Winter Wheat (4 page)

Bill went inside to talk to the soldier he had met after lunch. Marge left to write a letter.

“It’s a lot easier to write home from the train than when you first get there,” she said.

I thought of writing. I would write often so Dad would have letters to take home to read to Mom. But I couldn’t write tonight.

“I’m going to do my nails. I have a date meeting me at the station,” Kay said.

I sat alone in the end of the train, watching the shapes of trees and barns and riverbanks hurry away into the dark. I would have given anything to be back home. I felt the train taking me away, faster and farther every minute, from Dad and Mom and all I had ever known. Or was it the train?

4

I THINK
I liked everything about the university.

There was a girl named Vera across the hall in the house where I had a room who was so homesick she used to cry herself to sleep. I heard her one night and took her into my room to cheer her up.

“If you lived in one of the women’s dormitories or a sorority house, it’d be different, but in a hole like this you might as well be dead and buried,” Vera said in the midst of her crying.

I looked around my room. It wasn’t handsome. The brown-and-green-leaf wallpaper showed tack holes and a long water stain. The couch that was my bed was lumpy. The desk was too small to rest my whole arm on when I wrote. The easy chair Vera was sitting in was a rocker set up on a kind of platform. It squeaked more than the springs in the truck. The rug had two spots on it. I guess I hadn’t looked at the room very hard before. It rented for $15 a month. But I wasn’t in it except at night, like the house at home during seeding or harvest.

“The room doesn’t matter. You don’t have to be here much of the time,” I told Vera.

“I am. I come back from classes and I get so blue I can’t even study.”

“Tomorrow you go with me. We’ve got the lib. and the woman’s lounge at the Union to study in. The whole range is ours.”

And the next day I met Vera after class and walked the length of the mall with her. But she walked along discontentedly looking at the fur jackets on the girls we met. In the woman’s lounge—that name makes me think of Bailey’s cat stretched out on the ramp at the elevator—she sank down in one of the low squashy chairs and I sat down in another. The light is soft in there because the blinds and the colors of the curtains and rug and chairs are the very colors you see on the flats at sundown. And it was bigger than the dance hall at Sun River.

“Why don’t you camp out here? I do when I have time.”

“I might,” she said. “Do you know that some of the sorority houses are furnished better than this even?”

I nodded. She made me think of Dad a little, the way she kept thinking of other places all the time. I had been invited to a sorority. Kay and Marge looked me up and took me to theirs. I could see they’d told the others I was something pretty funny, the way they looked at me and laughed at anything I said. I’d have liked to live there, but I couldn’t afford it even if they wanted me. It didn’t worry me any.

“Well, I’ve got to go. I’ll meet you at the lib. and we’ll walk home together,” I told her. “If you eat at the cafeteria I’ll see you.” I thought she looked more cheerful.

The job at the cafeteria was fun. I liked it best in the morning before many people were there, and the metal counters shone like new milk cans. There was the smell of fresh coffee from the big urn, and fresh broiled bacon, or sausage. The fried eggs, laid out on a warming table, looked like daisy heads with their yellow centers and white petals. It was fun to slide one off on a plate without breaking it. But the rush hours were exciting; you had to keep on your toes. The girls who’d worked there longest said, “Wait till it gets hot and you serve fish a whole noon!” I kept thinking how easy it would be to feed a harvest crew in a cafeteria—but try to find a crew that would wait on themselves! The same people came every day and I got to know a lot of them. Some of them kidded, like the red-haired boy that always called me “Swedie.” I wouldn’t get fat working in the cafeteria; there was so much food around I never felt hungry.

At four-thirty, just as I started back toward the library from “Teaching Methods,” I remembered I had a conference with Professor Echols on my first composition. I couldn’t meet Vera then and there was no time to stop in and tell her. I hurried back to Mr. Echols’ office.

Mr. Echols had a way of saying things that stayed in your mind. In our first class he told us we were the voice of a new America learning and growing and becoming articulate in the sheltered places of the earth, while out beyond, a death struggle was going on for us and for learning. It made me think of our house in the shelter of the coulee. It can be as still and quiet as a church outside the kitchen door and above the coulee the wind will be roaring and driving the tumbleweed in front of it at fifty miles an hour.

