“Mom doesn’t want you to work too long down here, Dad,” I said.
“I’m all right. I’ve laid up long enough.”
“Leslie will love watching you get the combine ready.”
Dad nodded. “He thinks the combine is the best thing on the place. He’s all right. You tell Warren when you write how much I like him. Here, if you want something to do, you can take off all these bolts for me.” Dad stopped to light his cigarette. “Ellen, don’t grieve so hard over Gil. It makes us feel bad to see you.”
I couldn’t say anything. Dad loosened the last bolt and took off the steel blade.
“But it’s pretty tough to see a young fellow like that ‘go West.’ It makes it worse, in a way, that he was still in training.”
I didn’t want him to go on. His expression from the last war made me squirm a little, it seemed worse than saying “die.” “I suppose that’s what you have to expect in wartime,” I said lamely, like Mrs. Peterson or Bailey. In Gotham folks jump from one safe and tried remark to another as though they were stepping-stones, not wanting to get their feet wet in their own feelings and thoughts.
“Hand me that grease can over there, Ellen.”
I watched Dad work. The sun was bright but I could see that his hands were cold by the bluish look of the skin.
“Well, next year you’ll be back in school,” Dad said. “You’re only twenty. By the time you’re through you’ll have forgotten you ever stayed out a year.” He was putting the blade back now. I held it in place while he tightened the bolts.
“If we have a crop, I’ll go back next year,” I said.
“There’s no if about it this year,” Dad said firmly, the way he likes to talk. Then he said, “I thought you were through with Gil last summer, Ellen.”
“I thought I was, Dad. But you were right that time you said he couldn’t get me out of his mind. I couldn’t stop loving him either.” It was hard to talk and yet it was a relief, too.
“Look here, Ellen, you don’t want to be like your Aunt Eunice. She loved Jim Robinson; his father was president of the bank back home. They weren’t engaged, just had an understanding, I guess, and he was killed in Belleau Wood. Eunice never got over it, never looked at anyone else after that. When I was back there last winter, Ellen, I thought she was just like the parlor at home. It’s closed up tight. No life gets to it. Don’t be like that.” Dad straightened up and looked out across the yard.
He stood idle so long I looked to see what he was watching. Mom was there waiting at the top of the road for Leslie. When he came up to her he showed her his school paper and we could see by the way she raised her hand that she was admiring his work. Then she laughed at something. Leslie laughed, too. She took his hand and they ran back to the house.
Dad turned back to the blade he was tightening. He had a kind of smile on his face as though something had pleased him.
“I used to watch Anna come into the hospital when I was sick. It wasn’t a hospital, really, just a sort of cellar hole. She was slender then and younger than you are, but she was strong and full of life. I was pretty weak and it did me good just to watch her moving around.”
It hurt me to think of Dad watching Mom and feeling her strength and health when he was sick. That was why she had attracted him, I thought. I stirred the thick grease that stood in a can, just to be doing something.
“Ellen, bring that light over here and hold it so I can see what I’m doing,” he said. I unhooked the powerful bulb in its wire cage and took it over where Dad was working. The light was on the machinery and his grease-covered hands but it shone up on his face and spread a glint on his hair below his cap. It was yellow, like mine. His work shirt showed a little white place at the base of his throat that didn’t seem to match the leathery skin above his collar. He looked younger and healthier than he had when he was cooped up in the house. When Dad was sick I guess I never quite looked at him because I knew how he hated it. When I was a child he had seemed so different from the rest of the people around Gotham I had thought he was wonderful. Since last June I hadn’t seen him without thinking how he had seemed to Gil. I kept looking at him now, the way you do with a stranger, sometimes, to see how much you can tell about him.
“Hold that light down a little, there. Don’t shine it in my eyes, Ellen, or I’ll have to get a new helper!” Dad grumbled jokingly.
I lowered the bulb. Why couldn’t things have been different for him, I wondered angrily. The feeling of injustice boiled up in me so that I spoke without thinking.
