Winter Wheat (21 page)

7

I WAS
filling the lamps that evening when I thought I heard a car. It was a queer sound after the stillness of that endless day. I had heard only a dog barking so far away it sounded like a dog barking in his sleep. I thought someone called. I lighted the lamps before I went to open the door to make sure I hadn’t just imagined it. Once just before dusk I had thought I heard a child crying and ran out in the snow. But it was nothing. Then I heard a good solid knocking on the door.

Leslie Harper’s father stood there.

“Come in. How did you get through the drifts?” I asked.

“Oh, the Pony Express. That old truck will go where a snowplow won’t; and the sled made good ruts,” he said. “I tried to get out to the sheep camp this morning and I got stuck, but the road’s all right.”

“How’s Leslie?”

“That’s one of the reasons I came over here. I wanted to talk to you about him. The other is that I couldn’t think of you here all alone after such an experience.”

“I’m all right,” I said.

“Well, I wasn’t sure. I thought you might be sick after that hike through the snow. My mother thought so, too. It’s a seven-day wonder yet that you made it.”

“Oh, I’m all right,” I repeated dumbly.

“You’ve got the place cleaned up, I see.”

I looked around at it myself. It did look nice.

“How would you like to drive to town and see a movie? The highway’s open and I had no trouble getting over here from our place. It’s only ten below tonight.”

I was so surprised I guess I looked blank. “Why, I . . .” I began.

“How many times have you been in to town since you took this job?”

“I haven’t been to town yet, but that’s not the point.”

He laughed. “Well, do we go?”

“That would be heartless two days after Robert died,” I said.

“No, it wouldn’t be. You can’t do him any good by sitting here and thinking about it.”

“No, thank you. I really couldn’t.” I walked up the aisle and sat down in my chair behind the big desk. A schoolroom is an awkward place to have a caller. He seemed like a pupil now.

“I wish you would come. I’ll get you back safely; or are you too tired?”

“No, I’m not tired,” I said slowly. “I’ve had all day to rest up.” And, suddenly, I wanted to go. I felt I shouldn’t; I didn’t like the idea of going out with the father of one of my pupils, but . . . “I’ll be ready in a minute,” I said.

“Fine. It’ll do you good. I’ll shovel a path for you to the car.”

I heard him out there while I dressed in the woolen dress I wore away to college last year. I wore some silk stockings, but I pulled some woolen ones over them. I even carried leather gloves to wear in town. It was wonderful to be dressing to go some place. I set the lamp on the wash table and put on lipstick and brushed my hair till it lay smooth. I couldn’t put the lamp any place so I could see myself in the mirror. I had to guess at how I looked.

“You’re quick,” he said. “We’ll stop at our place and take my car. Hang on—this is a through express; no stops till we get there. Once you stop on a road like this, you’re done for.”

He drove the ruts as well as I could. The old truck bounced and swayed and slid. I had to hang on, all right, but not because I was scared.

“It’s a long time since I’ve driven in snow like this!” he said once. When we got out at the Harpers’ ranch he said: “We won’t go in, because Leslie’ll just be getting to bed and he’ll be excited at seeing you. He thinks a lot of you. The only letter he wrote me was half full of you.”

Mr. Harper’s car was a coupé, this year’s model, and had a heater and a radio. I hadn’t ridden in anything but a truck since last spring in Minneapolis, with Gil.

“You look as though you like it,” he said.

“I do.” I laughed. The highway was covered with snow but packed smooth and hard.

“Tell me where you came from, Miss Webb.”

“Gotham.”

“That doesn’t tell me a whole lot. My mother says you went to college last year.”

“Yes, just one year. We didn’t have much of a wheat crop this year.”

“That sounds familiar, only it was always the price of wool with us. When you’re away from here you forget how everything really depends on crops and livestock. Going back next year?”

“If I can. You live in Detroit, don’t you?”

“If you call it living. I earn my living there.”

“What do you do?” I asked.

“I’m in the drafting room of the Seacox Machine Company. It’s the kind of a job you think you’re pretty good to land when you first get it, but after six years of it you think you were a fool ever to get started in it. I’m taking a little vacation.”

He was quiet for a way, with his eyes set on the road ahead. He must have felt me glance over at him, because his eyes came back from the road to me for an instant.

“Let’s talk about Leslie,” he said. “You said you were glad I came, for Leslie’s sake. I’m not sure how much I can help him. You see, he doesn’t care very much for me. But I know he likes you and I thought perhaps you could help us.” His voice was almost apologetic.

“I’d like to if I can,” I said.

