Winter Wheat (14 page)

When I came up alongside Tony in the truck, he shook his head. “The old woman sure can work!”

“Mom’s good, all right,” I said.

I think we all tried to outdo each other. When you think there’s a chance of finishing a long job that day, it goes easier. Even I could tell that the hay wasn’t as heavy as it was last year. The dry weather had dried it, too, so the bottom of the stem was brittle, not sweet when you sucked it between your teeth.

Working hard made me feel better. I began to think that maybe I would drive over to the reservoir a mile to the east of us and take a swim tonight. Maybe Mom would go, too. She could swim twice as well as I could. I could feel the delicious coolness of the water on me even while my shirt stuck to me with sweat and the hay that had crept up the leg of my jeans prickled.

Then I saw Dad. He was limping and coming painfully slow. He looked paper-thin against the sky. He hadn’t worn a hat, and I knew he shouldn’t have come. Mom was turned the other way, so she didn’t see him. The truck was making too much noise over there for her to hear unless I shouted, and suddenly I didn’t want Tony Bardich to turn and stare at him.

When Dad was close enough I waved. I was sure he saw me, but he didn’t wave back. Tony saw Dad as he turned in from the road and came limping across the hay stubble toward us.

“Say, I thought you was s’posed to be sick in bed! That’s what your missus said when she came crying for me to help,” Tony yelled out in his big hearty voice. Dad never had liked the Bardiches. He always called them “ignorant foreigners.”

Mom turned around and saw Dad.

“Ben Webb, you ought not come here. You get your sore infected like you did other time before!” Mom was hot and tired and her voice was loud. Then she softened it as though she were talking to a child. “We get done today, you don’t need worry.”

Dad kind of jerked.

“Oh, I know you can run the whole ranch by yourself—run it better alone.” He sounded so hurt and he looked so thin I wanted to say: “No, we can’t. We can’t do it without you at all.”

Mom didn’t say anything at first. Her eyes were glued on Dad, but she didn’t look big and strong, just hot and tired.

“
Proclyatye!
That is not so,” she said in a low voice, as though she didn’t want Tony to hear her. I looked back; Tony was standing in the truck, grinning a little. Dad saw him and turned toward him suddenly.

“I can do as much as you’re doing standing there, even if I am sick,” he said. “You can have your time.”

My throat ached, I was trying so hard not to cry out. I knew the way he felt. I knew so well that I hated Tony patronizing him with his health. I even knew how he hated Mom’s strength. I hated it, too, just then, and my own.

“You are a fool, Ben! We have the hay done by night if we don’t talk all day. Tony, come on now. He don’t mean nothing.”

Tony chewed on a blade of grass. He laughed an easy-going silly laugh, like boys laugh when they take you out the first time—boys around Gotham, I mean. He turned to me.

“Which pays the wages here? That’s all I want to know. Your old lady hired me, but your old man looks pretty mad.”

Dad didn’t usually carry much money in his pocket. I don’t know how he happened to have it, but he took a ten-dollar bill out of his pocket.

“I’m paying you today. Get along.” He limped over and dropped the bill on the hay by Tony’s foot. Tony picked it up.

“It’s okay by me. I get off a couple hours sooner and get paid for them just the same. Well, s’long.”

It was four miles over to the Bardiches. We would have taken him home after work, but we stood still as though we were frozen. And the feeling was worse because of the sun blazing down and making us hot on the outside. I was ashamed to look at Tony, going off across the field. I knew that he would tell his family and the story would go all around Gotham. I couldn’t look at Dad or Mom. Something in me cried out:

“Don’t! I can’t stand living this way!” But no sound came out of my lips.

Mom started to work again. From the ground I could just see the back of her head and shoulders. She knew how to build a haystack as well as any man. She kept working with the pitchfork, like a toy figure when the spring is wound up. Dad still stood there by the fence.

By now he was sorry. Help was so hard to get and we would never be able to get any of the Bardiches again. But he couldn’t bring himself to say anything. Couldn’t Mom see? I felt Mom’s hardness. I didn’t look at Dad, but I felt him standing there, sorry and hurt and wanting Mom to stop so he could take Tony’s place and not wanting to call out and have her tell him his leg was too bad.

