Winter Wheat (12 page)

10

AFTER
that night, I began to watch Mom and Dad, wondering what they were thinking. We all watched each other, sitting across the oilcloth-covered table from each other. I could feel Dad’s eyes on me. I could feel him wondering how badly I felt. When Mom and I were quiet too long, he talked. He invented errands for me to do in Clark City, but I made excuses. I’d rather stay home, I said. Why didn’t he and Mom go?

Maybe there was one good thing about it; I thought about Anna Petrovna and Ben Webb as much as I thought about Ellen Webb and Gil Borden. I could feel the weight of their lives weighing on my own. Sometimes, up on the rimrock, I would look far off and try to separate their lives from mine. They had nothing to do with me, I told myself.

I was free in myself, in my own body and mind. I would look at Mom and think how my hair was as light a yellow as the wheat and my eyes were gray and my body was slim. I would notice coldly how red Mom’s neck was below the strong, black hair. I would hear Dad’s cough and look at the tired lines in his face and think how unwearied I was after a whole day’s work outdoors. But it didn’t do any good; we were all bound together.

There were two letters a couple of days after Gil left, one addressed to Mom. She opened it and made out most of the words. It was very polite, thanking her for her gracious hospitality, saying what a new experience it had been for him, saying how he would always remember her hot borsch. Every word hurt me. It seemed insincere, because he hadn’t appreciated Mom.

There was a letter for me. I couldn’t make myself read it for a long time. I looked at the ending first.

I took it with me down to the barn and climbed up in the seat of the duckfoot to read it.

I crumpled the letter into a hard ball, then I opened it up again and tore it into pieces so no one could ever read it. I didn’t let myself think; it would hurt too much. I went up to the house and saw that Mom had left her letter on the table, but she had gone out to the chicken house. I put it in the stove. I couldn’t stand looking at myself or the house. The smell of a soup bone simmering on the stove nauseated me. Outside I could see Dad running the harrow over the fallow strips. I walked down there and told him I’d do it.

Dad looked at me and his face was full of questions, but he didn’t ask any of them. I saw that he was a little afraid of me, and that made me feel more separate from him than ever.

“All right, I’ll go to Bailey’s and get the gas for the truck.”

I felt it a relief to have Dad gone. I watched him going slowly back to the house; then I had the sky and the hard clumpy earth to myself. I started to put on Dad’s gloves he had handed me, but I stuffed them in the pocket of my jeans instead. Why should I care how my hands looked? I didn’t care if I got burned with the sun or if I drove back and forth all day in a deadly monotony of rows, with the harrow dragging after me across the field like my own unhappiness.

I didn’t go up to the house for lunch and Mom brought a pail of lunch and some milk down to the fence. I wished she hadn’t. I wished she would let me alone.

“Your Dad an’ me eat up at the house,” Mom said.

I ate it and I noticed how thick the crusts were and I thought with anger how I had cut the bread so thin for Gil.

We had more rain that June, but not enough. Mom watched the sky anxiously. Dad complained about it and discussed it with anyone who stopped at Bailey’s. All he thought of was the land and crops and weather, I thought critically. No wonder that Gil was bored when he was here.

Chuck Henderson was home helping his father. I used to go places with Chuck. He was going to the University of Montana. He came over one night and asked me to drive to town to a movie. I could feel Mom and Dad behind me, wanting me to go.

“Why don’t you go ahead, Ellen?” Dad urged. A hard anger burned inside me. I had trouble keeping my voice pleasant.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll just get my coat.”

“Wear that black dress you get,” Mom said.

“I’m all right as I am,” I said, and put my coat over my cotton dress. I ran my comb through my hair in front of the kitchen mirror and put on some lipstick. I didn’t bother to look very closely, but even in that quick glance I could see my face looked dull.