“Don’t you feel bitter, Dad, about the way things have turned out for you?” I asked. Then I was ashamed of my question. I knew he did. Why did I make it worse by asking him? I couldn’t stand the silence so I went on talking.
“That’s why I’ve hated this war so, even before Gil was killed. I’ve thought how the last war took your health and twisted your life around.”
“I don’t feel that way,” Dad said mildly, not looking up from the screw he was tightening. “I guess the war gives as much as it takes away from you. It has for me, anyway.”
“I mean,” I squirmed, “you could have done something with your head, something easier than ranching.”
“Ranching takes plenty of head. Of course, I might have done something I had more of a knack for, but Anna wouldn’t have been happy back East.”
“That’s what I mean, Dad! If you hadn’t married Mom. She’s so . . . well, she wouldn’t want to live any place but a ranch. I love her, but I mean . . .” My voice trailed lamely off into silence. I couldn’t look at Dad. He can’t face the truth, I thought, and I didn’t blame him. I was trying to think how to put the words to tell him I knew what Mom had done. I wanted to say that I didn’t blame him if he couldn’t forgive her for deceiving him and spoiling his whole life. He stopped turning the wrench in his hand. It was as though we were frozen there. Dad was the one who liked to talk usually, Mom was more silent, but it was harder now to talk to Dad. I wondered if he wished I would go.
Then Dad said, going on with his work, “Sometimes it’s hard to understand your mother, Ellen. She wasn’t born in America, you know; that makes a difference. She had a harder life as a young girl than you can imagine. The first year out here was hard on her, too. Sometimes I think she’s forgotten all about those bad times, but once in a while I can see she hasn’t. When she first saw this place she took to it. She could hardly wait to get the house built so we could start plowing. I remember how we stood out here one day, deciding where to put the house. It looked pretty bare to me and all of a sudden Anna said, ‘It’s good to see so much sky.’
“I told her she’d be sick of seeing just sky before we got through out here, but I don’t know that she has. She’s liked it here.” Dad said it as though it gave him a good feeling.
He dropped a bolt and I got down to hunt for it.
“I’ve laid up so long doing nothing I’m getting to be a regular butter-fingers,” Dad muttered when I found it for him. Then he was quiet so long I was afraid he had forgotten what we were talking about.
Finally he said, “I don’t suppose you can get any idea of how this country seemed to me when I came out here, Ellen.” I was disappointed, he wasn’t going to say anything more about Mom and I had heard him tell before how the country looked to him.
“It looked like the end of nowhere except for the glimpses of the mountains. I couldn’t get used to it at first. I’d known little villages back home, I didn’t come from a very big place, but villages back there have a church with a tall white spire sticking up on them instead of a grain elevator, and houses with lawns and streets with trees. I got pretty homesick for them that first year. Everything was different out here, even the dirt. Why, we wouldn’t have thought gumbo was any kind of soil worth bothering about back home. I don’t understand it yet. Sometimes when I’m plowing I look at it and wonder about it, how it holds enough moisture to grow wheat! But I guess it doesn’t make any difference whether I see how it does it or not!�
�
Dad stopped to light a cigarette and I hung the bulb back where it belonged. My arm ached from holding it for him so long. He was off on the country. I wasn’t listening very well.
“. . . crazy darned country, lonely as Time and as violent as the everlasting wind out here. Maybe you never quite understand why, but it gets to be a part of you when you live with it. It was a funny thing, but last winter when I was home I was actually homesick for this place. I couldn’t get a good look at the sky back there and I knew what Anna meant.” Dad gave a little laugh. “I packed up and came home before I’d planned to.”
Perhaps Dad would have said more, but we heard the house door bang and Leslie came running across the yard.
“Uncle Ben, Ellen! Dinner’s ready. You better hustle right in here ‘cause Aunt Anna’s got that red Russian soup all dished up. What are you doing?”
“I’ve been getting things ready so you can help me, Leslie,” Dad said. He laid down his wrench and cleaned off his hands with an old rag. “Come on, Karmont.” Then he kicked away the prop that held the shed door open and we started back to the house.
