Winter Wheat (5 page)

“You aren’t mad at me, Ellen, are you?”

“Of course not. Look, I don’t work at the cafeteria tonight. How about getting dressed and we’ll go some place to eat.” I didn’t want to much, but I couldn’t leave her like that.

She started to cry again and dab at her face with tissue. “You don’t really want to. You’re just being . . . kind.”

And then I had to tell her in five different ways that I was crazy to. She got up finally and began combing her hair while I sat watching her. Suddenly she laid down her comb and said, “You’re pretty, Ellen.”

I stared at myself in her mirror harder than I ever had before. I saw that my hair had a soft shine to it, but that was because I had just washed it, and I had good color because of my fast walk home. For the rest, my gray eyes and too-high cheekbones and wide mouth were so familiar I couldn’t tell.

“See, you even think you are! I’m not. Nobody would turn and look at me twice.”

Then I got sick of such talk. “Don’t be a goose, Vera. How can you worry about whether you’re pretty or homely when people are worrying about whether they’ll be living tomorrow!” I sounded to myself exactly like Mom. There was the time Mrs. Yonko’s daughter sat in our kitchen talking about how poor they were and Mom turned on her.

“You don’t know nothing about poor!” she had said in a cold hard kind of a way. “Wait till you live on black bread and cabbage three year and be glad to get it! During war we don’t have that some time.” Mom’s eyes had seemed to see way beyond us.

“Tell us about that time, Mom,” I had begged. I was about twelve then. Mom closed up tight and the fierceness went out of her; but it comes to my mind when I read about poverty. Mom never wasted anything, and she’d urge Dad or me to eat the last piece of anything left on the platter till Dad used to get angry. Dad never liked having pigs, but Mom had to have them. “They eat cheap,” Mom used to say, “and they sell good.”

Vera was pretty when she was all ready and we had left that terrible sloppy room behind. She had on a red corduroy dress and some red shoes to match and a white lambskin jacket. Her lips matched her dress and the beanie she wore on the back of her head. She didn’t have any stockings without runs, so I loaned her a pair of my white knit socks with the red and black border.

“Gee, they look hand-knit,” she said.

“They are. Mom made ‘em.”

“Pretty hot! They’re like the real peasant stuff over at the ski shop.”

“They are peasant stuff,” I said. I thought of Mom coming in from the barn in her big galoshes and her hair tied in a bandanna. I suppose she must have been a peasant girl when Dad met her. I knew Mom hadn’t had much regular education. She could read a little and write a little, but Dad wrote me mostly. Sometimes Mom tucked in a little note. I think she didn’t want him to read them. But always they told more in a sentence than Dad’s long ones.

“Gus Johnson was over help your father with post holes. He is real hay-maker.” Which was Mom’s way of saying he was a hard worker . . . or she would write “Your Dad don’t talk much. Wind is bad.” And I could see the whole long day with Dad sitting miserable and silent by the stove.

We went to the Beanpot because that’s the most popular place near the campus. It has a big fat beanpot out over the door and they serve a full dinner for 65 cents, which is 20 cents more than you’d have to pay at the cafeteria. It was nice to sit down at a table and order, but to save my life I couldn’t help noticing each plate that went by to see the size of the helpings. That’s what working at the cafeteria does for you. The food did taste different. The steam table does things to food in spite of how clean and shiny the metal dishes are. We ended with a serving of chocolate pie topped with whipped cream and Vera smoked afterward while I had a third cup of hot black coffee.

Then I remembered Mr. Echols this afternoon.

“Vera, what do you want to do after college?”

“Get rich,” Vera answered, so fast it took my breath away. “I’d like to be a dress-designer in Hollywood and make pots of money.” Her face didn’t look so thin. “I’d have a penthouse apartment that was really beautiful with a bedroom in gray and dusty pink and a bathroom opening out of it in Dubonnet with a square gray bathtub.”

I thought of the messy bedroom she had at 1112 and the bathroom down the hall that was always draped with washing and the washbasin littered with bobby pins and broken pieces of soap.

“What do you want to do?” Vera asked.

“I want to be able to talk different languages and go and live in foreign countries for a while. Last year when I took Spanish I knew I wanted to do something with languages.” I couldn’t explain to Vera that I’d always wanted to talk Mom’s language. There are English words that don’t quite fit the Russian ones. Mom says something in English and doesn’t look satisfied sometimes, as though the English words didn’t really say it, like my name that she calls Yeléna. The Bardich girls won’t let their mother and father talk Yugoslav together; they want them to be American, but I don’t feel that way. Mom’s Russian is something precious of her own that she brought from Russia when she came, like her icon.

