Winter Wheat

by Mildred Walker

  Dad stopped in the shed where the combine was. Cold bright bars of light came through the loose boards in back of the shed, but even with the front door propped open it was shadowy in there. The combine looked bigger than it was.

  “I want to get the model number off this thing,” Dad said, bringing out a pencil and an envelope.

  I laid my hand on the floor of the combine. It was as icy-cold as it had been blistering-hot last summer. When I was younger I used to pretend it was an airplane standing in our own private hangar.

  “I don’t know what was the matter with me, Ellen, that I didn’t raise some money on this before for you.” Dad’s voice was muffled, but I could feel the apologetic note in it. “I guess I was so wrapped up in my own misery about that time . . .”

  “Oh, Dad, this didn’t hurt me any. I can go back next fall.” It was easy to be generous now.

  “Your mother can’t understand how I feel about helping your Aunt Eunice, Ellen.” I felt Dad expected me to understand. “I should have managed better back in the beginning with your mother and my family. There should have been some way . . .”

  “Do you and Aunt Eunice look alike, Dad?” I asked, partly because I was trying to see her, partly because Dad seemed so sad.

  “No, I don’t think so. She was dark. I used to think she was the prettiest girl in town. I brought her back a samovar from Russia, but I don’t suppose she ever used it.”

  “Did she . . . was she nice to Mom in the beginning?”

  “I think she meant to be. They were so different, of course.”

  We were so quiet for a minute that I heard Mom calling from the house. I went outside and Mom was standing in the kitchen doorway. Her face was alive and excited.

  “Ben, Ellen, come up here, quick!” she called.

  She sounded so urgent we ran. Mom had the radio blaring. She always turned it up too high. We couldn’t hear it at first for the noise of it.

  “It’s war!” Mom said as soon as we got to the porch, and the way she said it sent shivers down my back. “The Japs come over Pearl Harbor and bomb it.”

  Mom stood with her hands on her hips. She looked like one of the figures you see in pictures of the crowds in Russia. She seemed somehow more foreign. I saw her more clearly than I took in the news.

  Dad stood by the radio, listening to every word.

  “We can’t do anything else,” he said. His face wasn’t sick or pale, now. I could see how he had gone to war before. Neither Dad nor Mom was thinking about themselves or me. “It’s time we were in!”

  Dad was so excited I felt ashamed that I was so quiet. I had never heard war declared before; I had only read about it. Mom sat down on the couch, listening to every word. Her eyes flashed, but she didn’t say anything.

  “This’ll make the last war look like a neighborhood fight,” Dad said.

  It was two o’clock before we sat down to dinner. All that time the radio had been blaring. Mom mashed the potatoes and peeled the beets with that listening look on her face. Dad wouldn’t stir until the war news was over. He was so excited he wasn’t like himself. I had never really known him before, I felt. I could see how he must have been at Gil’s age.

  Mom laughed suddenly. “Ben, you remember how you was so sick you didn’t know there was armistice?”

  Dad nodded. “I couldn’t believe it. I thought you were all fooling.”

  “Remember, you said, ‘Give me a kiss, then.’ An’ the Army doctor he laugh and say, ‘Go on, kiss him, Anna!’”

  “Sure, I remember,” Dad said.

  “Yeléna, watch out or your Dad go off to war again!” Mom joked. She gave him a little slap on the shoulder. All their coldness of last night was gone.

  I felt a kind of resentment. They were fools. The last war was to blame for Dad’s ill-health ever since, it was to blame for his marrying Mom and all their bitterness and hatred and trouble. I couldn’t understand them. They didn’t even seem to notice that I was quiet.

  After a while Dad said, “Well, wheat will go up.”

  “Just for little,” Mom said. “Wars are bad after.”

  But Dad wasn’t listening. He had gone over to sit by the radio again to eat his dessert. I looked at him.

  “Dad, I’d think you’d feel all you did in the last war was wasted. I’d think all the men who were crippled and came back sick like you would feel bitter about another war.” I had to say it.

  “What was that, Ellen?” Dad turned down the radio a little so he could hear me, but they were giving some details of the catastrophe at Pearl Harbor; he turned it up again and bent nearer to hear without waiting for me to repeat what I had said.

  Warren Harper came just after dinner. He and Dad started in on the war.

  “This makes my mind up for me; I’m going into the Army. I’m twenty-seven and I have only one child. It looks as though they’d need plenty of men.”

  “Well, you know, I was in the last war,” Dad began, “and . . .” I went into the other room as though I had something to pack. I couldn’t stand it to hear Dad go over all that again. Mom stood by as though she were interested in every word. I wished I were not going back with Warren Harper. I wished I were driving back alone. I had nothing to take, so I picked up the book of poems. Dad wouldn’t do anything but listen to the war news from now on anyway.

  “Didn’t I tell you I’d come? You didn’t believe it, though, did you?” Mr. Harper asked, smiling, as we drove out on the highway.

  “I didn’t do anything about the bus, though,” I said.

  “Have a good time?”

  “I was glad to see them and the place,” I said cautiously.

  “They’re an interesting pair. Your dad’s certainly excited about the war, isn’t he?”

  “How’s Leslie?” I asked, to turn the talk from the war.

  “Oh, I don’t know. I brought him a knife back from town and he thanked me politely enough, but he didn’t holler for joy like any ordinary boy would. I took him out to look at the stars last night when I got home. They were as clear as you’d ever want to see. I thought he’d like to learn the name of the constellations, but he got cold and shivered and said he wanted to go in.”

  “He probably was cold. Take him out when it’s warmer. In the summer I used to like to lie on the hill back of our house and look at the stars.”

  “I won’t be here by then. I’ll be in the Army. Let’s stop and do the town,” he said as we drove down the main street.

  “This is something like it,” he exclaimed as the waiter set down our drinks. “Last night I had a glass of beer with a hamburger on my way home. Then when I was out looking at the stars with Leslie I picked him up to carry him over a place where the snow was deep. He said, ‘Dad, you’ve been drinking!’ as though I’d broken all the Ten Commandments. I didn’t tell you that part, but you can see how the star expedition wouldn’t be very successful. I’m afraid he’ll never do anything but dislike me. It’s just as well for him that I’m going into the Army. He’s better off without me.” Mr. Harper ordered another drink.

  “That’s not so,” I said quietly. “Give him more time. You don’t have any idea how the life of his mother and father affects a child.”

  I had never meant to tell anyone about Ben Webb and Anna Petrovna, but I told Warren Harper, whom I hardly knew. He sat holding his tall glass in his hands, his eyes very bright and sympathetic, his face a little flushed and his hair rumpled from the way he ran his hand over it. I guess I told him because I had just been home and it had all hit me so hard, and because of Leslie. I didn’t know whether he took in all I said or not, but he listened. His eyes hardly left my face. I told him about Gil’s leaving and how I came home and overheard Mom and Dad. I didn’t seem to mind his knowing about Gil.

  “That was pretty thick,” he said. “I suppose Leslie overheard us plenty. No wonder a kid gets to hate his parents.”

  “Oh, I don’t hate Mom and Dad. If anything, I hate . . . I guess I hate the war. Things wouldn’t h
ave happened just this way except for the last war. And now there’s another war.”

  “It’s not the war. People do the damnedest things without wars,” he said thickly.

  I couldn’t get him to leave before eight o’clock. We had sat there over three hours. When we left I made him let me drive. He was quiet so long I thought he must have fallen asleep, but he was wide-awake, staring out at the road ahead of us. I liked driving, but it’s lonely with someone so sunk in his own thoughts. The world was black and white and cold. There was nothing soft or indistinct or tender about the night.

  I drove all the way to the teacherage and turned the car around. He had spoken only once; that was when I got out of the rut and then landed back in it.

  “Not bad!” he said.

  “I hope you get home all right,” I said when I got out of the car. “And I don’t know that I blame Leslie,” I added brutally, but partly because I was annoyed that I had talked so much.

  He didn’t say a word. The car stood there for a few minutes, then I heard him driving off. The most he could do was to run in a snowbank and have to walk home.

  9

  I LIKED waking in my room at the teacherage. Everything was just as I had left it. I looked across at Prairie Butte as though it were an old friend. I hadn’t stopped to make a fire in the schoolroom stove last night, so I built one before I was dressed, and opened all the drafts. I went over and wrote on the board “This is December 8, 1941.”

  The La Mere boys came first, kicking their old horse into a gallop. Francis waited to tie the horse, but Raymond rushed in ahead to say:

  “Gee, Miss Webb, I’m fourteen. I might get in the war yet, if it lasts long enough.”

  I heard Francis and Nels arguing outside before they came in.

  “My dad was in the last war, I guess he knows,” Nels declared.

  “Miss Webb, we’re going to beat them Germans and Japs now, ain’t we?” Mike Cassidy asked me, his blue eyes shining.

  Leslie Harper was late. We were lined up at attention saluting the flag when I saw him running along the road. He slipped into his place while we were singing “Oh, say can you see . . .” Every eye this morning was fixed on the flag floating at the top of the flagpole, very bright against the white of the wide snowy plain. I wondered if the sheepherder saw it there, flying in a kind of no man’s land between the butte and the rimrock.

  When we broke up to go into school, Leslie came up to me anxiously. His thin face had bluish shadows under his eyes, and he was still out of breath from running.

  “Miss Webb, I’m sorry I’m late. I had to walk this morning. My dad wanted to take me but I wouldn’t let him.”

  “I see, Leslie. But if you’re late, you’ll have to stay after school, you know.”

  “Oh, yes, I know,” he said almost proudly, as though he welcomed the penalty. There was a hardness back of Leslie’s delicate little face that wasn’t like a child’s.

  Whatever subject we studied that day came back to the war. At noon we ate our lunch with the war news coming over the radio. Two of the boys amused themselves by drawing Japanese and American airplanes in battle on the blackboard.

  I noticed Leslie wasn’t eating any lunch.

  “Please, Miss Webb, I don’t feel good. I’d rather just drink some water,” he insisted when I asked him about it.

  “How about a cup of hot soup, Leslie?” But he was firm.

  The third grade was doing multiplication when I saw Leslie slide off his seat onto the floor.

  “Jiminy, Miss Webb, he’s fainted!” Mary Cassidy said in a hoarse excited whisper.

  I picked him up and carried him into my room and laid him on my bed. When I put cold water on his face, he opened his troubled gray eyes with a little moan. I put the soup on to heat and left him there while I gave the others something to do. But when I took the soup to him he turned away his face.

  “Please, no, Miss Webb, I can’t. I promised God I wouldn’t.”

  “Leslie, what is this business of not eating and bringing God into it?” I asked a little sternly.

  He sat up cross-legged on my bed with very bright eyes. “Promise you won’t tell, Miss Webb?” he asked dramatically.

  “No. I won’t tell,” I said. He leaned a little forward and spoke in a whisper.

  “Miss Webb, my father went to town yesterday and when he came back he’d been drinking. I promised God I wouldn’t eat until he promised to stop.” His face shone with an unhealthy glow.

  I had to leave Leslie until school was dismissed, then I came back and sat down beside him.

  “Leslie, do you really want to help your father?”

  He nodded.

  “Well, you won’t do it this way.”

  “But his soul is lost, Miss Webb, unless he repents.”

  I took a long look out the window at the patient face of the butte and the blue sky.

  “You don’t know about things like that. You’re only a little boy. Even your mother didn’t know. God wants you to love your father. He doesn’t want you to try to teach him.” Leslie’s solemn eyes hung on my face. I felt uncomfortable. “You sit up now and drink this soup and then go home and don’t say anything about this morning to your father.”

  “But I can’t eat. I promised.” He buried his head in the pillow.

  Even Mom could be no more stubborn than this. I left Leslie there by himself and went outside. I took the shovel and cleared wider paths to the mailbox and the cistern. At four o’clock the western sun was weakening in strength, trading its brave yellow for tinsel pink and lavender that colored the sky but had no warmth. The empty flagpole no longer made a zigzag shadow on the tumbled snow of the playground. The snowman the boys had made and perched on one of the swings had a rakish lurch. Someone had taken a blackboard eraser and inserted it in the wide face for lips. The nose was a stub of wiener from someone’s lunch and the eyes were two pieces of charcoal from the stove. I traipsed way across to the only jack pine that grew near the teacherage and broke off a bunch of pine needles to use as mustache and a fringe of hair. I glanced up toward the window of my bedroom and saw a quick movement at the window. Leslie had been watching me.

  “Come on and help me build a fort,” I called to him. I went ahead without waiting for him, not knowing just what I’d do next. When I heard the door open I didn’t look up. “If we get a big enough wall we can have a snowball fight tomorrow noon,” I said, pushing up the snow.

  He came over slowly and stood a minute watching me. I felt his eyes on me, but I was too busy to look at him. Then he started in. I wondered how he could work so hard when he had had no lunch. We made a wall of snow that stretched about seven feet from the flagpole toward the school. I stood up straight to look at it.

  “Gee, lookit how long it is, Miss Webb!” Leslie called. His clear high voice carried way across the empty plain. I threw a snowball at him that broke into fluff on his cap, and ducked down behind the wall. He gave a shrill little laugh that echoed against the side of the schoolhouse.

  “Watch out!” he called and threw, but the snowball hit the steps of the porch. I sent one back that struck the snow wall.

  “I’m sending that one right back at you, Miss Webb!”

  “I’ve got to get some ammunition ahead,” I said, kneeling behind the wall to make a few snowballs. When I stood up I saw Leslie’s father leaning on the mailbox post watching us.

  “Hello,” I called.

  “Hello,” he answered. Leslie saw him and stopped making snowballs.

  “May I play?” Mr. Harper asked.

  Leslie didn’t look up, His lower lip set against his upper.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “I shan’t,” Leslie answered. “I’m going home now.” He started off down the road, a dogged, stubborn little boy.

  “Well, I’ll be going on home too.” Warren Harper smiled and his whole face gentled. “What would you do?”

  It was almost dusk, a cold wintry grayness that made it easy to speak out.
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br />   “I’m not sure, but you might try giving up drinking for a while,” I suggested. “He’s so lonely and really frightened of his hate. It separates him from the rest of the children, too.” Then I added, “Hate always isolates you, doesn’t it?”

  “Well, thanks. I wish I were sure it would help.”

  The country is so wide here at the teacherage a single human being tramping along the road looks small and insignificant. Warren Harper was a tall man, six feet at least, but his shoulders drooped a little. The growing dark made his hat and clothes one color as he went along the road. I felt a kind of pity for him, going to try to make friends with his own son.

  The next morning Leslie came in with the Cassidys. I saw his green tin lunch box with the others on the bench by the door. I knew each one’s lunch box now. The blue one with the flowers almost scratched off was Mary’s. The black one with the jammed corner used to belong to old Mike Cassidy when he worked in the smelter. Old Mike was lamed in an accident, so he had come out to farm the homestead he’d taken when he first came to Montana. I missed the round red box that used to be Robert Donaldson’s.

  Leslie looked more rested. He waved his hand frantically in history class. I saw him shoot a paper wad at Sigrid’s back and held my tongue.

  “When you finish your lunch you can have a snowball fight over my snow wall,” I promised them.

  “Who built the wall, Miss Webb? It’s a good one,” Francis asked.

  “Leslie helped me after he got through staying after school.”

  “I bet Mr. Harper helped,” Mary piped out. I looked at her quickly.

  “No, it was all finished when he came by for Leslie,” I said, but I saw Mary roll her eyes at Nels.

  Leslie opened his lunch box and ate as eagerly as any of them.

  We practiced for the Christmas play in between classes. It was snowing again today, “a flour-sifter kind of snow” Mary Cassidy called it.

  “No, that’s Aunt Rhody picking her old white geese,” Nels said.

  After school the children stayed a little later to practice the carols. I sat on one of the desks nearest the stove and the children perched like sparrows near by.