Mom nodded. “We get thirty-six bushel a acre year before last,” she boasted.
Warren whistled. “That was all right! Ellen said something about bringing my little boy over here sometime. I hope you’ll let him come.”
“Your little boy? Sure,” Mom said. “I like children. You bring him this spring when we got new baby chicks. Poor boy, his mother dead long time?” Mom asked too curiously, too obviously, I thought.
“Over two years,” Warren said. Then he stood up to go.
“He’s good-looking young man,” was Mom’s comment when I came back into the house.
“Not bad,” I said. “He’s going into the Army.”
Mom nodded, her eyes secret with her thoughts. “He like you. He drive way down here just to bring you, eighty-five miles.” Mom said it so triumphantly it irritated me.
“He wanted something to do, that’s all. Mom, what made Dad decide to go way back to Vermont?”
Mom shrugged and poured a little coffee into her saucer. “He want to see that sister. Once before he went off, but he don’t go all the way! He come back when he get to North Dakota.” Her face took on that triumphant, almost sly, look that it could get.
“When, Mom? I didn’t know. I thought the only time he went back to Vermont was when I was eight and his mother died.”
Mom shook her head. “There was other time when we was married, maybe three years. We went for walk one Sunday, way over past Bardiches’. Ben carry you. He was quiet-like—you know? That was queer for him. He kep’ walking. I think maybe you get heavy and I say turn back, but he kep’ on. I ask him what was wrong.
“After while, he say he going to take trip back home. We had good crop that year an’ some money in bank. We plan to buy pair horses and a new harrow with that money, but I say, ‘Sure, you go ahead, Ben. Why don’t you go tomorrow?’
“So he go. Next night after that I was calcimining the whole house. Everything piled in the kitchen an’ me in old dress, bare legs, and my head tied up in flour sack, when I hear someone step on porch. The door open an’ in walk Ben.
“‘I caught train back from Fargo, Anna,’ he say.
“I say, ‘Where you goin’ to sleep tonight, Ben? You ain’t got any bed.’ I show him how I had it piled up with things.
“‘Where you going to sleep?’ he say.
“‘Oh, I sleep anywhere when I get done.’
“‘I can sleep where you can,’ he say.”
Mom laughed telling me. Her eyes were bright and soft with fun.
“But this time I guess he go all the way.”
I traced the squares on the oilcloth cover of the table. My throat ached. I could see how it must have been. Dad must have started out because he was homesick, starved for things and ways he was used to, and then he must have felt he shouldn’t do it and turned back home. It made Dad seem younger to think of him wanting something so much. Mom thought Dad had turned around and come back because of her, because he wanted to be with her. She couldn’t understand that it must have been his own hard sense of duty, making him feel he shouldn’t take the money and go away, that made him turn around. It must have been the same sense of duty that made him marry Mom and take her back to his home and stay with her even after he knew she had fooled him. I knew I shouldn’t feel that way about my mother, but I couldn’t help it.
“This will be first Christmas without Ben,” Mom said, and suddenly I was filled with pity for her. She had tied Dad to her by her rights, by his sense of duty. I thought a little proudly that I hadn’t said even one little word to hold Gil.
“I got forty-five turkeys to dress to take into town tomorrow, three more than Thanksgiving. I better get at ‘em.”
Every year except last year I had helped Mom fix the turkeys for town. Mom’s regular customers wrote her every year. Mom raised a special duck-breasted kind that had more white breast meat than others. People had them quick-frozen and shipped them East, they were so good. Mom charged three cents more a pound for dressing them ready to stuff and roast. She always felt she put one over on people charging for that, but she said, “Town women are that lazy an’ they faint if they see blood.” Mom never counted her own labor as costing anything, so the extra cents were so much pure profit.