“How would you make a living doing that?”

“Oh, I’d translate and interpret for people or be a correspondent.” But I wasn’t very sure about it.

“You don’t want to go back to Montana, do you? I’m never going back to Iowa if I can help it.”

“I wouldn’t mind going back for a while. I may teach a year or so after college. I’m taking enough education this year so I’ll have my certificate.”

“For heaven’s sake! My folks want me to teach school back home, but I’d starve to death rather than go back to that dump and teach kids.”

We walked up Third. Two boys on the porch of a fraternity house whistled at us.

“Do you know any boys in school?” Vera asked.

“Nope, not one,” I said, though the boy in history class had asked me to go to a movie Friday night.

“All the nice ones go for girls in sororities.”

“You can get in next year, maybe,” I said, thinking if we had a bumper crop maybe I could, too.

“If I’m asked, you mean,” Vera said.

And then we cut across the campus and there was room to smell the rotting leaves and the night air. I forgot Vera. My spirits rose like a partridge startled out of the brush. I had never been inside so much in all my life as this last month and a half. I hadn’t known how cooped-up I had been.

When we came to the door of the rooming house and climbed the three flights of stairs, the narrow hall crowded in on me. I thought of the feeling of space on top of the rimrock back of our house at home and the wind in the aspens in the creek bed. I undressed in the dark and lay in bed with my face turned toward the open window, but the lighted windows of the house next door blocked my view, and there was no wind stirring.

5

I HAVE
reason to remember the library. Now of all the buildings on campus it is the clearest in my mind. I remember the shallow feeling under my feet of the steps leading up to it, and the weight of the front door, and the worn marble stairs inside. I know each room with its subdued shuffle of papers and feet, the smell of books that is different from the smell of periodicals and papers, and the sound of the light switching off in the stacks and the tinny tread of feet on the steel stairs of the stacks. I remember the sun across the study tables, the sun of that spring shining through green and the paler sun of that winter whitened by snow. I remember the feeling of excitement at ten o’clock when half the lights in the reading room were turned off as a warning of closing time, and I would go down and meet Gil.

I always studied in the library, never in my room at 1112. There was a table in the corner between two long windows where I usually worked, but if I sat with my face toward the window I kept looking out, studying the weather the way we do at home. If I turned toward the door, I watched people coming in and out. But I learned to look at the window and think about what I had been reading, too.

It was in October that I met Gil. I saw him sitting at a table halfway across the room. I watched him when he went over to the encyclopedias against the wall. I met his eyes and looked away. Finally, I turned my chair toward the window. It was better to be distracted by the weather than to keep glancing up at some boy. But after that I always looked to see if he was there when I went in.

One day I went over to the lib. after Mr. Echols’ class to work on the next assignment. Mr. Echols wanted us to write autobiographies. “Begin with your family. Make me see them with your eyes, then make me see you growing up, your town, your house, your religion, your school.” It must be interesting, I thought, for him to know all about each one of us sitting there in his classroom.

I thought it would be easy. Things I wanted to say sprang into my mind all the way over to the lib.: I would tell how the warm, melting breath of a chinook felt after days of dry cold; how it felt to pull the harrow or drive the combine; how it felt when a cloudburst struck after weeks of hard bright heat and I stood out in the open and let it drench me; how hail felt, too, when I ran out in it to get the chickens all in. I wanted to bring my whole world and set it down on paper.

But now, sitting in front of a pad of empty paper, it wasn’t easy. “Begin with your family,” Mr. Echols had said.

I started in: “My father and mother are very different. My father came from a small town in Vermont.” I knew that town almost as well as Gotham. I could describe some of the people and the house where Dad was born, he had told me so much about it. The house was three stories tall and had a long two-tiered porch. I knew just how the parlor looked with its horsehair and walnut furniture and I knew Dad’s room when he was a boy. His windows looked out into green maple leaves that sometimes woke him in the night with the noise they made, louder and more scary than the sound of the aspen leaves by the creek, Dad said. There was a big picture of the Day of Judgment that scared Dad, too. He told me that when I said I wished we had more pictures in our house and he said it was better to have none than the kind that scared you.

Dad’s father was the principal of the high school and I think Dad stood in awe of him as a boy. He died while Dad was in the Army. When Dad went back with Mom only his mother and sister were there. I felt I knew a lot about Vermont, too. Dad so often talked about it—how different it was from Montana. Trees grew easily there, the way they do here in Minnesota, and there were picket fences and neat garden plots and all the houses were painted and every village had a church with a white spire on it.