He seemed to have trouble going on, then he said:

“I suppose you ought to know something about his unfortunate parents who have made him the way he is. We were married when I was nineteen and Gladys, Leslie’s mother, was eighteen. She came from a little town on the main highway, a couple of hundred miles north of here, one of those towns with six beer halls and a couple of stores and two or three gasoline stations. Her father was a barber and her mother’s father owned the grocery and the dry-goods store. Her grandfather sent her to college, where we met. She was pretty and liked a good time. I did too. We were married that June and I took her home to the ranch. Mom and Dad went in town, where they ought to be now—you saw how old they are. I was bursting with ideas from school, even thought I’d change from sheep to Herefords. Of course, her home town with the one street looked like Paris next to our ranch. She stuck it all that year, but she hated it. She kept talking about going to the city. She had relatives in Detroit and she thought that was about the swellest place in the world. I didn’t take her very seriously. I guess I was busy, and nuts about her, and I didn’t really believe she wasn’t happy. I have to tell you all this to make you see Gladys’s side. My mother thinks she was a regular Jezebel. Well, she wasn’t. She was a good kid in her way.

“That spring when Leslie was born she had a nurse who was in some kind of a new religious sect. The nurse stayed six weeks and by the time she left she had Gladys converted. Gladys couldn’t eat this and that and she had to read her Bible every day and go to meetings in town. She tried to convert me at first, and then she gave up and I stayed home with the baby while she went to town.

“Finally, she began to have calls to go on ‘missions.’ She’d leave Leslie with my mother or she’d take him back to her folks. We had some real rows over that, that were finally settled by her agreeing to give them up if I’d give up the ranch and go to Detroit.

“But I don’t suppose it was much better for her. We didn’t know anybody there but this aunt of hers. Gladys was left alone all day in a little apartment with Leslie. She finally met up with members of the same religious sect and after that she was busy as a bee. She’d take Leslie to the meetings, and from the time he was four he had their brand of religion spooned into him.

“I got discouraged and drank occasionally, and that didn’t help. She began to go out on her missions. She’d leave Leslie with her aunt, and then come back and work on him harder than ever, about God hearing everything he said and knowing everything he thought and what a lost soul I was. When Leslie and I were together he’d look at me as though I were an outcast.

“She went away on a mission finally and got pneumonia and died. I guess she didn’t have much of a life, and part of it was my fault. But the worst of it is now that Leslie hasn’t seen her for two years and he still talks the lingo she taught him and fights shy of me. You saw how he was at school yesterday.

“I sent him home here where I had a great time when I was a boy, and it hasn’t helped any. In God’s name, what can I do?” His voice had a hopeless sound to it. “Makes a pretty story, doesn’t it? I feel like a fool taking a girl to town and telling her the story of my past for fifty-four miles.”

“You didn’t begin until we got to Harwood,” I said. “That’s only thirty-four miles.”

“Well, it’s bad enough. What do you think?”

I said the thing I knew he wanted to hear, and yet I wondered if it were true. “I think that Leslie will get over it and forget all that, if you’re here with him. It’s a terrible thing for a child to know there’s trouble between his parents.” Then I added, almost to myself, “It stays with her.”

We were in town. The street lights seemed brilliant, as they always do to me.

Once in the middle of the movie I remembered that two nights ago at this time I had been going up and down in the snow in front of the teacherage, calling Robert. The South American scenery looked as though it were cut out of paper and the actors were dull.

“What’s the matter?” Mr. Harper asked.

I was startled. I wondered how he could tell that my interest had wandered from the screen. “I was just thinking about night before last.”

“I wouldn’t. It won’t do any good,” he said.

After the movie we had a steak and a green salad and rolls and coffee. I don’t know when anything had tasted so good. After those weeks of canned meats and vegetables, the little pieces of young green onions made me think about the garden at home. The tomatoes were hothouse, I suppose, but they were ruby-red, I don’t wonder that they call them love apples.

“You were hungry!” Mr. Harper laughed.

“It tasted awfully good.”

He dropped a nickel in the slot and the canned jangle of music burst out. It seemed a little like Pop’s Place.

“Do you like to dance?”

“I love it,” I said.

“How about going some place where we can dance now?”

“Not tonight. I have school tomorrow.”

“Sometime before I go?”

“Perhaps.” But I was glad he had asked me.

The Harpers’ ranch was dark except for a single light in the kitchen.

“I’m sorry to take you out of your way,” I said.

“It’s kind o’ fun. After driving in the city so steadily I’m glad to find I can still drive back country roads in the winter.”

We changed to the old truck with the flapping side curtains; it wasn’t much better than an open car. The cold came up from the seat through my coat and the wind slid under the curtains. Mr. Harper went back into the barn for an old bearskin rug and covered me up with it, but I believe I was colder than the other night.

