Winter Wheat (22 page)

“After all, Eunice is my only sister. I should hate to see her having to move out of the house. She hasn’t had too much out of life. The young fellow she expected to marry was killed in France early in the war. She never went with anyone else as far as I know. I can’t forget how she cried the day I went away to the Army. I told her I’d be back, but I suppose to her I never really did come back. She went on taking care of Mother and working hard, and after Mother died she went on alone.”

“You help with funeral!” Mom muttered. But Dad seemed to have lost sight of Mom and me and to be back in Vermont. It had never occurred to me before that he might still love this faraway sister. She had never seemed very real to me.

“This is a bad year for ready cash. She needs five hundred dollars by the end of the week. I know she tried to raise it herself first.” Dad was really talking to himself. “I suppose she thinks I’m well off. To people back there a rancher in Montana sounds . . . pretty prosperous.” I could see that Dad’s pride was in this, too.

“How do you think you get five hunderd dollar?” Mom asked from the sink. Her voice was sly, almost sneering.

“I thought I’d go to town Monday and get a loan. I won’t have any trouble. Everything I own is paid for.”

I went over to get a dishtowel back of the stove. For an instant a kind of anger flashed up in my mind like pan grease that’s caught fire. He could talk about a loan for his sister and how easy it would be, but he didn’t get a loan to send me back to college. I forgot for the moment that Dad had been sick, and I hadn’t really asked him.

“You won’t put loan on this ranch,” Mom said, looking at Dad across the little kitchen. “She don’t mind to borrow money. Let her borrow some more.” I held my breath for what Dad would say next.

“That’s right, Anna, I put the ranch in your name, didn’t I?” His tone was quiet and cold. “I told you you’d earned it, you’d worked so hard.”

I glanced at Mom and her eyes seemed to me to gleam under her dark brows.

“Don’t worry, I won’t put no loan on the ranch,” Dad said, mimicking Mom’s grammar. “I can raise the five hundred dollars on the combine!”

I think I have never seen Mom move so swiftly. She came over and sat down at the table. “Don’t do that, Ben!” Fear made her voice heavier. I knew how she loved the combine.

“I won’t see my sister having to sell her house, Anna,” Dad said. “That’s something I couldn’t do.”

“What if we get no crop next year?” Mom said.

“Maybe we’ll have a bumper crop!” Dad said. “Anyway, Anna, I’m going to raise that money and send it to Eunice.”

I was so used to thinking of Dad as sick or tired and Mom as strong, it was strange now to see Mom frightened and angry and feel Dad’s strength. Maybe it was because he was sorry for her that he said gently:

“Look, Anna . . .”

“I don’t want to hear no more,” Mom said like an angry child. “You are big fool, Ben Webb, to make debt on the combine.” She slammed the kettles together as she put them away in the cupboard under the sink.

I picked up the snapshot on the table and studied it again, just to be doing something

“Eunice is honest about it. She writes that she could sell the house for a good price.” Dad took out a cigarette and went over to the stove for a match. “It must’ve been hard for her to write and ask me,” he said as the match flared out in his hand.

I saw Mom watching Dad as he got out a pad of paper and pen and ink and sat at the kitchen table writing. I finished drying the dishes, and all the time we could hear the pen scratching across the paper. When Dad was through he folded the paper and put it in the envelope and did not seal it. We didn’t know what he wrote, but we knew he was going to send the money.

Mom couldn’t seem to settle down. She opened the door to my room so the warm air could go in there and brought some flannel pyjamas of mine that were cold from lying in the drawer and hung them behind the stove, then she set the table for breakfast with a noisy clatter of the knives and forks. I wondered why I had come home.

It’s a terrible thing the way a child can sit in judgment on her parents without their knowing it.

We had to leave our bedroom doors open that night to keep warm. I lay in bed and heard no least murmur of voices from the other room. They had gone to bed in silence, Mom in anger. I couldn’t sleep. About midnight I closed my door and pushed up my window to the cold. I would be glad to be back in the teacherage.

