Winter Wheat

by Mildred Walker

  “Oh, Gil,” I kept whispering over and over, and each time it hurt me more. I put my arms around my own shoulders and tried to comfort myself.

  4

  I NEVER woke up till I heard Mom making breakfast in the kitchen and Leslie came and tickled my nose with the end of a feather. I bounced up with a little scream and he jumped back, laughing.

  “Never wake me with anything but an eagle’s feather, Leslie,” I said as I picked up my blankets and went into my own room to dress. But all the feeling of yesterday had gone out of me. The weather had changed, too. It was cold and the wind was blowing again. It was almost too dark to see Gil’s water color. The gray dark light swallowed up the yellow.

  “Below zero again,” Dad said at breakfast. We sat down to eat with the naked electric light glaring down on us. Dad looked tired and unshaven. He had walked with a limp when he came to the table and I knew his leg was bothering him again. He turned the radio on to catch the early morning news broadcast. Leslie asked grace under cover of the news.

  “You get same thing you get last night, Ben,” Mom said doggedly, as she had said so many times before.

  “Why, no, you don’t. They get news all night long,” Dad answered. “You see in London now . . .” Dad took out his watch to figure the time exactly, “it’s seven hours later . . . that would be about three P.M. there. . . .”

  “I bet bombs are falling on them, aren’t they, Uncle Ben?” Leslie asked.

  I drank my coffee and hoped they wouldn’t notice that I had nothing to say.

  “Yeléna, you an’ me clean chicken house this morning. Your dad don’t feel so good,” Mom said.

  “Are you going to get the baby chicks? Can I go with you?” Leslie asked between bites of toast.

  “Be still, Leslie. We gotta get place ready first. March we get the chicks,” Mom told him. “You put your scarf over your ears today an’ wear your mittens, like I tell you.”

  After Leslie had gone and breakfast was over, it seemed to me that the house settled down into dreariness. Dad took yesterday’s paper that he had already read in on the couch. The radio still jangled and would go on all day while Dad was sick. Mom moved around the kitchen, stolid and busy as though there were no difference between the days. I poured hot water to rinse the dishes I had washed and began to wipe them. My life seemed as coarse and ugly and dull as the cracked white plates I wiped, as far away from the kind of life I had meant to have as the fine china Gil’s mother had.

  Keeping Gil’s death secret had helped to make it not seem true, but this morning it did no good. I emptied my dishwater out beside the back door and I looked on the bare, empty ground that lay flat and dead under the sky.

  “Close that door, Ellen,” Dad called from the front room. “The cold goes right through me. See what the temperature is now.”

  I looked at the thermometer nailed to the house. It read three below.

  “I wish there were more snow. Cold on the bare ground doesn’t do the wheat any good. After it’s been so warm, it’s likely to winter-kill,” Dad fussed.

  “Don’t worry so much, Ben. Cold won’t hurt the wheat none,” Mom said, almost crossly. She was always like this when Dad was sick. “You better let me start them packs right now. I felt it an’ it’s going to fester way up.”

  “You fix the mash and I can do the rest, Anna,” Dad muttered. He hated to be waited on and it made him grouchy. Twenty-four years, almost a quarter of a century, they had done this. The deadly dreariness of their lives lay on my own. I was glad to get out of the house. I wished I had gone right into town and tried for a job. I knew now that I had been waiting to hear from Gil. Well, now there was no more use. But there was no use getting a job in town now, either. With Dad sick, Mom would have to have me here.

  I milked the cows, but it wasn’t like that other time. The electric light in the barn gave off a hard, thin light. There is no comfort in a light turned on in the daytime, even though it’s still dark. The milk pail was so cold my hand stuck to the handle. The milk sent up a little cloud of steam in my face, and I could see my own breath.

  But I didn’t mind the cold. It was better to be off by myself. I sat on the stool by Dunya, sheltered between the side of the stall and the cow’s body. I leaned back against the wall, and for a minute I wished I could stop thinking and remembering and feeling. I wished I could just stay here or hide out in the combine the way Leslie did. I sat there till the cold cut in on my thoughts and drove me inside.

