Winter Wheat (19 page)

It was midnight before I was through with my bath and had the light out. I ran the shades way up and opened the windows. It wasn’t really cold, but the air was as clear as ice water. The moonlight was so bright I could see the pattern of the calico on the patchwork squares of my quilt. I didn’t mind being alone here any more.

Since I had been in love with Gil I hadn’t ever been quite alone. And all summer I had felt so weighed down with Dad and Mom. Now I was free and alone in myself. It was the only way to feel. I wouldn’t ever let anybody matter so much to me again. I wouldn’t let myself need anybody that way. Dad and Mom had made their own lives and I was separate from them. I was free from Gil now, too—I hardly ever thought of him, I told myself.

It was snowing when I woke in the morning, and I could see my breath in the air. There were two inches of snow on the floor by the window and the top of the stove was covered. The snow came pouring down like wheat emptying out of the truck at the elevator. Prairie Butte was hidden as completely as the faraway Main Range.

4

SUNDAY
forenoon Mom and Dad came. I was sitting by the window translating
Cyrano de Bergerac
as hard as though I had a class next hour. My airtight stove was roaring like a furnace and I had the door shut into the schoolroom. Nothing had gone past the window all morning but a sheepherder driving his sheep up over the rimrock. He had his head bent against the wind and his chin down in his coat collar. The sheep kept close together and moved in a gray wall. He went past without seeming to look at the teacherage at all, and yet he must have faced it all the way across from the highway. There was a kind of secretive look about him as though he wanted to be let alone, the look I’d seen on a deer that came down in the wheat field one time. If he had looked up once toward the window I would have called to him. When he had passed, the place seemed more lonely than before.

It was about eleven when I saw the truck coming through the snow. I knew by the blanket tied over the radiator that it was ours. Mom always covered the radiator in cold weather. I ran out to meet them.

“Well, Karmont, I had to come and see where you are,” Dad said.

“Yeléna,” Mom said very low, and hugged me as though I were a child. How could I ever have thought I could be separate from them?

“They couldn’t have found a much more God-forsaken spot to put a teacherage on!” Dad grumbled.

“How are you, Dad? Is your leg all well?” He looked pale to me beside Mom.

“Yes, but he has a cold. I told him I come alone, but he won’t hear. He is stubborn like a pig.” Mom scowled when she talked.

“We miss you, Ellen,” Dad said, paying no attention to her. We were standing out in front of the school, hardly knowing we were still outside. I can’t tell the gladness there was in me.

Mom approved of the schoolroom. Out of the corner of my eye I could see her looking at the floor. I was glad I’d washed it this morning and put the border of turkeys on the blackboard in colored chalks. Mom nodded her head.

Dad didn’t think so much of it. “How far would you have to go for help?” he asked, looking out the window.

“About two miles, to Harpers’ place,” I said.

“Why would she need help?” Mom grumbled.

“Sit down, Mom, and take off your coat.” She had been too busy looking. Now she took off the bandanna she wore tied under her chin because of the cold. Then she thought of something.

“Ben, go bring it.”

“How did you ever happen to start out a day like this?” I asked.

Mom shrugged. “We plan yesterday, before it get so cold, to come today. The cold don’t hurt nothing.”

I laughed; it was so good to hear Mom again.

“Mom, I like it here now. I hated it at first, but I don’t mind it any more.”

Mom’s eyes can get brighter while she looks at you. They did now, but she only said:

“You got it good here. Where you put your canned stuff?”

And then Dad came in loaded down. He gave me a box and I knew when I felt the weight of it that it was a radio.

“If you ever needed one you need it here in this place,” Dad said. “Let’s see if it’s any good.”

“It came yesterday. Your Dad was crazy to start right out,” Mom said.

Dad set it up, but the static was bad. I thought of the first few days when I had been afraid to make any noise. I was glad they hadn’t come before, until I was all right alone. Then Dad went back out to the truck for the food they had brought.

“Mom, I can’t eat it all!” I shrieked.

“In this cold will keep all right.”

“You killed a turkey, Mom!”

“There’s one less to run away. She’s been out hunting them till the Bardiches complained she keeps them awake.” It was Dad’s old joke. He always insisted that the Bardiches did nothing but sleep once their crop was in.