Chuck was nice enough, but I wasn’t interested in him. He was taking agriculture and coming back to help his dad on the ranch. He talked about school and the football games and the girls down there. I didn’t listen very hard. I was feeling the road going by, the same road Gil and I had driven over. It seemed to belong to us. I saw the light in the La Rouche shack and felt the mud suck at the wheels in the place where we were stuck. Why hadn’t I sat still in the truck and wrung my hands and acted scared? But I knew it wasn’t my getting the truck out that mattered. It was something bigger than that and harder to understand.

“When does school open down there?” Chuck asked.

“The seventeenth,” I said.

“Why don’t you switch to Missoula? That’s where you ought to go,” Chuck said.

“Oh, I’ll finish where I started. They have a good language department there; that’s what I’m majoring in,” I said, but it seemed a long time ago that I had been interested in studying.

“Language! You mean French and Spanish . . . not me!” And then Chuck came back to the weather and ranching. I thought of Gil talking to a girl about crops.

“. . . We may get a good summer after all. Dad says there’s nothing to keep us from having rain for a week steady. I’m going to own a place of my own someday and believe me, it’s going to be partly irrigated. The day of the farmer praying to God for rain while his crops fry up is over. . . .”

I couldn’t keep my mind on what he was saying. All I could think of was driving to town with Gil. I looked at Chuck’s hands on the wheel and thought of Gil’s.

We went to a movie and sat and watched a play about two sisters. One stole the man the other sister loved. That was different: to have someone else take your man. That was different from having him change and cool and no longer love you because of something in yourself.

Chuck put his arm inside of mine and measured our finger tips together in my lap. I let him. Why not? We went out of the movie and had hamburgers and I remembered the night after the concert when Dad bought them. I wished I were eight years old again. It isn’t good to wish you were a child; it’s like hiding your face in your warm collar out of the wind. When you lift it again, the wind seems twice as cruel.

“Want to stop in at the Bijou?” Chuck asked. “I’d like to dance with you again.”

“I’d just as soon,” I said. I had a sudden fierce desire to hurt myself. I even picked out the place where we had sat, Gil and I. I told Chuck to ask the orchestra to play “Tomorrow Is a Lovely Day.”

We had cokes and danced. “You dance just as well as you used to,” Chuck said, “but you seem quieter. You didn’t use to be so quiet.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, but I couldn’t think of anything to say to him. I dreaded the ride home. I meant to let him put his arm around me going back, but when he tried to, I couldn’t stand it.

“Don’t, Chuck!” I said, so sharply he was cross.

At our gate Chuck said, “How about going to the dance at Sun River Saturday night?”

“I’m sorry, Chuck, I can’t go.”

“Well, if that’s the way you feel about it . . .”

Then he drove off and I had to go into the house again and face Mom and Dad. I dreaded that. I felt them both sitting there watching me, looking to see if I had had a good time.

“Hello,” I said. “You’re getting so you sit up late.”

“Why didn’t you ask young Henderson in? He’s developed considerably,” Dad said, trying to be offhanded about it.

“I didn’t want to,” I said and went into my room, and I could feel their silence through the thin wall.

Until there was hay to be cut, I worked in the garden. Once a week I drove the truck down to fill the big barrel with water from the creek. It was almost a joy to attach the hose and spray the hard-packed gumbo. The water spread out over the hardpan surface like a map, peninsulas and islands of moisture creeping out farther. When the dirt was wet black I felt easier in myself; some tightness that had held me loosened.

I used to like to run in wet black mud when I was a child. In summer the ground was always so hard; the roads that had been puddings of mud turned to dust that stuck in your throat and tickled your nose, and made your hair lie flat and lusterless on your head. Dust was what bodies of people and animals alike turned into; it was part of death. But mud was elastic and springy; there was life in it.

I remembered, one time in the spring, coming home from school with Judy Bailey and seeing Mom down by the fence. We ran across the field instead of going to the house first. When we came up to her I saw that Mom was barefoot. She had left her shoes way round by the gate. I didn’t mind until I felt Judy looking at Mom’s feet. I could feel her thinking right through her silly fat little head.

Judy and I were walking on the stubble to keep our school shoes out of the mud. Mom was walking in the plowed fallow that was so soft that the mud squshed up between her toes.

“Don’t your feet get hurt going barefoot, Mrs. Webb?” Judy asked.

“Not where it’s soft,” Mom said. I was thinking how Judy would tell about it in a hateful, sly whisper to the girls at school. Then Mom laughed. “You girls, take off your shoes and stockings; run up to the house that way. It feel good!”

“No, thank you,” Judy tittered. “I’ll have to hurry over home.”

When she was gone, I went barefoot with Mom, not because I wanted to, but out of a kind of loyalty. We looked at the footprints we made in the mud. We set them together over by the firm edge, mine shorter than Mom’s then and not so broad.

“You feel like it was spring through the bottom of your feet!” Mom said. “Feel?”

Then I did feel it. Mom laughed at me. “We hurry up to the house an’ wash our feet before your dad come. He don’t like me barefoot.”

On the porch steps Mom brought out a basin of warm water. “Wash your feet,
Yólochka
; they feel like new,” Mom said. She washed her own and put on the heavy men’s shoes she wore around the ranch. My own inside their heavy laced boots still kept that cool springy feeling.

“They feel dancy,” I said. Mom laughed again.

“That’s right, they do,
Yólochka moya.”

But today when I thought of that, I could feel Gil wincing at the sight of Mom and me going barefoot in the mud. I hurried with the watering, only to be through with it.

I did nothing to keep my skin from sunburn or my hands from calluses, or my hair from going coarse and flat in the hot sun, and I felt how slovenly I looked. I kept on wearing shirts that were faded and ragged and the jeans that had patches over the knees, yet I despised myself in them. I couldn’t be content the way I used to be, liking whatever I was doing.

All the time I kept listening, spying on Mom and Dad, picking over anything they said to find a hidden meaning in it. I had no feeling of sadness for them, only distaste and aloofness. How could they help but see how I felt? I was glad when there was more work to do. I would be glad when it was time for threshing.

I dreaded meals more and more. I listened to what we said and thought how stupid it sounded.

One day, I came in with Dad and Mom had the table all set in the front room with the cloth we had used when Gil was here. I knew she did it to please me, but instead of thanking her, I was cross.

“Well, Anna, that looks nice,” Dad said.

“You make yourself a lot of extra work, Mom,” I said.

We had a steak broiled rare, the way Dad loves it, and onions fried in deep fat and a salad of pears in gelatin that I had learned to make in school. Mom even made a strawberry shortcake. I was hungry, and all these things I ate knowing Mom had made them especially for me, but I felt her pitying me and the pity made a sour sauce. I felt anger just behind my eyes, stinging them without tears. I saw their kindness clear on Mom and Dad’s faces, and my own stiffened. Why should they love me so much when they must have conceived and borne me in hate?

We were eating dessert when Mom said, “Gilbert was poor eater.”

Having his name spoken out loud was like being flicked with a whip. Dad looked at me quickly as though he realized how I might take it. I just sat there eating the tasteless berries without saying anything. When we’ve lost a field of wheat with grasshoppers or hail or drought, it’s always Mom who can talk about it first. And then, since Mom had said Gil’s name out loud, I wanted to hear her say it again.

“This was all awfully strange to him. He had never seen anything like this country and our ranch,” I said.

Mom’s face looked stolid and secretive the way it goes when she meets a stranger. But Dad nodded.

“Well, it’s different from the East. I remember when I first came out here, I thought it was pretty strange, too.”

“Dad, did you hate it?”

“No,” Dad said, “I didn’t hate it. It was too big and strange and new. I liked being on my own out here. When I first got back to Plainville, after the war, I felt cramped. There was plenty of room out here.” Dad’s face wrinkled the way it does when he’s talking with Bailey. “I didn’t know enough about ranching to fill a tin cup. If it hadn’t been for your mother we’d have been back in Plainville before the next spring.”