Oh, why didn’t we give up the hay? What good was it to cut it and feed the cows just so they’d give food for us, if all we ate was soaked in bitterness and hate? Then I saw Mom standing still, looking at Dad.

“You go rest while the leg is bad, Ben, an’ keep soaks on it so you don’t be sick when threshing time come. We do this easy; we can’t do threshing without you.”

Mom saw how he felt. It was as though she was walking a little way across the field to meet him. If he would only come as far.

“I guess you can manage the threshing as well as the haying,” Dad said stubbornly. He got out a cigarette.

“Oh, Dad, you know it takes three. Please go back. We want you to be feeling good.” I couldn’t wait for them to come together. It was too far and too hard for them.

“Well,” Dad said, “it’s kind of tough to feel you’re so much dead wood.”

I don’t think he expected to be answered. Even the way he said it was like the exit line in a play that lets you go off the stage without feeling silly. He started limping away.

Mom and I worked like—well, like haymakers. It was an awful handicap not having Tony, but we didn’t say anything about it. When I got thirsty I kept right on, because Mom didn’t stop. When I was little, I used to play that a spot out on the fields was an island and I was marooned there, between the sky and the sea. I wasn’t a child any more, but I felt that way today. We worked until it was too dark to see the hay at the end of a pitchfork.

“We got to stop,” Mom said, and a little wave of relief washed up over the island. We were too tired to be hungry. I drove the truck home and Mom sat beside me.

“We let the other field go. The hay isn’t much good anyway,” Mom said out of her tired silence. I think she wanted to be through with haying. A half a mile away we could see the lights of our place, the big yard light showing everything up clearly, like a prison that is floodlighted so the prisoners can’t get away.

Mom was lame when she got out of the truck. The hay smelled sweet in the cooling night air, but I closed my senses to it. No use to wish on the load of hay, tonight. What could I wish now? For Dad to be well? For Dad and Mom to be different? But there was no getting those wishes. For Gil to be here?

If Gil were here, how would he like me? I asked myself, walking across the yard in my dirty jeans and sweaty shirt. I wiped my face and my hand smelled of rusty iron and grease from fixing the truck hitch. I knew how my feet looked in their boy’s work shoes, though they were hidden in the dark. I felt them plodding ahead of me, big and heavy. What was the use of wishing, anyway? I went on into the house.

Dad had made supper for us. There was a clean cloth spread on the kitchen table and three places set. Usually, summer nights we just sat down at the oilcloth-covered table. Dad stood at the stove making scrambled eggs and bacon.

“Why, Dad, how nice,” I said, trying to make my voice sound excited and pleased, but I was too tired. Mom had gone on into the bedroom.

“There’s plenty of hot water to wash with,” was all Dad said.

I felt better when I was cleaned up, and I was hungry after all. But we couldn’t seem to talk much or make what we said sound natural.

“This tastes so good, Dad,” I said, but my voice stayed up in the air.

“You shouldn’t walk on your leg,” Mom said.

“If you’re going to do the work in the fields, the least I can do is to keep house,” Dad grumbled. The hot uneasy silence settled over us again. Dad had opened a can of pears for dessert. They were still a little cool from the root cellar and I let each piece lie on my tongue for a second.

“Did you get through?” Dad asked.

“Near enough,” Mom said. “We let the rest go. It’s no good anyway.”

Dad didn’t make any comment.

“I see the wheat’s got a little color already,” Mom said. The haying and Dad’s firing Tony and our not getting through was in the past now. Mom could as well have said, “Forget it, there’s the wheat to think of.”

When I was in bed on the swing I could see Mom fixing Dad’s bandage. I looked at them through the open window as though I were watching a play. A day like this when Dad felt guilty he must hate to have Mom take care of him. Maybe Mom hated it, too, but she didn’t show it. They both bent over the sore on Dad’s leg.

“There!” I heard Mom say. “It’s big piece.”

I knew just what it would look like, a hard, irregular piece of shrapnel, no bigger than the tip of a knife blade, shot so long ago, taking all this time to work up through.

