Winter Wheat

by Mildred Walker

  “He drank and he didn’t go to church or read the Bible,” Leslie said, watching the windshield wiper. “Mother said he was lost.”

  “Leslie, the thing that matters is that he loved your mother and he loves you. You can’t be lost when you love someone!” I opened the window a little. The rain felt warm and fresh.

  “I gave him the eagle feather you told me to,” Leslie said almost defensively.

  “I know you did. He showed it to me and said it was the nicest thing that had happened to him. You wouldn’t have given it to him if you hadn’t loved him.”

  Leslie shook his head. “I gave it to him because he looked so sad that day driving in to town. He didn’t hardly talk all the way. I meant to tell him I knew he’d broke his promise and gotten you into trouble. He did that, Ellen. You know he did. You can’t forgive him that!”

  “Yes, but, Leslie, that doesn’t hurt your loving him.” From where we sat I could see the wheat shining green under the rain. It made me think of what Mom had said to me. “Look at that wheat, Leslie. It’s been there all winter and it’s had cold and snow on it and it hasn’t been hurt any. See how green it is? How it’s coming in spite of everything? That’s the way love is.” You can say things to a child sometimes that you couldn’t say even to yourself.

  Leslie didn’t say anything. I didn’t look at him.

  “Wheat can stand a lot,” I went on. “The hard wheat doesn’t grow in warm countries, you know. And wheat grown on irrigated land lacks the strength of dry-land wheat. I guess it takes cold and snow and dryness and heat to make the best wheat.”

  Leslie laughed and gave a little bounce on the seat. “You’re funny, Ellen. First you talk about love and then you talk about wheat.”

  “I get them mixed up, don’t I?” I said.

  Mom was outdoors when I drove into the yard.

  “Like spring!” she said, holding up her hands to the rain.

  “Wet, though,” I laughed.

  “That don’t hurt nothing. Look at it take the dirty snow. That’s all that’s left of winter.”

  We went up on the porch, just out of the rain, and watched it.

  “Smell!” Mom said. Leslie stood on the top step with his palms out to feel the rain.

  “You should see the wheat from the hill, shouldn’t she, Ellen? Gee, it looks green.”

  “Yes, but it looks spotty down by the road,” Mom said.

  That evening, after supper, Leslie got out his tablet and pencil. “I thought I might tell Dad about the rain and how far the wheat’s up,” he said, looking at me.

  “Tell him we’re going to start plowing tomorrow,” Dad said.

  Then I remembered Warren’s note to me. I took it out of my pocket and read:

  “Dear Ellen,

  “Thank you for telling me about Leslie. He sounds very happy. I am grateful to have him there. Whenever you are tired of him you must say so.

  “I am sorry to hear about Gil. You cared so much about him, you will miss him badly. I think of you a great deal and hope the spring doesn’t hurt too much with Gil gone.

  “We are almost into summer here, but I missed the spring back home. This is a curious life. I like it, but I shall like it better when the training period is over, and we move on to our real work.

  “Warren.”

  I looked over at Leslie writing at the kitchen table. I saw he had covered a page with large printed letters. He gave a big sigh.

  “There! I guess that’s enough. Can I print my name in ink, Ellen?”

  I brought the ink bottle and Mom’s straight pen and I saw him print LESLIE under the penciled word “love.”

  “I think Dad’ll make a good officer, don’t you, Ellen?” he asked. His eyes were only a little anxious.

  “I’m sure he will,” I said.

  Dad heard him. “Your dad, Leslie? Why, he’s the kind it takes. If I was picking an officer to be under, I’d choose him, I’ll tell you.”

  “Would you, Uncle Ben?” Leslie’s smile spread over his face. He hitched one knee over the other in a way he had when he was excited. “I’ll tell him that. I can put it in a P.S., can’t I?”