6
WE went across the yard that was full of puddles from the melting snow. Leslie ran ahead and jumped them all. Mom stood in the doorway waiting for us.
“What you think, Ben? Will it rain?” she asked.
Dad turned his face up to the sky. “I wouldn’t wonder; it’s a whole lot warmer.”
Inside, the kitchen was steamy from the hot soup. Leslie giggled aloud. “Aunt Anna never dished up! I just said that to hurry you!” He shrieked with delight at his fooling us.
We took turns washing while Mom filled the soup bowls and cut the bread that was so fresh it was hard to slice. Leslie was asking Dad questions about the machinery.
“You’re coming on, Leslie. Couple of months ago you’d have thought a belt was just something you wore on your pants,” Dad teased him.
“Is much got to be done, Ben?” Mom asked.
“Oh, there’s some work on it. It makes me anxious to get out and get started.”
Mom nodded her head and gave a little laugh. “You start plowing in the snow maybe, too!” Mom reached over and gave him a little nudge and I saw how her dark eyes gleamed with fun.
I sat at the table taking spoonfuls of the hot soup.
“It tastes good, Mom,” I said.
“Sure.” Mom nodded. “Borsch is good. Even Ben’ll stand the cabbage smell for it.”
“You notice I went down to the shed, though,” Dad retorted. This was the way they talked, laughing at their old jokes.
Maybe it was from eating alone at the teacherage or maybe that I so often found myself thinking of Gil when we sat here at the table that I didn’t have anything to say. If Mom noticed that I was quiet she never said anything about it.
In the middle of the meal she remembered she had seen the name of a Russian town she knew in the paper and she brought it for Dad to read to her. While he read out loud she sat listening, stirring her coffee round and round without knowing that she was doing it. When Dad mentioned a Russian name she said it after him, differently, but he paid no attention and went right on. It was funny to hear them.
From where I sat I could look out the window by the sink and see the sky above the roof of the barn. I thought back over the things Dad had said. Even when I had made it easy for him he wouldn’t say anything against Mom. He had acted almost as though he had not liked my criticizing her. And he had gone on to try to make me understand her as he did. . . . My own thought startled me . . . I had to stop and look at it.
AS HE DID!
I had been so sure that there was no real understanding between Mom and Dad. He had said himself: “Sometimes it’s hard to understand your mother, Ellen,” and then in the next breath, as though he were embarrassed, he had gone on about this country and how different it was from the East. “Maybe you never quite understand why, but this country gets to be a part of you when you live with it.” Could he have meant that he felt that way about Mom, too? It struck me all of a sudden, as though I had been trying to read something in the half-dark and now I had come outside where there was light.
“You have more soup, Yeléna? Look, I got plenty meat left in the bottom.” Mom stood at the stove lifting the big soup ladle to show me.
“No, thanks, Mom,” I said, looking at her as though I had never really seen her before. I looked at Dad. He was listening to Leslie tell about school. Their faces told me nothing. They were just the same.
I thought of Dad saying, “Sometimes I think she’s forgotten all about those bad times, but once in a while I can see she hasn’t.” I began to see how it must really be between them. He could look at Mom without saying anything and know how she felt, even when they were talking like this about nothing that mattered, or when they were working all day in the fields. That was what I had wanted Gil to do, to understand sometimes the way I felt without my telling him.
I kept looking at them in wonder as the sense of their strange understanding and love grew on me. I thought of a hundred little things whose meaning was changed now: how Mom had said, “This will be first Christmas without Ben.” And how she had looked in the mirror in the store and wondered if Dad would like her in her new red coat. I had thought she was pathetic then. I thought of her fixing a poultice in the middle of the night and of the days when Dad lay on the couch watching Mom through the doorway. I had thought of him as being trapped and frustrated by illness and our ranch. Maybe he had watched Mom as he used to do in the cellar hole in Russia.
“It did me good just to watch her moving around . . . she was strong and full of life,” Dad had said.
