Winter Wheat (7 page)

I couldn’t remember a time when Dad had been so gay. He called up and ordered ice water sent up to the room and tipped the boy who brought it, as though he were a king.

“Remember the hotel we stayed in the night after we got into New York?” he said to Mom. “I told you we were having our honeymoon and you thought ‘honey’ was the word for ‘hotel,’ Anna!” I walked into the bathroom and drew water out of the shiny faucet, feeling good because they were laughing.

It was a wonderful night. We didn’t eat dinner in the beautiful dining room; that cost too much. We went out to a cafeteria, and I thought of that cafeteria some days when I was serving in the one here.

I lay awake that night looking at my room until I knew every object in it. Light from the alley came in the window and shone in the mirror like the moon does at home. It was better at night, because you couldn’t see the dust along the edge of the carpet or that the rose-silk lampshade was punched through. I liked listening to footsteps in the hall and cars out in the street, and my body felt delicious after its hot all-over bath.

When I woke in the morning I had a funny feeling. I was afraid something would go wrong. Dad came into my room all dressed in a new white shirt he had bought himself. He’d had a shave downstairs in the hotel barbershop and he looked as though he didn’t know wheat from barley.

“Well, Ellen, how do you like it?”

“All right,” I told him. Something in me wouldn’t let me sound any more pleased for fear . . . fear. Maybe it’s because I was born on a dry-land wheat farm and I know you’ve got to be afraid every spring even though the wheat stands brave and green, afraid until the wheat’s cut and stored, afraid of drought and hail and grasshoppers. Dad is, always. Mom used to say to him, “If you’re going to be afraid of drought all the time, you might as well be afraid of planting in the first place.” Yet Mom is the one that feels it worst when the drought comes.

When Mom came into my room to braid my hair she had on her new silk stockings I’d given her and the scent of the perfume was on her. The stockings fitted her ankles and legs better than skin. They were too fine for the black laced low shoes she wore, but they were beautiful. Such a pride came up in me it almost drove out the little fear. I think that’s why folks dress up in their best clothes when they do something special—to keep them from being afraid anything will spoil it. I had another bath that morning and I felt as light as tumbleweed, but a lot cleaner.

We had breakfast at the cafeteria down the street. Dad had a paper to read while he ate and he gave Mom the woman’s part and me the funnies.

“It’s been nearly twelve years, Anna, since I’ve had a morning paper to read at breakfast. By heaven, this is living like a white man!”

And suddenly, I was proud that Dad knew how to live, that he was used to places like hotels. Mom loved it, too. Her eyes were bright and dark. I leaned toward her a little and there was the delicious smell of “Russian leather” again, nicer than fresh hay or sweet clover or buffalo willows in the spring and as penetrating as the smell of sage. I looked at the three of us in the mirror. We might have been travelers just passing through town for the day.

“I don’t like letting the cows and pigs and chickens an’ all wait for their food,” Mom said, but Dad didn’t hear her.

“Well”—he folded the paper on the table—”it’s close to ten. Where do you want to go?”

Mom looked surprised. “To church, Ben.”

I remember driving along the streets, quiet on that Easter Sunday morning. Bells on one church began ringing. I had never heard church bells before.

“Let’s go where the bells are, Dad,” I begged.

We could pick out the churches easily from the steeples that reached up above the roofs of the bungalows. I leaned way out of the car to try to see the bells swinging in the tower, the way they do on Christmas cards. I noticed how the sun glinted hard on the cross that topped the spire, like the sun on the lightning rod on the Hendersons’ barn.

“Sit back, Ellen,” Dad said. He stopped the car and Mom got out.

“I think I’ll take Ellen over to the Congregational Church, Anna.”

Mom leaned against the car door. All her face waited. I knew with dreadful certainty that the thing had come, the thing I had feared when I woke up this morning, the thing that would spoil our day. I couldn’t say anything. I looked at the people going into church, whole families together. Some of them wore flowers. The bell was still ringing. The double door opened and I caught a glimpse of brightness, of candles far down in front, and the stained-glass windows.

Dad was making the engine sound louder with his foot. “We’ll come back for you at twelve or as soon as our service is over, Anna. Wait right out in front.”

I wanted with all my heart to go with Mom. It was no good this way. I held my hands tight together. Why didn’t Mom say something? Her face was firm like it is when she goes to kill a turkey.

“Now I don’t want any church,” she said.

“Oh, Mom, come with us,” I said as she opened the door of the car. Mom shook her head. Her lips came out farther than usual. “I go to his church once. Everyone is too busy look at me to say prayers.” The hard cold feeling was there. Nothing could help now. It was no use.

Dad pushed his foot down hard on the accelerator. The engine roared so loud people on their way to church looked at us. Dad drove back down from the quiet shady streets where people lived, out the road toward home. I watched the road straight ahead without looking at Mom or Dad. They didn’t speak. After a while I looked down at Dad’s shoes with the city shine on them, at Mom’s silk stockings so thin and smooth they showed a blue vein through.

We were more than fifteen miles toward home when Dad said, not to Mom or me, just aloud, “I guess we’ve lost our religion out here along with some other things.” He didn’t sound mad, only discouraged. We never drove into town to go to church again.

“Tell about your religion,” Mr. Echols had said. “How much it has meant to your family, to you.” The sheet in front of me was blank. I hadn’t written a word for an hour.

It was just there that I looked up and saw Gilbert watching me. I always remembered that meeting him was mixed in with my writing my biography, as though I must have known how deeply he was to be part of my life. He met my eyes and smiled. I smiled a little in return. He picked up his book and came over to my table and I saw again how slender and tall he was. He took the chair next to me.

“I’ve seen you here for two months. It’s time we knew each other. How about calling it a day and going over to Pop’s Place for a coke?”

I hesitated, then I put my pencil down. “Okay,” I said. We went down the marble stairs together.

“My name’s Gilbert Borden—Gil. I’ve been trying to find out what yours is.”

“Ellen,” I told him. “Ellen Webb.”

“I like that. It fits you. Where do you come from, Ellen Webb? You must be a freshman, because I’d have seen you if you’d been around here.”

“I came this fall from Montana.”

“It would be some place far away and unusual.”

I remember laughing at that. I remember how we laughed at all kinds of things. Everything we told each other seemed exciting. He was a senior in the school of architecture.

“Any other year I’d have been working for the Paris fellowship. If I got it this year, I’d have to take it in Cincinnati or Cleveland or some place. Anyway, I’ll probably go into the Army in June.”

That, too, gave a deeper color to everything he said. We had a booth in Pop’s, the last one. Gil kept punching out “Tomorrow Is a Lovely Day” on the jukebox. He played it over again three times. I felt as though I’d known him for years.

We walked back across campus and sat on the steps of the auditorium. The lights along the mall seemed to lie at our feet. We sat against one of the pillars, so we weren’t cold.

“No kidding, I’ve watched you in the library ever since the first week in October. You came in and sat down there at the end of that same table and the sun on your hair made it shine like silver.”

“I’ve seen you, too,” I said.

“You didn’t take much time from your work to look my way!”

“I can’t. I have a job at the cafeteria and it takes quite a lot of time. Don’t you ever go there?”

“I will now. But that’s no job for you.”

“I hope to get a job in the library next year if I can.”

“Maybe Dad can help you. He teaches history.”

“You live here, then?”

“Oh, I live at the fraternity during school.”

He walked back with me to the rooming house. I ran up the stairs that night not feeling that they were narrow or that the upper floor was stifling. I looked at the biography, but all that had happened to me before seemed unimportant beside the future. I wrote that at the end and copied the whole thing neatly before I went to bed. Mom and Dad’s story seemed less important than my own.

6

WHEN I
got that biography back, Mr. Echols had written across the top “C. Disappointing, stereotyped. You write with more feeling about objects than about people. Characterization poor.”

I would have minded more if it hadn’t been for Gilbert. But by now my days were measured off by seeing him. I was in love. Once in a while the marvel of it struck me, when I’d stop in to see Vera down the hall, or when I would see some of the very stunning girls on the campus, but most of the time it only seemed natural. Gil said that was the way it was with him, too.

We were different, but we were excited about the same things. Nothing was dull when we did it together, even studying in the library. I hadn’t meant to fall in love so soon, but there’s nothing you can do about it. It’s like planning to seed in April and then having it come off so warm in March that the earth is ready. The spring doesn’t wait.

Gil came to the cafeteria for lunch when he could have eaten at his fraternity house. He looked so funny carrying his tray I loved him all the more. He chose the craziest, most unbalanced food and there were so many things he didn’t like to eat I told him he’d be hard to cook for. Sometimes he’d come by and say: “Only twenty-nine minutes more. I’ll meet you by the corner.” He never would believe that I didn’t mind serving in the cafeteria. He acted as though I were delicate and kind of frail, and I’m not. I’m as strong as Mom.

“You’re like silver,” he used to say.

I laughed at him and told him he should see me after I’d been working in the field, haying or threshing. I get so burned my eyes look light and my hair looks almost white against my skin. He never seemed to get any picture of the way I was, really. And I never stopped to think how different Gil was from anyone at home. I used to think Dad must have been a little like him when he was well and young and in school. Gil liked to talk a lot, the way Dad does.

One night in Pop’s Place he got to talking about how the war would change his life. “I don’t mind doing my bit; but for an architect, every year after college counts.” He looked moody and discouraged the way Dad does. “This 1940 is a cockeyed year for me. I’m starting my aviation training in June—and then I meet you.”

I’m a little like Mom, I guess; my mind gets so full of one thing it moves slowly to the next. Gil’s mind jumps so fast it keeps me breathless. I was thinking about his work and he was already back to us.

“But we did find each other,” I said. “Think if we hadn’t.”

“What if I get across and am shot up and come back minus a limb? There’s that, too.”

I thought of Dad and the days when the shrapnel hurts and he’s moody and quiet. I tried to think of Gil that way, but it would be different. I would have known him this way, the way he really was. I could always remember that. If he were changed it would be the war that had done it.

“That wouldn’t make any difference,” I said slowly, thinking about it hard.

“You think so now.”

“Why, Gil, if I loved a person I wouldn’t change.” I don’t know how I could be so sure so soon, but I’m made that way. “Would you, Gil?” I knew he wouldn’t, I just wanted to hear him say it.

Gil wasn’t listening to me. “Ellen, you’re beautiful,” he said. But there are times when you don’t want to be told something like that.

“Would you, Gil?”

“What?”

“Change if you loved a person?”

“Never, Ellen.” We looked at each other across the table in the end booth that we called ours. I didn’t even know what the jukebox was playing. I felt as though I were in a little room alone with Gil and I wasn’t afraid of what the war or illness or Time—any of the big and terrible things—could do to us. It was the kind of feeling you have when you read the words “They plighted them their troth.”

The month after I met Gil I had a note from his mother inviting me to dinner before a concert.

“Aren’t you kind of scared, Ellen?” Vera asked me.

“Why, no, I want to meet Gil’s family.” I wasn’t. I hadn’t thought of it that way.

“I would be. Anyway, you’ll knock them over by the way you look,” Vera said. She made me wear a black dress of hers with nothing on it except a pin that was Dad’s mother’s, and black velvet ribbons in my hair. I thought I looked like a war orphan. I was going to curl my hair but Vera wouldn’t let me.

“You don’t want to look like any girl with a date!” she said scornfully. “You know you could get a job as a model; you’re tall enough and you sure have the figure.”

“No, thanks,” I said. “I don’t like to stand still that well.”

I was ready the minute Gil came, because he always acted as though he didn’t like the parlor. I hadn’t thought anything about it until I saw it through Gil’s eyes. I was never in it, anyway. It was just a kind of dark little room with lace curtains and green drapes and a lot of furniture. I used to glance in on my way upstairs.

“What a parlor!” Gil said the first time I left him there. “I couldn’t hear myself think, it screamed so.”

Gil’s family lived in a gray stone house set way back in some trees. The way the roof came down in front, low over the door, made me think of a sheep shed, but I couldn’t tell that to Gil, because he’d never seen one. It would be so much more fun when he’d been out to Montana and knew what I was talking about.

Mrs. Borden was sweet. She was so little I felt huge beside her.

“This is Ellen, Mother,” Gil said.

“My dear, Gilbert has told me so much about you. Come in.” She wore a long dress and her hair was brushed up high on her head. I liked to watch her when she talked. Dr. Borden was just coming across the hall. Gilbert looked like him. He was very tall and gray-haired, with long white hands like Gil’s. He didn’t often put his eyes on me as though he were really seeing me, but when he did it was worth waiting for, his eyes were so kind. He was almost too gentle for a man.

Sitting in their parlor—I mean living room—I understood why Gil shuddered so at the parlor in the rooming house. I looked around trying to fix in my mind the differences. The colors in the room were as soft as the summer colors of the prairie. There was an open fire burning white birch logs; it seemed a pity to burn a white birch tree.

“You come from Montana,” Dr. Borden said at dinner. He made it sound as though it were Australia. “Were your people pioneers?”

“No,” I told him, “my father came from Vermont and homesteaded after the war.” And at my saying Vermont Mrs. Borden told of several summers they had spent in Vermont. They even knew the town my father came from.

“Some of the houses are beautiful; they are so dignified and simple and old, particularly the ones around the common.”

“Oh, my father’s house faced the common,” I told her excitedly, and I was describing it as though I had lived there. All of a sudden, I began to wonder if Dad’s family hadn’t been the same kind of people that Gil’s family were, and I felt warm and at home.

Mrs. Borden took me upstairs before we left, into the daintiest bedroom I had ever seen. It was as big as our front room, with a four-poster bed and wallpaper. I never can get used to wallpaper; we have only calcimine at home. While I was powdering my nose Mrs. Borden said:

“My dear, you are as lovely to look at as Gilbert said you were. He cares a great deal about you.”

I saw myself going furiously red. “I care a great deal for him,” I said.

I felt so happy all the way over to the concert. We separated at the auditorium and Gil and I found our seats.

“Like the family?” Gil asked when we were seated.

“I loved them,” I said. “You are like your father, Gil.”

“Not so bookish. Dad doesn’t live outside his books. Mother’s always plotting on how to get him out of them. They liked you. Dad said you made him think of the women of ancient Greece. That’s tops for Dad.”

I had all this to think of as we listened to the music. Gil held my hand. At first, it seemed odd to sit still and just listen. Most of the music I’ve heard has been over the radio and I’ve been doing dishes or studying or cooking. I could feel Gil beside me really loving it. He played the piano himself, but I hadn’t heard him. I stole a glance at his face in the half-dark. His face is finely cut; his features are smaller than mine. My eyes touched his hair waving back from his forehead. His mouth is shaped almost like a woman’s and yet it isn’t feminine. I wasn’t hearing the music at all. Guiltily, I brought my eyes away from his face to his hand lying across his knee. You could never tell a man you loved his hands, and yet I did. I turned mine quietly in my lap, the one Gil didn’t hold. It was as large as Gil’s. It didn’t look like a hand to be held.

The music didn’t seem to touch me, but I liked sitting there beside Gil in the half-dark. I had plenty of time to think. I tried to make the music sound to me as the program said it did, “gaiety finally giving way to despair,” but it didn’t, so I just sank back into the joy I’d felt when Mrs. Borden told me Gil cared a great deal for me.

Gil lifted his hand and laid it on his knee. His face looked far away and secret as Mom’s does sometimes, so I went on with my own thoughts.

I was always trying to explain myself to Gil. I suppose all people in love do that. I wanted to know all the things he had felt and wondered about and hated or been afraid of. I wanted him to know the excitement I felt when the wind blows above the coulee or when we’re threshing and working so fast that I forget that I’m a separate person. Maybe he would learn that feeling in the Army.

I wanted him to know the terrible feeling of sadness that creeps into my mind sometimes, like rust on the wheat. I wanted to know if he felt that way. Maybe I never would again, now that I had him. I stole another look at Gil and felt suddenly how little I knew him, even yet. I wished he would take my hand again, so I’d feel nearer.

Then something happened to the music. It was different. It had a swing and pulse to it. I could feel it now. I glanced at Gil, wanting to tell him I knew how he felt. The music was as familiar as though I had heard it before. I looked at the program, but I wouldn’t know it by the name. It took me back suddenly to a concert in Clark City one early spring. I must have been about nine. Mom saw the concert advertised and wanted to go. I remember, because it wasn’t like Mom. I remember Dad saying, “Well, if you’re set on it, but it seems a lot of money for a little fiddling.” I remember the program had a lot of Polish and Russian names on it.

We had good seats in the balcony that time. I sat watching the curtains, waiting for them to open. When they did, there was only an empty stage and a shiny black piano. Then a man in evening dress came out and people started clapping. Another man came after him and sat at the piano. When everything was still, the man lifted his violin under his chin and began. I was disappointed. I had expected something more. Once I looked at Mom and her eyes were like the big water barrel when you look into it at night. You can see the stars in it, sometimes. There were notes way up high that were so sweet you could almost taste them and some lower notes that made you feel warm and comfortable and there were times when the music was wild and made you want to dance. I glanced at Dad and he winked at me, the way he did when he was in high spirits. I looked at Mom wanting the three of us to be together. She was leaning forward. The light from the stage fell on her face so it seemed lit up too. Her hands were held tight together. I reached out to touch her hand, but she didn’t seem to feel it. She had forgotten about Dad and me.

“Well, did you get your money’s worth, Anna?” Dad asked in the car. Mom caught her breath and her teeth were shining in the dark.

“So much worth, Ben!” Dad bought us hamburgers to eat and made it a real party.

When we got home Mom went around to cover her tomatoes against the frost. I heard her humming, not soft and low as she did sometimes around her work, but deep down and full. Then the humming stemmed out into words that I knew were Russian, but they didn’t sound hard and strange; the night or the music in them gave them a meaning that was deeper than word meaning. Suddenly, I knew what Mom had felt when she sat there, separated from Dad and me. The music swept over me as though it had hung in the air all this time, as though I had heard it before. I ran across the garden.

“Mom!” I cried out breathlessly, catching hold of her coat. “Mom, the music is Russia. That’s how it is!”

Mom put her hand on my head and I smelled the cold dirt and the sharp scent of tomato plants on her fingers.

“
Solnieshko moyo
, that’s how it is. Run now, you’ll have cold.”

But I sat a minute on the gate feeling the power of understanding was in me. It was like a miracle. “
Solnieshko moyo
”—I knew that much; that meant “my sunshine”—but I knew so much more. I wanted to tell Gil this. I wanted him to know what I felt. When you love someone you’re no judge at all of what’s important and vital. A little thing seems important to share. But I went on sitting quietly beside Gil.

We went out during the intermission. Everyone loitered in the lobby, but I wanted to go way out. “Let’s walk around the block, Gil.”

“We better stay right by the door. I don’t want to miss any of it,” Gil said. “There’s nobody like Kreisler, really.”

We were quiet at first, then I tried to tell Gil: “I was sitting there thinking about both of us, Gil, and the music was just a kind of windbreak to sit against and think, and then he played something that seemed familiar. It was the ‘Hungarian Rhapsody.’ It made me remember the only other time I ever went to a concert. Mom made Dad go . . .” I had the feeling that Gil wasn’t listening. I didn’t go on.

Gil threw away his cigarette. “Let’s go back in, Ellen.”

All through the second half I sat listening to the music with Gil’s hand on mine, but the music didn’t carry me up to the gate again. Maybe what I was trying to tell him wasn’t anything anyway, I thought.

I spent Christmas Day at the Bordens’.

I gave Gil’s mother two towels that Mom had embroidered with a wide border. She was pleased.

“Why, Ellen, what beautiful work!”

“Mom did them,” I told her. “She used to do that work when she was a girl in Russia.”