Mom was lighting the burner on the oil stove under a kettle she’d brought from home. I knew without asking; it was borsch, Mom’s beet soup.

“Oh, Mom!”

“I bet you’re sick of them canned soups, eh,
Yólochka
?”

“She won’t get the smell out of the school for a week. When your children ask what it is, you tell them they’re going to school in Russia now!” Dad teased.

“And cranberry sauce, Mom!” That was one of Dad’s favorites.

My room was too small. We spread a napkin over my big desk in the schoolroom and used it for a table. The rows of desks stood around us like astonished children. By now I thought of them almost as being the children who sat in them.

“There’s one my size,” Dad said. “Who sits there?”

“Oh, that’s Robert’s. He’s not quite bright but he’s . . . he’s not bad,” I said. It seemed a long time since that first day when I had almost fled from him. I told Dad and Mom about one after another. I told them about Leslie crying at the story of Bluebeard.

Dad looked out the window. A fine soft snow was coming down steadily.

“I know how he feels,” Dad said. “It’s the loneliest damn country in the world.”

Silence spread between us; we all three sat staring out the window. I looked at Mom. She was holding a turkey drumstick in her hand. Her face was closed. I think she liked the country because it was like Russia.

“We better start back, soon as we do the dishes,” she said. “It’s dark quick, now.”

“Oh, I’ll do the dishes. You go ahead. You ought to stay here all night.”

“Because of that little storm!” Dad scoffed.

“We make it all right,” Mom said.

When I saw the truck drive off into the snow it was all I could do to keep from running after it. I lighted the lamp and began picking up the dishes. Then I turned my radio on. The static was like the sound of a machine gun, but the dance music filled the emptiness. If the sheepherder passed by now, he’d have to look this way, I thought. It must be funny to have so much music and noise suddenly bursting out in the snow. I ran outdoors to see how it sounded. In the dusk the snow hid the teacherage from sight and the clatter of the radio seemed to come from nowhere.

I liked the snow falling down on the hardpan soil around the teacherage. It was almost a foot deep. I felt the way I do when I see the snow coming down to cover the strips that are planted to winter wheat. I guess you have to live on a dry-land wheat ranch to feel that glad about the first real snow; it seems such an easy way of getting moisture into the soil.

I wondered how it would look here in the spring when fresh grass broke through and it was green for a little while in June. Would there be as many wild flowers as we had on the top of the coulee at home last year when I tried to show them to Gil? I stood out there in the first real snow of winter and I was thinking about spring already! I laughed and ran back into my box of a school. My flesh tingled and my hair was damp from the snow.

It was Sunday night and I hadn’t corrected the arithmetic papers or prepared my Monday lessons. The week end I had dreaded was almost over. I sat on the bed with the lamp moved over beside me and the radio playing dance music from the Drake Hotel way off in Chicago, with the cracks and splutters of static in between.

I started marking Francis La Mere’s spelling paper. I hadn’t been thinking of Gil at all, but I pulled a fresh piece of ruled yellow paper to me and began:

I read it through. It said exactly what I meant. He would wince at my blunt sentences. It would be kinder not to send it to him. I sat a long time thinking about it. Then I folded it up and put it in an envelope and addressed it. It freed me of him. To make it more final I stamped it and ran out through the snow and put it in the mailbox. I thought of him turning it over in his long straight fingers that I loved even now. He would read the postmark: “Prairie Butte, Montana,” and he would take a long time to open it and a longer time to read it. The cover of the mailbox made a loud clang as I banged it closed. The snow came up on my ankles. It was falling so fast the tracks I made on the way out were already filling.

5

THE
next morning Mr. Donaldson brought Robert in his big sled. He had stopped by for the Thorsons and the Cassidys. I knew Mr. Donaldson now. He never mentioned Robert’s mentality and I had the feeling that he held himself to blame. He was a faded copy of a man who made me think of his jeans, limp and faded against the stout new denim of the patches. Mrs. Donaldson was a big bustling woman who had told me right away how Robert’s condition was due to scarlet fever and poor teachers.

