Winter Wheat (17 page)

I turned the pages and read a line here and there to myself. I read a long poem by Walt Whitman.

These words startled me. They might have been written about Mom and Dad and me. This minute here with Dad’s old books and the poems that had thrilled him was part of him that he gave me and was now part of me. First Mom gave to me and then Dad gave to me. Only that night when I had learned about the hate between them had they ever taken away—but then they had taken away so much.

I put the books on the table that stood against the wall. Gil might have felt more at home if he had been able to look over and see them.

“Can I take them to the teacherage with me, Dad?”

“Sure. I might just look over the poetry book again.”

When we were getting supper that night I told Mom about getting out the box of books.

“Why did you ever leave them out there all these years, Mom?”

Mom was frying potatoes and she had to talk above the sissing sound.

“All his folks was always propped up with books; your father don’t need ‘em.”

“But, Mom . . .” and then I let it go at that.

PART TWO

1

PRAIRIE BUTTE
lay eighty-five miles northwest of us. Mom drove me over on Friday. We had the back of the truck full of bedding, towels, clothing, and canned goods. I had to supply my own food. The county furnished wood and furniture and school supplies.

We drove along, silent with our own thinking. I glanced at Mom. She was watching the endless, flat, treeless plains, warm and sunny the first week of September, but so bare. There was no expression on her face. She had always said how like Russia this country is, not up near Seletskoe, but farther south where they grew wheat—only they have more snow in Russia and there are no chinooks to break the cold.

“It’s more bare here than down around Gotham,” Mom said.

But there were little jack pines growing out of the rocky ground and the sagebrush grew in bigger clumps here. There were no wheat ranches, mostly sheep. The ground was nibbled so close it looked like my old coat with the nap worn off. The last six miles were foothill gravel and full of rocks.

“The mud won’t be bad out here in spring,” Mom said.

We could see the butte from which the school took its name. It thrust up out of the ground like some earthwork made by children. I would climb up there some day.

“There is your school, Yeléna!” Mom said suddenly.

It was only fifteen miles from Prairie Butte and six miles from the highway. I don’t know why I stared at it so hard or why it scared me a little. Teacherages are the same everywhere. I have seen them all my life; this was in better repair than many.

There was the usual long boxlike building painted gray, standing alone in the shadow of the butte, with a line of windows on each side. The last two must be my room where I was to live. Two smokestacks rose up out of the roof: one for the stove in my living quarters, one in front for the schoolroom. In front of the school stood the empty flagpole. In back of the school were the two outhouses.

You look at a place where you’re going to live differently from any other place. It is almost as though you look at yourself coming out the door or peering out the window. Your mind goes so far ahead of your eyes.

When I went over to see Mr. Henderson about the teacherage, his wife said:

“It won’t be bad, dear, just like the summer pasture farm where the girls in Norway stay alone in the summertime. I liked it. I’d gather wild flowers and do hardanger work and dream. You’ll have plenty of time to dream about love up there.”

I thought as we walked across to the teacherage that Mrs. Henderson had spent only the summers in her saeter. I was going to spend the winter here, and I felt as chilled as though the wind were already rushing across the plain to flatten itself out against the schoolhouse and the butte.

I turned the key in the door. Flies banged drowsily against the dirty windowpanes. The school board had put the place in order but a good cleaning wouldn’t hurt it any.

“The roof don’t leak,” Mom said. Her voice sounded too loud in the empty room.

A door at one side of the wall back of the teacher’s desk opened into a second room where I was to live. It didn’t lack for furniture. There was an oil stove as well as a small sheet-iron heating stove, an iron bed, a dresser, a table, one rocker, and one straight chair. A cupboard on the wall with a faded cretonne curtain across it held some dishes. A frying pan and two saucepans hung on the wall under the oil stove. Four pictures of Clark Gable were tacked on the wall by the dresser, one of Walter Pidgeon and Franchot Tone over the bed. On the rack under the table lay a pile of
Photoplay Magazine
. A bright-patterned linoleum rug covered the floor.

I had to do something. I started tearing the pictures of the movie stars off the wall.