  7

  SOME folks begin their spring plowing when the county agent tells them to, some folks watch their neighbors, but we always wait till there’s life in the ground. There was life in the ground by the last week in March that year. Some years it didn’t come till later, as late as May, one year. After the hard dead look of frozen gumbo the earth changes, shows cracks around the roots of the windbreak, looks darker. Ground sparrows dart up from the stubble, ants crawl across the bare ground, and green shows bright in the winter wheat and up the side of the coulee. It’s a thing you can feel. Then you know it’s time to plow.

  It was good to be out working in the fields again with nothing between me and the sky. It was still cold early and late, but the sun was warm on my head and the back of my neck by mid-morning. I was glad I wasn’t in the library at the university or in the teacherage at Prairie Butte. I was glad I was back here riding the tractor across the fields.

  There’s one thing about plowing: trying to keep a straight line with the tractor, you forget other things. A ground sparrow will fly up from the furrow ahead of you or a Chinese cock pheasant will flaunt his colors against the plain dirt and take your mind off what you were thinking.

  But I thought often of Anna Petrovna and Ben Webb plowing this same dirt their first spring in Montana. I thought of them hardly speaking all day. I knew so well how Anna Petrovna’s face could look when it closed all her feelings inside, and I knew how Ben Webb could look when he was discouraged and tired and sick. I thought of them going up to that unpainted house under the coulee and eating in silence and lying down beside each other at night. That they could plow under their hate and bitterness and grow any love for each other seemed a greater miracle than the spring. Sometimes it was hard to believe, I had believed in their hate so long, but I could look over and see the green of the winter wheat. Because of what Mom had said, I took it as a kind of proof.

  One day, the first week of April, we had a turn of cold. The wind blew so hard it lifted the fresh dirt I had plowed. By afternoon, a thin snow came down and covered the fields an inch deep, but the wheat stuck up through it as green as life. It gave me a good feeling all day.

  I thought often of Gil as I went back and forth over the field, and I tried to plan out my life and think what I would do after the harvest. I turned the tractor at the corner and felt the extra pull of the moist spring earth, then I faced across the field to the east again.

  Some days I forgot everything but the good feeling of the spring day and the soft cool air and the wideness of the field. When I stepped down off the tractor I liked even the stiff, sticky sqush of the gumbo furrows under my feet. I was glad it was an early spring; the winter had been long enough.

  The sun stayed longer each week. We could work later in the fields. Mom seemed to know I wanted to be outdoors. She was the one who always went up ahead to tend to meals and she and Dad did the chores while I was still riding the tractor. They left me a lot to myself. I felt a sense of understanding between Mom and me, without any words. It seemed to grow with the green that spread up the coulee.

  I remembered how impatient I used to be with Mom because she never seemed to be excited or to look ahead; she just worked through the day as it came. But I knew now that there were times when you couldn’t look ahead. It hurt too much if you tried to think what came after spring and what after summer. It was easier to go along and work so hard in the day that you were tired at night. It came to me one morning, going back and forth over the field, that maybe so much had happened to Mom back in Russia that work out here had seemed peaceful. Maybe it had seemed good to Dad, after being sick so long, just to be out here in the sun. I began to understand how they had stood that first year here. Maybe it hadn’t seemed like being exiled to Dad, after all.

  It was after eight o’clock when I stopped some nights. Leslie ofte
n came down to wait for me by the fence and I would let him drive the tractor a few rods across the field. The wild flowers were out, but I didn’t have time to climb the rimrock these days—maybe I didn’t want to. But Leslie would try to bring me something new he had found: the first pale lavender crocus, some little bright pink flower, no bigger than an ice crystal on a frozen windowpane, or a bluebonnet as bright a shade as the Thorson children’s eyes. And in my mind I would show each one to Gil.

  Once Leslie took a flower home to press and send to Warren in a letter.

  “Maybe, by now, he’s lost the feather I gave him,” he told me.

  Leslie and I walked back up to the house together, leaving the tractor in the field for the next day. Oh, yes, Warren, the spring hurt. Sometimes it hurt most on these walks back up to the house at the end of the day. I thought of writing that to Warren in one of Leslie’s letters, because Warren must know for himself how spring could hurt. But I didn’t write.

