Winter Wheat (18 page)

“Where does your father live?”

“He’s in Detroit. He left me with my grandmother and grandfather. We live over that way. There’s my grandfather, now.”

Leslie ran out of the schoolroom. I followed to see an elderly man driving up in an old Ford truck filled with pine knots.

“How d’you do,” he called out to me. “After a while this boy’ll learn to walk home, but his grandmother’s afraid he’ll get lost. It’s only two miles.” Leslie waved to me as they drove off. I watched until they were out of sight, then I stood awhile stupidly staring at nothing but the green grass growing.

3

I WORKED
hard at teaching fractions and interest and reading and spelling and yet all the time, underneath, my life seemed to be reaching out like the roots of a cottonwood tree after water. The days fell into a pattern: The Part before School, then School and The Part after School and The Long Evening. I was glad to hear the children arriving in the morning, and every afternoon I had a little dread of the sudden stillness that settled down on the teacherage when they left.

At three-thirty we marched out into the yard and sang “America” while two of the boys lowered the flag. Leslie Harper was chosen first, because he was a new boy. Leslie would hold the folded flag carefully across his flat little chest and march in to put it away.

“The pole looks kind of lonesome when the flag gets down, don’t it, Miss Webb?” Leslie said once.

The children were seldom in a hurry to get off. Raymond would bring in wood for me. Francis, not to be outdone by his brother, would bring a fresh pail of water. Some of the children had a swing before they left. I lingered outside with them as long as they stayed. But all of a sudden they were gone. The Part after School had begun.

With a little sinking feeling I realized that today was Friday and I was alone again. I went back into the schoolroom. Somebody always forgot something: a lunch box or a hair ribbon or a cap. Today there was Nels’s slingshot over on the window sill and I could see a half-eaten apple in Mike’s desk. There was the faint smell of hot dirty hands in the room, and I recognized the scent of the musterole Sigrid’s mother had put on her chest. I opened the windows and let it air out. Soon it would be too cold to do that.

Nels Thorson’s father had brought a truckload of wood this morning, big chunks of fir and poplar, and dumped it at the corner of the schoolhouse.

“There, Miss Webb, that oughta see you to Christmas. It’s January and February that’s the worst months,” he told me cheerily.

Today I wished it would rain or snow, or the wind would blow hard. Then I would be glad of the snugness of the teacherage and open my books and get to work, but this placid, pitilessly clear fall weather made me feel like a fly held in a drop of honey.

“I must wash my hair,” I said aloud, trying to pretend to a great busyness. “I must hurry so I can dry it before the sun goes down. This schoolroom needs a good cleaning,” I told myself as I went down the aisle. “I have all those arithmetic and spelling papers to mark. But what are eight papers?” my mind sneered. “The blackboards need washing. I must make a pattern for those paper turkeys. The children can cut them out and paste them on the windows.” But I went into my room and sat down on the bed.

Time filled the room and lay across the empty prairie and pushed against the window. There was so much of it that it had pressure and weight. But it was empty. Somewhere there were people who didn’t have time enough, who forgot time and themselves.

I wanted to get away from here, to go home and pack my clothes and go back to the city to college. I would work, oh, how I would work, and be busy and hurry! I thought of the hurry down the mall to eight-o’clock classes, and it seemed the thing I wanted most in the world.

When it was five o’clock I started to get my supper. I opened a can of corned beef and cut thin slices, and opened a can of green beans. I heated a potato left from yesterday and made tea in the pot with the broken nose and cut a piece of Mom’s fruit cake for dessert. I laid it all out on a napkin on the narrow table by the window. I was hungry.

Then I caught sight of myself in the mirror. Sometimes, last year, I’d catch sight of my own reflection in the shiny surface of the counter as I stood serving, or in a mirror at the Bean Pot, but then it was only for an instant, just time to say hello to myself, not even long enough to think about it. Now there was time for a long stare. I saw how long my neck looked above my shoulders, how my hand around the fork handle looked strong enough to hold a grain shovel. The pink sweater I had bought in Dayton’s college shop last year had been washed too many times. I looked dull. “You look so quiet, but so alive,” Gil had said once. He wouldn’t say that now.

I tried to go on eating, lifting my cup of tea to my lips, but my eyes would find themselves in the mirror. I wasn’t hungry. The food was tasteless. My cans stacked along the wall looked like a grocery store. I picked up my plate and went out to scrape it into the garbage can. I put my dishes in the oven and closed the door on them, and went out of the teacherage.