“Maybe that’s the last of it,” Mom said. She always said that, and it never was.

I thought of our modern-history class at the university. Everyone talked about the last war as though it were as long ago as the Napoleonic Wars. They didn’t feel it still, as I did.

But if the last fragment of shrapnel were out, there would still be the hate and resentment between Mom and Dad. Those were bits of shrapnel, too, sown by the war.

12

LAST
fall, going away to school, and last winter had been full of excitement. Last spring I had known so much joy it had made me almost breathless, but since June there had been nothing to look forward to. One day was like another, hot and bright and full of work. I was glad when it stormed.

The sudden darkening of the sky and the wind springing up out of no place to blow the dirt across the barnyard and lash the sunflower plants like giant pendulums back and forth gave me a kind of excitement. The sudden dropping of the temperature was a relief after the long continuous pressure of the heat. The chickens scuttled together against the wall of the chicken house, the hogs planted their great fatness together like a fortress and let out frightened squeals. Mom and Dad and I all came in from the fields. Dad stood on the porch looking anxious.

“Worst country for extremes,” he muttered.

But I like the swift cruel changes. They make me feel that this country isn’t just flat placid farm country, that it’s as violent as the dark Doone country or any wild Cornish coast you read about in English novels.

We could watch the storm come, steellike against the yellow-gray sky. We could see the first drops hit. They whacked like the scattering of broken beads and looked on the ground like rock salt. We had a little hail insurance, but never enough to amount to anything. We sat dumbly on the porch, waiting. The hailstones were bigger now. Tomorrow at the store and the elevator they’d swap stories of how big they were. We watched them smashing the nasturtiums I had kept watered with dishwater all summer. There wasn’t much left of them.

Then I realized, sitting there on the steps where the hailstones just hit my shoes and bounced back down the steps, that I didn’t care what they ruined. Always there is a chance that the next ranch will be hailed out instead of ours. Ever since I was a child I have had a tight feeling in my throat when it hailed, but now I just sat waiting for it to stop. It isn’t so hard on you when you don’t care, but it’s an empty feeling. I looked quickly at Mom and Dad, hoping the way I felt didn’t show through on my face. Mom’s lips were moving tight together as though she were biting something tiny like a grape seed between her teeth. I’d seen her do it before when she was worried. I think she really bit at the skin of her lips. But otherwise her face was still. Dad smoked a little faster than usual, letting the ash grow out on his cigarette until the wind blew it off.

“Get your jacket, Yeléna, and bring out your father’s hat,” Mom said. She wore her old brown sweater that had the front ends stretched way down from wrapping them around her arms.

Inside the house the hail beat on the roof as loud as a drum. It was too warm and shut-in. I picked up my denim jacket and Dad’s hat and started back outside, but Mom and Dad were coming in.

“It gets too cold,” Mom said.

“No man ought to try to raise a crop in a place where it can hail in August,” Dad grumbled.

But I went outside and sat astride the porch railing. The air was as cold as though it came down off the mountains. The sudden change made me think of the sun drawing farther and farther away and the earth growing colder. When that happened it would come like this, I told myself. But the cold was a relief after the heat.

When the hail was over the sun came out, like a child that was over its tantrum. We drove around in the truck to see what damage it had done. It had riddled the cabbages in the garden that were just beginning to head up, and the hay we hadn’t had time to cut lay draped every which way like a tumbled bolt of cloth. We crossed the highway in one place to get to the extra land Dad had bought and we saw a whole mile-long strip of the Bardiches’ hailed out. I looked at it without caring, but I heard Mom catch her breath.

“
Gospode Boge!
” she said very low. I think it meant “Lord God.”

Then we came to our own. Three strips were hailed out; the stalks looked as though they’d been chewed to shreds and then spit out, as ugly a sight as you could ever see. The hailstones lay all over the fallow ground, peppered through the stubble. The three of us on the seat of the truck, just sat there a minute.

“It looks pretty sick,” Dad said. He pushed his hat back on his head and his voice sounded tired.

“I look at this piece yesterday and I think we get maybe twenty bushel a acre.” Mom shrugged with a kind of down-settling of her shoulders.