We didn’t talk much on the way home. On this road again, the night of the blizzard all came back to me so strongly, as though it had been waiting for me. All day I had fought to keep from thinking of it. Now I remembered again the cold of Robert’s body and the helpless feeling of the dark and the sting of the snow in my mouth. I lost the feeling of the lights and the music and warmth of the evening as though they were a string of beads I had dropped in the snow.

Mr. Harper went with me to the door of the teacherage. He must have felt my silence because he said:

“Don’t be sorry you went. You have your own life, you know. Can I stir up your fire for you?”

I shook my head. “No, thank you.” I didn’t want to talk any more.

I found something out that night: something that made me feel closer to Mom. A thing doesn’t hurt you so much if you take it to you as it does when you keep pushing it away. All day I had tried to keep my mind full of other things, but underneath I knew I could have saved Robert if I had only watched him more closely. Then I’d try to push that thought away. That night, lying wide-awake in bed, I stopped trying.

I remembered Mom telling me about her mother and father’s death, when we weeded the beets in the garden. I could see in her face that she remembered it all as though it had just happened and it hurt her all over again, but I felt she wasn’t afraid to remember it. I wouldn’t be afraid of this; it was a time I had to remember; it was a part of my life.

8

THE
next morning I could hardly wait to see the children. I had a panicky feeling that they might not come. Perhaps their families wouldn’t want to trust me with them. I hadn’t really wanted to teach before; it was just a stopgap. But now I wanted to teach here. The children had driven away with such solemn faces, and I wanted to see them singing or laughing or listening to a story again.

I was ready for school so early I had a long time to wait. I sat at my desk as I had sat the first day of school. The room was just the same as it had been that first day, and yet everything was different. Now I knew the children who belonged in these seats, even the oversize seat at the end of the first row. I knew the color of Raymond’s galluses that held up his made-over trousers and how he could snap his fingers, and Mary Cassidy’s hair ribbons and Mike’s giggle and how painfully Nels Thorson went at arithmetic.

The schoolroom was quiet and orderly and empty, but full at the same time. Lincoln looked out through the windows at the snow-covered butte. The patent-medicine calendar hung on the back wall. I glanced at the calendar and then I wrote on the board, as I always did, “Today is December 4, 1941.” A date looks so innocent until you know what can happen on that date.

I picked up the broom and threw a jacket over my shoulders and went out to sweep the front stoop, but really I went to watch for the children. It was starting to snow again—a fine soft snow powdered the air—but there was no wind. The very air seemed gentle. I thought of the snow sifting down on Robert’s grave if they buried him today.

The La Mere boys came first, riding double on the old horse they called Tobacco. I waved to them and they waved back. Leslie Harper’s father brought the others in the Pony Express. Sigrid Thorson slid out of the end of the little truck before the others and came running to me with a big box in her arms.

“Mother sent you a cake, Miss Webb,” she shouted eagerly. Mary Cassidy brought a jar of baked beans.

“Mamma said she guessed we must have eaten you out of house and home, Miss Webb.”

I saw the children glance quickly, almost surreptitiously, at Robert’s desk as they came in, and then their eyes came back a second time with eagerness because of the little tree.

“We’re going to trim our tree this year in memory of Robert,” I said. “Every day that we get through our work in good time we’ll make something for it.”

We raised the flag this morning in the gently falling snow. The children laughed as the snow tickled their faces and made the Cassidys’ and La Meres’ black hair gray. We sang Christmas carols at noon and talked about our Christmas entertainment for the parents. And then, because it was bound to, I suppose, the conversation slipped around to Robert.

“They took him on the train back to Illinois,” Nels Thorson said. “That’s where the Donaldsons come from. I wish I hadn’t pinged him with my beebee gun last fall,” he said.

“Do you think God’ll take him home, Miss Webb?” Leslie asked.

“I’m sure he will,” I said.

The mailman came through in the afternoon. He stopped to leave my mail with a great honking and hand-waving. I went out to get the mail because I thought he might have a message for me, but he only wanted to talk.

“Too bad about that boy,” he said as he handed me a letter from Mom.

“Yes.”

“It’s a miracle to me you didn’t all freeze; there was a mailman on the Higgins route, Jed Larson, froze to death in a snowbank. I knew him well, often used to see him in town. Mrs. Donaldson was saying in town you should have kept closer watch on Robert. ‘Why, say,’ I sez to her, ‘she oughter get the Carnegie medal for that trip to Harpers’.’ I didn’t tell her I was glad you saved the bright ones, but I sure was.”