I wondered anxiously what Mr. Echols would say to my theme. “For the first theme I want you to choose your own topic,” he had said. “Write about something you know or something you think or believe, but for heaven’s sake don’t let it be anybody else’s idea and don’t write me how it feels to be in a Nazi concentration camp or in a submarine, because I’ll make a pretty good guess you haven’t been there.” He was always saying funny things like that.

I wrote about Wheat. I’d had a letter that day from Dad saying John Bardich, whose land touches ours on the east, was selling his wheat now for 70 cents a bushel. “It’s a pity we didn’t hold some of it back. But that’s the way with the wheat business,” Dad ended.

That started me off. I wrote: “The pioneers who came West in the seventies in search of gold were no greater gamblers than the prosaic-looking ranchers planting wheat on the dry-land farms. They gamble with the weather that it will be neither too dry, nor too hot, nor too wet, nor too cold; that the wheat will not be destroyed by hail or grasshoppers; and when at last they have the ripe wheat cut and stored they gamble with the market that wheat will be selling for enough money to pay for all the summer’s work.”

I stopped writing and thought about Bill Bailey, who runs the Excelsior Grain elevator and knows a great deal about wheat. He can tell whether it has smut or rust or garlic in it, or why the top of the sheaf is empty or what is the best seed to plant. Bill Bailey likes to talk, and he says, “If you know a man’s wheat over a few years you’ve got a pretty good line-up on the man himself.” In harvesttime he sits at the center of things, in his little office in the elevator, and sees the ranchers driving in with their loads of wheat. Sometimes they stand parked in line till midnight. Bill Bailey can see them coming all day. There is nothing to hinder his view from his little window. I wondered if the ranchers far back on the prairie roads don’t make him think of ants.

I went on writing: “I love the wheat and I hate it. I love the green blades of winter wheat in the spring. They show through the snow on the ground and make the only bright color in that winter world of grays and blacks and whites. I love the spring wheat that always seems trying to catch up with the winter wheat. It is like a person without much education or background trying to measure up with a person who’s had years of both. The beardless wheat always seems to me like a young boy, and the shaggy bearded wheat like an old man.

“When the wheat is an even ripeness, the color of the crust of the fresh-baked bread it will go to make, and the wind sings across it, I love it so I could sing too, just to look at it. My mother says the wind in the wheat makes her think of the wind in the forests of northern Russia, only this is a sharper, thinner sound. When I was a little girl, I used to lie on my back in the field of wheat where my mother and father were working and play I was in a forest. The trees of wheat reached high above me and the wind sang in their tops; only my forest was golden instead of black like Mother’s forest. Perhaps mine was the forest of the sun and hers was the forest of the night.”

I could have gone on and on. I wanted to tell about harvesting and riding the combine when you feel as proud as a king on a chariot at the start of the day, but you can’t feel and are like a piece of the machinery itself by the end of the day. But I liked the sound of the words I had just written: “forest of the sun” and “forest of the night.” So I stopped there. It’s funny that you can put down some words on a tablet and have them leap up from the page and carry you with them. I felt like the woman in the fairy story who baked the gingerbread boy that came to life.

I knocked on Mr. Echols’ door and opened it. He was sitting behind a littered desk. His eyes looked so sleepy when he glanced up I thought maybe he couldn’t remember my name.

“I’m Ellen Webb,” I told him.

“Yes, I know. Won’t you sit down, Miss Webb?” He was hunting in the pile on his desk for my theme. I saw it before he did, telling it by the way I’d turned the corners down to fasten it together. He picked it up and looked at it as though it were something strange he had never seen before. I wondered if he had even read it. The sun came in palely across his desk. The sun is always pale here, never out-and-out bright as it is at home. I could smell the heat in the radiators and outside I heard someone calling.

Mr. Echols was turning over the pages the way you do a newspaper you’re not going to read through. He came to the last one.

“‘The trees of wheat reached high above me and the wind sang in their tops; only my forest was golden instead of black like Mother’s forest. Perhaps mine was the forest of the sun and hers was the forest of the night.’”

It sounded terrible when he read it aloud. I felt my face going red. He took off his glasses.

“Very interesting, the way you see the land. Do you . . . Are you fond of Montana? I take it you come from there.”

“Yes,” I said. “I’ve always lived there.”

“You don’t have cattle?”

“No, we have a dry-land wheat ranch.”

“Do you want to go back and live there?”

“I love it there, but I can’t live there, because I want to be a . . . a linguist.” Our Spanish teacher in high school called it that.

Mr. Echols took up his pipe. He looked at me while he lighted it. I could feel how hard he was trying to look into my world, into Gotham, Montana. He couldn’t know how different it was. I felt so safe from being looked into. I wondered if that was the way Mom felt sometime when people looked at her and wondered what she was really like.

“That’s very interesting,” Mr. Echols said. “Do you speak any other language now?”

“Not really, but I can understand some Russian and some Yugoslav and I can speak some Spanish and French.” I hated to admit how little I knew. “Languages are easy for me, though,” I added.

“Have your family always been ranchers?”

“Oh, my father isn’t naturally a rancher; he just took the ranch after he was married.”

“He comes from some other part of the country—or was he born in Montana?”

I couldn’t help smiling a little. “Almost everybody around Gotham came from some other part of the country.”

“That’s odd, isn’t it? Where do they all come from?”

Looking out of the window of Mr. Echols’ study I could see Gotham spread out; There were the Yonkos and the Bardiches, they were both Yugoslav and the best wheat farmers around. Next to us were the Halvorsens; they were Norwegians and the Hakkulas were Finns. Mr. Peterson, who ran the store, was a Swede, and there was one family of Germans and Bill Bailey was from Iowa and the Whalens from Missouri.

When I’d told him, Mr. Echols said, “Is there any real unity of feeling with such a mixture?”

I had to laugh. He should see them. “No,” I said, “not very much. We live mostly to ourselves.”

“But don’t you have a church and a grange?”

“They never got the church finished. The store is pretty small. I guess the grain elevator is the center of things. But we’re only thirty miles from Clark City; that’s our big town, with over thirty thousand people. That’s where I went to high school. I went in on the bus every day.”

I guess he couldn’t picture it very well. He sat there trying to think how it would be. Then he said, looking at me as though he was trying to make me out:

“What nationality is your father? I take it that your mother is from Russia.”

“Yes,” I said. “But my father came from Vermont.”

“Very interesting.” I could see that he was wondering how they ever got together. Then he looked at his watch and leaned across the desk to hand me my theme. “Go on writing about what you know, your own part of the country—what you think, what you feel.”

He had put an “A” on my theme, and underneath in a little scrimped handwriting I was to come to know very well, “Freshness of viewpoint,” which seemed kind of meaningless.

I ran all the way to the library to see if Vera was still there. She wasn’t at the lib., so I walked on back to the rooming house. It was like Indian summer and there were a few leaves on the pavement that crackled like a piece of paper when you stepped on them. At home the cottonwood tree by the coulee would be all yellow and the aspens in the windbreak turning copper. The sage would be tall and whitish and tough-rooted if you tried to pull it up. Mom’s asters would be purple and pink and red and white all along the front of the house and down the path to the fence. My eyes were glued so tight to home I almost didn’t see the maple tree in a yard I was passing. It had leaves as red as apples. There was a kind of windbreak around the yard, only cut very low, that was new to me. Most of its leaves were gone, but it had red berries. I found out later that it wasn’t a windbreak at all but a barberry hedge.

I love the fall. I loved it even here, where there was no clear distant view, and no mountains and so much rain. I ran into the house and up the stairs feeling as though I had something rich and lovely and both pockets full of it.

We were both on the third floor, Vera near the bathroom and I halfway up the hall. I knocked on her door but there was no answer. But just as I started to go on I heard her crying. The door wasn’t locked, so I walked right in and said “Hello.”

Vera was lying on the bed. She had come home and put her hair up in pin curls, and if there is anything a girl can do to make herself look more pinched and homely I don’t know what it is. She wiped her eyes with a wad of tissue before she answered.

“I’m sorry. I couldn’t stay over there. I didn’t go to chemistry lab, either. I just came on back here.”

I sat down on the arm of the chair and looked at her, trying to understand how she could crumple up like that. She was for all the world like a bum lamb that’s going to die; there wasn’t anything to work on. Her face didn’t look unlike a sheep’s face as it was now. She must have felt this way all week, the room was in such a mess. I picked up the clothes thrown on the chair where I was sitting and hung them in the corner behind the cretonne curtain. I guess it was my silence that made her turn over to look at me.