I was outside all the next morning. It was a bright, clear day. The roof of the house and the long side of the barn laid a bluish shadow on the snow, and the dogwood bush in the coulee was bright-red above the snow, and the willows were as yellow and shining as a new-varnished floor. The strips of fallow ground and the strips of stubble were covered equally by the snow, and the blue sky looked as bright and warm as a blue wool afghan. Way off, the mountains of the Main Range were blue, streaked with white, and looked thin-edged against the sky. It was six below zero on the barn thermometer, but Mom had only a sweater over her shoulders and I had only a leather jacket. The sun made us feel warm, I guess, and the brightness made us a little giddy. This morning I knew why I had come home. I loved this place! The night’s trouble was shut in the house.

Mom showed me the turkeys.

“Thirty-eight orders already and the meat man take what I got left. Three cents more a pound I get this year. Pretty good,
Yólochka
?” Mom said, looking at me with a wide smile.

We walked over to the chicken house. I had something I wanted to tell her.

“Mom,” I began, “at first I couldn’t bear to think about Robert. I kept trying not to remember things . . . you know. Then I thought how you used to tell me about the killing of your mother and father in Russia and I could tell by your eyes how you could see it all over again. So I stopped pushing Robert’s death out of my mind. I was to blame, and I just looked right at it. It hurts but not the same way. . . .” I looked at Mom and found her eyes big and dark on my face.

“Sure, is no good to hide your eyes,” Mom said.

We were on our way back to the house and I was feeling very close to Mom when I said:

“Don’t be that way about Dad’s helping his sister. He has to do it.”

“We got to think of ourselves and you, Yeléna. We work hard for what we got.” She looked out past the barn to the snow-covered wheat fields. “She don’t work so hard!” she grumbled.

We might have walked at either end of a strip of wheat—we were no closer together than that, after all.

Dad took me out to see the pigs and the two horses we kept in the barn. It was cold enough so their breath was white and thick in the air, pretty plumes that meant life in the coldness.

“Should you be out here in the cold, Dad?” I asked.

“Oh, I don’t think it makes much difference. I seem to get these bad colds in the winter whatever I do. Your mother babies me like a child.”

It was never so easy to be quiet with Dad as with Mom. I think he was more comfortable talking.

“It’s pretty quiet around here without you, Ellen. It seems as though you’re farther away over there at Prairie Butte than you were last winter.”

I laughed. “Eighty-five miles isn’t very far. When the weather’s better you can drive over often, or I can catch a ride back.”

Dad stopped in the shed where the combine was. Cold bright bars of light came through the loose boards in back of the shed, but even with the front door propped open it was shadowy in there. The combine looked bigger than it was.

“I want to get the model number off this thing,” Dad said, bringing out a pencil and an envelope.

I laid my hand on the floor of the combine. It was as icy-cold as it had been blistering-hot last summer. When I was younger I used to pretend it was an airplane standing in our own private hangar.

“I don’t know what was the matter with me, Ellen, that I didn’t raise some money on this before for you.” Dad’s voice was muffled, but I could feel the apologetic note in it. “I guess I was so wrapped up in my own misery about that time . . .”

“Oh, Dad, this didn’t hurt me any. I can go back next fall.” It was easy to be generous now.

“Your mother can’t understand how I feel about helping your Aunt Eunice, Ellen.” I felt Dad expected me to understand. “I should have managed better back in the beginning with your mother and my family. There should have been some way . . .”

“Do you and Aunt Eunice look alike, Dad?” I asked, partly because I was trying to see her, partly because Dad seemed so sad.

“No, I don’t think so. She was dark. I used to think she was the prettiest girl in town. I brought her back a samovar from Russia, but I don’t suppose she ever used it.”

“Did she . . . was she nice to Mom in the beginning?”

“I think she meant to be. They were so different, of course.”

We were so quiet for a minute that I heard Mom calling from the house. I went outside and Mom was standing in the kitchen doorway. Her face was alive and excited.

“Ben, Ellen, come up here, quick!” she called.

She sounded so urgent we ran. Mom had the radio blaring. She always turned it up too high. We couldn’t hear it at first for the noise of it.

“It’s war!” Mom said as soon as we got to the porch, and the way she said it sent shivers down my back. “The Japs come over Pearl Harbor and bomb it.”

Mom stood with her hands on her hips. She looked like one of the figures you see in pictures of the crowds in Russia. She seemed somehow more foreign. I saw her more clearly than I took in the news.