“I go see where you get your water,” Mom said. “It is better when you get a good cleaning. I can stay overnight and help clean up.” I saw her looking at the rain-streaked windows.

“Oh, no. It’ll be something for me to do. I can take my time about it; I have until Monday.” I wanted her to go before the creeping feeling of depression overwhelmed me.

We went to work to bring in the canned goods and provisions that were to last me most of the winter. I’d get home sometime in October and again at Thanksgiving and Christmas, but I didn’t plan to go back and forth often. The jars of fruit and chicken and our own beef and vegetables filled the cupboard. I had to pile the single-portion cans on the floor against the partition.

“I can lie in bed and decide what I’ll eat before I get up,” I said, trying to make a joke of it.

“You eat right,” Mom said sternly. “I make up the bed, anyway.” She turned the thin-looking mattress and made it up with the sheets and blankets we had brought. On top she put the quilt Father’s mother had made. I was touched at that. Then she brought up from the box of bedding the old icon and the little wooden shelf that belonged in my room at home.

“You have to have something you are used to,” Mom said, crossing herself as she turned from hanging the icon.

When I saw Mom driving away after supper with eighty-five miles to go I felt deserted. I sat down on the wooden stoop and looked at the sunset over the butte and the empty twilight. If I had been able to see a thicket of aspen against the soft endless sky it would have helped, but there was nothing but the shabby earth rolling off under the slack wires of the fence that marked the school land from the prairie, and here and there a lonely, twisted jack pine. For the first time in my life I knew what Gil meant by the emptiness. I had taken it in with my mind before, but I had not felt it in my throat and my stomach. The emptiness surrounded me and swept over me until I was nothing.

I put my mind on Mom driving home. Would she be thinking about me, worrying about whether I was lonely? Mom always drove fast when the road lay straight across the prairie, holding the wheel tight as though it were the wheel of the combine. I thought of this summer when she and Dad and I had lived so closely together. I had listened to all they said, trying to find more than the words, scorning and pitying them by turns. At least I was alone now with my own life.

I went in through the schoolroom, trailing my hand over the desks as I passed, and lighted the lamp on the table in my room. It made a round yellow light but smelled of kerosene and the singed bodies of dead flies, and left the corners of the room in deeper shadow than before. My throat felt so dry I spoke out loud.

“Well, Ellen Webb, how’re you doing?”

The sound of my own voice spilled out into the stillness around me like a drop of kerosene in a pail of water. It refused to dissolve and mingle, but held its own so long I could keep hearing it.

I had never been afraid of being alone or of the wideness of the earth and the sky. I stood there by the lamp, looking fearfully off beyond the circle of the light into the shadowy dark of the schoolroom. Its empty desks were lined up like little ghosts. I hesitated to make any sound. I would turn out the light and get on the bed and cover up. I looked for the little icon, but it was lost in the shadow.

I saw the pail of water Mom had brought and I went over and lighted the kerosene stove. I had to stoop down and tease the flame along the wick. I got out soap and rags and changed into jeans and a shirt. I moved quietly, afraid of making a noise.

When the water was hot I carried it into the schoolroom and went back for the lamp. I began at the front and scrubbed the floor, moving the lamp as I went along the boards. By the time I got to the fourth desk I tried whistling. I whistled the tunes the jukebox in Pop’s Place used to play.

“You’re doing fine, Ellen Webb,” I said out loud when I went to empty my pail, and I threw the dirty water with a flourish on the moth-eaten grass and into the wide, soft darkness. But the splash made so tiny a sound in all that stillness that I knew I lied. I wondered if I could stand it here all fall and all winter and all spring.

2

BY
Monday morning I had lived through two whole days alone. The nights had been endless. I kept waking and raising on one elbow to listen, but there was not even the sound of the wind. I think the stillness itself woke me. I slept best after it was light and I didn’t get up until ten on Sunday, to cheat the day. That was the longest day I had ever known.

Sunday afternoon, I set out from the teacherage and walked about three miles until I saw a ranch house, but I didn’t go up to it. I saw two boys running across to the barn and I knew they must go to my school, but the sight of them made me shy away. I wanted to meet them at school first.