The La Mere boys had walked over and were late. The big boys brought in enough chunks of wood to last us for the whole day. We filled the water pail with snow and perched it on the stove to melt.

The deep snow and the lowering sky gave an eerie light to the teacherage. The children’s eyes were always out the window while I read the chapter from the Bible.

Mary Cassidy lifted her hand. “Miss Webb, they didn’t know what snow was in the Bible times, did they?”

“No, Mary, they lived in a country of deserts and palm trees, you know.”

“They had sheep ranches,” Nels Thorson put in.

“I keep wishing Jesus knew about Montana, though,” Mary said wistfully.

“He musta knowed because His Father made all this and every place else,” Nels argued with firm Lutheran assurance.

Leslie Harper raised his hand. I had come to be wary of Leslie’s eager interest.

“My father doesn’t know God, but my mother did. God holds the whole earth, every place in it, in the hollow of His hand.” He spoke with such earnestness that the other children stared. His gray eyes were like the gray stone that has flecks of shining mica in it. It was like a glimpse of his mother too. I could almost see how she would have enough fire to go out on religious missions even though it meant leaving her child.

“Why didn’t your father know God, too?” Francis La Mere asked, his eyes bright and cunning.

Leslie shook his head and his face lost its eagerness and became sullen. “He said he didn’t want to know Him.”

“Now we’ll stand and sing ‘The Star-spangled Banner,’” I said quickly.

At noon they opened their lunch boxes and I heated the borsch for them. As Dad said, the fragrance filled the schoolroom. It was a good hearty soup that would warm them up. The cold was beginning to come in around the windows.

“What’s this?” Mike asked as he tasted his soup. “I never saw a soup that was red like that.”

“Hush up, this is Teacher’s soup,” Mary scolded.

“It’s beet soup they make where it’s lots colder than this,” I told them. The children had to eat it in every kind of container, because I didn’t have enough dishes. Then as a surprise I went into my room and turned on the new radio.

“Miss Webb, you got a radio!” Raymond shouted.

I let them all file into my room to see it. They were crowding through the doorway when the dance music of the Farmers’ Noon Hour Program was interrupted by a voice announcing:

“Storm warning: The Highway Department warns motorists to stay off the roads. Snow is drifting and the temperature is dropping. Temperature at two
A.M.
thirty-two degrees below zero. Below fifty degrees expected by night. Children in rural schools should remain there rather than attempting to go home. Parents are advised not to set out for them until the storm clears.”

“We gotta stay here tonight, Teacher!” Mary exclaimed, jumping up and down.

“Where’ll we sleep?” little Sigrid Thorson wanted to know. I wondered myself, but I was thankful for the radio; I might have let them start out as usual.

We could feel the wind. It blew the snow like so much sand against the windows and the walls. The big stove roared with the fire in it, but the outside edges of the room were so cold I had the children move up to sit with the others nearer the stove. Robert began to cry. The other children laughed at first. But the sound of Robert sniffling was hard to hear. It mingled with the wind and snow.

“Robert, stop that!” I spoke so sharply I felt the children staring at me. Then I said to Robert in the manner of a teacher at the practice school:

“How would you like to string a macaroni chain for the Christmas tree?” Robert looked interested, so I brought him my pound package of macaroni and a darning needle threaded with string.

I kept the radio on low to hear any other storm warning. I heard the fourth-grade spelling and Raymond’s arithmetic, but I was listening to the radio all the time.

The windows were frosted over so we couldn’t see out. They made me think of the tall frosted glass windows of the gymnasium at the university. Soon it would be so dark I’d have to light my two lamps.

After the regular schooltime we played games: quiet games, “I See Something” and “I’m Going to New York” and “I’m Going to Take . . .” We played blindman’s buff till I was afraid the stovepipe would fall. I lined them up, four on one side and three on the other, for a spelling bee while the room darkened and the snow spattered and drove in under the front door in an icy drift.

When the children had to go outside, I would send two older ones together. I took the younger ones, holding a blanket over our shoulders and keeping our heads down against the wind. It was not safe for anyone alone. When I took six-year-old Sigrid Thorson out she cried and clung to me. “It makes me think of wolves, Miss Webb. Don’t it make you scared?”

“No, it doesn’t scare me, Sigrid,” and I thought how Mom on nights like these, after we had hugged the fire for hours, would say suddenly: “Put your big coat on, Ben, an’ we go outside and see the storm.
Yólochka
, come; wrap up your head tight!”

Dad would get up muttering about “that crazy Russian woman I married,” and Mom would laugh and bundle herself up until she looked as fat as an Eskimo. Outside, the cold would grab us and hold us so tight we couldn’t breathe easily. It would make a pain in my forehead and I could feel it wind around my legs. When it was cold like that it was often clear and Mom would point out the stars.

“Jump,
Yólochka
, up and down, and clap your hands!” She would have us all jump. Dad would seem suddenly young and tall and limber. “Like this!” Mom would say, swinging her arms around herself as she jumped. “Good, Yeléna, but more faster!” I felt as though I were hugging the cold to me.

And once, I remember, when we were out Mom said:

“Hush! I can almost hear the bells on the troikas, Ben.”

When we went back in, little Mike Cassidy was crying and the other children were sitting around idle. “I want to go home,” Mike sobbed. “I don’t want to stay here all night.”

I had to think of something, so I said, “But, Mike, we’re going to make candy—two kinds, fudge and taffy.”

After that they were fine. All these children were used to such storms beating at the walls and windows of small frame houses. Robert dropped his string of macaroni and stepped on it getting out of his seat to pick it up. He looked at me, ready to cry.

“That’s all right, Robert,” I said quickly. “You can make one of paper rings.” Then his face cleared and he laughed instead.

Leslie Harper went over to the window and tried to scratch a place on the glass where he could look out. The sound of his fingernail scratching on the glass window made the flesh at the back of my neck prickle.

“Leslie, keep away from that window, there’s too much draft there!”

“I was only trying to get a peek out,” Leslie explained sulkily.

It was luck that Mom had brought all that food. I made turkey sandwiches and used up all my butter and then had to make jelly sandwiches without any butter at all. The borsch was gone, but I made a hot soup by pouring three cans of chicken soup with three cans of tomato together. One of the La Mere boys named it “tomatochick.” We ate around my big desk and the stove. The two lamps on the desk made a warm yellow light but the back of the schoolroom was left in partial darkness.

“I wonder how Pop likes doing my chores tonight!” Nels Thorson said.

“I got outa washing the milk pails tonight, too,” Mary gloated.

“Gram’ll worry about my not getting home,” Leslie said.

I only half listened to their chatter, but they sounded content. I got out colored papers for Robert and set Francis to cutting them in strips so Robert could paste them. It had come to be almost second nature to keep Robert in busywork.

“Now can we make the candy?” Nels asked.

“Yes, after we do up the dishes. Everyone get in line and bring the dishes out to the work table in my room. There are more cookies if anyone wants some more.” They all trooped in with their dishes, but Robert and Francis were the only ones that had room for more cookies.

I had just finished the dishes and come back into the schoolroom when the storm warning was repeated over the radio. “Teachers in rural schools are not to allow children to start home. Parents are advised not to try to go for them.” I glanced around the room thinking how comfortable and safe they all were, and suddenly I didn’t see Robert.

“Where’s Robert?” I asked.

“He was here just a little bit ago, ‘cause I seen him come back with his cookies,” Nels said.

I grabbed up my sheepskin coat and galoshes and ran outside. I called as I went but the wind took the sound away from me. I ran through the snow to the outhouses by the fence but no one was there. The wind was blowing too hard and there were no footprints but mine.

I ran back into the school, almost sure that I had made a mistake; that Robert must be there. The children were still as I came in. They looked frightened.

“Try to think, children—who saw Robert last?”

“I helped him wipe up some soup off his desk,” Francis said. “He kept saying, ‘I want to go home’ and I told him he couldn’t and to go up and get some more cookies.”

I remembered giving him the cookies and telling him to bring his paper chain up by the stove. I kept looking into the dark corner of the room at his big empty desk, expecting to see him.

“Raymond, I’ll put you in charge. You must all do just what Raymond says till I get back. No running or jumping, and I don’t want anyone to move the lamps. The candy will have to wait.”

“Miss Webb, where you going?” Mary Cassidy asked.

“I’m going to find Robert,” I said, with more assurance than I felt. I went into my room and stuffed my skirt into some old wool pants and tied on a hat with a brim to keep the snow out of my eyes.

“Oh, Miss Webb, you hadn’t oughta go, the radio said . . .”

But I didn’t wait to hear. I had to cover my face a minute to get my breath. I couldn’t see more than six feet ahead of me.

“Robert!” I called into the dark, and then I stood still hoping to hear him, but there was only the sound of the wind. He never walked quite firmly; he must have fallen down; he must be lying now in some snowdrift. I plunged ahead through the snow until I found the mailbox post and leaned against it a minute. Once I thought I saw something dark in the snow. I grabbed for it, expecting to find a mitten, but it was nothing but a frozen tumbleweed. If Robert had come this far he might have worked his way along the fence. I felt for the sagging wire and used it as a guide. In places the snow had piled up higher than my waist. Whenever I came to a rounded humplike drift I thought it might be Robert. I turned around to catch my breath and look at the schoolhouse, but I had drawn the shades to keep out some of the cold. I doubt if I could have seen any light through that snow, anyway.

“Robert!” I screamed into the wind. “Robert!” I never wanted anything so much in all my life as to see that big lummox of a boy with his half-bright smile and his clumsy shambling walk.

“Robert!”

The wind blew so hard I had to stand still a moment. It went through my sheepskin-lined coat as though it were thin cloth. I turned and struggled back through the snow. The wind was at my back. That helped, but the cold numbed me. It seemed to have taken every bit of blood from my brain so that I couldn’t think. I had known plenty of blizzards before; I must keep my head now. If I went back to the school and worked out from there in every direction surely I would find him. Maybe he was warmer than I. He was fat; that helped, I told myself. He hadn’t shivered the way some of the children had.

I floundered along the wire back up to the school. The vestibule that had seemed like an icebox this morning seemed warm to me now, and a refuge from the wind. I heard Raymond’s voice that was changing break as he went through the rigamarole of the game:

I opened the door of the schoolroom. “Are you all right?” I asked dumbly.

“Yes, Miss Webb,” they chorused.

“Did you find Robert?” Leslie asked, his eyes big in his pale face.

“Not yet. I will, though,” I said crossly. “Children, nobody remembers seeing Robert after he went up for cookies?”

“I think I remember hearing him close the door. He banged it,” Sigrid said.

“Sigrid, think. Did you really?”

Sigrid twisted her head, but said more dubiously, “Well, I think I did.” Sigrid had thought she saw a camel one day, too.

But I was wasting time. He would be getting farther away. I cautioned them again about the lamp and saw that the stove was full of wood. I raised the window shades so the light might shine out for Robert to see, and I took time to put on some heavy felt shoes of Mom’s, “valenkis,” she called them.

The cold seemed more cutting after being inside and it was harder to see, or maybe my fear made it worse. I knew he was lost, and I’d never find him.

I walked into the woodpile without seeing it and fell sprawling.

When I stood up my mind seemed to clear. If I could get to the Harpers’ ranch perhaps they could help. At least they could get word to the Donaldsons. All these children had stayed alone before. Raymond was fourteen. Nothing would happen to them.

I found the fence post and began the struggle along the wire. After a while there was so little feeling in my hand I hardly knew I had hold of the wire. I slogged through snow above my hips and had to stop to rest.

When the fence came to an end beyond the school land, I had to get down on my hands and knees and feel through the snow for the deep ruts of the road. It was easiest when I came to a stretch where the wind had blown the snow thin. If I stood upright I knew I’d lose the road. I went along almost on all-fours. At times I stood up to look for some marker that I would remember from my one walk back from Harpers’, but that had been in the bright moonlight before the snow fell. The snow clung to my eyebrows and eyelashes and my eyelids kept freezing shut, as though they were granulated. It frightened me. I took snow and rubbed at them to get them open. As long as I stuck to the ruts of the road I wouldn’t get lost; that kept me going. But the farther I went, the more certain I was that Robert couldn’t be alive.