I couldn’t say anything. Maybe I couldn’t go back to school. I’d have to stay here. I felt penned in between Dad and Mom in the cab of the truck. Dad started the motor again. I looked hard at the fields as we passed. When we came to ours again Dad stopped and Mom got out. She broke off a head of the starting wheat and rubbed it to see the seeds. She made a kind of grunt.

“Look at that. Half-empty.”

“What makes it, Mom?” I asked.

Mom shrugged. “Wind, maybe.” When she shook it, dust sifted out.

“It’s better farther in,” Dad said, “but it’s been too dry.”

I had heard talk like this always, every summer. Every spring when we saw the first pricks of green through the thin scattering of snow we felt good and full of energy and we planted the spring wheat full of hope. Then slowly through the summer our hopes grew less.

“We won’t get five bushels a acre,” Mom said in a kind of final tone. “More like we get four.”

Enough to live on till next year and buy some new seed and oil and gas and tires, but not enough to go away to school on. Dad talked about how independent the rancher was, but he talked to make himself believe it.

As we drove we could see how the grain that was untouched by the hail was coloring up fast. The kernels shelled out of the sheaf when you rubbed them. They tasted sweet and hard between your teeth, the way your life should taste to you in the morning when you wake up and at noon when you’re hungry and again at night when you’re through for the day—only mine didn’t, I thought, and spit the grain out of my mouth.

“We ought to get started combining about Monday,” Dad said. “The hail wouldn’t have had to hold off much longer to make us a crop.”

We listened to the Grain Market Broadcast each noon now as we had listened last August.

“This is your Grain Market Broadcast for today: Spring and Winter up four . . . Repeating . . .” The news of the hail and the heat and the lack of rain in the Northwest had reached all the way back to the grain markets of the cities. Wheat was up. The price was good this year. They needed wheat in Europe. War needs wheat always. But we would have so much less to sell this year.

“One dark Northern Spring . . . eighty-two.”

But it hadn’t been like that. Mine had been one tender, happy spring, too beautiful to last.

“One dark hard Winter . . . eighty-three.” The words sounded like a melancholy prophecy of what was ahead.

“Durum, Flax, and Rye . . . no change.”

“Minneapolis futures for September . . .”

There wasn’t any Minneapolis future for me, I thought. Maybe I could borrow the money for school, but what if we had a crop failure the next year? Dad and Mom said nothing about my going away next month. Were they worrying about it, too?

But in the morning the worry slipped from me. I went out after breakfast and looked across the country. Gil should see it now, I thought, and a kind of hard anger came with my thinking of him. Anyone who loves beauty, I told myself, would be blind if he couldn’t see it here now. The wideness that Gil had thought was depressing was here, but it was beauty, too. The deep-yellow grain, laid against the fallow strips, was beautiful beyond anything you could think of. The damage of the hail didn’t show from here. There isn’t anything prouder than a field of ripe grain. It makes you stand a little taller so you can see farther across it.

Mom and I were putting up chickens. It was blazing hot in the kitchen with the fire roaring in the range, and the dishpan in the sink was piled with dishes. We’d been working outside so much the house was just a place in which to sleep and cook. Dust would be thick on everything in the front room, but we didn’t have time to go in there anyway. Mom’s face glistened with sweat, but it didn’t look heavy or dull. She likes this time of year for all the work is hardest.

Dad came by and called to me to come and ride over to the elevator with him.

“Go ahead,” Mom said, and I went like a child.

We drove out of our way to look at the Yonkos’ wheat. It was no heavier than ours. Afterward, when the wheat is all cut and sold, the difference between what you get and what you expected strikes in on you, but while it is standing in the fields you don’t think of that.

Even Bill Bailey at the elevator had a new briskness. His busy time was just starting. Ranchers came to the elevator like cattle to a water hole. Nobody had time to lean against the wall and talk or play pinochle in the office. They had to get right back. Gotham showed its reason for being: carloads of grain were going out of Gotham every day now, bound for all parts of the world. We had a reason for being, too. Maybe that’s what everybody is after. Mine had been Gil this spring. Now it was getting in the wheat. After the wheat . . . I didn’t know.