I even looked at that night again; the night Gil went away, when I had lain against the side of the hill and looked in through the window at them. I thought of Mom’s bitter, angry words and of how Dad had gone into the front room to sleep. But now I remembered how I had heard Mom go in to him, saying without any anger at all in her voice that he would be lame in the morning if he lay there all night. And Dad had gone back with her.
And Mom had said, “Sure we get mad, but that don’t hurt nothing. Thunder an’ lightning an’ cold an’ snow don’t hurt the wheat down in the ground.” “Why you let him go, then, first time you get mad?” she had asked when I told her I loved Gil. I couldn’t swallow the bread in my mouth for a minute; something choked me. I felt like the night out in the barn when I was milking the cows and I had suddenly known that I still loved Gil, that kind of a feeling that changes the whole world and you with it.
“Solnieshko, did somebody give you a present? What struck you? You sit there looking like it was your name day!” Mom said.
My thoughts must have shown through in my face. Mom and Dad and Leslie were all smiling at me.
“No,” I laughed. “I just feel good, I guess.”
Mom gave a little grunt. “That don’t hurt you none.”
There we sat in the kitchen with the cooking dishes piled in the sink, at the table where I had so often shrunk from the picture we made, with the silverware from the dime store and the china that didn’t match, and I didn’t mind at all. I did feel good. I felt as light as though a weight had been taken from me.
“Leslie, how would you like to ride down with me to get the mail? I’ve got to go down to the store anyway,” I said.
Leslie loved to ride in the truck. He held on tight to the side and I hit the bump where our road went into the highway so that he bounced. We swooped up to the tracks and down the steep pitch on the other side and came to a stop just by the ramp with Leslie shrieking with excitement. I let him run in. I hadn’t been for the mail since the day I got the letter about Gil. I wished I could write him about Mom and Dad—how wrong we were about them.
Leslie came running back with the paper and a letter from his father. “It’s raining, Ellen, big drops. Whyn’t you turn the windshield wiper on?” I had sat there and not seen the rain.
“Shall I read your letter to you?
”
“If you want to,” Leslie said.
Warren’s letter told him about the company’s mascot and the soldier who asked about his eagle feather, and how hot it was there.
“There’s a letter for you, too. He always writes you, doesn’t he, Ellen?”
“Yes,” I said. “It’s nice of him.” I tucked it away in my pocket. It was usually about Leslie.
“Ellen,” Leslie said slowly, “Dad didn’t say whether he kept his promise. Do you think he hasn’t and he’s ashamed?”
“Oh, Leslie! That’s not the important thing. Stop worrying about what your father does, and love him.”
“I should think you would think it was important! Nels told me. I know all about how Dad came to the teacherage when he’d been drinking and he stayed all night and then the school board fired you. Miss Webb, I mean Ellen, I hate him for that. I wish he wasn’t my father!” Suddenly he was crying with his fists dug into his eyes. I put my hand on his knee, but I didn’t dare to put my arm around him. His shoulders looked too independent.
“He hurt my mother, too, and broke her heart,” he sobbed.
“Leslie, look here!” Suddenly, I understood. He was as mixed up as I had been. “I’m just like you. I used to think my mother had spoiled my father’s life and it made me angry and unhappy.”
“About Aunt Anna and Uncle Ben?” he asked unbelievingly.
“Yes, but I didn’t know how things really were. That’s the way with you. You weren’t very old when your mother died. You can’t remember how things were. Maybe I can explain some things to you.” It seemed easy to talk with the sound of the rain and the comfortable rub of the windshield wiper against the glass.
“Your father loved your mother and wanted her to be happy,” I went on. “She was like you. She didn’t like it out at Prairie Butte. She wanted to get away from there. Going out preaching and to meetings was a chance to get away. Your father moved to Detroit so she would be happier, but by that time she liked the meetings and traveling, so she kept on, even though she had to leave you a lot of the time. Your father took care of you. I have an idea he was often lonely and unhappy because you weren’t old enough to be company for him like you are now.”
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