  As soon as I opened the door, I smelled the flaxseed mash on the stove. Mom was in the other room with Dad. It was a day when the house was too small. It’s all right when everyone’s well and we all have work to do outside, but in winter there is no place to be by yourself. Dad must have felt that all these years. And there’s nothing important to do except the chores. Winter is a waiting—only for me there was nothing to wait for now.

  “It’s going to warm up. Maybe you can start whitewashing the chicken house, Yeléna,” Mom said. “You think it’s too cold?”

  “No, I’ll do it,” I said. “I’ll put on a sweater underneath and my valenkis.” I tied my head up in a woolen scarf. I looked like a peasant, all right, but Gil couldn’t see me.

  There was a kerosene stove in the chicken house that we kept going in cold weather. Mom thought it made the chickens lay better. It was so cold some of the turkeys had got in there. They looked shabby inside. Turkeys need sun and space to strut in. Cold doesn’t hurt them, Mom always says, so I chased them out. I was taking wide strokes with the sloppy brush by the time Mom came down.

  “Well, you got good start,” Mom said. “Is not so cold in here. Did you look for eggs? I never see such a girl—come in the chicken house an’ don’t look for eggs!” Mom went around picking them out of the nests.

  “How’s Dad?”

  “His leg hurt bad. Always he think he don’t need no poultice this time, an’ he always must have them. I tell him, but ‘No, we see,’ he says.”

  I went on painting. Mom poured some of the whitewash into another pail and began on the opposite wall. The chickens pretended to be scared and set up a noise whenever we made a sudden movement. Mom talked to them, half in English, half in Russian.

  After a while, Mom said, “What did he say, Yólochka?”

  “Who, Mom?” I asked, though I knew perfectly well.

  “That Gilbert.”

  I shrugged. “Nothing much.”

  We painted on without talking till Mom said: “He’ll never marry you. You waste your time. He ain’t nothing you want, anyway.”

  Anger burned in me so I could hardly see where my brush went. Then I said, squatting down to get the bottom board, and my words came out as hard as hailstones:

  “I’m not like you, Mom, so I’d do anything to get a man to marry me!”

  Mom held her brush still. She looked at me so blankly it made me all the angrier. I couldn’t stop then.

  “Don’t look as though you didn’t know what I was talking about. I know how you tricked Dad. I overheard you the night after Gil left. I know he married you and took you back to America because you told him you were pregnant. Then you made him bring you out here on this ranch where he never wanted to come. And when he knew you weren’t going to have a child it was too late. He was married to you, and he was too honorable to go away and leave you.”

  I couldn’t seem to stop. I watched my words fall like blows on Mom’s face. I don’t think she took in all I said; I talked too fast. Mom couldn’t understand if a person didn’t speak slowly.

  “And you’ve gone on all these years hating each other. Gil felt that hate. He could tell just being here. That’s one of the things that drove him away from here, from me.” I almost choked on my own words. I guess I was crying. I sat down on an old box and covered my face.

  Mom was still so long I looked up at her. All the color had gone out of her face, except in her eyes. She shook her head.

  “You don’t know anything, Yeléna. You are child li
ke that Leslie. In our church if baby is not christened we say she go blind in next world. I think you go blind in this world—blind dumb!” She stopped and then went on slowly. “No, Yeléna, I never hate Ben an’ Ben don’t hate me. Gospode Boge! I love him here so all these years!” Mom touched her breast and her face broke into life. Her eyes were softer. “Me hate Ben!” She laughed. I sat there dumbly watching her. Her laughter seemed far away, like the children’s laughter I’d heard through the closed windows of the teacherage.

  “But, Mom, I heard Dad say you had tricked him. It was true, wasn’t it?”

  Mom nodded. She was a long time answering. “Yes, that is true. I was seventeen year old. I never love anyone before. If war don’t come I would be married before that to some man from our village. But my people was killed an’ I went to nursing. Ben was brought in almost dead. I take care of him. I never seen no one like him. He was always good and full of fun. Even when he hurt bad he make joke.