There would be seven children in the Prairie Butte teacherage, Mr. Henderson said. They came from four families. I had only taught a week in the practice school. I hadn’t come to know the children at all. When I got back to the schoolhouse, I took out my notebook from the class in teaching methods and reread the notes, but I remembered how often I had thought of Gil in that class. Sometimes, if I walked across the campus to the library after it I caught a glimpse of him. I hadn’t thought I would ever use these notes. Along one margin I had figured out the days till Gil would be in Montana. I drew a harsh line through the pathetic figuring.

I was through breakfast by seven this morning and had two sandwiches made for my lunch. When my bread was gone I’d eat crackers, I decided.

“You can make bread and dumplings or muffins. What’s the matter with you?” Mom had said. “You got a oven.” But I doubted if I’d bother to bake just for myself.

The schoolhouse was clean. The sun and air had taken out any closed-up stale smell or odor of the soap and water, but it was so bare. I wished I had brought over some of Mom’s geraniums for the window sills. I did pick a bunch of feathery sage and put it in a pickle jar under Lincoln’s picture. I looked at the picture of Lincoln longer than I ever had before. He had known small wooden dwellings and bareness too, I thought. I would like to write that to Gil, but I wasn’t writing Gil. Lincoln’s eyes seemed to look across the desks through the opposite window. I raised the green shade so he could see the faint rim of mountains beyond the butte.

I had polished the windows. The shades gaped at the sides and had been used so long they looked like relief maps and let in light through all their cracks. Some schoolhouses have curtains at their windows, but I liked seeing out across to Prairie Butte. The sky was so wide it filled the whole upper sash. I would leave the windows bare, like Mom’s kitchen windows.

I still had an hour before I could hope to see any of my children. I sat at my desk, facing the wide-open door and the oblong of prairie, and waited. I picked up a pencil to have in my hand so I’d look busy, and I must have pinched it tightly, because my fingers grew stiff. I pulled a piece of paper to me and wrote on it as though I were going on with my biography for Mr. Echols:

“Ellen Webb began teaching September 4, 1941, and taught continuously at the Prairie Butte teacherage for the next thirty-five years.” Then I scribbled it out so hard the pencil went through the paper. I’d never do that. Next fall I’d be back at the university. I’d study this year and keep up. I wouldn’t be like Dad, leaving my books boxed up in the shed.

I looked up suddenly and saw the boy standing silently on the porch looking at me. He had come up without my hearing him. I wondered uneasily how long he had been there watching me.

“Hello,” I said. “You’re the first one.”

The boy smiled slowly. There was something queer about his smile. He reached up and got his cap off.

“H’lo,” he answered, and his voice was too heavy for a child’s. It had no tone in it.

“Come in,” I said.

He must have been fifteen or sixteen. He looked too big for this school.

“I’m early. Ma said I’d be early. I ain’t never been late,” he said like a five-year-old. He had a queer disjointed walk, hunching one shoulder ahead of the other. His head looked too big for his body. He was half-witted. I sat still behind my desk as though it were a fortress. Mr. Henderson hadn’t told me one of the seven pupils was feeble-minded.

He took the biggest desk at the back of the room by the window. It must have been made especially for him. The seat was knocked together carelessly out of old boards. There was a horrible likeness between the look of the boards that didn’t quite join and the look of the boy’s shoulders and feet. It was like a cruel joke. He slid into his seat with a loud thud and smiled foolishly at me.

“What’s your name?” I asked, speaking loudly, as though he were deaf.

“Robert.”

“Robert what?”

“Robert Donaldson.” He beamed as though this were something he was sure of.

“My name is Miss Webb.” I went over and wrote it on the blackboard and erased it and wrote it again because my writing went downhill. “Can you say Webb?”

He stuttered over the “W” and then brought the name out in a burst.

“Good. Can you tell me what grade you are in, Robert?”

“Four,” he said proudly.

“And how old are you?”

He looked down at his hands and frowned. I could hear a truck coming toward the school. Someone shouted. Robert looked up as though to see if I were waiting.

“Five, ten, fifteen,” he said. His voice had a flat sound.

He clasped his hands at his desk and smiled vacantly. With a sense of fleeing I went on out to watch the other children come.

“Hi, Mary, there she is!” I heard one shrill voice scream out, but anything was better than that toneless voice and empty smile.

When I faced my schoolroom at quarter of nine I had eight children, representing five families who lived somewhere in the shallow bowl of land between Prairie Butte and the low rimrock. I picked up my record book to write down their names.

“Mr. Henderson told me there would be only seven,” I said, feeling more comfortable if I was talking.

“He’s new!” a little girl with black braids announced, pointing across the room at a pale-looking boy in the second row. “He’s just moved back here,” she went on.

“What is your name?” I asked the boy.

“Leslie Harper.” He stood up to answer, and his lips pinched together nervously when he finished a sentence. “I moved here from Detroit, Michigan. I was in the third grade last year—you can see my report card.” The whole class stared at him.

I started a little speech about the pleasant time I hoped we would have and how much I hoped we were going to learn. I felt like someone other than Ellen Webb.

“We have a chapter of the Bible and the Lord’s Prayer and America’s Creed first thing in the morning an’ we raise the flag and sing ‘The Star-spangled Banner,’” the boy named Nels Thorson interrupted. The other boy sitting beside him laughed out loud. Mary Cassidy became convulsed and hid her face in her arms. Suddenly Robert began to laugh as though he had just sensed the joke. The laughter trickled out of his open mouth in a slow thin stream. Then the class began to laugh at him. I quieted them sharply.

“Today we’ll skip the usual exercises, because we have so much to do,” I began again.

At noon the children ate outside on the gravelly ground in front of the stoop. I made a cup of tea hurriedly on my stove and went out to watch them. I saw how the new boy, Leslie Harper, seemed to sit by himself on the corner of the step, but he was watching the big boys play marbles on the ground. Robert came over and sat beside me. Once I found his vacant eyes on me, his cheeks bulged out with the big bites he was taking. I looked away with relief to the swing, where the wiry little Cassidy girl was swaying, pumping herself up so high the chains screeched.

“Don’t you have no radio, Miss Webb?” Nels Thorson asked me. He had won the marble game and rattled the marbles in the pocket of his jeans.

“No, Nels, I’m sorry, I don’t.”

“You oughta have one. Miss Barnett, our last year’s teacher, had one. She used to let us listen to the war news at lunchtime and sometimes if we got through we could hear the three-o’clock quiz program. Gee, she had a swell one, eight tubes. Her boy frien’ gave it to her.”

“Maybe after Christmas I’ll bring one back with me,” I said. “Is Miss Barnett teaching this year?”

“Nope, she got married,” the dark-haired La Mere boy said. “Her boy frien’s a mechanic in the Air Force. He’s a sergeant. She showed us his picture.”

I looked at my watch. The time was up, but Robert was still chewing slowly.

“Don’t mind him. Miss Barnett just let him come in when he got through. His folks ain’t going to send him any more after this year.”

Robert could hear all Nels said, but he seemed to pay no attention. It made me uncomfortable.

“We can wait a minute or two. Are you almost through, Robert?”

He smiled and began packing what was left in his lunch box.

“Feed it to the birds, Robert,” Mike screamed at him. All the children talked louder when they talked to him. “Here, give it to me.” Mike snatched the leftover sandwich out of his hands and broke it up on the ground.

“Gee, you wait’ll you see the magpies. Sometimes there’s ten or twelve,” Mike told me.

“If you have any trouble with the pack rats under the floor, Miss Webb, I’ll set you a trap and then I can empty it when I come. You won’t have to bother with it,” Raymond La Mere told me as we went back to the schoolhouse. “I’ll help you with the fire, too.” I could see that Raymond, as the only sixth-grader, was the head of the school.

