Wheat That Springeth Green

by J.F. Powers

  “I’m turning this bird in,” Father Stock said to the women behind the counter, and to Joe, “Make change while I’m gone, boy.”

  So Joe, warned by the women to watch out for Canadian coins (“Somebody tried to give Father one!”—“The very idea!”) and shown the cashbox, made change while the women filled orders and discussed the saucers on the counter (Sister Agatha and Sister Margaret had disappeared), one woman for putting the ice cream back in the freezer, the other one for letting it stay right there, where Father could see it when he returned. There wasn’t so much business. One woman could’ve handled it, and the other one, though she’d have to wash her hands if she went back to filling orders when Father Stock returned, could’ve made change. Joe wanted to say this to the women, but was afraid it wouldn’t do any good, and so said nothing. Then, when he couldn’t wait any longer—he’d been watching the crowd gathering over by the church—he blurted out, “I have to go now.” “Oh, dear!”—“Can’t you wait?” Knowing what that meant—he couldn’t leave now—and too embarrassed to say anything, he turned away from the women so they couldn’t see his face. He wanted to cry, but didn’t, just snuffled. “Oh, dear!”—“Did you go?” He was even more embarrassed, staring down at the cashbox. “Did somebody give you one?”—“A dime or a quarter?” He shook his head, not embarrassed, just annoyed. “Did somebody say something?”—“Oh, you poor kid!” He realized then that they knew who he was and had seen the picture in the paper.

  “Here, what’s this?” said Father Stock, returning and seeing the ice cream melting in the saucers on the counter, but wouldn’t listen to the women, said “Shhh!” to them, for Sister Agatha was also returning to the stand. “Sister,” Father Stock said to her, “you and Sister didn’t eat your ice cream. Where’s Sister?”

  “Over in church,” said Sister Agatha. “Praying. For you, Father. Oh, how you treated that poor old soul!”

  “Now, now, Sister. Gave him a good talking-to and let him go. Gave him a dollar.”

  Joe was astonished to hear this and thought Sister Agatha would be, but if she was she didn’t show it.

  “And that’s not all, Father. You made Joe, here, miss the race with your—your moneychanging.”

  “Sister, that was not my intention—and that’s what counts, fortunately for all of us here below. Come with me, boy. Make change while I’m gone, Sister, and eat your ice cream. Eat Sister’s too.”

  Joe followed Father Stock through the crowd, over to where, alongside the church, the race had been run, where Sister Martina was assembling the contestants for the next event, and where Joe gave up the idea that Father Stock, who could do it, would order the race rerun.

  “Sister, this boy, through no fault of his, missed the foot race. Please see that he gets one of those sacks.”

  “I’m sorry, Father, but they’re all taken. Unless”—Sister Martina raised her voice—“someone would be willing to give up his or hers?”

  A girl who wasn’t in hers yet, a sixth-grader who wore tortoiseshell glasses, said, “I would, Sister.”

  “Good for you, Dolores,” said Sister Martina (who taught the sixth grade).

  Father Stock smiled at the girl, at Joe, said (to Sister Martina), “I have to get back to my stand,” and left.

  Joe went over to the girl and whispered to her, thinking she’d be pleased to hear it: “It’s all right. I don’t want your sack. I’m not in this race.”

  “Sisterrr!”

  Sister Martina came. “Now what?”

  Joe got in first. “Sister, it’s all right. I don’t want her sack. I’m not in this race.”

  “Sister, he has to be!”

  “I don’t!”

  “Father said!”

  Joe reeled back. “Father didn’t!”

  “No,” said Sister Martina, “but Father expects it.”

  Joe could’ve cried, but didn’t. “Sister, I don’t want to.”

  “Sister, he has to!”

  “Nobody has to, but one of you should.” Sister Martina moved away from them, calling to the other contestants to line up.

  “You know you’re the one,” the girl said to Joe, stuck her tongue out at him, threw down the sack, and walked on it. “Thanks for taking my place. Half-Pint.”

  “Four Eyes.”

  Joe knew, when he picked up the sack, why the girl hadn’t got into it—it was dusty, which he didn’t mind so much, but damp at the bottom, which he did, and said BIG BOY POTATOES on it.

  Joe went over to the starting line, carrying his sack to save energy, which other contestants were wasting by hopping around and falling down in theirs, but he also wanted to put off the moment when it would clearly be seen that he was one of them. When the moment came, he was laughed at by guys who knew he was the fastest runner in the fifth grade (and probably in the whole school), and by some of the girls, including one who’d been in love with him last year, and by Frances and her friends. Frances held up the Kewpie doll and said to it (really to her friends), “See Daddy!” Joe just smiled at Frances and everybody, so they couldn’t tell how he really felt about being in the sack race, so he wouldn’t get mad and cry and fight and maybe lose if he fought the guy he wanted to fight—Delbert Freeman, who was stumbling around, making believe his orange pop was whiskey, looking cross-eyed, and saying, “Hic!”

  “Piss Pants!”

  Delbert Freeman didn’t hear it, but Sister Martina did and yelled:

  “On your mark, get set, go!”

  Joe broke fast and—he’d been in sack races before—watched out for early fallers. When he was clear, he eased up some to save himself for the stretch, concentrated on his sack, jockeying it, grabbing it up when he jumped, letting it out when he came down. (The noises from the crowd, the screams and groans, were not for him.) Lying third, breezing, gaining on the big seventh-grade girl who looked like Powerful Katinka in Toonerville Folks whose movements were erratic and might bring her (and him) down, he gave her more room, lost a little ground, gained it back, drew even, passed her. (Now the noises from the crowd were for him, cheering him on.) Closing on the leader, a big eighth-grade guy who smoked Wings (ten cents a pack) in the boys’ washroom during recess and might not stay, Joe drew even, and was going ahead in the stretch, driving, when he fell.

  “His old man’s a bootlegger!” Delbert Freeman.

  “His uncle!” Catfish.

  Joe jumped up and out of his sack. He was heading not for Catfish but Delbert Freeman when, seeing and hearing Sister Agatha (“Joe, don’t!”), he changed directions . . . and ran away . . . all the way home, where he went up to the little tower and did what he’d wanted to do all that day, cried.

  3. LOOKING UP SKIRTS

  AT THE LAST meet that spring, Joe won his events, the hundred and the two-twenty dashes, and ran anchor in the four-forty relay, won by the team. But then, because the team’s second best distance man had twisted an ankle in the broad jump, Joe—against the conscience of his coach, Father “Germany” Zahn, an old dash man—was entered in the mile. After setting a pace intended to tempt and kill off the opposition, he faded as expected, but miraculously came again and got up for a third, a point, which proved to be the margin of Immaculata’s victory over hated Cathedral.

  Joe was a hero to the faculty and student body for what remained of the school year—not much, summer vacation depriving the track star, as it didn’t the football and basketball star, of his admirers all too soon. But Joe had lettered in a major sport as a sophomore, something seldom done at Immaculata, where standards were high, and he made the most of it, wearing his sweater of pale blue with its snow white I as long as the weather permitted, or a little longer—he was hoping for an unseasonably cool summer. And was looking forward to fall and football because, though he didn’t care for the game and was small for it, Immaculata could use his blazing speed in the backfield—the head football coach, Father “On” Wisconski, present at the last meet, had been heard to remark (by the student manager of the track team, one
of Joe’s admirers), “I’d like to turn that little fart loose on Cathedral.”

  With that in mind, Joe was in training that summer. Instead of sharpening pencils and practicing his typing at Hackett’s, he stayed home and cut the grass, about two acres of it, with a hand mower, weeded the flower beds, practiced fast starts and broken field running, did push-ups, chinned himself on the apple tree, and ate a lot.

  By July, though, it had become one of those summers that melt the streets, and Joe was spending more time in the cool of the cellarway. Here, in a deck chair, he read the Sporting News regularly, keeping track of players he’d seen before they went up to the majors, or after they came down; also read Anthony Adverse, a very long book, regularly; and occasionally dipped into Butler’s Lives of the Saints and Rumble and Carty’s Radio Replies, this (a gift from Sister Agatha, now stationed in Green Bay) answering questions he might be asked by the laity or enemies of the Church if he became a priest, which he wasn’t sure about that summer.

  Early in July, when the heat had reached into the bricks of the cellarway and was wilting the moss, he said good-bye to the horseflies and moved the deck chair inside, into the cellar, and shut the door. Here, sitting under a dusty lightbulb, he smoked (English Ovals, exhaling into the open furnace to avoid detection) and drank (beer and ale, there being, or having been, a good supply in the cellar). Here he discovered what, until that summer, had been a mystery to him, why some stars stay out all night, experienced himself the special pleasure, the thrill, there is for the athlete in dissipation, in tempting fate—imagined himself in the fall (“Fumble!”) being taken out, hooted at.

  And while smoking and drinking away these days in the cellar, abusing his body, he also abused his mind and spirit with the little magazines he bought with embarrassment at a downtown cigar store, to which he’d return for more of the same, he knew, though regularly disappointed by the art (“Pensive,” “Nocturne”) and the fiction (“Concealed from the other merrymakers by a potted palm while the band played on, Randy cupped one of Diane’s creamy cherry-tipped orbs”).

  He couldn’t trust himself these days.

  If he suddenly shoved his reading matter into the furnace and rushed out into the heat of the day, it might appear that he’d suddenly resolved to amend his life and that he just happened to be occupied in the front yard, moving the sprinklers, raking the gravel driveway, for a brief period in the morning and afternoon. The truth was, his reading matter could be retrieved from the cold furnace and he’d availed himself of the trial offer made to adults only for a limited time only by Seemore Products of Hollywood, to be dispatched to addressee in a plain brown envelope posthaste. Weeks had passed since addressee enclosed a dollar and signed himself J. Hackett—not such a good idea as he’d thought, since it meant meeting the mailman twice a day if the uncensored poses (“Kind Men Like! Nuff Sed!!”) weren’t to fall into the hands of the other J. Hackett at that address. Write and say that Seemore should cancel his order and give the money to the poor? Or that he’d moved to a nonexistent address in a distant city? Or that he’d recently married and was no longer interested? Or that he’d recently passed away, yours truly, Mrs J. Hackett?

  It didn’t just happen, either, that he’d be occupied in the backyard when Frances and Dora, the new maid (over twenty-one and built like a brick . . . as the guys at Hedblad’s service station would say and Joe wouldn’t, even there), came out to sunbathe by the stone wall—on which a friendly young neighbor, as he might appear to be, though seldom speaking or spoken to, would soon be leaning, with an erection, considering the possibilities in the bodies below and sometimes in the conversation.

  When Dora said, as she frequently did, “Rex, he don’t care if I go out with other parties, just so’s I don’t go steady, and I don’t care, just so’s he don’t,” Frances seemed to understand. But Joe wondered about this, since Rex and Dora (she seemed to meet these other parties while working at her other job, relief cashier at the Orpheum and the Palace) were engaged and planning to get married right after Rex had done his hitch. Joe also wondered about the property that Rex and Dora were hoping to buy with his winnings (craps) and her savings, which Joe thought could not amount to much. Dora called the property (“propitty”), which was in “easy reach” of Fort Bone, where Rex was stationed, a roadhouse—something Joe knew little about, only what he’d learned from his reading that summer (Randy had met Diane at a roadhouse, the Red Rooster) and from movies in which babes in high silk hats and black silk tights sold cigarettes to merrymakers at small tables with bed lamps on them. Joe thought that some of the places he heard swing music emanating from on his radio late at night, places like “Frank Dailey’s Meadowbrook” and “the beautiful Glen Island Casino,” might be roadhouses, real ones, but that what Rex and Dora had in mind was only a highway tavern with a name like Dew (or Do) Drop Inn stenciled on a beer sign. Even that was putting it too high, Joe thought when he heard that Rex would tend bar and keep order there while Dora kept order among the hostesses and doubled as one of them on busy nights, at least until the roadhouse got on its feet. “It won’t take long. Rex says we’ll be chargin’ a dollar for a ten-cent bottle of beer, and maybe more after hours. All his old buddies’ll come.”

  “Dora!”

  “Whut?”

  “What you said!”

  “Whut?”

  “Come!”

  At such times they’d laugh, and even when they were lying with their heads down and their bottoms up (how Joe most liked to see them), he’d gaze off in the distance as if not listening to the conversation—he didn’t know whether Frances thought he couldn’t understand it, didn’t care if he could, or was trying to embarrass him. Sometimes she’d suddenly look up at him and say: “You still here?” Once she’d said, but hadn’t looked up at him, fortunately, because it had made him blush:

  “Dora, what about this Peeping Tom here?”

  “Whut? Who?”

  “Joe. He drinks, you know. What if he came in drunk some night?”

  “Whut? Where?”

  “The roadhouse.”

  “Whut if he did? So whut?”

  “Dora!”

  “Whut? Not old enough to do business with?”

  “Dora, he plans to enter the priesthood.”

  “Do tell.”

  “Maybe,” Joe said, “I’ll just enter the family business.”

  “Anytime, kid,” Dora said.

  And Frances laughed.

  Until that summer, Joe had visited Hedblad’s only as a customer, in the Reo or the Pierce-Arrow, usually in the daytime, but late in June, still wearing his letterman’s sweater, he began what was now his routine in the evening (unless he drove out to the ball park in the Reo), dropping in at the station to talk sports with the night attendants. Dale, the younger one, had gone to Immaculata for a while, but wasn’t the kind of guy Joe had known, not an athlete and not much of anything else, just one of the guys you see around school and then don’t. Rock, over twenty-one, was from Chicago and thought he was so great—claimed that he’d once seen Ralph (not Al) Capone, whom he called Bottles, and that he’d lived near Wrigley Field, Home of the Cubs.

  If Rock and Dale were busy, Joe was now trusted to answer the phone, to hand out road maps, to hose down the pavement, and the talk was now less of sports, more of cars and babes. Joe didn’t pretend to know much about cars, couldn’t say what the Reo or the Pierce would do if opened up, and wouldn’t have pretended to know much about babes if it hadn’t been thought (by Dale, not Rock) that he did because he was so blasé. (“You’re Blasé” was one of Joe’s favorite songs.) Dale, if not Rock, was impressed by the neighborhood Joe lived in, the clothes he wore, and probably by the way he’d casually pick up a dirty cartoon book and toss it aside unread, the way he’d casually point out that a car was waiting for service when the talk was about babes, and the way, recently, he’d casually bought (as if they were cigarettes) a pack of “cundrums” at the station. “Ever lose one on the job, Joe?” �
��Can’t say I have, Dale. You?” Blasé.

  So if Joe asked for advice on how to do business with Dora, he had plenty to lose at the station, at least with Dale, who, though, was a very serious guy for a guy with nothing on his mind but cars and babes and wouldn’t laugh at him, as Rock would. But what if Joe asked for advice and Rock found out from Dale? Rock was a crude character. At first he’d called Joe Dash Man—“Hey, Dash Man!”—but now it was Gash Man. Joe, though embarrassed by this, was also flattered by it, as he wasn’t when Rock asked him how often he beat his meat, pulled his pud, or when Rock held his hand out limply, palm up, as though the fingers were broken, and whispered, “Smell my new babe,” which Rock had done nightly until Joe replied, “Sorry, Rock, I’ve got a cold.” Blasé.

  Some of the things Joe heard at the station were hard for him to believe. It was a sure sign of recent sexual activity if a babe’s eyes were all black underneath, Dale said, and as often as not, after a babe whose tank he’d filled, oil he’d checked, windshield he’d cleaned, and eyes he’d inspected, drove away, he’d shake his head and say, “Goes another one,” drawing from Joe, at most, a nod. Blasé. According to Rock, when Mr Hedblad was there during the day, hot babes phoned the station, even in the summertime, to say they couldn’t get their car started—that was the code—and off Mr Hedblad (whom Rock called Horse Cock) would go in the wrecker. “You seen him in it, Joe.” “Oh, sure.” Blasé. It was hard for Joe to believe this of Mr Hedblad, an old bald-headed married guy who wore a black leather bow tie. But from other things Joe heard at the station and did not doubt, many more people than he’d imagined—not just young guys like himself, and certainly more babes—were having trouble with the Sixth Commandment.

  It showed Joe what the world was like, what he’d be up against if he became a priest.

  It also showed him he wasn’t so bad, made him feel better about himself, but not much.