Winter Wheat (13 page)

“We never go back to Plainville,” Mom said.

“Oh, you’d have come to like it back there. You didn’t give it a chance.”

Mom shook her head. “Not me. We stay too long then.”

“Did you have any fun when you first came?” I asked shrewdly. I knew they were making things sound good for me.

“We worked too hard to think about it, and I was sick that fall. All we asked was to get a crop the next spring.”

“We get thirty bushels a acre,” Mom put in as though that made up for everything.

“And I was born the third winter,” I said, wanting them to go on.

Mom’s eyes gleamed with fun. “I can’t have you in summer, I was too busy. February was good time.” Mom piled her dishes on top of each other and took them out to the kitchen. Dad went over to his chair with the
Post
. I finished clearing the table and wiped while Mom washed.

“Were you glad I was coming, Mom?” I asked, ashamed of my own slyness.

“I want you long before you come,” Mom said.

“Mom, were you glad to get out of Russia?” I asked after a while.

Mom shrugged. “Things was bad in Russia, but I was used to hard times. My people was gone, all but Peter; he go to be priest.”

I dried all the plates before I asked another question.

“You must have been very much in love to come way off here. You hadn’t known Dad very long.”

Even in the bright glare of the electric light, Mom’s face told nothing. “From November all winter. We leave next spring when ice is out of the harbor. Almost so long as you know Gil.”

I wondered if Dad were listening. I crossed the kitchen to put the cups on the shelf. He wasn’t reading, anyway.

“We had good time on boat. There was only fifteen womans, only eight Russian woman.” Mom wasn’t often so communicative. “I dance on boat for the soldiers, gapak an’ mazurka an’ valcs, all Russian dances. Ben dance valcs with me, Russian way, not hugged up tight together. Your Dad can dance fine.”

“Oh, Dad, Mom says you were a good dancer!” I leaned against the doorjamb. I made my voice like a child’s. I felt deceitful and underhanded.

“You should have seen your mother dance. Anna, whirl for her,” Dad said.

Mom shook her head at first. I could see her color come up under the sunburn. Mom lifted her skirt, her apron flew out. She whirled as lightly as a young girl, her face all lit with laughter.

“Mom, you’re good,” I said genuinely.

“When we dance at Plainville your Aunt Eunice say I dance with too much ‘abandon.’” Mom gave the word a funny pronunciation, as though she had carefully remembered it. A kind of reserve seemed to shut down on Dad’s face.

“Didn’t you dance any out here, when you came?”

Mom shook her head. “Too much to do.” She was big and heavy-looking again. It took a lot of imagining to think of her as young.

I sat out on the steps after the dishes were done. It seemed to me that I could see clearly how it had been with Anna Petrovna and Ben Webb. They must have been happy enough together until they reached Plainville. Even there, Ben Webb must have defended her against any criticism from his mother and sister and taken care of her, thinking of the baby coming. But the summer must have come and gone and there would be no sign of her body growing bigger. Dad must have asked. I wondered how Mom could have found the words to tell him the truth. Dad had a temper that had lost him one hired man and spoiled a good sale once. I knew how he must have lashed out at her in his anger. But she had had a child, after all, three years later, carrying it with Dad’s hate against her, I thought. It was awful to remember that I was that child. I felt like weevily wheat, the sound grains of beauty or pride or joy spilled out on the ground, leaving the sheaf empty.

The nights were warm and I slept out on the glider. In my own room Dad and Mom seemed too close to me. I couldn’t go to sleep for thinking of them.

Mom liked to leave the light on the post by the barn burning all night, but I got up and went across the yard to switch it off. It was a relief to have the dark hide our house and the three of us.

11

THEN
began the days of heat; the wheat grew before our eyes. I wished Gil could see the moving forest that hid the bareness of the earth now. There was a sense of order that I liked about the wide strips of green beside the wide strips of fallow ground. It made me feel as though my life this last year had been without any pattern.