At six-thirty it was dark. The long light nights of summer were over. The top edge of the butte was hidden in darkness, but there would be a moon tonight. The patent-medicine calendar on the wall of the schoolroom said so: three-quarters full. I walked fast at first, away from the butte this time, toward the south. I would stop at whatever house I came to. I had been here five weeks and already I craved people, grown people.

The stars seemed to come out between one step and another. I couldn’t see them blink on like street lights, but as suddenly they were there. They seemed to lie just above the rimrock. I climbed toward them, wishing I were climbing the rimrock at home. When I reached the top the moon was up. I could look down on the school sitting there like a doll’s house in the center of the flat ground. The flagpole stood out clearly.

I walked along the rimrock a long way, until a ranch house lay below me, and the long squat roof of a sheep shed. There was a light in the house. I ran down from the rimrock almost eagerly. Once I saw two red eyes that I suppose belonged to a jack rabbit.

A dog barked when I came near the gate. The door opened and a woman’s voice called out, “Be quiet, Shep!” She lingered there against the oblong of light and I could see that she was small and bent. “Is someone there?” she called.

“Yes,” I called back. “How do you do?” I went rapidly up the plank walk to the log house. “I’m the new teacher at the Prairie Butte teacherage.”

“Come in. I’m Mrs. Mathew Harper. I was going to send some fresh bread over by Leslie tomorrow. You can take it now for yourself. It didn’t turn out as good as it used to.”

“I wondered if this wasn’t where Leslie lived. You’re his grandmother?”

“Yes, and mother too, poor boy.”

“Leslie told me his mother was dead,” I said.

“Dead!” Mrs. Harper gave a kind of snort and went on in a half-resentful tone. “Yes, she is dead and you hadn’t ought to talk about the dead, but I think about her and just boil up inside. She went off when Leslie was three, got a ‘call’ is what she said, to traipse around the country holding religious meetings. It’s a queer religion, I say, that calls a woman to leave her own flesh and blood. She’d keep coming back, all dressed-up, and bringing a load of Bibles and books and tracts and then just when Warren’d begin to think she’d settled down, she’d go again. Fin’lly, Warren went and hunted her up in Los Angeles and she was living with the religious preacher that traveled with her. Warren never mentioned her again, and he told Leslie she was dead, as she was a year later. Here, sit down there where you’ll be comfortable. Leslie’ll be real glad to see you.”

The room was like rooms I’ve always known. Folks on ranches usually buy out of the same mail-order catalogues, but it was different, too. There was a kind of crowded disorder about it. The window sill was piled up with mending. Wood was stacked under the kitchen table and back of the stove. The dishes must have come from dinner and supper both.

“Leslie says you come from Minneapolis?”

“I was there last winter, but I come from Gotham, Montana,” I said. “You were just doing the dishes. May I help?”

“Oh, don’t bother. I don’t make any fuss.” As though she was glad to be reminded of what she had been doing, she went back to the sink and picked up her dishcloth. It was too dark over by the sink to see.

“Can I move this lamp over for you?” I asked.

“Father does that for me when he’s home. I don’t like to move it, I’m so unsteady with my hands.”

With the light nearer, I saw how old Mrs. Harper was. Her left hand was knotted up with rheumatism so that she could only use it to hold the dish while she washed it with the other. She was too old to keep things in order. They piled up on her. She was too old to have to raise a grandson.

“How long has Leslie lived with you?” I asked.

“His father brought him here in April. Leslie’s a nervous kind of child. His father thought he’d be better off back here.”

Maybe it was the light on the shelf above the sink shining down on her face that gave it such a worried look, or maybe I was used to Mom’s calm face. She went on talking without my saying anything.

“Warren was a bright boy. I was telling Leslie today I could remember how proud he was when he won the 4H award for raising the best buck, and he did real well at college.” Mrs. Harper sloshed the dishcloth over the plates while she talked. She didn’t get them clean. I don’t think she could see well enough. Her mind was on her son, anyway.

“He got a job the second summer on a boat that went to South America. We didn’t want him to go, but, land, he’d have run away if we’d said no, and wool was selling so low and there wasn’t anything here on the ranch that summer, so he went. Seems like he never settled down again after that. I knew when he came back from college next year with a picture of a girl that he’d decided to marry her. He did, the end of his junior year. But we didn’t say anything. Mathew said there wasn’t any use.”

I took the teakettle from the stove to rinse the dishes, but it was empty. I didn’t want to interrupt to ask where the water was.

“I could tell from the girl’s picture she wouldn’t do on a ranch. But you wouldn’t think to look at her she’d take up with a new religion, either. I forget what they call it. I haven’t any use for it, anyway.

“And I never seen such a change in a man as Warren. He stayed in Detroit for six months after he got the wire saying she was dead. I guess he drank some. I’m not excusing him any. He worked hard—Warren always was a good worker—but he looked tired and old enough to be fifty when he drove into the yard last April, and he’s only twenty-seven.”

“Tell me where these go and I’ll put them away,” I said.

“Oh, just put them there on the table. I don’t fuss.”

I was glad to hear Leslie’s voice outside.

“Hello, Leslie,” I said. “I’ve been visiting with your grandmother.”

The little boy nodded and smiled. He came over toward me. “Grandfather and I went to fill the water barrels.”

“Here, I was forgetting about the bread!”

Mrs. Harper brought a loaf from a crock and began wrapping it awkwardly in a towel. Mr. Harper came in with a dog at his heels that seemed too big and wild for him.

“Mathew, this is Miss . . .” Mrs. Harper looked at me blankly.

“Webb, Ellen Webb. We met the first day of school.”

Mr. Harper nodded, but I don’t think he really remembered me. He was smaller than I, and very frail. I noticed how his eyelids made little peaks above his eyes. His ragged jeans were dirty and he had an old black suit coat that was spotted down the front, but all the same he looked clean. Maybe it was his white hair against his pink skin.

“I’ll walk part way home with you, Miss Webb,” Leslie said. I looked at Mrs. Harper, but she was too busy trying to tie a string around the bread to hear.

“Not very far. It’s getting late,” I said.

Mr. Harper sat down in the chair and began taking off his boots.

“That school’s got a good roof on it. We put the new shingles right over the old ones,” he said, showing me with his heavily veined hands just how it was done.

“I’m glad of that,” I said.

When Leslie and I came out of the house it was bright moonlight. I held out my hand to him. “Let’s run a ways. I love to run in the moonlight.”

Leslie looked at me a minute, then he grinned and took my hand. Running across the hard bare ground, we could see our shadows running with us. The dog’s shadow looked like a bear’s. I waved my hand in the air and my shadow gestured comically back. Leslie’s high, little-boy laughter sounded shrill in that empty place. The dog barked and started echoes way against the reef.

“I think you better go back by the road so you won’t get lost after I leave you, Miss Webb,” Leslie said soberly. We left off running and went over to the dry, rutted road.

“Do you get scared alone at night?” he asked when we had walked a way.

“No, not scared. I get lonely sometimes.”

“I get scared, but not with you and Shep. Would you like to take Shep home with you tonight, Miss Webb?” he asked.

“Oh, no. But if you hear of a puppy, I’m looking for one.”

“There’re just old dogs around here,” he said sadly.

I promised I’d watch him after he left me until he was out of sight. He’d run a little way and then turn to see if I was still there, and wave. In the bright moonlight I could see him a long distance.

I came around the bend in the road and saw the school standing out square and squat on the plain. I ran the rest of the way, partly because of the moonlight, partly to shake off the feeling of the Harpers’ house. I would feel old, too, if I stayed there long.

When I lit my lamp and drew the shades my room had a friendly feeling. I liked it for the first time. I moved around feeling natural. I could hum without having the sound stay in the silence. While I undressed I planned out my days: tomorrow I would do some French. Every day I would do some extra work. Sitting on the bed, I looked across at the cans piled against the wall. Why should I wake up every morning staring at beans and soup and canned corn? I went out to the shed and got some cartons to put them in and shoved them under my bed. Then I took red crayon and marked the contents on the box ends.

I put on my coat over my pyjamas and went across to the cistern to get two pails of water. I set them on the stove to heat and dragged out the tin washtub I used for bathing. I had to sit in the tub with my knees almost under my chin, but the hot water was delicious. I made white gloves on my hands and up my arms with the soap, like a child, then I dipped them under the water and watched the soap slide off the smooth skin. My arms, still tanned from summer, looked dark against the white pinkness of my thighs. When I stepped out on the towel I could feel the warmth from the stove and I turned around to feel it on my back and rubbed until I glowed. I unpinned my hair and let it flop softly down on my shoulders. I felt so warm and clothed in my own skin that for a minute I hated to put on my pyjamas. I thought of old Mrs. Harper, and I had a sudden greedy joy in my young, strong body.