Mom wrote:
“Your Father want to see you. He says you are for away as last year in Minnesota. He is still down sick. Can you come home Saturday. I meet you in Clark City. Anna.
” Mom always signed her name that way, even to me.

When the children left that day I got out the letter and read it again and I decided to go home. The bus went past the highway about 10:30. If I started early enough I could walk the six miles to the highway easily.

It was a good feeling to lock the teacherage and know that I’d be away overnight. I was on the road by seven Saturday morning. I wore Mom’s valenkis; they didn’t make my feet look any smaller, but they kept them warm. I didn’t carry anything with me. I had old clothes at home. The sky was still dark and the snow stood out white, as though the two were wrong side around, the sky where the ground should be. The gentleness had given way to cold again.

I reached Harpers’ place by eight. Even before I got to their gate I could see a man moving around there. He was too big and straight for old Mr. Harper. I moved over to the outside rut of the road and made up my mind to go by quietly. We had told each other a lot about each other for a first evening’s visit. I thought it would make me feel strange and half-embarrassed to talk to him again.

But Warren Harper saw me and came out to the road. The country is bare enough so you can see a person a mile away. He stood at his corral gate as though he were uncertain, then I guess he remembered my black bandanna with the red fringes.

“Hello, Miss Webb,” he said as soon as I was near enough.

“Hello,” I said. “The snow’s packed down good.” But I kept right on walking.

“Where are you going?”

“Home for the week end. I can’t stop,” I said, and then thought that he hadn’t asked me to.

He leaned comfortably on the top rail of the fence as though it were summer. “Going to walk all the way to Gotham?”

“Oh, no, I’m catching the bus on the highway.”

“Six miles, as cold as it is today! What do you want to do, freeze your face again?”

“It isn’t bad when you’re walking. Father’s sick. I wanted to go home this week end.”

“I can see how you might anyway. Come on in a minute and I’ll drive you home.”

Leslie and Mrs. Harper were not up yet. Only Mr. Harper was in the kitchen.

“Father, I’m going to town to put in a claim for the insurance on those sheep,” Warren said. “We lost about five hundred in that blizzard,” he told me. I knew what such a loss meant to a sheep rancher.

We talked about Leslie most of the way in.

“He must have been devoted to his mother,” I said.

“Yes, he was. She was little and dark and laughed easily, and cried easily, too. He saw her do plenty of both. He heard from her that the ranch was the last place on earth to live and how the wind blew and how cold it got. He’s made up his mind not to like it because she didn’t.”

Then Mr. Harper seemed lost in his own thoughts. I didn’t interrupt him. The day was as light then as it was going to be. The sky made me think of a piece of iron covered over with frost.

“I went over to Los Angeles once to see Gladys after she’d been gone over a month on one of her missions,” Mr. Harper said abruptly. “I felt so sorry for Leslie I thought I’d see if we couldn’t patch things up again. She was living with a man, this preacher fellow. I couldn’t tell Leslie a thing like that about his mother even if he’d understood it. So I came back and told him she had died. She did die a year and a half later.

“When I told Leslie that she wouldn’t ever come back he didn’t cry, just looked at me, and then he said, ‘You didn’t love her.’ That was something for a six-year-old child, wasn’t it?”

“That was hard,” I murmured. I wanted to say I knew a little how Leslie had felt. I could have told him about Mom and Dad, but that was too deep a part of me.

Warren Harper lit a cigarette and smiled at me. “Did you ever know such a guy? Known you two days and pours out his soul. Well, don’t worry, I won’t say a word about myself or my child on the way home.”

“On the way home?”

“I’d like to come down Sunday afternoon and get you.”

“But that’s eighty-five miles.”

He shrugged. “I’ve gone a lot farther for less reason.”

I made him let me out where our road turns off the highway. “You can meet Mom and Dad Sunday, if you come. I don’t know how Dad is,” I told him.

“I’ll be here Sunday. You can count on it.”

The road wasn’t shoveled and there were no ruts through the snow. Dad must have been sick all week. I tried to see the house as I had that day with Gil, unpainted clapboards and all, but I couldn’t; it looked good to me. I saw the kitchen window and the gray-white bark of the cottonwood above the coulee and I began to run through the snow.

Mom heard me call and came to look out the window. We could never break Mom of her habit of looking out first when someone knocked. But it was good to see her face break into a smile when she saw me.

“Yeléna!”

“Hello, Mom!”

“We gave you up when we don’t get no letter and then we hear the radio.”

“Ellen!” Dad called from the other room.

“Oh, Dad, you’re still laid up!”