I used to catch the turkeys for her, with a long wire bent into a hook at the end. I could hook the wire around the turkey’s leg so swiftly he didn’t have time to get away, but he made such a squawking you could hear him out to the highway. Mom bled them. I only held them for her, but I helped pick them afterwards out in the shed. Sometimes my fingers would be so cold out there I’d bury them in the soft feathers of the turkey’s breast or under the wings where the body heat of the turkey still felt burning-hot. We would fill big cartons with the feathers by the time we were through.
Many a time I have gone to bed with Mom still hard at work fixing turkeys and waked up hours later and found her still working. She wouldn’t let Dad help, but he never went to bed until she was through, even if she worked till two or three in the morning. He would sit in the next room and read and call out from time to time that she mustn’t do this another year.
“You get yourself something to eat and then you can help,” Mom said now.
There were soup and fresh bread Mom had made, and her own butter. After all these years, Mom still made her bread in round loaves. There was nothing so good. I was glad of this vacation, I thought, as I sat there eating. I missed Dad, though. Coming home was cut in half to find him away. I said so to Mom.
“He took idea to go. When he get all that money borrowed it go to his head. Next year when we don’t have no crop he’ll think a little,” Mom said darkly, pulling out a mess of bright-colored entrails from the big carcass in front of her. I watched as though I hadn’t seen all this a dozen times before.
“But we will have, Mom. Look at all the snow we’ve had already this year, and we put in more winter wheat this time!”
Mom shrugged. “We see.”
I don’t think I realized until that night how fast and deft Mom’s fingers were. They seemed to know every hollow of the turkey’s carcass. She would hold it up to the light and peer in and nod when she was through. When she laid the finished turkeys in a row on the table, hens in one line, toms in another, they were beautifully clean, the powerful legs crossed and tied, the big wings folded underneath, a string of red uncooked cranberries around each neck. Dad laughed at her for that, but I believe her customers liked it. She had her necklaces all strung and ready in a bag. Mom was systematic without thinking about it. I picked up one cranberry ring, half-expecting Mom to tell me to leave it alone as she always used to, but instead she said:
“Cranberries are awful dear this year!”
It was after two o’clock when we had the tags with the weight marked on them tied to each turkey. We piled the turkeys carefully in two big clothes baskets and a tin tub and set them out in the shed to keep cool. Mom scoured the table and the sink board and I did up the pans we had used. Then we sat down and had some coffee and another slice of bread. When we were through, Mom opened the kitchen door and let the cold air sweep into the hot kitchen till it was freshened of all its odors. She sniffed the air.
“Feel like chinook tomorrow. We better get them turkeys in early.”
11
I WONDERED how many trips to town I had made like this, the day before Christmas! It began Christmas for me, and afterward, when all the turkeys were delivered and Mom had the checks and cash in her big black bag, we had lunch and did our Christmas shopping. The one afternoon was always enough for us. We only gave to each other. Dad sent money back home, I knew now. And always every year, a present came for me from Aunt Eunice. Next to the doll, the present I remember best was a pair of white gloves when I was seventeen. I wore them for the first time to Gil’s house.
Mom had the list of customers with their addresses in her own handwriting. It dawned on me today as I looked down on the notebook in her hands that Dad must have taught her to w
rite too.
“You better watch the road!” Mom said. I straightened the wheels. I had got over too far looking at Mom’s handwriting.
“Did Dad teach you to write English, Mom?” I asked.
“Sure. While he get well, an’ on the boat. He don’t do so good learning Russian,” Mom said, laughing.
“I’ll take them in,” I said when we got to town. I had been proud the first year Mom let me take the turkeys from the truck to the houses and come back with the money. Mom liked the hard silver dollars best; the paper checks she cashed as soon as we got downtown. I used to wonder why so many of the women looked so hurried and had to hunt to find the money; they knew we would be there that day. One woman borrowed from her maid, and once a woman asked us to stop at her husband’s office to get the money from him.
“That’s it, the white house. Mrs. Harriman, she get seventeen-pound tom,” Mom read.
I thought of Gil as I went around the house to the Harrimans’ backdoor. They had a dog that barked, I remembered, but there was no dog there today. Maybe it had grown too old to bark.