Dad stood by the radio, listening to every word.

“We can’t do anything else,” he said. His face wasn’t sick or pale, now. I could see how he had gone to war before. Neither Dad nor Mom was thinking about themselves or me. “It’s time we were in!”

Dad was so excited I felt ashamed that I was so quiet. I had never heard war declared before; I had only read about it. Mom sat down on the couch, listening to every word. Her eyes flashed, but she didn’t say anything.

“This’ll make the last war look like a neighborhood fight,” Dad said.

It was two o’clock before we sat down to dinner. All that time the radio had been blaring. Mom mashed the potatoes and peeled the beets with that listening look on her face. Dad wouldn’t stir until the war news was over. He was so excited he wasn’t like himself. I had never really known him before, I felt. I could see how he must have been at Gil’s age.

Mom laughed suddenly. “Ben, you remember how you was so sick you didn’t know there was armistice?”

Dad nodded. “I couldn’t believe it. I thought you were all fooling.”

“Remember, you said, ‘Give me a kiss, then.’ An’ the Army doctor he laugh and say, ‘Go on, kiss him, Anna!’”

“Sure, I remember,” Dad said.

“Yeléna, watch out or your Dad go off to war again!” Mom joked. She gave him a little slap on the shoulder. All their coldness of last night was gone.

I felt a kind of resentment. They were fools. The last war was to blame for Dad’s ill-health ever since, it was to blame for his marrying Mom and all their bitterness and hatred and trouble. I couldn’t understand them. They didn’t even seem to notice that I was quiet.

After a while Dad said, “Well, wheat will go up.”

“Just for little,” Mom said. “Wars are bad after.”

But Dad wasn’t listening. He had gone over to sit by the radio again to eat his dessert. I looked at him.

“Dad, I’d think you’d feel all you did in the last war was wasted. I’d think all the men who were crippled and came back sick like you would feel bitter about another war.” I had to say it.

“What was that, Ellen?” Dad turned down the radio a little so he could hear me, but they were giving some details of the catastrophe at Pearl Harbor; he turned it up again and bent nearer to hear without waiting for me to repeat what I had said.

Warren Harper came just after dinner. He and Dad started in on the war.

“This makes my mind up for me; I’m going into the Army. I’m twenty-seven and I have only one child. It looks as though they’d need plenty of men.”

“Well, you know, I was in the last war,” Dad began, “and . . .” I went into the other room as though I had something to pack. I couldn’t stand it to hear Dad go over all that again. Mom stood by as though she were interested in every word. I wished I were not going back with Warren Harper. I wished I were driving back alone. I had nothing to take, so I picked up the book of poems. Dad wouldn’t do anything but listen to the war news from now on anyway.

“Didn’t I tell you I’d come? You didn’t believe it, though, did you?” Mr. Harper asked, smiling, as we drove out on the highway.

“I didn’t do anything about the bus, though,” I said.

“Have a good time?”

“I was glad to see them and the place,” I said cautiously.

“They’re an interesting pair. Your dad’s certainly excited about the war, isn’t he?”

“How’s Leslie?” I asked, to turn the talk from the war.

“Oh, I don’t know. I brought him a knife back from town and he thanked me politely enough, but he didn’t holler for joy like any ordinary boy would. I took him out to look at the stars last night when I got home. They were as clear as you’d ever want to see. I thought he’d like to learn the name of the constellations, but he got cold and shivered and said he wanted to go in.”

“He probably was cold. Take him out when it’s warmer. In the summer I used to like to lie on the hill back of our house and look at the stars.”

“I won’t be here by then. I’ll be in the Army. Let’s stop and do the town,” he said as we drove down the main street.

“This is something like it,” he exclaimed as the waiter set down our drinks. “Last night I had a glass of beer with a hamburger on my way home. Then when I was out looking at the stars with Leslie I picked him up to carry him over a place where the snow was deep. He said, ‘Dad, you’ve been drinking!’ as though I’d broken all the Ten Commandments. I didn’t tell you that part, but you can see how the star expedition wouldn’t be very successful. I’m afraid he’ll never do anything but dislike me. It’s just as well for him that I’m going into the Army. He’s better off without me.” Mr. Harper ordered another drink.