A half-hour before school should end, I closed my book. “That’s enough for today. I think we’ll have a story, an old story many of you have heard, and then tomorrow I’m going to ask you to act it out, so I want you to listen very, very closely.” I sounded to myself like the demonstration teacher at the practice class. “Let’s see . . .” I looked out the window trying to think of a story simple and dramatic enough to act out. I don’t know why, but I thought of Gil on the rimrock at home.

“How many would like to hear the story of Bluebeard?”

“Aw, tell us a war story,” Mike Cassidy cried out.

“Yeah, don’t you know no spy stories, Miss Webb?” Francis La Mere begged.

“No, not this time. Now listen: Once upon a time, near the city of Baghdad,” I began, “there lived a very wealthy man who had the terrible misfortune to have a blue beard.” I could see the children settling down. Sigrid Thorson’s mouth was wide open. Raymond La Mere’s fine dark eyes were intent on my face. Robert was drawing on the piece of paper I had given him. I saw the black-and-white magpies fly past the open door. They were coming for the lunch crumbs, but none of the children noticed them.

“When Bluebeard had to go away on a long journey he gave his wife Fatima the keys to all the chests and rooms of the palace, telling her that everything was hers. But he gave her one key that opened a little closet on the gallery and told her never to use it, and that if she disobeyed him something very terrible would happen to her.”

“Our father don’t like our mother to use the car keys when he’s away, neither,” Sigrid Thorson said.

“Shut up!” her brother said sharply.

“But so great was Fatima’s curiosity . . .”

“What’s curiosity?” Mike asked.

“. . . she took the little key and put it in the lock and slowly turned it. When she opened the door it was all dark inside, and then she saw that the floor was covered with blood.”

One of the children caught her breath. The only sound in the room was the noise of Robert’s crayon on the paper. It was fun seeing these children so spellbound. Even Robert left off crayoning and watched me. I came to the place in the story where Fatima cries out “Sister Anne, Sister Anne, do you see anybody coming?”

“And Sister Anne said, shaking her head, ‘I see nothing but dust blowing and the green grass growing.’” I made my voice hopeless and dreary and I looked out the window as I said it. I’m afraid I was thinking again of Gil on the rimrock.

There was a sudden frightened scream. It was the new boy, Leslie Harper. He put his head on his desk and hid his face in his arms. The other children were too startled to make any sound.

“Why, Leslie.” I went down to his desk. “Don’t be frightened, it’s only a story.”

“Oh, please, Miss Webb, please let her see something besides . . . besides the grass and the wind. I can’t stand it.” He hid his face again. I sat down on the desk of the vacant seat behind Leslie.

“Listen to the rest of the story.”

“Does it turn out all right?” he asked in a smothered voice.

“Yes, it turns out all right,” I promised, going on with the story: “‘Sister Anne, Sister Anne, do you see anybody coming?’”

“‘I see,’” replied Sister Anne, “‘a great cloud of dust that comes this way.’”

“‘Are they my brothers?’”

“‘Alas, no, my dear sister, I see a flock of sheep.’” I felt Leslie’s hand against my knee and slipped my own down to hold his.

“Then Bluebeard bawled out so loud he made the whole house tremble: ‘Naught will avail. You must die!’ and he was on the very point of cutting off Fatima’s head when two horsemen galloped into the castle, not even dismounting . . .”

“Like the Lone Ranger,” one of the children squealed.

“Lone Ranger! Lone Ranger!” shouted Robert, banging on his desk.

“And whipping out their swords they ran them through Bluebeard’s body and his poor wife was saved.”

“And then what?” Mary Cassidy demanded.

“And then she had all of Bluebeard’s money and married the man she loved.”

“And lived happily ever after?” Leslie asked.

“Yes, they lived happily ever after,” I said. He smiled faintly at me and pulled his hand quietly away.

When the others trooped out Leslie waited behind.

“I’m sorry I cried,” he said, “but I couldn’t stand it . . . about the dust blowing and the green grass growing, I mean.”

“Why, Leslie?”

His small peaked face twisted as though he were going to cry again.

“That’s the way it does here, and I hate it.”

“Have you never been here before?” I asked.

He shook his head. “I was born here, but my folks moved away right afterward. My father used to live here. My mother’s dead.”