Mom had been right about the chinook. The turkeys were soft now as I took them in. Sometimes they were frozen hard from standing overnight in the shed and in the open back of the truck.
“My! Are you Mrs. Webb’s daughter?” one woman asked. “I remember when you used to bring our Christmas turkey years ago. You had long blond braids!” I felt ten again.
It took us till nearly one o’clock to get them all delivered. It was good to see the clothes baskets and the tub empty. We had a good many checks, so we went right to the bank and Mom cashed them. I had two monthly checks for teaching uncashed too. I started to deposit them in the savings account I had opened in September, then I decided I’d buy a new coat for myself. I looked at Mom in her old black coat standing at the cashier’s window. Mom needed a new coat, too.
I told her at lunch. Mom’s eyes sparkled.
“You and Ben, you go crazy when you get money. I don’t need no coat. You buy new coat for yourself.”
“I am going to, but you need one too. It will be my Christmas present.” It was a wonderful feeling to have money of my own to spend.
We went up to the coat department. It was nearly empty. Most people don’t leave their Christmas shopping till the day before Christmas. The coat I bought for myself was a polo coat with big pockets and lapels that I could turn up. I put it on and walked up and down over the green carpet past the long mirrors. Mom sat on an imitation white leather chair, and watched me, nodding approval. Mom liked it because the salesgirl showed her the original price slashed down a third because it was so near Christmas.
“Why you do that the day before Christmas?” Mom asked.
“I guess to tempt someone. Most people are home trimming their tree today.”
I liked the coat because I thought Vera would approve of it. I wondered where she was this year, and what she would think of me teaching at Prairie Butte. I walked past the mirror again and pretended I was hurrying down the mall to meet . . . well, if not Gil, someone.
And then I got Mom to try on a coat.
“No, too tight. I can’t move my arms,” Mom said, swinging her arms to show the saleswoman. She tried another, a black with a fur collar.
“What kind a animal you call it?” Mom asked, holding up the collar. When she heard it was dyed skunk she wouldn’t have it. Each time when she took off a coat she reached for her own old one, till I took it and held it.
Then Mom saw a red one on the rack with a gray squirrel collar. I saw the saleswoman thought it was too young for Mom, but she had already put it on. She walked over in front of the glass and for the first time in my life I saw she must have liked clothes, too. Mom smoothed the soft fur cuffs with her hand.
“You like it, Yeléna?”
“Yes, I believe I do,” I said, looking at Mom in a new way. It’s hard for a daughter to realize that her mother could be still young. Mom wasn’t fat, she was just big, I thought critically.
Mom let me pay for it finally. We argued back and forth while the saleswoman went to have the buttons set over.
“All right, Yólochka, you pay,” Mom said.
I made Mom wear it out and we took her old coat in the box. We bought a hat, too, but it took time. The hats looked silly above Mom’s wide forehead. She sat in front of a glass, her face expressionless. A hat with a veil bothered her and she pushed the veil out of the way. I saw how her eyes kept resting on the red coat.
“It’s the color of the cranberries we put on the turkeys, Yeléna,” she said.
The hat we bought was dark-red felt. The saleswoman hunted in a big drawer until she found a piece of gray fur to match the collar on the coat.
Mom nodded. “We take that,” she said. “You sew the fur on good.”
It was becoming. I was ashamed that the red had seemed too young to me too, at first. Mom was seventeen when Dad married her. She was only forty-one now.
“Ben like red,” Mom said while the saleswoman was gone. I turned away from the silly smile on her face as she looked in the mirror. “I might go in to town to meet your father’s train when he come back.” She wanted him to see her in her new coat and hat. I squirmed inwardly, it seemed so pathetic to me. I felt years older.
We went to a man’s store and bought a new sweater for Dad and house slippers, the sweater from Mom and the slippers from me.
“Crops must have been good out your way,” the salesman said as he wrapped up the gifts.
Mom’s face closed up tight. “Crops was bad out our way,” she said, and the young man made no more attempts at conversation.