Dad used to tell me about skating parties and corn roasts and the fun they had in the high school where his father was principal. Once he was telling about home and Mom looked up from the knitting she was doing and said:

“And the womans in that town would see a murder done better than have dust in their parlor. They are afraid of what their neighbors don’t do, too.”

Dad stopped talking about Vermont and went outside.

“Go get to bed,” Mom said sharply to me. That came back now more clearly than the stories Dad had told me.

I didn’t know much of anything about Mom’s town. I hardly knew what she looked like as a girl, except that Dad had a candy box of old snapshots: of the boat he went to England on, and the one he sailed to Archangel in, and pictures of other soldiers and the snow in Russia, of towns that looked half-buried in snow and groups of Russians with funny hats. One of them showed Mom in a dark dress with a bandanna over her head. There was a big black coffeepot in front of her as though she had just put it down, and she had a snowball in her hand and she was laughing. Mom was seventeen then, she told me. “The soldiers always laugh and joke and make fun,” Mom said. “Your father always had something fun to say. The day they bring him to Seletskoe all shot up and bleeding he can make jokes.”

Some of the fun had gone out of him in Montana, it seemed to me, the way so many dry years have taken the moisture out of the soil.

I knew Mom’s family were very poor and she was the only girl in a family of five brothers. “I have five uncles, Mom. Will I ever see them?” I asked one time.

“Four was killed in last war,” Mom said, “and one go to be a priest.”

“Are my grandparents living, Mom?” It seemed as though a little part of me must be in them. I wanted to know about them in order to know more about myself, the way you do when you look at your baby pictures and listen to things you did before you can remember.

“They was both killed,” Mom said. I couldn’t have been more than eight when Mom told me about them. We were thinning beets in the garden; Mom was always more talkative outdoors.

“Killed, Mom?” I couldn’t believe it. Children in Gotham had their grandparents living with them. How could mine have been killed?

“My father try to keep his pigs from robber soldier. The man shoot him and burn our house. My mother burn to death.”

I stared at Mom. Even to a child my mother didn’t hide things or make them seem better than they were. I saw in her face that she could see it all just as it was.

“Did you see it happen?” The question almost stuck in my throat and yet I had to ask it.

“I see my father shot, then I run for help. When I come back the house is burned, and my mother dead. It was in winter.”

I remember how still it was out there in the garden, and since that day I have always known how red are the veins of the beet leaves and how like soft green leather the leaves themselves.

“What did you do, Mom?”

“My brother and I live in old shack for while. Then he go to be priest. I help nurse wounded soldiers. Move your hands faster. See, like this!” Mom was through talking, but all afternoon as we worked down the hot rows I thought about my grandmother and grandfather, part of me, killed. I remember wishing they could know that I was here.

I wished even now that they could know I was here in college, sitting in this big room at a polished table writing about them. But the paper in front of me was still empty except for two sentences: “My father and mother are very different. My father came from a small town in Vermont.” I began now purposefully. I would start with their meeting.

“My father was sent to Archangel in the last war. In a way, I think it must have been the most important happening in his life. Before the war he had had one year of college and expected to go right on and finish. That spring he enlisted and that summer he sailed for England. While his transport was in the harbor in England, the order came that sent him to Russia.”

Dad has a picture taken in the harbor and one of himself leaning over the railing and waving. He says he’d never had an ache or pain then. He’d even won his letter for track freshman year. I had studied that snapshot a long time. It seemed so good to see Dad well. I’ve never known him when rain or cold didn’t set his shrapnel wounds to hurting and make him cough.

“The American troops were sent to Archangel to keep the Germans from gaining control of the railroad and the new Russian government from seizing the Allied ammunitions.”

I knew all about that; I had heard Dad talking to Bailey over at the elevator. “Damn-fool expedition!” Dad had called it. “The Armistice was signed less than three months after we got there, but the port of Archangel was frozen up tight as a prison. You ought to see it! We don’t know what cold is here. Cold fog everywhere. They told us what to do to keep from frostbite. One of the boys, a little fellow from St. Louis, insurance salesman he was, was so afraid he’d freeze his face he kept making faces every few minutes and it nearly drove us crazy. We’d bellow at him, ‘Stop doing that!’” Then Dad and Bailey had laughed and Dad had lost his tired look. I’ve heard Dad tell how the very morning the Armistice was signed, while some of the men were still at breakfast, the Bolshies came out of the woods in a regular attack formation. “Armistice or no armistice, that’s when I got filled with shrapnel!” Dad had said.

