that blizzard,” he told me. I knew what such a loss meant to a sheep rancher.
We talked about Leslie most of the way in.
“He must have been devoted to his mother,” I said.
“Yes, he was. She was little and dark and laughed easily, and cried easily, too. He saw her do plenty of both. He heard from her that the ranch was the last place on earth to live and how the wind blew and how cold it got. He’s made up his mind not to like it because she didn’t.”
Then Mr. Harper seemed lost in his own thoughts. I didn’t interrupt him. The day was as light then as it was going to be. The sky made me think of a piece of iron covered over with frost.
“I went over to Los Angeles once to see Gladys after she’d been gone over a month on one of her missions,” Mr. Harper said abruptly. “I felt so sorry for Leslie I thought I’d see if we couldn’t patch things up again. She was living with a man, this preacher fellow. I couldn’t tell Leslie a thing like that about his mother even if he’d understood it. So I came back and told him she had died. She did die a year and a half later.
“When I told Leslie that she wouldn’t ever come back he didn’t cry, just looked at me, and then he said, ‘You didn’t love her.’ That was something for a six-year-old child, wasn’t it?”
“That was hard,” I murmured. I wanted to say I knew a little how Leslie had felt. I could have told him about Mom and Dad, but that was too deep a part of me.
Warren Harper lit a cigarette and smiled at me. “Did you ever know such a guy? Known you two days and pours out his soul. Well, don’t worry, I won’t say a word about myself or my child on the way home.”
“On the way home?”
“I’d like to come down Sunday afternoon and get you.”
“But that’s eighty-five miles.”
He shrugged. “I’ve gone a lot farther for less reason.”
I made him let me out where our road turns off the highway. “You can meet Mom and Dad Sunday, if you come. I don’t know how Dad is,” I told him.
“I’ll be here Sunday. You can count on it.”
The road wasn’t shoveled and there were no ruts through the snow. Dad must have been sick all week. I tried to see the house as I had that day with Gil, unpainted clapboards and all, but I couldn’t; it looked good to me. I saw the kitchen window and the gray-white bark of the cottonwood above the coulee and I began to run through the snow.
Mom heard me call and came to look out the window. We could never break Mom of her habit of looking out first when someone knocked. But it was good to see her face break into a smile when she saw me.
“Yeléna!”
“Hello, Mom!”
“We gave you up when we don’t get no letter and then we hear the radio.”
“Ellen!” Dad called from the other room.
“Oh, Dad, you’re still laid up!”
“I’m over this bout. I’m just waiting for the weather to get human and I’ll be out.” Dad was dressed, but he wore his sweater and bedroom slippers and he looked sick.
I sat down on the couch and Mom brought up a chair. They had set up the heater here in the front room.
“Yeléna, that boy, was he the big one?” Mom asked right away. “Your father was reading the paper and I am setting my bread dough. I wasn’t listening much, then I hear ‘Prairie Butte teacherage.’ I come quick to listen . . .” I’d forgotten how Mom told things. Dad always listened impatiently because she told so many details and then, as usual, he interrupted her.
“I should never have let you go to that place,” Dad grumbled. “Do you remember, I asked Sunday when we were there how far you’d have to go for help? Anna asked why you’d need any,” Dad finished triumphantly.
Mom made a business of picking up my coat and helped me off with my valenkis. Her face was sulky at being in the wrong. They always argued like this in the winter. Then Dad said:
“It must have been a terrible experience! That was the boy who wasn’t quite bright, wasn’t it?”
“Yes. It seemed awful that he was so near all the time. I don’t see how I missed him, because I hunted back and forth and called and called.”
“It was bad storm,” Mom said. “I could lose myself going to the barn, almost.”
“How did the family take it?” Dad asked.
“His mother blamed me; the father was very kind.”
Mom nodded her head. “You can’t tell about children. You have to keep your eye on them.”
“That boy wasn’t bright anyway,” Dad said crossly.
My room had been shut off since cold weather. It was cold in there and looked bare without the icon in the corner. The lipstick in my bureau drawer was as stiff and cold as though it had been frozen. I found some green beads I used to wear last year and fastened them around my neck. They were like ice. I opened the drawers and looked in. In the bottom drawer was Gil’s picture staring up at me.
“Yeléna, you catch cold in there. Hurry out!” Mom called. I shut the drawer quickly before I had time to look at Gil. But I wished suddenly that I hadn’t written that letter. I felt strange here at home with Mom and Dad. I could see so much better now what Gil had felt.
It was better that evening eating supper in the kitchen. Everything seemed so bright in the electric light after my lamps. We had fresh meat and Mom’s fresh bread. When we were drinking our coffee, Dad took a letter from his sweater pocket with such deliberateness I knew he meant me to notice. Mom left her coffee and started clearing off the dishes.
“Your Aunt Eunice had occasion t
o write me last week about some business in connection with our father’s house,” Dad said. “Several years ago she had to place a mortgage on the house in order to pay a hospital bill. The man who held the mortgage, an old friend of my father’s, has died, and his son wants to foreclose. Eunice says he wants the house for himself. She writes to ask if I could help her.”
“You have no good from it,” Mom put in.
Dad seemed not to notice. “Your aunt wants to keep the house. She has lived there all her life. It has my grandfather’s name plate on the door, ‘Benjamin Webb, Esquire.’ I had to polish it when I was a youngster, with vinegar and salt, I remember.” Dad pulled a snapshot out of the envelope and handed it to me. “Your aunt enclosed a picture of it.”
I had never seen it and yet when I looked at the picture, the house was so exactly as I knew it must be that it was like recognizing a place I knew well. Only I hadn’t known there was an iron grill along the porch or that there was a big bush in the front yard next to the fence.
“What’s that bush, Dad?”
“That’s a smoke bush, kind of a pink feathery stuff. You could pull it off in your fingers and blow it. My mother was very partial to it,” Dad said.
I turned the picture over. On the back was written “I enclose this picture in case you have forgotten what the old place looks like.” The writing was so light it was surprising that the words should have such barbs. It wasn’t a house anyone would forget. It stood very square with two big windows on either side of the front door, four windows across the second story, and a dormer on the third. The house was built of wider clapboards than I had ever seen, and each window had blinds. I had never seen blinds on a house before.
“Eunice writes that she could perhaps sell the house for a good price. Summer people are glad to pick up a house in Vermont nowadays, but she wants to live in it.”
Mom had been picking up the dishes. “If she can’t pay, she better sell,” she said.
There was a long hard silence in the kitchen, the kind I knew well. I looked at Mom’s face set so sullenly and at Dad’s, cold and hurt.
“Do you think you’d like to go back there sometime, Ellen?” Dad asked.
“Oh, I’d love to go back and see it.”
Mom stood by the table and stirred her cold coffee. “I want no part in it,” she said.
“You have no part in this, Anna. This was my life before I ever met you. This is for me to decide.” I had never seen him so stern. Mom went back over to the sink. Her face was dark and thick. I knew she minded Dad’s talking like that before me. Dad turned to me and went on in a quiet voice:
“After all, Eunice is my only sister. I should hate to see her having to move out of the house. She hasn’t had too much out of life. The young fellow she expected to marry was killed in France early in the war. She never went with anyone else as far as I know. I can’t forget how she cried the day I went away to the Army. I told her I’d be back, but I suppose to her I never really did come back. She went on taking care of Mother and working hard, and after Mother died she went on alone.”
“You help with funeral!” Mom muttered. But Dad seemed to have lost sight of Mom and me and to be back in Vermont. It had never occurred to me before that he might still love this faraway sister. She had never seemed very real to me.
“This is a bad year for ready cash. She needs five hundred dollars by the end of the week. I know she tried to raise it herself first.” Dad was really talking to himself. “I suppose she thinks I’m well off. To people back there a rancher in Montana sounds . . . pretty prosperous.” I could see that Dad’s pride was in this, too.
“How do you think you get five hunderd dollar?” Mom asked from the sink. Her voice was sly, almost sneering.
“I thought I’d go to town Monday and get a loan. I won’t have any trouble. Everything I own is paid for.”
I went over to get a dishtowel back of the stove. For an instant a kind of anger flashed up in my mind like pan grease that’s caught fire. He could talk about a loan for his sister and how easy it would be, but he didn’t get a loan to send me back to college. I forgot for the moment that Dad had been sick, and I hadn’t really asked him.
“You won’t put loan on this ranch,” Mom said, looking at Dad across the little kitchen. “She don’t mind to borrow money. Let her borrow some more.” I held my breath for what Dad would say next.
“That’s right, Anna, I put the ranch in your name, didn’t I?” His tone was quiet and cold. “I told you you’d earned it, you’d worked so hard.”
I glanced at Mom and her eyes seemed to me to gleam under her dark brows.
“Don’t worry, I won’t put no loan on the ranch,” Dad said, mimicking Mom’s grammar. “I can raise the five hundred dollars on the combine!”
I think I have never seen Mom move so swiftly. She came over and sat down at the table. “Don’t do that, Ben!” Fear made her voice heavier. I knew how she loved the combine.
“I won’t see my sister having to sell her house, Anna,” Dad said. “That’s something I couldn’t do.”
“What if we get no crop next year?” Mom said.
“Maybe we’ll have a bumper crop!” Dad said. “Anyway, Anna, I’m going to raise that money and send it to Eunice.”
I was so used to thinking of Dad as sick or tired and Mom as strong, it was strange now to see Mom frightened and angry and feel Dad’s strength. Maybe it was because he was sorry for her that he said gently:
“Look, Anna . . .”
“I don’t want to hear no more,” Mom said like an angry child. “You are big fool, Ben Webb, to make debt on the combine.” She slammed the kettles together as she put them away in the cupboard under the sink.
I picked up the snapshot on the table and studied it again, just to be doing something
“Eunice is honest about it. She writes that she could sell the house for a good price.” Dad took out a cigarette and went over to the stove for a match. “It must’ve been hard for her to write and ask me,” he said as the match flared out in his hand.
I saw Mom watching Dad as he got out a pad of paper and pen and ink and sat at the kitchen table writing. I finished drying the dishes, and all the time we could hear the pen scratching across the paper. When Dad was through he folded the paper and put it in the envelope and did not seal it. We didn’t know what he wrote, but we knew he was going to send the money.
Mom couldn’t seem to settle down. She opened the door to my room so the warm air could go in there and brought some flannel pyjamas of mine that were cold from lying in the drawer and hung them behind the stove, then she set the table for breakfast with a noisy clatter of the knives and forks. I wondered why I had come home.
It’s a terrible thing the way a child can sit in judgment on her parents without their knowing it.
We had to leave our bedroom doors open that night to keep warm. I lay in bed and heard no least murmur of voices from the other room. They had gone to bed in silence, Mom in anger. I couldn’t sleep. About midnight I closed my door and pushed up my window to the cold. I would be glad to be back in the teacherage.
I was outside all the next morning. It was a bright, clear day. The roof of the house and the long side of the barn laid a bluish shadow on the snow, and the dogwood bush in the coulee was bright-red above the snow, and the willows were as yellow and shining as a new-varnished floor. The strips of fallow ground and the strips of stubble were covered equally by the snow, and the blue sky looked as bright and warm as a blue wool afghan. Way off, the mountains of the Main Range were blue, streaked with white, and looked thin-edged against the sky. It was six below zero on the barn thermometer, but Mom had only a sweater over her shoulders and I had only a leather jacket. The sun made us feel warm, I guess, and the brightness made us a little giddy. This morning I knew why I had come home. I loved this place! The night’s trouble was shut in the house.
Mom showed me the turkeys.
“Thirty-eight orders already and the meat man
take what I got left. Three cents more a pound I get this year. Pretty good, Yólochka?” Mom said, looking at me with a wide smile.
We walked over to the chicken house. I had something I wanted to tell her.
“Mom,” I began, “at first I couldn’t bear to think about Robert. I kept trying not to remember things . . . you know. Then I thought how you used to tell me about the killing of your mother and father in Russia and I could tell by your eyes how you could see it all over again. So I stopped pushing Robert’s death out of my mind. I was to blame, and I just looked right at it. It hurts but not the same way. . . .” I looked at Mom and found her eyes big and dark on my face.
“Sure, is no good to hide your eyes,” Mom said.
We were on our way back to the house and I was feeling very close to Mom when I said:
“Don’t be that way about Dad’s helping his sister. He has to do it.”
“We got to think of ourselves and you, Yeléna. We work hard for what we got.” She looked out past the barn to the snow-covered wheat fields. “She don’t work so hard!” she grumbled.
We might have walked at either end of a strip of wheat—we were no closer together than that, after all.
Dad took me out to see the pigs and the two horses we kept in the barn. It was cold enough so their breath was white and thick in the air, pretty plumes that meant life in the coldness.
“Should you be out here in the cold, Dad?” I asked.
“Oh, I don’t think it makes much difference. I seem to get these bad colds in the winter whatever I do. Your mother babies me like a child.”
It was never so easy to be quiet with Dad as with Mom. I think he was more comfortable talking.
“It’s pretty quiet around here without you, Ellen. It seems as though you’re farther away over there at Prairie Butte than you were last winter.”
I laughed. “Eighty-five miles isn’t very far. When the weather’s better you can drive over often, or I can catch a ride back.”
Winter Wheat Page 23