It was hard to get help on the ranch. Dad and Mom and I did the haying. We worked from sunup till eight or nine at night, as long as the sky stayed light. We cooked dinner after that and didn’t get through till nearly eleven. There was no time to think, hardly to talk. We fell into bed and were asleep.

One night, with only two days’ haying left, I woke, aware of a soft shuffling noise. I raised on one elbow. The sound came through the screen door. Then I lay back. I had heard that sound since I was a child. Dad was walking up and down because of the pain in his leg.

There was nothing I could do to help, so I lay still with a hopeless feeling. I knew Mom was awake, too. I stared across the sweet warm dark to the shoulder of the rimrock. I had learned as a child that if you stared at something long enough, it made something you didn’t want to be seem not to be.

Dad groaned softly as though he were trying to stifle it, and the selfish hypnotism I had been practicing broke completely. Dad was out on the couch now.

I heard Mom in the kitchen. The light glared across the porch. Then it was not so bright. Mom had pinned a newspaper around the bulb like a shade. I knew without seeing her how Mom would look with her hair in a braid down her back and her crinkle-crepe nightgown hanging shapeless and clean. She struck a match and I knew she was lighting the two-burner oil stove we used in summer. Then all my senses seemed to wait for the pungent smell of the flaxseed mash she was boiling up for a poultice. I knew that scent so well. Sometimes the hot mash we made for the baby chicks smelled a little like it.

I heard Mom going into the other room. The light burst from the front window and laid a path across the dry mud of the road.

“Turn off the light, Anna. There’s enough light from the kitchen.” Dad’s voice was irritable and tired.

“Too hot, Ben?” Mom’s voice was low and without any tiredness, but it didn’t sound sympathetic. Dad just murmured, then he let out his breath in a little sigh. It was so hot I pushed my cover back. How could Dad stand a hot pack against his skin on a night like this?

I thought of the fields where we had worked all day, stretching out under the gentle covering dark, and tried to think of this spot of pain here. I must have fallen asleep. I heard Dad say:

“That’s enough, Anna.” There was a long silence. Mom was already back in the kitchen when Dad said: “Thank you. You’ll be tired tomorrow.” I thought it sounded grudging.

“Come to bed now,” Mom said.

“It’s cooler here. Maybe I’ll read awhile.”

But Dad didn’t read. The house was dark and still. I could feel all our breathing and our wakefulness, and the fields that began so close to the house, breathing, growing, awake, too. There was too much life. It was like a pain to think of it; life in the wheat that could be dried out and pinched off by drought, or beaten out suddenly by hail; life in us that could suffer and ache and want. I tried to think of something still and not living. I felt better when I thought of the rimrock that was gray and too hard and unchanging for life, then I must have fallen asleep again.

Mom woke me at five. She was already dressed in overalls and an old shirt of Dad’s.

“We let your father sleep,” she whispered. “He was awake most the night. I been over by Bardiches and get Tony to help today. It’ll make your father rest up.”

I got into my jeans and shirt and shoes and washed outside the kitchen. Mom made tea for herself, but I had milk and fruit and bread. We didn’t talk lest we wake Dad, but I felt good. I could just dimly remember last night when I had tried to think of something without life. This morning seemed separated from last night by the width of a whole valley.

Once, Mom knocked a spoon off the table and I pointed my finger at her and we both laughed noiselessly like children at school. Mom tied a clean towel over her head and motioned me to come outside. There was still a pink freshness over everything.

“I go get Tony started. You stay up. I don’t like your father to wake up alone. If shrapnel hurt bad you put poultice on. This afternoon we need you, too.”

I wanted to work in the field. I wanted to be rid of the house, but I nodded. I tiptoed in and pulled the seldom-used shades in the front room. I felt shy looking at Dad. Mom had thrown a sheet over him and the white sheet made his face and neck look sallow and tired. But he was good-looking in spite of the beard on his face. How awful that he had ever had to grow old—well, forty anyway. Since I had known how he and Mom had come to marry I hadn’t quite looked at him. Now I stood there, feeling half-guilty, thinking how he must have been as a young soldier; he and Mom in love once. It’s queer that being young yourself and in love doesn’t make it easy to see how it was for your own mother and father; but in this they seemed stranger to me than people I hardly knew. I was afraid my thoughts and my looking at him would waken Dad, so I went back to the kitchen.

When he woke he asked right away where Mom was. I told him she had Tony Bardich working and that seemed to make him feel better. He limped outside and washed and I could see how it hurt him to move. I fixed him his breakfast and asked him if I could put the compress on again.

“Oh, not for a while, but the old Adam surely did try to get out last night!” It was what he used to tell me when I was little, about the tiny sharp pieces of shrapnel that worked their way up to the skin from time to time, festering and hurting until they finally came out. He was too sick in Russia for the doctors to try to get them all out and all these years he had carried them.

“I wanted to finish that southwest piece today. With two of them working they won’t,” Dad said.

“After I get your lunch made I’m going down and help,” I said.

Dad nodded and lay back against the pillow with pain. I washed the dishes and cut vegetables into the soup kettle and swept out the kitchen. Then I went in to tell him I would go and help with the haying now. I leaned over the back of the chair.

“Feeling any better, Dad?”

He was looking over yesterday’s paper again.

“Yes, thank you, Ellen.” He said it differently from the half-grunt he had managed in the night. “Just reading about the war. We’ll be in it by next spring, all right. We’re working up to it just like last time.”

I was glad Dad felt enough better to talk, but I wasn’t much interested at first. Then I remembered how he had said to Mom that night: “If there hadn’t been a war, we wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t be a physical wreck.” My mind felt stealthy and sharp.

“I wouldn’t think you could forgive the last war for . . . for this, Dad?”

“Why not? You have to take a chance. Other men had lots worse things than this.” Dad’s voice was mild and unresentful.

“Do you wish you had never been a soldier, Dad? You would be back in Vermont, wouldn’t you?”

Dad lit a cigarette. “Yes, I presume I’d be still in the East; probably be teaching somewheres. There are things I wouldn’t have missed, though.”

I felt a little ashamed, but I asked anyway. “What things, Dad?”

“Oh, a lot of things, Ellen. It was a pretty big thrill sailing for Europe when I was nineteen, feeling the world was counting on me. I felt sorry for the boys back in Plainville whose parents wouldn’t let them go. You had to have your parents’ consent if you were that young.

“Oh, it wasn’t all patriotism, I don’t suppose. My family was very strict. When I was home I couldn’t miss church or stay out with a girl after eleven o’clock or drink or smoke. I liked being free and on my own. Some people wouldn’t think of the Army as letting you be very free, but I did.

“And I had a good time with the other men in my company, fellows I would never have known in Plainville. There was a fellow named Josef Podoroski, a Polack from Hamtramck, Michigan. He’d worked since he was fourteen in a factory. I wouldn’t ever have met him if it hadn’t been for the Army. I never liked any man so well.”

“Where is he now, Dad?”

“He was killed in that fracas Armistice Day when I got this bird shot in me.”

“Oh,” I said softly. I wanted him to go on. Then, because I wanted to get back to Mom, I said, “Did Mom know him too?”

“No. They took him on a sled to Seletskoe. It was forty degrees below zero, and he died on the way. On our way out to Montana your mother and I stopped in Detroit and hunted up his family. They were poor Polish people, living in a tenement. Anna could talk some Polish, but I couldn’t understand much of what they said. Anna told them he was my best friend. They wanted to give me everything they had.”

“Do you wish you were living back in your old home, Dad?”

“Oh, sometimes, when I don’t feel good, I’d like to be back in my own room. It was always cool there in summer because of the maple trees.”

I felt sorry for Dad because the sun was burning down full-force now on the low roof of the house. In spite of the shades being drawn the front room was hot. There wouldn’t be any coolness till late tonight. Suddenly, I wished we weren’t out here on a dry-land wheat ranch under the burning sun. I wished we were in Vermont and that Dad was a teacher and that I had never worn jeans in my life. When Gil came to see me Mom would have served tea out on a green lawn. I went over to the couch and sat down beside Dad. I couldn’t think of anything to say. I looked down at the white, thin places in the knees of my jeans.

“Well, it was a great experience, even if I paid for it. A third of the men in our company lost their lives. I think I would have, too, except for your mother.”

“You didn’t know Mom very long before you were married, did you, Dad?” I asked him as I had asked Mom.

“No,” Dad said, “I didn’t. Things are different in wartime, though, especially over in Europe.”

“I don’t think it matters how long if you love a person, do you?” I couldn’t look at Dad, but I had to say it. Maybe it was the heat and Dad being sick and the way I felt about Gil . . . everything pressed on me. I wanted to force Dad into a corner and say: “I know you didn’t love Mom; Gil felt you didn’t love each other. That’s why I lost him; because of that and this naked little ranch and the way we live. You could have been like Gil’s father, but you came out here and tried to be like a peasant, too. You never read anything but the newspaper and a magazine or two; you can only talk about the last war or the weather or the wheat!” The words crowded at my mind to be said. “I don’t blame Mom as much as I blame you,” I would like to have told him.

Dad put his arm around me and I writhed inside, wanting to get away.

“Ellen, stop thinking about Gil. He isn’t worth worrying over. You don’t want to let him ruin your life.”

I moved away from the couch. “He isn’t ruining my life,” I said, and my voice broke shamefully. If I had known how to get out of that room I would have run. I couldn’t stand to have
him
pitying me. He had no right! The room was so tight and still. I had to say something.

“It’s just one of those little things,” I said, and I tried to make my voice flippant. “I think I’ll go back to school a little early this fall, Dad. I’m going to take more hours the first semester.”

I went inside the door to my bedroom and took quite a while to fix my hair. I made a pompadour in front and pinned a bow on top. It looked pretty crazy with my stretched-out polo shirt and jeans.

When I came back Dad didn’t look at me and he didn’t say anything for a long time. It seemed as though the room were filled with heat and pain and sadness: sadness of Dad wanting to be back in his cool bedroom at home, of his not loving Mom and living off here with her all these years, of Gil’s not loving me.

“If you’ll heat up that flaxseed, I think I’ll try another poultice on here,” Dad said.

When I brought it to him hot, he wouldn’t let me put it on. “Thank you, Ellen. Now if you can take your mother’s place out there, you might ask her to come back up here.”

They were haying in the field farthest over. I was glad of the walk down, though it was so hot I knew the butter on the bread I took would be all soaked in. I had the big thermos jug of hot soup, and oranges bulged the pockets of my jeans. I didn’t want to eat with Tony, but I thought Mom would like to eat up at the house with Dad.

I could see Mom a long way off, standing on the stacker. She was making Tony Bardich hump himself to keep up with her. The sky, all one deep-blue, came around her head and shoulders and made her look bigger than she was.

“Hi, Mom!” I called up. Somehow, it was a relief to see her. She didn’t look as though she wanted to be any place else. “Let me get up there. Dad wants you.”

Mom stopped. “Is pain bad?”

“I don’t know. He said it was better awhile ago, but just now he asked for a poultice again. Do you want me to take you back up in the truck? I can go while Tony’s eating.”

“No. Put the lunch over there. We finish this first,” Mom said.

“Say, I might fall down in a faint if I don’t eat pretty soon,” Tony Bardich said, grinning at me. He’s an easy-going kind with nice teeth, like all the Bardiches, and black hair. He plays the accordion at country dances, but he gets drunk too easy. I thought Mom was going to slap back at him, but she said:

“All right, eat, but we don’t waste no time. We got to get the haying done today.”

We ate sitting on the running board of the truck. There was enough for the three of us, anyway. Tony and I talked a little, but Mom was quiet. She kept looking away beyond the growing haystack over the fields as though she was thinking about what still had to be done. And she was through first. She sucked her orange and wiped her hands off on a handful of hay. Then she wiped her mouth on her arm.

“Come on, Yeléna . . .”

“What about Dad’s lunch, Mom?”

“It’s all there, isn’t it? He can help himself if he’s hungry. I go up soon. The work go faster with three of us.”