Bailey shook his head. “Don’t they know what’s going on in the rest of the world?”

“Russia’s a world by itself. They were mad at each other and they didn’t want us up there, so they kept on fighting.”

I loved hearing about their escape over a trail through the woods. Some of Dad’s stories Mom didn’t like, but she liked the part about the soldiers being brought into the little village where she lived. That was where she took care of Dad.

I tried to put it down in the biography, but I couldn’t get in so many things. When we had Mom’s hot red borsch Dad would say sometimes, “This is the stuff your mother filled me with to make me well.”

“That was poor stuff, not like this,” Mom would answer. “You’d had so many of those cold apple pies and salt-pork meals you don’t know good soup from bad.” Sometimes I felt Mom wasn’t joking when she said things like that. She didn’t like anything about Dad’s home.

“Did you fall in love with each other right away?” I asked just last summer when Mary Bardich got married.

Mom went on knitting without looking up. Her face went blank the way it can do when it shuts down over something. I looked at Dad. Dad was busy getting his pipe to draw.

“I mean,” I said in the funny little silence that had spread until it was big, “wasn’t it hard with Mom speaking Russian and you English?”

“We didn’t find it difficult,” Dad said kind of formally.

“He can say ‘
bol
,’ pain, and ‘hurt,’ and ‘water’ in Russian,” Mom said, “and ‘What is your name?’” She looked at him and laughed a little.

“
Kak vashe emya
,” Dad said like a child saying his lesson.

“You could say ‘rest now’ and ‘eat it up’ and ‘you will feel better,’” Dad said, as though he had forgotten me and was talking to Mom. And I could see suddenly how it must have been through those few words. I think I began wanting to know different languages then.

“And ‘
mne holodno
,’ remember?” Mom asked, hugging herself as though she was shivering cold.

“I remember the day you said ‘cold’ in English,” Dad said.

“And how you try to teach me English,” Mom said.

“You learned very fast,” Dad admitted.

“That was easy!” Mom said, as she says about planting a whole field or cooking for harvest hands or even digging stones out of the field.

I sat there in the library, chewing the end of my fountain pen while I tried to sort out what was important in the story of Dad and Mom. I remembered one time I had heard her admit that a thing was hard. Judy Bailey was getting married and going to Illinois to live. I was helping Mom with the washing and I said I bet it would be hard meeting her husband’s family the first time.

Mom lifted the dripping clothes out of the hot suds with a stick. “It is hard,” she said. “Everything is different when I go to your father’s town, everything!” She made a gesture with the stick and dripping clothes that showed how wide the difference was. “They don’t eat same as I do—house, clothes, church, everything different. They don’t even think same. That was hard.”

“You weren’t there long, though, were you?” I asked.

“Long enough!” Mom said, and her face was dark and heavy. “They was glad to see me go. We come out here.”

I asked Dad once, when he was talking about Vermont, how they happened to come off out here, and Dad’s face looked almost as though he didn’t know either, but he said:

“I wanted to go to the other end of the earth just then and your mother wanted to live on a farm. So we homesteaded. Sort of last-call pioneers.”

I heard Dad talking to Bailey one afternoon in winter when it started to grow dark at three o’clock and it was so cold in the elevator Bailey kept the door into the office closed. They both sat there with their feet on the airtight stove. I think they’d forgotten me.

“If anyone was to tell me when I was seventeen that at forty I’d be ranching it out here in Montana I’d have told him he was crazy,” Dad said. “At seventeen I was hesitating between being a lawyer and teaching. My father wanted me to be a college professor. He taught in Andover for a year before he became principal of the high school at home. And I was leaning that way. I’d have liked to teach history.”

“And then the war threw the monkey wrench into all your plans, eh?” Bailey said. “You could have gone on and taught anyway, couldn’t you? It would be a long sight easier than raisin’ wheat in this infernal country.”

“No, I couldn’t,” Dad said shortly. “I was married and had a child on the way. My father was dead by that time. Not a chance!” He got into his heavy sheepskin and the cap Mom had knit him that came way down over his ears, and the mittens. “Good night, Bailey. Come on, Ellen.”

There was one day when Dad was sick and had to lie on the couch all day. Mom and I were cleaning the barn, and some of my thinking and wondering came out in a question.

“Mom, couldn’t Dad have gone back to school? Wouldn’t his mother and sister help him and you could have found some position?”