We went to the grocery store and Mom bought all kinds of things she didn’t buy ordinarily—powdered sugar and nuts and candied fruits and a tin of caviar and a jar of pickled herring. I sat in the truck outside, but I could see Mom through the big glass window of the store. It didn’t seem like Christmas with the chinook melting all the snow and the children going past bareheaded. The road home would be a mess.
We must have been about two miles from home when Mom put a little book in my lap. “There, Yólochka, it is yours.”
“Why, Mom!” It was a black bankbook like my own.
“I put all the turkey money to you. Two hunderd eighty-four dollar, for school next year.”
“But, Mom!” I couldn’t say any more.
“Sure, why not?” Mom said. “You buy me this coat, don’t you?”
The road was soft where we turned off the highway. I had to tend to my driving. It was dusk when we came to Gotham, a soft warm dusk, almost like spring. We drove with the windows rolled down and I could hear the water running in the culvert when we came to our place. No one had been there to turn on the yard light. I liked the house under the darker ridge of the coulee with the dark fringe of trees above the roof. I shut off the lights and the ignition and we sat there a second in the truck. The wind stirred past us and smelled sweet, of moist dirt and stable smells and some freshness I couldn’t name. It was chinook weather for Christmas Eve.
“Ben’ll miss being home,” Mom said.
“I’ll do the milking,” I said quickly. “I’ll be right ready.” I slipped on my jeans and an old shirt and the boy’s work shoes I wore around the ranch when it was muddy. After I’ve been to town these things feel good.
Mom had hung away her new coat and hat, but she was just sitting by the table. Usually, she was so busy the minute we got home from town. She sat idle like that only when she was thinking out some problem.
“Yeléna, it would be good for you to marry. You’d do good on a ranch. How you like this Mr. Harper?”
“Oh, Mom, for heaven’s sake, I hardly know him.” I let the milk pails clatter together as I went out. I was angry at her for trying to plan things out for me like some old country mother.
It was late to milk the cows, but we had left them in the corral all day with hay to eat. With the chinook melting the snow, the ground of the corral was soft and soppy. I slipp
ed the wooden bar on the gate and talked to the cows as I went in. The yard light reached way over here, so I could see well enough. I led them into the barn one by one. We milk three, and have enough for Bailey and for Peterson at the store.
The light bulb in the barn was mirrored in the cows’ big dark eyes. I’m out of practice, but I like milking. May turned her big head and looked at me and I could see myself perfectly reflected in her eyes. She was easy to milk. The milk poured down evenly into the pail. I gave May a pat on the flank and set the pail on the shelf where it was safe and moved to Belle. The cows’ names were May and Belle and Dunya. Dad had named the first cow they had on the ranch Dunya after a girl they knew in Russia to tease Mom, and we had had one by that name ever since.
The wide door stood open. I could hear the cows chewing at the hay and the sound of the milk in the pail. I thought how strange a way it was to spend Christmas Eve. Last year I had been with Gil. We had gone downtown and had dinner and danced. Carolers sang carols in the dining room and Gil paid them to sing certain ones for me. They stood by our table and sang “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen” and “Noel.” Gil held my hand under the table. I had thought that I would spend all the Christmas Eves of my life with him. I moved over to Dunya, but in my thoughts I was back with Gil. I remembered Christmas Day and Christmas night last year. I remembered how happy I was.
I turned the cows back out through the corral and heard Dunya’s bell as she led the way down to the coulee bed. Their big hoofs made a sucking sound as they picked them up out of the mud. I stopped to pull down hay for the horses and turn off the barn light. From the wide barn door I could see the yellow lights from the kitchen and the dark top of the tree above the house roof. Patches of snow jumped out of the dark, whiter than they were by daylight. There was a dripping sound of melting icicles. Nothing was like Christmas Eve. I wished I could stay out here and not go back to Mom’s questions, but I took the pails of warm fresh milk and went back up to the kitchen.
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