Winter Wheat

by Mildred Walker

  “Isn’t it Christmasy, Miss Webb?” Leslie said, hugging his knees, his eyes wide and clear. I nodded and sounded my tuning fork for “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” I caught Sigrid’s rounded childish tones and Raymond’s, newly turned to bass. Mary Cassidy sang with a sweet swinging rhythm that carried all the others.

  I looked beyond them out the windows where the sky and the snow were merging into one soft gray light. I almost held my breath. I had the feeling I had had long ago when we had come home from the concert and I had climbed up on the gatepost and heard Mom singing as she covered the tomato plants. It was a feeling of happiness.

  I sat there watching them put on their wraps to go: Francis struggling with that rusted zipper on his jacket, Sigrid coming to have her long red scarf wound around her cap and over her mouth, Raymond rushing out as always bareheaded in his thin leather jacket yet never seeming to catch cold. These things had come to be so familiar that they were dear to me.

  Leslie came up when he was ready to go. “Miss Webb,” he said in a low voice, “Dad said he’d try. He says he don’t like making promises but he means just the same thing by it.” Leslie’s eyes shone with a triumphant gleam that broke the spell for me.

  “I’m glad, Leslie,” I said. I started to say something more, that if he would just let his father feel that he loved him it would help more, but I didn’t. What did I know about love? I was born of unlove. I couldn’t hold Gil’s love. I didn’t watch the children go off as I usually did, but began straightening up the schoolroom. The snow beyond the windows seemed tiresome and endless to me now.

  Saturday morning I was mopping the schoolroom floor—I had on jeans and an old shirt and my hair hung down every which way. I was singing the Russian hymn I know, one that Mom used to sing. I don’t think it was meant to be sung to work, but it fitted the thrust of my mop. I heard a whistle and my name called out. I stepped over my mop pail and opened the door. Leslie and his father stood there with skis in their arms.

  “Hello,” Warren said. “We brought a pair for you. Come on and help me teach Leslie.”

  “I don’t know how either.”

  “Fine! We’ll all learn.” It was good to see Leslie jumping up and down.

  My eyes met Warren Harper’s. Leslie ran ahead of us and threw snowballs at his father and chased the dog. His cheeks were red from the cold and he looked almost robust in his heavy jacket and snow pants.

  “We have to walk up here about a mile and then there’s a good hill to learn on. I was up here last week when I took supplies to the sheep camp,” Mr. Harper said.

  We walked quite a way before he said, “I went in to see about applying for a commission last week.”

  “What about your job?” I asked.

  “I wrote my boss last week and said I was going in the Army. It makes more sense than anything else for me.”

  “You’re like Dad,” I said.

  We came to the little slope and put on the skis.

  “Those were Mother’s,” Leslie told me. “She had them when she lived out here.”

  “Did she like skiing?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Mr. Harper said shortly.

  All the time we were skiing he was shouting directions first at Leslie and then at me. He was having fun now and his face looked younger.

  “Oh, that was awful. I’m afraid I’m hopeless,” I said. The first couple of times I stayed upright but the last time I took a terrible sprawler. “Stop laughing at me!”

  He was laughing so hard he could hardly help me up. “If you could have seen your face! You knew you were going to fall and you looked so indignant. Do you think you could call me Warren? It’s hard to say ‘Miss Webb’ every time I pick you out of a snowdrift!”

  “I think I could,” I said. “Do call me Ellen.”

  “Look, Miss Webb, see me!” Leslie called.

  “You know you’ve seemed so much older until today,” Warren said.

  “I’ve felt old this fall, ten years older than I was last year at school.”

  “That’s not good.”

  I shrugged the way Mom does. Sometimes I catch myself with some of her mannerisms and some of Dad’s big words. “I can’t help it.”

  “I felt a hundred when I came back from Detroit,” Warren said, “but then I’m seven years older than you are.”

  “How did you know how old I am?”

  “I guessed,” he said, laughing. I don’t know why I should have thought of it then, but I remembered how Mary Cassidy had looked over at Nels Thorson and I stopped laughing.

  I went back to the Harpers’ for dinner. Old Mrs. Harper was rushing around the kitchen, but she let me set the table and help. We ate in the kitchen and it was comfortable and like being home.

  “Were you born here?” I asked Warren.

  “Right here in this house, in the room off’n the kitchen,” Mrs. Harper said. “I remember how the wind blew. I’ve thought maybe that was why he was so strong-willed and set on having his own way. We’d only been out here ‘bout a year. We’d oughta stayed where we was in Wisconsin.”

  “It’s a long sight better climate here,” Mr. Harper said. “We set out to raise wheat in the first place, but we had two crop failures an’ I said that was enough of that. Wheat’s too big a risk.”

  “How about lambs, Dad?” Warren teased. “Wait’ll we get cattle on the place.”

  “My father raises wheat,” I told old Mr. Harper. I had a funny feeling of pride as I said it. “We didn’t have much of a crop this last year, but with all this snow the winter wheat ought to do well next year, he thinks.”

  After dinner, Leslie took me in his room to show me his collection of bird feathers. On the big old-fashioned dresser was a tinted photograph of a young woman in a choir robe.

  “That’s my mother,” Leslie said.

  “She’s pretty.”

  “I think she must make a lovely angel, don’t you, Miss Webb?”

  “Oh, yes, indeed I do,” I told him. I went over to look at the feathers carefully laid out on a shelf of an old bookcase.

  “Let’s see, this is a magpie’s and this is a flicker’s and this is a chicken hawk’s. What’s this, Leslie?”

  “I don’t know. I call it my white bird. Dad says maybe it could be from a sea gull that got too far away from water. He saw one once flying over the reservoir.” I ran my finger along the feather. There is a sense of swiftness even in the feeling of a feather, and a little silken sound of wind as you run your finger along its edge.

  “I have a blue jay’s feather and a red-winged blackbird’s at home, Leslie. I’ll bring them back to you after Christmas.”

  His eyes shone and then were grave again. “Miss Webb, can I ask you about something?”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “Miss Webb, Mother told me if I was good and prayed to God, He’d speak to me like He did to Samuel in the night, and I’ve waited and waited and prayed every day and He doesn’t. Why doesn’t He?”

  Leslie’s eyes were on my face, and his whole body seemed to be waiting for my answer. I knew how he felt from asking Mom questions. It is so hard not to be answered.

  “I think God speaks in different ways from the way He used to,” I began boldly. “I think now He speaks in the things we see in the country and in the snow and the skies and the mountains and the grass. If you don’t like this country, God couldn’t speak to you through it, and when you were angry with your father God couldn’t talk to you if He wanted to.” I was glad to get back to the kitchen, where the conversation clung to crops and cookery and neighbors.

  Warren took me home in the Pony Express. I told him what Leslie had asked me and of my lame answer. He pushed his hand back over his hair like an embarrassed boy.

  “If Gladys had set out to drive me crazy after she died, she couldn’t have thought of a better way, could she? I want him to come to like it here, but I wonder if he ever will. I suppose it was this country and the loneliness of it that drove his mother to do what she d
id, and here I’ve brought Leslie back here and expect him to like it the way I do.”

  “Well, he’s your son too,” I said.

  “Yes, that’s so, but I wonder if parents and children often see things the same way, let alone understand each other.” Warren’s voice was sad, and some tone in it matched the late afternoon light and the bare cold look of the country. I wished I could do something to help them.

  10

  ALL the families came to the Christmas exercises, even to the three-weeks-old baby in the Thorson family. When the Donaldsons came in there was a little stir all over the schoolroom.

  I had drawn the shades and lighted two tall red candles on my desk. There was a candle burning in each window.

  We began with a Christmas carol. Mary sang the second verse alone and we all hummed the chorus. Then came our pageant of “The News of the Christ Child’s Birth” coming to a single shepherd boy off alone with his flock. Francis La Mere was the young shepherd, and the corner of the front of the room with my desk moved out of the way was the hill where he watched his sheep. Warren had brought two sheep over in the Pony Express and Francis kept a firm grip on them. One of the sheep bleated and the audience laughed and clapped.

  The young shepherd wanted so to follow the star, but he couldn’t leave his sheep because of wolves. Nels made the sound of a wolf from outside the window. So the angels appeared unto the boy and sang carols. Mike kept a flashlight trained on them from behind for a halo. One of the angels guarded the flock while the other took the boy to the stable where Mary and the Baby were. The angel took the sheep out at this point and our audience was hilarious when one sheep balked and had to be pushed down the aisle.

  Francis walked after the angel with all the awe and excitement I could ask for. When we were practicing this part Francis said:

  “I know, Miss Webb, you mean to walk like I was out hunting and maybe there’s an elk over there?”

  Mary Cassidy, as Mary, held her own five-months-old sister in her arms and Raymond as Joseph stood by them. The young shepherd had no gift, so he left his crook, which he had made himself out of aspen wood. Then he went happily back to his flock.

  Leslie announced the beginning and the end of the pageant. A baby cried and some child coughed croupily so the last words were drowned out, but everyone clapped.

  As Raymond raised the shades and blew out the candles at the end, the late winter sun struck in across the room in a blaze of brightness. The parents looked at the papers we had hung along the wall, spelling papers and writing exercises and drawings. I went over to speak to the Donaldsons.

  “It was good of you to come,” I said.

  “I guess it’s still our school. We paid our school tax,” Mrs. Donaldson sniffed.

  “Don’t, Minnie,” Mr. Donaldson murmured, stooping to put on her galoshes.

  “We saw you in town two nights after Robert’s death, Miss Webb. We were in the front window of the undertaker’s parlor when you went by with Mr. Harper.”

  I felt my face redden. “I’m sorry I didn’t see you,” I said stupidly, but my mouth tasted as bitter as though I had been chewing alder bark.

  “It looks warmer, don’t it?” Mrs. Thorson exclaimed, and I was grateful to her.

  “I wouldn’t trust it yet,” Mr. Thorson said with a big laugh. He was a solid, red-faced man with bright-blue eyes.

  “How old are you, Miss Webb? I don’t suppose you’re at an age yet where you’re touchy about it!”

  “I’m over twenty,” I said in the midst of the laughter, and I could see Warren Harper smiling at me across the room.

  “Well, you’re all right, young lady. You can have this school another ten years as far as I’m concerned,” Mr. Thorson assured me. And Mrs. Cassidy squeezed my arm and told me I was better than last year’s teacher. And then they were all leaving at once.

  “Merry Christmas, Miss Webb!” the La Mere boys called out.

  “Merry Christmas!” I must have called a dozen times. Mr. La Mere had fastened sleighbells on his old jalopy and they made a gay jingle through the late winter afternoon, as gay as the bells on the troikas Mom used to tell about, I thought.

  I set the little Christmas tree out in the snow and swept out the litter of popcorn and paper and greens. I would be away ten days. I took a knife and scraped off the candle wax that had dropped on the window sills and tore December off the calendar. My suitcase was already packed. When I heard Warren’s car, I locked the door and went out to meet him.

  “You did well by Christmas,” he said.

  “Thank you. The children loved it, didn’t they?”

  “And the parents.”

  “I keep forgetting that you went to school here. Did you like it?”

  “Oh, yes. That was all I knew. We had the sister of a rancher who lived where Thorsons do now for a teacher. She taught us spelling and reading and arithmetic all right, but I think she was over her depth in geography. The summer before I was married I got a job on a boat going to South America, and I kept thinking of the map in my first geography book here. I thought the world was my apple in those days. I wasn’t going to stop till I had been all over the world. I got stymied pretty easy, didn’t I? Maybe the war’ll give me another chance in geography!”

  “Tell me something about South America,” I said quickly. I liked to hear him talk when he was interested in a thing. We rode along at seven below zero with the heater on and he told about how awful the heat was when he was unloading fruit in the harbor at Rio. He knew a little Spanish and we tried talking together. All of a sudden, he didn’t finish his sentence.

  “Ellen Webb, do you know I love you?”

  “Oh, please don’t,” I said. “I’m through thinking about love. It took me all summer and all this fall to stop thinking about Gil. I like feeling alone in myself. I feel free.”

  “You can’t live on that basis all your life.”

  “I don’t know—maybe I can. I know I can live alone. I’ve tried it this winter.”

  “What about when you’re older?”

  “I still think I could manage. I’ve seen Mom and Dad. I’m sure they don’t love each other, but they have to go on as they are.”

  “That doesn’t mean that you and I couldn’t be different.”

  “Don’t, Warren, please!” I didn’t mean to speak so sharply but his saying “you and I” made me uncomfortable. I didn’t want anyone too close to me again.

  There were few cars on the road and the ranches were far apart. Here and there a lonely spot of light gleamed out of the dusk to show where a house stood. I wondered a little hopelessly if there were happiness back of those lights or just lives like Warren’s or mine or Mom’s or Dad’s. I said something like that to Warren; he was easy to tell half-thoughts to.

  “Maybe a country settled by homesteads is bound to be made of expectation and disappointment,” he said. “So much hope to begin with settling down into so much resignation. Look at that!”

  The headlights shone on a solitary deserted building at a crossroad, with broken windows covered with old handbills. “Gold Block” was cut in stone above the entrance, as though it had once been meant for the center of a city.

  “Somebody had a big idea once!” Warren said.

  I tried to think of threshing time when the country looked so good and everyone felt strong and full of hope, but now the wheat was deep under the snow and nobody knew how it would turn out. The snow in the lights from the car was no longer soft and fresh and white, it was frozen into hard gray banks.

  Our yard light was on when we turned off the highway.

  “You’re all lit up like a church,” Warren said.

  “Yes, Mom loves a lot of light.” I couldn’t help thinking what a sturdy light it was in the darkness of the prairie, like Mom. As we drove into the yard I saw Mom looking out the window. Then she opened the door and stood there, thick and plain and so good to see.

  “Yeléna!” she called.

  “Hi, Mom! Come in, won’
t you?” I said to Warren.

  “I was going to drive over for you tomorrow. Your dad, he is gone back to his home.” Mom jerked her head backward.

  “To Vermont! When did he go?”

  “You don’t get his letter? Sure, he go last Monday. You have some coffee, Mr. Harper?”

  “Thank you. That would taste good.” I could see how he liked Mom.

  “Yeléna, you get the cups and some cake in the box. We go in other room.” But Mom asked it rather than said it.

  “It’s fine here,” Warren said. So we sat around the table in the kitchen. Mom and Warren talked about the war and the prospects for next year. He told her how good the cake was and Mom cut him another slice.

  “It’s good with coffee. You like more coffee, too?”

  He said he would and Mom got up to pour it and turned her back on us as though she knew we would want to talk by ourselves. There was something in the way she smiled and was so ready to cut more cake that made me uncomfortable, as though I had done well to have somebody to see me home again—like any peasant mother with a daughter on her hands to marry. I wished Dad were home.

  “When will Dad be back, Mom?”

  Mom shrugged. “He get letter from his sister one day, next day he make up his mind to go.” Mom didn’t like to talk of family affairs before Warren. And then she added, as though it were forced out of her, “It cost lots of money to go back there.” She passed Warren the coffee. “You a rancher, too, Mr. Harper?” Mom looked at him with her bright, inquisitive eyes.

  Warren laughed. “At heart. But I’ve been away a long time.”

  Mom frowned and waited. I could almost follow her mind with my own. She couldn’t understand why anyone would want to leave here, I thought scornfully.

  “It seems good to be back here,” Warren said.

  “Sure,” Mom said.

  “I was telling Ellen that I admire anyone who raises wheat. That takes lots of . . .”

  “Work,” Mom said with unusual quickness.

  “Yes, and faith, too.” Warren could see faith wasn’t a word Mom used familiarly, at least not about ranching. I could see him hunting for a better word. “You have to have plenty of patience,” he added.