  “Bailey says up on the high line they’ve lost half their winter wheat crop; they’re going to have to reseed to spring,” Dad said one night at supper.

  “How, Uncle Ben?” Leslie asked.

  “Winter-killed,” Dad said. “So many hard freezes after warm spells this last winter. A freeze on the bare ground does it.”

  “You know how that water stood in places, Ben, an’ then froze solid!” Mom’s face was as solemn as wood.

  “That’s what does it,” Dad said.

  “The ground heave up,” Mom added, showing Leslie with her rough red hands.

  “You see, it tears the wheat loose from the roots, Leslie,” Dad explained. He could make sentences out of Mom’s phrases when I couldn’t get the meaning at all.

  “You mean that could happen to our wheat?” Leslie asked, his eyes bigger with sudden alarm.

  “Sure,” Mom said darkly.

  “But it’s green now. Ellen said it could stand cold and snow!” His voice was like a cry of protest. I knew what he felt. It was more than wheat to him. It was more to me, too. I got up to fill Leslie’s glass with milk.

  “I was looking at the wheat today,” Dad said. “I pulled up some stalks here and there that weren’t really rooted. But you can’t tell how much of it’s that way.”

  “You mean, we might have to plow it up and reseed the whole thing?” I asked.

  “Sure! All that seed an’ gas an’ time gone for nothing!” Mom said. “You won’t get that money paid back on your combine this year, Ben Webb. An’ I don’t see you’ve heard anything from your sister yet about what you send her!”

  I held my hands tight together under the table. There was that sharp, almost taunting note in Mom’s voice that went through me. “Don’t do that! How can you?” My mind cried out as it used to when I was a child. I couldn’t look at Dad. I wished Leslie didn’t have to hear them.

  “Well, maybe I won’t, but we won’t lose the combine, either,” Dad said, setting himself against her taunt so firmly I was suddenly all on his side. “We’ll pay off half anyway.” Dad had a different kind of strength from Mom. I could feel it.

  “No, we just go on dragging a mortgage after us. Work so many years to be free an’ then go out and ask for more!” Mom was so angry her face blotched with red, her eyes flashed, and her voice was heavier.

  “The combine isn’t the biggest thing in the world to me, Anna.” The coldness of Dad’s voice separated the two of them as far as Russia was from Vermont, I thought.

  I started to clear the dishes. Here I was again, as I had always been, pulled this way and that by their attitudes. I was glad when Dad went into the front room with his magazine and Mom went out to the chicken house. Leslie came to stand by the sink to dry the dishes. I didn’t quite meet his eyes.

  “But, Ellen, I thought you said for sure that the wheat could stand the cold?” he insisted.

  “It does mostly,” I told him. “It isn’t the cold that hurts it. It’s these warm spells that melt all the snow and leave the wheat exposed, and then the cold strikes.” But my voice trailed off. I felt there was nothing you could say “for sure.” I dumped my dishwater outside and hung the pan against the house. I stood there by myself in the dark. The house was too full of feeling and tension.

  “Oh, God!” I said, as I had that night in the blizzard, and only the snow had blown in my face.

  “When you feel it, you will pray,” Mom had said.

  “Oh, God, don’t let the wheat all die,” I prayed with my whole heart.

  That night I made up my bed again on the glider on the porch. It was still cold at night, but I couldn’t have stood it in the house.

  I woke next morning to an all-day rain. I helped Dad in the shed all morning, but in the afternoon there was nothing more to do.

  “It won’t hurt you to take time to fix yourself up,” Mom said. “Put on that white dress, for once.”

  But when I dressed up in the white piqué dress I could only think how I had worn it to town last spring with Gil. I looked at my hands and they were red and rough against my skirt, like Mom’s. When I combed my hair it caught on the rough places on my fingers. My nails were dry and worked down close to my fingertips. Gil would wince to see them now. I felt such a longing to see Gil’s hands again, to feel them against my face, that it was like a pain. “I know he was coming back to me,” I said out loud in my room to the icon and the peach walls and the mirror that Gil had looked on. That was what the little water color meant. That was why he sent it.

  All that next week we watched the wheat without saying much about it. I saw Leslie on his way to school stop by one of the long strips of wheat. He pulled up a single stalk. I couldn’t see from where I was how it looked, but it seemed to come out easy. Then he walked slowly a way before he began to run.

  The second week of April came off warm. The grass around the house was green, the aspens in the coulee shivered in their pale green leaves. The box elders that sprang up wild against the bank held out tight-furled green torches at the tips of their bare branches.

  “Well, let’s go down and look at the wheat again,” Dad said one morning, as though we hadn’t been watching it every day.

  “How you think it look, Ben?” Mom asked.

  “I don’t think it did any harm to wait,” Dad said. “Some folks have plowed up and reseeded already, but there’s too much good wheat left there.”

  Once again, the three of us sat on the seat of the truck while we went to see the wheat. I was driving and I went the long way around.

  “The road’s muddy the other way,” I said. I came around the first strip of stubble and parked. We made a procession across from the road. The stubble creaked like an old basket as we walked over it.

  “There’s some brown, all right,” Mom said, pointing.

  We each studied every strip with our own eyes. Through the green wheat that stood already four inches high there were spots where the blades had turned brown and lay along the ground or drooped with a sick whitish-green, and here and there were bare moth-eaten places. I walked up a row and pulled up one of the brown withered stalks and felt it come away in my hand. I looked out over this strip and the one beyond. The brown stalks were only scattered. There were places where the wheat was deep green and thick. I pulled at a green stalk beside my foot, but it clung to the earth as though its root reached two feet deep.

  I looked at Dad. His face was thin and already burned by the wind. He had a stick or a match in his mouth and his lips gathered up around it as he considered. I could feel his impatience, that was still part of him even after all these years out here, in the way he took off his hat and put it on again and then felt for his package of cigarettes and lighted one with so much attention he hardly seemed interested in the wheat. When he got it lighted he turned back to the field. Mom had tramped ahead of us to look for herself.

  “How about it, Dad?” I couldn’t wait any longer.

  “Well,” he said slowly, “it’s spotty. There’s places where it winter-killed, but some o
f those spots were just wind-blown. It came through better than I thought it could. There’s enough good wheat there for you to ride to school next fall on a first-class ticket, girl! All that through there has been slowed down a little because of the rain and cold these last weeks, but it’ll blaze now. Anna!” he shouted.

  “Ben!” Mom’s voice across the strip had a warm excited sound to it. “Look over here! It’s good here. She done better than she look last week!” Mom came back to stand by Dad.

  “I thought you said I’d lose the combine!” Dad had a laugh in his voice.

  “Well, you might yet with hail or grasshoppers. Watch out!” Mom looked up at him with her eyes sparkling the way they did over a joke.

  I went back over to the truck. This afternoon I would bring Leslie down here to see the wheat that didn’t winter-kill.

  “See,” I would say, “it didn’t die out. Oh, in a few places, but look here—try to pull it up. See how strong and green it is?” Leslie would know what I meant. His eyes would shine.

  I slid in on the seat of the truck to wait for Mom and Dad. They had walked a little way along the strip. Now they were standing together. They looked smaller under the too-wide sky, Mom so thick and peasant-looking with her bandanna tied around her head, Dad spare and angular and a little round-shouldered.

  Why had I worried about them? I had been as blind in this world as Mom had said. They had love that was deep-rooted and stronger than love that grows easily. It gave me faith for my own life.

  “You can’t pick up faith at the cut-rate drugstore,” Warren had said. I must tell him sometime that faith had to grow like wheat, winter wheat. Love was like that, too.

  I thought how I had sat in Dunya’s cold stall and wished I could stop feeling and thinking and remembering after I knew Gil was dead. How had I ever felt that way? I didn’t feel that way any more. Now I wanted to live my life with the strength of the winter wheat, through drought and rain and snow and sun.