“Hurry up, Ellen. We want to get right back,” Dad called. There was a kind of importance in the sound of his voice. I wished it could be that way all the time.

We must have gone a mile before Dad reached into his pocket and brought out a letter for me in Gil’s handwriting. He gave it to me without taking his eyes off the road.

“I didn’t know whether to give it to you or not,” he said.

I didn’t want to read it there with Dad sitting beside me, watching, but I couldn’t not read it, either. It was postmarked “Tampa.” I tore off the end of the envelope and the “Dear Ellen” in his handwriting made me weak and shivery as though I’d had a sunstroke.

I stuffed the letter in my pocket. I felt he didn’t want anything changed, but he wanted to be sure I wasn’t angry so he could feel right with himself. “Won’t you write me?” What would I say if I wrote him? “I loved you but you didn’t love me enough.”

Suddenly, Dad reached his arm around me.

“Oh, Dad,” I whispered.

“I know, Karmont,” he said gently.

Dad didn’t say anything against Gil—that wouldn’t have helped any. But I could feel how much he loved me. I handed him the letter and took hold of the wheel so he could read it. He folded it and handed it back to me.

“He can’t get you out of his mind.”

“Like a duty,” I said. “Something you feel you should have done and didn’t.” Then I thought of Dad and Mom. Dad must have felt Anna Petrovna was a duty. He could have gone off and left her; instead he had taken her back to his home. He had come to depend on her, but I didn’t believe he had ever loved her.

“Could a man come to love a girl if in the beginning he felt it his duty to?” I was ashamed after I had asked it.

Dad was slow in answering. “Don’t let any man think of you as a duty, Ellen,” he said very soberly. “You don’t want Gil back because he feels obligated.”

It seemed to me that he had as good as said that he hadn’t loved Mom. I felt the kind of coldness I used to feel as a child, even in the truck with the engine throwing up heat in our faces and the sun beating down on us. I tore Gil’s letter into pieces and dropped them over the car door.

We took the combine out of the shed that afternoon. That starts the threshing the way setting up a Christmas tree begins Christmas. I get as excited over one as the other. Dad went right to work on it, oiling and cleaning out straw and seeds and dust. I put on old jeans and covered my head with a cap and got underneath to put grease in all the little grease nipples. It looks so complicated from underneath it makes your head ache to try to understand it. As I crawled out I saw the shadow of the combine laid out on the hard gumbo of the yard as clear-cut as a photograph.

We were one of the first ranches around Gotham to get a combine, the first of the small ranches, that is. Mom kept coming out to watch us and look at it. Every rancher’s wife is proud of the combine; it does the work of so many men that there aren’t any big threshing crews to feed any more. Mom’s so proud of it that when anything happens to it she acts as though it were a hurt child. Mom and Dad and I can thresh the wheat in ten or fifteen days by ourselves if the weather’s any good. We used to be cooking and setting tables and washing dishes at harvesttime. Now we can be in the field all day.

Dad had the combine ready Saturday night. He could have begun Sunday. Way over to the west we could see by the cloud of dust rising from their combine that the Yonkos had started. But Mom said it was bad luck to start on Sunday. Dad laughed at her for that, but it was hard to go against Mom when she said something so firmly with her lips set.

Mom made bread and pie and cake; we wouldn’t have much time to cook next week. There was such a festive air in the house that I said to Dad, “You’d think Mom was getting ready for company.”

And Mom said: “I am. I got The Harvest here.” Mom says quaint things like that with a different twist to them that gives them a foreign sound, but it’s as much the thought behind it as the words themselves that make it sound foreign. She doesn’t think like anyone else.

Monday I was up at five. I knew Mom had been up long before that. By six we were down at the field. The combine was all ready to go, but there was too much damp yet on the wheat. It has to be bone-dry if the wheat is going to come out clean. It was hard to wait. We were kind of quiet and excited. Mom went back up to the house to do something. Dad fussed with the combine and the tractor. I sat against the fence and chewed a stalk of wheat and watched the morning grow wider. It was cool now, and in less than half an hour it would be like a furnace.

The Bardiches came by on their way into town to the fair. Jake Bardich yelled at Dad: