Winter Wheat

by Mildred Walker

  “It’s just one of those little things,” I said, and I tried to make my voice flippant. “I think I’ll go back to school a little early this fall, Dad. I’m going to take more hours the first semester.”

  I went inside the door to my bedroom and took quite a while to fix my hair. I made a pompadour in front and pinned a bow on top. It looked pretty crazy with my stretched-out polo shirt and jeans.

  When I came back Dad didn’t look at me and he didn’t say anything for a long time. It seemed as though the room were filled with heat and pain and sadness: sadness of Dad wanting to be back in his cool bedroom at home, of his not loving Mom and living off here with her all these years, of Gil’s not loving me.

  “If you’ll heat up that flaxseed, I think I’ll try another poultice on here,” Dad said.

  When I brought it to him hot, he wouldn’t let me put it on. “Thank you, Ellen. Now if you can take your mother’s place out there, you might ask her to come back up here.”

  They were haying in the field farthest over. I was glad of the walk down, though it was so hot I knew the butter on the bread I took would be all soaked in. I had the big thermos jug of hot soup, and oranges bulged the pockets of my jeans. I didn’t want to eat with Tony, but I thought Mom would like to eat up at the house with Dad.

  I could see Mom a long way off, standing on the stacker. She was making Tony Bardich hump himself to keep up with her. The sky, all one deep-blue, came around her head and shoulders and made her look bigger than she was.

  “Hi, Mom!” I called up. Somehow, it was a relief to see her. She didn’t look as though she wanted to be any place else. “Let me get up there. Dad wants you.”

  Mom stopped. “Is pain bad?”

  “I don’t know. He said it was better awhile ago, but just now he asked for a poultice again. Do you want me to take you back up in the truck? I can go while Tony’s eating.”

  “No. Put the lunch over there. We finish this first,” Mom said.

  “Say, I might fall down in a faint if I don’t eat pretty soon,” Tony Bardich said, grinning at me. He’s an easy-going kind with nice teeth, like all the Bardiches, and black hair. He plays the accordion at country dances, but he gets drunk too easy. I thought Mom was going to slap back at him, but she said:

  “All right, eat, but we don’t waste no time. We got to get the haying done today.”

  We ate sitting on the running board of the truck. There was enough for the three of us, anyway. Tony and I talked a little, but Mom was quiet. She kept looking away beyond the growing haystack over the fields as though she was thinking about what still had to be done. And she was through first. She sucked her orange and wiped her hands off on a handful of hay. Then she wiped her mouth on her arm.

  “Come on, Yeléna . . .”

  “What about Dad’s lunch, Mom?”

  “It’s all there, isn’t it? He can help himself if he’s hungry. I go up soon. The work go faster with three of us.”

  When I came up alongside Tony in the truck, he shook his head. “The old woman sure can work!”

  “Mom’s good, all right,” I said.

  I think we all tried to outdo each other. When you think there’s a chance of finishing a long job that day, it goes easier. Even I could tell that the hay wasn’t as heavy as it was last year. The dry weather had dried it, too, so the bottom of the stem was brittle, not sweet when you sucked it between your teeth.

  Working hard made me feel better. I began to think that maybe I would drive over to the reservoir a mile to the east of us and take a swim tonight. Maybe Mom would go, too. She could swim twice as well as I could. I could feel the delicious coolness of the water on me even while my shirt stuck to me with sweat and the hay that had crept up the leg of my jeans prickled.

  Then I saw Dad. He was limping and coming painfully slow. He looked paper-thin against the sky. He hadn’t worn a hat, and I knew he shouldn’t have come. Mom was turned the other way, so she didn’t see him. The truck was making too much noise over there for her to hear unless I shouted, and suddenly I didn’t want Tony Bardich to turn and stare at him.

  When Dad was close enough I waved. I was sure he saw me, but he didn’t wave back. Tony saw Dad as he turned in from the road and came limping across the hay stubble toward us.

  “Say, I thought you was s’posed to be sick in bed! That’s what your missus said when she came crying for me to help,” Tony yelled out in his big hearty voice. Dad never had liked the Bardiches. He always called them “ignorant foreigners.”

  Mom turned around and saw Dad.

  “Ben Webb, you ought not come here. You get your sore infected like you did other time before!” Mom was hot and tired and her voice was loud. Then she softened it as though she were talking to a child. “We get done today, you don’t need worry.”

  Dad kind of jerked.

  “Oh, I know you can run the whole ranch by yourself—run it better alone.” He sounded so hurt and he looked so thin I wanted to say: “No, we can’t. We can’t do it without you at all.”

  Mom didn’t say anything at first. Her eyes were glued on Dad, but she didn’t look big and strong, just hot and tired.

  “Proclyatye! That is not so,” she said in a low voice, as though she didn’t want Tony to hear her. I looked back; Tony was standing in the truck, grinning a little. Dad saw him and turned toward him suddenly.

  “I can do as much as you’re doing standing there, even if I am sick,” he said. “You can have your time.”

  My throat ached, I was trying so hard not to cry out. I knew the way he felt. I knew so well that I hated Tony patronizing him with his health. I even knew how he hated Mom’s strength. I hated it, too, just then, and my own.

  “You are a fool, Ben! We have the hay done by night if we don’t talk all day. Tony, come on now. He don’t mean nothing.”

  Tony chewed on a blade of grass. He laughed an easy-going silly laugh, like boys laugh when they take you out the first time—boys around Gotham, I mean. He turned to me.

  “Which pays the wages here? That’s all I want to know. Your old lady hired me, but your old man looks pretty mad.”

  Dad didn’t usually carry much money in his pocket. I don’t know how he happened to have it, but he took a ten-dollar bill out of his pocket.

  “I’m paying you today. Get along.” He limped over and dropped the bill on the hay by Tony’s foot. Tony picked it up.

  “It’s okay by me. I get off a couple hours sooner and get paid for them just the same. Well, s’long.”

  It was four miles over to the Bardiches. We would have taken him home after work, but we stood still as though we were frozen. And the feeling was worse because of the sun blazing down and making us hot on the outside. I was ashamed to look at Tony, going off across the field. I knew that he would tell his family and the story would go all around Gotham. I couldn’t look at Dad or Mom. Something in me cried out:

  “Don’t! I can’t stand living this way!” But no sound came out of my lips.

  Mom started to work again. From the ground I could just see the back of her head and shoulders. She knew how to build a haystack as well as any man. She kept working with the pitchfork, like a toy figure when the spring is wound up. Dad still stood there by the fence.

  By now he was sorry. Help was so hard to get and we would never be able to get any of the Bardiches again. But he couldn’t bring himself to say anything. Couldn’t Mom see? I felt Mom’s hardness. I didn’t look at Dad, but I felt him standing there, sorry and hurt and wanting Mom to stop so he could take Tony’s place and not wanting to call out and have her tell him his leg was too bad.

  Oh, why didn’t we give up the hay? What good was it to cut it and feed the cows just so they’d give food for us, if all we ate was soaked in bitterness and hate? Then I saw Mom standing still, looking at Dad.

  “You go rest while the leg is bad, Ben, an’ keep soaks on it so you don’t be sick when threshing time come. We do this easy; we can’t do threshing without you.”
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br />   Mom saw how he felt. It was as though she was walking a little way across the field to meet him. If he would only come as far.

  “I guess you can manage the threshing as well as the haying,” Dad said stubbornly. He got out a cigarette.

  “Oh, Dad, you know it takes three. Please go back. We want you to be feeling good.” I couldn’t wait for them to come together. It was too far and too hard for them.

  “Well,” Dad said, “it’s kind of tough to feel you’re so much dead wood.”

  I don’t think he expected to be answered. Even the way he said it was like the exit line in a play that lets you go off the stage without feeling silly. He started limping away.

  Mom and I worked like—well, like haymakers. It was an awful handicap not having Tony, but we didn’t say anything about it. When I got thirsty I kept right on, because Mom didn’t stop. When I was little, I used to play that a spot out on the fields was an island and I was marooned there, between the sky and the sea. I wasn’t a child any more, but I felt that way today. We worked until it was too dark to see the hay at the end of a pitchfork.

  “We got to stop,” Mom said, and a little wave of relief washed up over the island. We were too tired to be hungry. I drove the truck home and Mom sat beside me.

  “We let the other field go. The hay isn’t much good anyway,” Mom said out of her tired silence. I think she wanted to be through with haying. A half a mile away we could see the lights of our place, the big yard light showing everything up clearly, like a prison that is floodlighted so the prisoners can’t get away.

  Mom was lame when she got out of the truck. The hay smelled sweet in the cooling night air, but I closed my senses to it. No use to wish on the load of hay, tonight. What could I wish now? For Dad to be well? For Dad and Mom to be different? But there was no getting those wishes. For Gil to be here?

  If Gil were here, how would he like me? I asked myself, walking across the yard in my dirty jeans and sweaty shirt. I wiped my face and my hand smelled of rusty iron and grease from fixing the truck hitch. I knew how my feet looked in their boy’s work shoes, though they were hidden in the dark. I felt them plodding ahead of me, big and heavy. What was the use of wishing, anyway? I went on into the house.

  Dad had made supper for us. There was a clean cloth spread on the kitchen table and three places set. Usually, summer nights we just sat down at the oilcloth-covered table. Dad stood at the stove making scrambled eggs and bacon.

  “Why, Dad, how nice,” I said, trying to make my voice sound excited and pleased, but I was too tired. Mom had gone on into the bedroom.

  “There’s plenty of hot water to wash with,” was all Dad said.

  I felt better when I was cleaned up, and I was hungry after all. But we couldn’t seem to talk much or make what we said sound natural.

  “This tastes so good, Dad,” I said, but my voice stayed up in the air.

  “You shouldn’t walk on your leg,” Mom said.

  “If you’re going to do the work in the fields, the least I can do is to keep house,” Dad grumbled. The hot uneasy silence settled over us again. Dad had opened a can of pears for dessert. They were still a little cool from the root cellar and I let each piece lie on my tongue for a second.

  “Did you get through?” Dad asked.

  “Near enough,” Mom said. “We let the rest go. It’s no good anyway.”

  Dad didn’t make any comment.

  “I see the wheat’s got a little color already,” Mom said. The haying and Dad’s firing Tony and our not getting through was in the past now. Mom could as well have said, “Forget it, there’s the wheat to think of.”

  When I was in bed on the swing I could see Mom fixing Dad’s bandage. I looked at them through the open window as though I were watching a play. A day like this when Dad felt guilty he must hate to have Mom take care of him. Maybe Mom hated it, too, but she didn’t show it. They both bent over the sore on Dad’s leg.

  “There!” I heard Mom say. “It’s big piece.”

  I knew just what it would look like, a hard, irregular piece of shrapnel, no bigger than the tip of a knife blade, shot so long ago, taking all this time to work up through.

  “Maybe that’s the last of it,” Mom said. She always said that, and it never was.

  I thought of our modern-history class at the university. Everyone talked about the last war as though it were as long ago as the Napoleonic Wars. They didn’t feel it still, as I did.

  But if the last fragment of shrapnel were out, there would still be the hate and resentment between Mom and Dad. Those were bits of shrapnel, too, sown by the war.

  12

  LAST fall, going away to school, and last winter had been full of excitement. Last spring I had known so much joy it had made me almost breathless, but since June there had been nothing to look forward to. One day was like another, hot and bright and full of work. I was glad when it stormed.

  The sudden darkening of the sky and the wind springing up out of no place to blow the dirt across the barnyard and lash the sunflower plants like giant pendulums back and forth gave me a kind of excitement. The sudden dropping of the temperature was a relief after the long continuous pressure of the heat. The chickens scuttled together against the wall of the chicken house, the hogs planted their great fatness together like a fortress and let out frightened squeals. Mom and Dad and I all came in from the fields. Dad stood on the porch looking anxious.

  “Worst country for extremes,” he muttered.

  But I like the swift cruel changes. They make me feel that this country isn’t just flat placid farm country, that it’s as violent as the dark Doone country or any wild Cornish coast you read about in English novels.

  We could watch the storm come, steellike against the yellow-gray sky. We could see the first drops hit. They whacked like the scattering of broken beads and looked on the ground like rock salt. We had a little hail insurance, but never enough to amount to anything. We sat dumbly on the porch, waiting. The hailstones were bigger now. Tomorrow at the store and the elevator they’d swap stories of how big they were. We watched them smashing the nasturtiums I had kept watered with dishwater all summer. There wasn’t much left of them.

  Then I realized, sitting there on the steps where the hailstones just hit my shoes and bounced back down the steps, that I didn’t care what they ruined. Always there is a chance that the next ranch will be hailed out instead of ours. Ever since I was a child I have had a tight feeling in my throat when it hailed, but now I just sat waiting for it to stop. It isn’t so hard on you when you don’t care, but it’s an empty feeling. I looked quickly at Mom and Dad, hoping the way I felt didn’t show through on my face. Mom’s lips were moving tight together as though she were biting something tiny like a grape seed between her teeth. I’d seen her do it before when she was worried. I think she really bit at the skin of her lips. But otherwise her face was still. Dad smoked a little faster than usual, letting the ash grow out on his cigarette until the wind blew it off.

  “Get your jacket, Yeléna, and bring out your father’s hat,” Mom said. She wore her old brown sweater that had the front ends stretched way down from wrapping them around her arms.

  Inside the house the hail beat on the roof as loud as a drum. It was too warm and shut-in. I picked up my denim jacket and Dad’s hat and started back outside, but Mom and Dad were coming in.

  “It gets too cold,” Mom said.

  “No man ought to try to raise a crop in a place where it can hail in August,” Dad grumbled.

  But I went outside and sat astride the porch railing. The air was as cold as though it came down off the mountains. The sudden change made me think of the sun drawing farther and farther away and the earth growing colder. When that happened it would come like this, I told myself. But the cold was a relief after the heat.

  When the hail was over the sun came out, like a child that was over its tantrum. We drove around in the truck to see what damage it had done. It had riddled the cabbages in the garden
that were just beginning to head up, and the hay we hadn’t had time to cut lay draped every which way like a tumbled bolt of cloth. We crossed the highway in one place to get to the extra land Dad had bought and we saw a whole mile-long strip of the Bardiches’ hailed out. I looked at it without caring, but I heard Mom catch her breath.

  “Gospode Boge!” she said very low. I think it meant “Lord God.”

  Then we came to our own. Three strips were hailed out; the stalks looked as though they’d been chewed to shreds and then spit out, as ugly a sight as you could ever see. The hailstones lay all over the fallow ground, peppered through the stubble. The three of us on the seat of the truck, just sat there a minute.

  “It looks pretty sick,” Dad said. He pushed his hat back on his head and his voice sounded tired.

  “I look at this piece yesterday and I think we get maybe twenty bushel a acre.” Mom shrugged with a kind of down-settling of her shoulders.

  I couldn’t say anything. Maybe I couldn’t go back to school. I’d have to stay here. I felt penned in between Dad and Mom in the cab of the truck. Dad started the motor again. I looked hard at the fields as we passed. When we came to ours again Dad stopped and Mom got out. She broke off a head of the starting wheat and rubbed it to see the seeds. She made a kind of grunt.

  “Look at that. Half-empty.”

  “What makes it, Mom?” I asked.

  Mom shrugged. “Wind, maybe.” When she shook it, dust sifted out.

  “It’s better farther in,” Dad said, “but it’s been too dry.”

  I had heard talk like this always, every summer. Every spring when we saw the first pricks of green through the thin scattering of snow we felt good and full of energy and we planted the spring wheat full of hope. Then slowly through the summer our hopes grew less.

  “We won’t get five bushels a acre,” Mom said in a kind of final tone. “More like we get four.”

  Enough to live on till next year and buy some new seed and oil and gas and tires, but not enough to go away to school on. Dad talked about how independent the rancher was, but he talked to make himself believe it.