  “When he get better we go out for walk around. I teach him Russian words, just for fun. But when he teach me English, I learn, not just for fun. I say them over and over till I know them good. I want to speak his way. I never have such good time. He was only twenty-one. He make love to me an’ kiss me. Once . . . You are grown, Yólochka, you know how those things can be. . . .”

  “No,” I said. My face felt cold and hard. But Mom didn’t hear me, she was living so in what she told.

  “When it get spring an’ ice melt in harbor an’ he talk about going home I can’t stand to think. He feel bad, too. ‘I’m going to miss you, Anna,’ he say, ‘but I come back.’ I talk about going with him now an’ he try to tell me it can’t be. He try to tell me about his mother an’ sister an’ father. He say he have to go back an’ tell them about me, let them get used to me. I can’t think what they are like then, but they don’t worry me.

  “They get orders for sal an’ Ben come to say good-by. I see how he love me. I can’t let him go without me. I love him so. I can’t help it, Yeléna, I tell him I’m going to have a child. Lots of soldiers, in Russia, they don’t care; they just go away, but not Ben. Ben is a good man. He feel awful bad, but he don’t get mad. Then he say ‘We get married.’

  “We was married an’ we was happy. Ben was happy. Even after we are in his home, when he come upstairs to me and shut the door we are happy an’ laugh together all the time. Ben was different when he was young; he make more fun.

  “I hope an’ I pray I get that way with baby before he know, but I don’t. I think I play sick an’ lose the baby. . . . I can never lie to Ben no more. When we are in Montana here, Ben know. He is very angry. Three days he says not a word an’ he sleep in other room. Then he sleep with me but not like he love me. But I love him. I try to make up to him with my body for all things. . . .”

  “He must have hated you,” I said. I wished Mom wouldn’t tell me these things. I stirred the whitewash with a stick.

  “I don’t blame him none. I feel bad. If he had beat me, I wouldn’t blame him. I love him so much. One night I go to put down his plate for supper an’ he reach up an’ pull my face down an’ kiss me. You see, Yólochka?” Mom asked, as though that answered everything.

  I couldn’t look at her, but I had to say what was in my mind. “But all these years, even when I was a child, I’ve felt that you hated each other. When I heard you that night you both sounded cold and hard.”

  Mom made a sound of disgust in her throat. “That don’t mean nothing. We get mad, sure! Like ice an’ snow an’ thunder an’ lightning storm, but they don’t hurt the wheat down in the ground any.” Mom picked up her whitewash brush and slapped it against the rough boards. “Yolóchka, you don’t know how love is yet.”

  I went on painting, too. I only had a little more to do. I was wondering how two people could love each other after all that and if Dad had ever really forgiven her.

  The sun was up at last. It came through the dirty windowpanes on the fresh whitewash and made it glisten. I glanced at Mom. In the bright sunlight her face showed more lines, but it had that closed look. I wondered what she was thinking. She finished her wall and poured the whitewash that was left back in the bigger pail.

  “You can write that young Gil of yours that he don’t know what he think he does. Sure, we fight sometime, but we got no hate here.” Her eyes flashed.

  I don’t know why I told her then, but I said:

  “Gil is dead, Mom. That letter was from his friend. He was in a bomber that crashed.”

  I heard Mom draw in her breath. “He was young,” she said, so gently my eyes filled.

  “I’ll take these to the barn,” I managed to say. When I opened the door the cold wind stung my eyes.

  5

  LIKE that other time I found myself watching Mom and Dad. They were so middle-aged, they said so little that mattered: whether to lease the quarter-section from Bailey again, how much to plant to spring wheat, whether the house roof could go another year without shingles. . . .

  Of course, I could see how dependent they were on each other. “How you feel, Ben?” Mom was always asking. And she knew how to make Dad comfortable. Dad explained things to her. “Read what it say, Ben,” Mom would say, giving him the paper. Then she would sit down beside him, her face withdrawn and empty, listening. But love . . . love was more than that. They had just made the best of a sordid, wretched mistake. Maybe Dad’s hate had cooled in all these years, but hate, cooling, was no better than love cooling, it was like mud drying to dust.

  Dad was sick a long time. “It’s good you be sick now in winter,” Mom said, trying to cheer him up.

  “I don’t like you doing all the barn work,” Dad said.

  “With Yeléna here I got it easy. That way I keep her from going off to town for job.” Mom laughed.

  We did the chores easily. Dad stayed inside reading or listening to the radio or working on his accounts. When his leg got too painful he just lay on the couch without talking. Then Mom was more silent, too. I was glad Leslie was there. Leslie seemed untouched by the housebound feeling of sickness. Perhaps I had been at that age, or perhaps he had always lived in an atmosphere of tension. He liked school in Gotham. There were two rooms and more children than at Prairie Butte. I was grateful for his chattering through a meal and when he perched on the end of the couch Dad made an effort to talk to him. One day Leslie found that Dad had been in the last war.

  “Were you really, Uncle Ben? Did you get to see any fighting?” he asked, climbing up beside him.

  “Sure I did. That’s how I got this,” Dad said, touching his leg.

  “Gee, I didn’t know that! I thought you just got sick.” His voice was awed and when Mom changed the poultices Leslie would sidle up as close as he could to watch. He kept a tiny piece of shrapnel that came away once, on the table with his feather collection.

  The cold relaxed a little in the middle of each day. There were chickadees chirping from the bushes along the coulee and under the warm sun the snow melted to water on the low fields, but by late afternoon it was cold again. The water froze to ice and the country looked dead. I thought I had been lonely at the teacherage and I had looked forward to the week ends at home, but I was more lonely here.

  One day I took down Gil’s water color. It hurt me too much to see it. I stood there holding the picture and the cartoon and Gil’s picture, trying to put them away, when Mom opened the door.

  “Yeléna,” she began, then she saw what I had in my hands.

  “I was just packing them away,” I said. I put them in the bottom drawer and banged it closed.

  “There’s no hurry,” Mom said. “He was good-looking young man.” It was the first nice thing she had ever said about him.

  “You didn’t think so till he was dead,” I said. I didn’t feel mean like that, but it seemed to say itself. Mom’s silence made it sound childish and crude.

  “Don’t take it that way,” she said. “Before this war gets done lots of girls got to lose their sweethearts. You aren
’t only one. You got no need to act like it.”

  I was grateful for her calling him my sweetheart and I scarcely listened to the rest.

  “Maybe if he hadn’t die an’ come back after war, maybe you don’t love him no more. He was lots different from you, Yeléna.”

  “You and Dad are certainly different,” I said.

  Mom leaned against the dresser. “Yes, Ben an’ me are different, but we are different from you an’ Gil. Ben don’t go away like Gil, an’ I don’t let him go.”

  “But . . .” I began angrily.

  “Look, Yólochka,” Mom said in a soft calm voice. “Soon we be outdoors working. You feel good again when you get out more.” Mom moved her shoulders as though they were muscle-bound now. “Sun an’ wind make you feel different. Same way with me, same way with Ben, too. After that time I tell you about, when Ben is angry that I trick him into taking me, even after he forgive me, we are quiet. That spring we work all day out in the fields; sometime we hardly talk a word. It was good we was both so tired. I never work so hard. I want to show him what I do for him. We plow under our bad feelings. Same with you, maybe, you put your feeling bad down in ground.”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “You wait an’ see!” Mom said. “Them baby chicks is in Clark City. You drive in town an’ get them. Take Leslie to see his folks an’ take your time. Winter will be gone before you wear your new coat.”

  “Don’t bother about me, Mom, I’m all right,” I said. I felt like a big, overgrown child she had tried to comfort.

  By the time it was warm enough to work in the machine shed, Dad was up again, looking thinner and paler than ever, but he was bound to get out there.

  “I’ll just putter around and see what there is to do,” he promised Mom. But when he had been out there almost an hour Mom said,

  “Go out, Yeléna, and see if you can help him.”

  I pushed open the shed door and the early spring sunlight split on the black metal disks he was taking off the harrow.

  “Put something against the door, the sun feels good,” Dad said. “You’re just in time to give me a hand here.”