“I’m over this bout. I’m just waiting for the weather to get human and I’ll be out.” Dad was dressed, but he wore his sweater and bedroom slippers and he looked sick.

I sat down on the couch and Mom brought up a chair. They had set up the heater here in the front room.

“Yeléna, that boy, was he the big one?” Mom asked right away. “Your father was reading the paper and I am setting my bread dough. I wasn’t listening much, then I hear ‘Prairie Butte teacherage.’ I come quick to listen . . .” I’d forgotten how Mom told things. Dad always listened impatiently because she told so many details and then, as usual, he interrupted her.

“I should never have let you go to that place,” Dad grumbled. “Do you remember, I asked Sunday when we were there how far you’d have to go for help? Anna asked why you’d need any,” Dad finished triumphantly.

Mom made a business of picking up my coat and helped me off with my valenkis. Her face was sulky at being in the wrong. They always argued like this in the winter. Then Dad said:

“It must have been a terrible experience! That was the boy who wasn’t quite bright, wasn’t it?”

“Yes. It seemed awful that he was so near all the time. I don’t see how I missed him, because I hunted back and forth and called and called.”

“It was bad storm,” Mom said. “I could lose myself going to the barn, almost.”

“How did the family take it?” Dad asked.

“His mother blamed me; the father was very kind.”

Mom nodded her head. “You can’t tell about children. You have to keep your eye on them.”

“That boy wasn’t bright anyway,” Dad said crossly.

My room had been shut off since cold weather. It was cold in there and looked bare without the icon in the corner. The lipstick in my bureau drawer was as stiff and cold as though it had been frozen. I found some green beads I used to wear last year and fastened them around my neck. They were like ice. I opened the drawers and looked in. In the bottom drawer was Gil’s picture staring up at me.

“Yeléna, you catch cold in there. Hurry out!” Mom called. I shut the drawer quickly before I had time to look at Gil. But I wished suddenly that I hadn’t written that letter. I felt strange here at home with Mom and Dad. I could see so much better now what Gil had felt.

It was better that evening eating supper in the kitchen. Everything seemed so bright in the electric light after my lamps. We had fresh meat and Mom’s fresh bread. When we were drinking our coffee, Dad took a letter from his sweater pocket with such deliberateness I knew he meant me to notice. Mom left her coffee and started clearing off the dishes.

“Your Aunt Eunice had occasion to write me last week about some business in connection with our father’s house,” Dad said. “Several years ago she had to place a mortgage on the house in order to pay a hospital bill. The man who held the mortgage, an old friend of my father’s, has died, and his son wants to foreclose. Eunice says he wants the house for himself. She writes to ask if I could help her.”

“You have no good from it,” Mom put in.

Dad seemed not to notice. “Your aunt wants to keep the house. She has lived there all her life. It has my grandfather’s name plate on the door, ‘Benjamin Webb, Esquire.’ I had to polish it when I was a youngster, with vinegar and salt, I remember.” Dad pulled a snapshot out of the envelope and handed it to me. “Your aunt enclosed a picture of it.”

I had never seen it and yet when I looked at the picture, the house was so exactly as I knew it must be that it was like recognizing a place I knew well. Only I hadn’t known there was an iron grill along the porch or that there was a big bush in the front yard next to the fence.

“What’s that bush, Dad?”

“That’s a smoke bush, kind of a pink feathery stuff. You could pull it off in your fingers and blow it. My mother was very partial to it,” Dad said.

I turned the picture over. On the back was written “I enclose this picture in case you have forgotten what the old place looks like.” The writing was so light it was surprising that the words should have such barbs. It wasn’t a house anyone would forget. It stood very square with two big windows on either side of the front door, four windows across the second story, and a dormer on the third. The house was built of wider clapboards than I had ever seen, and each window had blinds. I had never seen blinds on a house before.

“Eunice writes that she could perhaps sell the house for a good price. Summer people are glad to pick up a house in Vermont nowadays, but she wants to live in it.”

Mom had been picking up the dishes. “If she can’t pay, she better sell,” she said.

There was a long hard silence in the kitchen, the kind I knew well. I looked at Mom’s face set so sullenly and at Dad’s, cold and hurt.

“Do you think you’d like to go back there sometime, Ellen?” Dad asked.

“Oh, I’d love to go back and see it.”

Mom stood by the table and stirred her cold coffee. “I want no part in it,” she said.

“You have no part in this, Anna. This was my life before I ever met you. This is for me to decide.” I had never seen him so stern. Mom went back over to the sink. Her face was dark and thick. I knew she minded Dad’s talking like that before me. Dad turned to me and went on in a quiet voice: