7

I WAS home two weeks before Gil came. It seemed longer than that, though I was busy every minute. I had to tell Mom and Dad about him. I wanted them to know him so they wouldn’t be like strangers. I had his picture to show them. Dad liked him right away.

“He’s a handsome-looking chap,” Dad said. “So his mother and father knew Plainville, did they?” He was pleased by that.

Mom took the picture on the kitchen table and studied it so long that I said:

“Do you like him, Mom?”

“I have to see him first.”

“You’ll love him when you see him,” I told her, but I was disappointed with her and took the picture back into my room.

Everything looked beautiful to me. I went out to see if the wild flowers on the prairie were still in bloom. The grass wasn’t very green, but there were bright blue and yellow and pink patches. I went up on the rimrock and felt the sun and looked way off to the mountains. It was almost as though I told all the places I loved that I’d be back and bring Gil.

It had been a late spring. I helped plant the low field to wheat that week and I ran the harrow. It was so good to be out of a town and to wear only a shirt and a pair of jeans and sneakers.

“Better not let your young man see you like that,” Mom said.

“Why not?”

Mom shrugged. “He look to me like he want a girl dressed-up.”

“He’s not that way at all! He’ll have to see me in them.”

Monday afternoon I washed the windows. I wished we had curtains, but Mom didn’t like them. Her geraniums were in bloom by the sink and in the front room the windows were small and you didn’t seem to miss curtains so much. Dad let me take the truck to town and I bought stuff to cover his big chair that was through on the arms. I tried to find a soft green the color of the sage, but I could only get a deep blue-green that was the color of the wheat before it turns. Mom helped me make the slip cover and we got it done, but I’d rather run the tractor any day than sit at that old machine and treadle it. I waxed the linoleum rug and polished the brass strip that is nailed down around the edge. I brought a pale-green paper shade home from the ten-cent store and put it on the electric bulb in the center of the ceiling. I wished there were floor plugs so we could have a lamp.

Mom stood in the doorway and smiled. “You think he look at the house or you?”

It did seem silly. “I guess I just like to be doing things for him,” I said. Mom didn’t answer, so I looked over at her.

“You have love for him all right,” she said.

I brought back some white piqué from town and Mom made it into a dress for me. I didn’t want her to, I meant to make it myself; Mom is always out in the garden this time of year. She does all the work in it herself, but she is quicker than I am. The pattern had a red cross-stitch design to stamp around the skirt, but I wouldn’t bother with that till later.

“You don’t do the embroidery?” Mom asked.

“Not now. Maybe I will sometime,” I said. I was impatient for each day to be gone. I was at the post office before the mail was there each day. Bailey keeps the post office in the little building on the side of the elevator. The first day I was home I had the first letter from Gil. He wrote it on paper that had his family’s house number in little raised black letters like the pattern the printer sent for our high-school graduation announcements, the one we didn’t get because it was too expensive. Gil wrote:

“Dear Ellen,

“Believe it or not, I have been to see about a job! A friend of Father’s who is an architect in Chicago has promised me an opening as soon as I am out of the Army, so you are apt to live in Chicago when we are married, Mrs. Borden! How will you like that? But I’ll be seeing you a week from Monday and we can talk about all this. I’ll buy my ticket, as you said, to Clark City.”

My eyes skimmed over the words, just barely taking in the sense, hunting for other words. Then I found them and it was like coming to a water hole on the prairie.

“I have thought of you steadily since you left. Without you this place is as empty as the stadium. I had to go to the library to return the book I had out and I looked in our room over at your table by the window. I resented seeing someone else there, someone fat!

“Commencement was terrible, like hundreds of others. Mother lapped it up, of course, and I had to trail around all morning in a cap and gown. I spent the evening at the fraternity house and got a little plastered, so I stayed overnight. This morning the place was a mess with everyone packing and leaving. The others at least had to see about trains and going home. I had only to walk eight blocks and be there . . . very flat.

“I put the finishing touches to the sketch of you, but I am disappointed in it as I always am with anything I do. I shall try again when I am out there. I can see you as you were at the station. You were beautiful even in that terrible brown hat. You must not wear brown.

“I love you, Ellen,

“Gil.”

I sat out on the ramp at the elevator and read and reread it. Bailey’s tiger cat come over and brushed against me as I sat there. Some of the words seemed as clear and shining as a pool of water. Then I wished I hadn’t thought they were like a pool. Out here the shallow pools that in June have ducks on them are dried up by August and look like nothing but the bottom of a burned saucepan. I liked best his saying the place was empty without me, and his looking for me in the library, and his last sentence. I put the letter in the pocket of my jeans and started back home. Mathews from the office in town drove up to the elevator.

“Hi!” I called out.

“Well, hello,” he said. “How’s college?”

“Swell,” I told him, but I kept right on going. I didn’t want to stop to talk to anyone.

Walking up toward our house from the elevator you can only see the top of the chimney above the coulee and the tops of the trees that grow in the coulee. I’ve always loved the way it was tucked down in. That was Dad’s idea. He wanted to get out of the wind and he liked the way there was some green shade in there. But as I came up today I almost wished it stood out bigger. I wished it were painted. The barn is painted, but the house is just the color of the earth that wind and rain and sun make everything if you give them a chance. If Gil didn’t like my brown hat, maybe he wouldn’t like the gray-brown house. Then I put the idea away hurriedly.

“When we are married . . .” Gil said. I went into the house with the paper for Dad, feeling somehow unreal.

“Did you hear from Gil?” Dad asked.

“Yes,” I said. “He’s coming next Monday.” I loved just saying it.

I was up at six Monday morning. There was so much to do. Gil would have my room, and I had cleaned it till it shone. Mom had painted the floor while I was away. She had painted it a bright blue and calcimined the walls a peach color, so it was pretty bright, but the quilt Dad’s mother sent me once was a nice faded color. Mom says lots of things made in New England can’t stand Montana sun. I cleaned off the dresser and laid a clean towel on it and put clean towels on the closet door. Then I picked a bowl of wild flowers for the dresser, and because I had talked so much about the sage out here I picked some sage and put it in an old olive bottle on the window sill. The little icon still stood on its shelf on the wall.

I was going to sleep on the glider out on the porch. I loved sleeping out there anyway and Gil’s window would be just around the corner.

To think he’d be here tonight was such a joy I could hardly keep from singing. I stood in the doorway looking at the dining room. Dad had bought a fresh carton of cigarettes home for him and left it on the table. I took a couple of packages out and laid them on the two tables. I saw the tied-and-dyed plush scarf on the table as though I were seeing it for the first time. Somehow the long silky fringes seemed too gaudy to me today. I wondered if Mom would care if we had the table bare.

“Mom, where did we get this cover?” I asked.

Mom came to the door. She was fixing chickens so I could take a picnic lunch to eat halfway home.

“First fair we go to, I hit down a wooden Indian with a ball and get it for prize.”

I left it there. What if it was awfully bright? Gil wouldn’t notice it any more than I had until today.

While Gil was here we would eat in the front room. Mom wanted to have it all set, but I said I’d do it when I came. I had a big bowl of blue lupin in the center and the shades drawn halfway to keep the room cool. It was hot for June. Everybody wanted rain, except me. I wanted it to stay bright and clear for Gil.

While I was in school Dad had traded the pickup for a ton truck. Mom was proud of the truck. It would be fine for driving alongside the combine to load the wheat in and carry it to the elevator.

“Will you mind driving in for Gil in the truck?” Dad asked almost anxiously. I wondered why.

“Why, no,” I said.

“Do you suppose he’s driven in a truck before?” Dad said.

“I don’t know. He’ll like it anyway.”

I drove off at ten o’clock so I’d surely be there. Dad and Mom came out to watch me off. I could feel their love over me like warm sun.

“You look like a girl in love all right, doesn’t she, Anna?” Dad said, and Mom laughed.

I wore the gray linen dress Vera had picked out for me at school and I had my big hat in a bag in the truck to put on when I got out at the station, but I’d feel silly driving the truck with it on. The lunch and a thermos bottle of hot coffee and two bottles of coke were on the seat beside me. I knew just where we’d stop to eat by a creek where it was shady. I sang all the way to town. Nobody could hear me above the noise of the truck. Once in a while I’d tip the mirror so I could see how I looked.

And suddenly the train was there and Gil was coming down the train steps. In two weeks’ time I had forgotten how he looked.

“Oh, Gil!” I was so glad to see him I think I kissed him first.

“Ellen, it’s good to see you. Wait, I want to see to my bag.”

It was a beautiful bag, as soft and smooth-looking as a new saddle.

“Over here, Gil, in the truck.”

“Well, there’s certainly room!” Gil put it in back. I could see that he was worried for fear it would get scratched.

“I wish I’d brought a blanket to wrap it in,” I said. It hadn’t a scratch on it. Even as I looked at it, I was loving the initials G.H.B.—Gilbert Hinsley Borden.

“It looks as though it might get bracked in there. Maybe I better take it in front with me.”

I remember now how hot the seat was when we got back in. The lunch and the thermos bottle were on the seat between us.

“Can you drive this thing? It looks pretty big to me.”

I laughed. “It’s fun to drive a truck. Oh, Gil, I’m glad to see you.”

“I’m glad to see you. Minneapolis was dead as a doornail. By the way, Mother and Father sent their love to you.”

“Thank you. Give mine to them.”

“So this is Montana!” Gil said as we waited at the intersection of the main street for the bell to ring and the arm that said “GO” to bob up.

“Wait till you get beyond the town, that’s more . . . that’s my part.”

“We bumped over the approach to the bridge and my hat that I had put behind me came down. I had forgotten to wear it. Gil rescued it for me.

“Oh, Gil, I meant to wear it to meet you in. Did you notice I didn’t have a hat on?”

“You looked beautiful to me,” Gil said, and I loved the way his eyes looked at me. “You handle this truck with a professional hand.”

“I’ve been driving trucks since I was twelve, not on the highway, of course, but over the fields.”

“Did you get my letter?” Gil asked, though he knew I had because he had mine in answer.

“Yes. I loved it. I liked your looking in the library for me. Did you get mine?” I asked idiotically.

“Yes. Thanks for the piece of sage. I had never smelled any. It’s a little like catnip, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know catnip. When do you start training?”

“I passed the aviation exam all right, and they tell me to expect orders to report within two weeks, but don’t let’s talk about the Army. If we don’t get into the war, I’ll be discharged in twelve months and we can be married next June!”

We were driving over the uninteresting part just out of town, where the mountains are far away and the rimrock looks dry and baked in the sun, but today I blessed it with my eyes. “We’ll be married next June” sang in my head as I kept my eyes on the highway.

“That would be wonderful,” I said. “It seems a long time away now.”

We drove into the place I knew where willows and alders and aspens made a green shade along a brook. I wished again I’d brought a blanket. Gil’s suit was awfully light, but the earth was hard and gravelly there, not dirty.

“I’m not hungry. It’s only twelve-thirty—I could wait just as well,” Gil said.

“I know we could, but I thought it would be more fun. We’ve never had a picnic.”

“That’s so,” Gil said, but he didn’t sound enthusiastic. I was busy laying out the fried chicken on a linen napkin. I had thought he would love a picnic.

“This is in memory of Pop’s Place,” I said, handing him a bottle of coke that was a little warmish. He laughed at that and we had some of the feeling of Pop’s.

“I’d like to do a water color of you with that yellow-green shade on your face.”

“Those are aspens. I’ll sit under one at home for you.”

“I couldn’t get it. Just that light would take a Renoir or a Van Gogh. I just daub.”

“Why, that’s not so, Gil! You haven’t worked at it very long. Maybe you’ll be just as good some day.”

He shook his head. “Could be you’re in love!” And then he changed the subject as though it annoyed him. “Were you glad to get home?”

“Oh, yes, but it was so different, Gil, because I kept thinking of you all the time. I had no idea how it would change things—loving you, I mean.”

“It does that,” Gil said. “For me, too. I like it that way.”

I started to tell him how it changed things for me. That it made waking up in the morning and going to bed at night and the sun itself different, but Gil went on:

“You see, I’ve never . . . been swept along by any one drive . . .” Gil was trying so hard to make me understand I sat still with my eyes on the shallow creek water. “Most fellows are; it used to bother me. I used to think I’d never really fall in love, and then I saw you that day in the library. I had to know who you were. I had to know you. I watched you all those days almost afraid you’d spoil yourself, someway—oh, you know, powder your nose or have runs in your stockings or . . .” He laughed and I saw he had colored like a girl. “You probably think I’m crazy, but you were so lovely I wanted you that way. Every day, you were just the same. On a bright day, all the sun would seem to center on your head and on a dull day your hair would give it brightness and you’d look cool and gentle and quiet and yet so alive, Ellen.”

“Why, Gil!” His words sounded like poetry. He had never opened so much of his mind to me before.

“And then after I knew you, I found I was in love, really and deeply. Mother noticed the difference right away. Do you see, Ellen?”

I watched his long, straight fingers breaking a stick into little bits and laying them in a tiny heap. I was so happy I didn’t want to speak. Gil’s fingers left the little pile of sticks. I lifted my eyes and met his that are brown and sometimes sad. He drew me into his arms. The little shallow trickle of water under the thin shade of the willows seemed almost to stand still. I could see the sky mirrored in it. I looked at these things thinking I could come and look at them any time and hear Gil’s words.

“I don’t know why it’s so easy to talk to you, Ellen—things I couldn’t say to anyone else.” He laughed.

“That’s being in love,” I said.

“You know, do you?” Gil teased.

“Yes, I know,” I told him soberly, for it was the truth.

After a while I folded up the picnic things and we walked over to the truck. “I’m glad we stopped there,” Gil said, “so we could be alone for a little.”

“Yes” was all I said, but of course that was why I’d brought the lunch.

“Don’t you want me to drive?” Gil asked.

“Okay. It’s fun. You have more power under you than you have with a regular car.”

Gil drove so easily in the city. I had always liked to watch him and I’d admired the way he slides a car into a narrow parking place, but he wasn’t used to the truck and he looked so funny sitting up straight on the seat and frowning. We drove off with such a jerk that I laughed at him.

“Stop that!” he shouted at me over the roaring he made with the starter. “There! After all, I had to get the feel of it.”

“After all!” I mimicked him, but I loved seeing his hands on the steering wheel. I reached over and laid my hand on his knee and we drove that way into Gotham.

“That’s the elevator where the post office is,” I told him. “Where your letters come.”

I waved to Mr. Peterson on the store steps and I saw him call something in to his wife. Everybody in Gotham would know by tonight that I was seen in the truck with a stranger driving me. I wondered how soon the Bardich girls would make some excuse to come over.

“How far are you from Gotham?” Gil asked.

“Only a mile by the road. We’re just in the next coulee.”

“Coulee?” Gil didn’t know even the names of things out here.

“Kind of a gully, a cut in the land. In spring a little creek runs along the floor of the coulee, that’s why there are trees there. When Dad came out from Vermont he hated the wind, so he built his house in the coulee. There, Gil! There’s where we turn.” I’ve always loved having the road to our ranch turn toward the mountains.

Across the bright green of a field of winter wheat you could just see the chimney and a piece of gray roof that was our house.

“Where? What are you looking at?”

“Our house—turn right by this post. The road dips, you better shift.” Gil shifted with such a grating I knew the folks would hear it. I felt the dip in the road happily all through me, as you do a place you know. “Drive on to the barn; we’ll put the truck in later.”

Dad came out to meet us. He was dressed in his town suit for Gil. I introduced them and we walked back to the house.

“Where’s Mom?” I had expected her to come to the door.

“She’s right there,” Dad said. He was busy talking to Gil. “Well, if this is your first trip West you’ll find you have to revise a good many of your preconceived ideas. I know when I came out here . . .” Did Dad always use such big words?

I went in the house ahead of them. Mom was in a clean print dress. “Come and meet him, Mom,” I said.

Dad had taken Gil around to the front door that opened right into the front room. We never used it. The stoop was sort of high and the walk led up to the kitchen door.

There seemed to be wide spaces between us: Dad and Gil coming in the front door, Mom not quite in the doorway from the kitchen, I between. “Mom, this is Gil.”

Gil came over to her and bowed in that easy graceful way he has. Mom shook hands with him, not smiling, her eyes looking so steadily at him.

“Pleased to meet you,” she said heavily. I wished she would smile.

“We had a delicious luncheon,” Gil said. “And Ellen let me drive the truck home. You know, I have always wanted to drive a truck since I was a little boy.”

“Trucks they make now is easy to drive,” Mom said.

“Sit down over here,” Dad urged. “Have a cigarette?” I wanted to run and get an ash tray or matches, but I knew they were already there on the plush scarf. Gil looked hesitatingly at Mom still standing in the doorway, then he sat down in the chair with the new slip cover.

“Yeléna, you sit down and visit,” Mom said.

“You come too, Mom. It isn’t time to get dinner.” I looked at my watch. It was only four. Mom sat on the straight chair by the door to the kitchen, I sat on the couch with Dad.

“The best time of year here is really fall,” Dad was saying.

“Oh, I love spring, too. I’m glad you came in June, Gil. Next time you’ll come in October. Look at these. I picked them this morning.” I brought him the bowl of shooting stars and harebells and crocuses.

“Do they grow in your garden?” Gil asked.

Even Mom smiled, and I laughed at him. “Oh, no, they grow wild right out on the prairie. I should have shown you some on the way out. We were so busy talking I forgot. Look, Gil, the crocuses make me think of your mother the first time I met her, all in kind of lavender-gray.”

“I see what you mean,” Gil said. But I wished I hadn’t said that. Mrs. Borden was different from Mom.

“I hear the people in your part of the country are talking war harder than we are here,” Dad was saying as though he were talking to Bailey at the elevator.

“Well,” Gil answered, “I suppose that’s natural. The farther east you go, the closer people feel to Europe.”

“I was younger than you, I guess, almost twenty, when I threw everything over and enlisted. Three months in Camp Devens . . .”

I was too excited to listen. I leaned over and smelled the sage I had put in a pitcher on the table at the end of the couch. Before dinner I wanted to take Gil out around the barn and up on the rimrock.

“. . . In the end I sailed with a Michigan regiment. Well, sir, we weren’t in the harbor at Liverpool more than twenty-four hours when we got orders to sail for Russia. Some folks think of hell as a fiery furnace, but I’ll tell you my idea of hell is a frozen God-forsaken village in Russia.”

I glanced over at Mom. She hadn’t said a word. Her face was still; all the expression was hidden. Her eyes were on Gil. I wished she would laugh, so Gil could hear her.

“You wouldn’t dare call the village where Mom lived that, would you, Dad?” I said, looking at Mom.

“That was the one I meant,” Dad said. “Even your mother thinks that, don’t you, Anna?”

“Winter is cold most places,” Mom said, without laughing.

Dad shook his head. “Not like that.”

I was afraid Dad was going to tell Gil all about Russia, then.

“I want to show Gil around a little,” I said. I tried not to see Dad’s disappointed expression. “I’ll be back in time to set the table, Mom.”

As we went through the kitchen the smell of the kettle of borsch was fragrant and warm. “That’s Mom’s famous Russian soup, Gil. Have you ever had borsch?” I had asked Mom to make it.

“No, I can’t say that I have. I’ve been to a smörgasbord,” he said.

“It’s very special. Dad doesn’t admit that he likes it, because they don’t make it in Vermont, but he does.”

We went out around the house. I wished the asters were in bloom against the gray clapboards.

“You don’t have much view with the hill so close, do you?” Gil said.

“No, not from the house, but I always run up here. See, I have a regular path up the side. Dad calls it my game trail. How’s that, Gil?” We stood on the top. “There’s no end to the sky up here, and see the mountains; that faint blue line over there, that’s the Main Range of the Rockies.”

Gil shaded his eyes. “‘Sister Anne, Sister Anne, what do you see?’”

I had to laugh. “‘Nothing but the dust blowing and the green grass growing,’” I quoted back from Bluebeard.

“Mother wouldn’t read me the story of Bluebeard because she thought it was so hideous, so when I found it myself I went all out for it.” Gil laughed.

“It was in a fairy book my aunt sent me from Vermont,” I said. “See, there are crocuses, Gil.” They were growing in the grass not more than a foot from us. “There should be cactus plants in bloom.” Then I found one. It was a pale amber and looked as though it were made of plastic. The blossom was as soft and smooth as the leaves of the cactus are prickly. “You have to get down close to see it.”

“I never saw a cactus growing before, either,” Gil said, but I felt he was being polite and wasn’t really interested.

I looked around the soft grass-covered hill at the yucca plants and the patch of shooting stars with a queer lost feeling, like you have in an exam when you can’t think of the answers. What was it I had meant to show Gil? I couldn’t think now. An empty silence spread between us.

Gil said: “How did your father happen to marry your mother—I mean, when she spoke Russian and he spoke English I should think it would have been so difficult.” But I saw that wasn’t what he meant. He meant how had Dad ever happened to marry Mom. I was suddenly hurt and a little angry.

“Why, he fell in love with her, I suppose,” I said, “and Mom learned English very fast.”

“Your father, though, must have had such a different kind of background.”

“Mother is always quiet with strangers. You have to know her awhile. She seems sober, but you should hear her laugh. And she loves fun and music. . . . She loves music the way you do, Gil.” All the time inside I was crying, “Please like her, Gil. Please see her as she really is.”

We sat there looking down on the roof of the house, not off toward the mountains at all. The screen door banged and Mom came out. We saw her walk across to the barn with a pail. She looked big and heavy except for her head and shoulders and the easy way she walked. I couldn’t say anything at all. I had meant to tell Gil how I always ran up here whenever anything exciting or sad happened, but I didn’t. I was afraid it might sound childish.

“Well, we better go back down,” I said finally. I ran down the path and it gave me the feeling it always does of plunging headfirst. “I dare you to run,” I said, trying to feel natural.

“Not I, Mrs. Bluebeard. I value my life.”

Dad and Gil sat out on the glider on the porch while we got dinner. I set the table in the front room. The cloth was shining white but it wasn’t very thick. I took a sheet from the bureau drawer in Mom’s room and laid it underneath for a pad. For the first time in my life I noticed how thick the plates and cups were; that they didn’t match. Only the dozen spoons that Dad’s mother had willed me were sterling. Then I was ashamed of thinking of things like that when Gil was here. The food would be so good, I told myself, no one would think of the table.

We sat at the table. Dad and Gil were talking about New England. Mom was silent. Was she always as quiet as this? The soup was hot and red.

“This is delicious, Mrs. Webb,” Gil said. I wondered if he would ever call Mom Mother easily.

I took out the soup dishes and brought hot plates to put in front of Dad. We had steak from our own beef. Mr. Hakkula came over to butcher for us, but Mom did as much as any man.

“I’ll tell you one thing, if the United States sends our boys over to Europe again, when they come back they’re going to want a changed world and they’re going to insist on getting it. We came back from the last war and accepted things as they were. That’s why we’re having another war.”

Dad looked younger when he was talking, even though his voice sounded a little oracular. I saw how Mom was watching him. Did Gil notice how big and dark her eyes were? I couldn’t keep my mind on what Dad was saying. I was aware of our hands on the white cloth—of Mom’s that were large and red and checked with black. I saw the broken nail on Mom’s finger as she cut her steak. Mom’s hands looked kind, but perhaps that was because I knew them putting on compresses for Dad, doing things for me. Dad’s were brown against the white cloth; they looked tired. I never noticed before that hands could look tired. I knew Gil’s hands better than any of our hands. I loved again their shapeliness, the wrists that were as slender as mine. I looked at my own hands. They were large like Mom’s and already roughened from the little work I had done outdoors, but I always forget to wear gloves and I don’t like the feeling of them anyway. Our hands, all moving, seemed to say things to each other. Gil’s hands didn’t seem to belong with ours. I put that thought away quickly as I got up to take off the dishes.

Once Mom held up her hand to make Dad and Gil stop talking. “There comes the rain; that’s good.”

“For the wheat,” I explained to Gil.

“You go on, now. I do the dishes,” Mom said when we were through. I hesitated. Dad and Gil could talk in the front room while I helped Mom, but I felt I’d been separated from him all during the meal. I wanted to be alone with him.

“Thank you, Mom,” I said. “We’ll take a little walk.”

We couldn’t walk far. It didn’t take much rain to stir the gumbo to a slick, slippery paste. I said as I would to any boy from school:

“Let’s sit in the truck awhile.”

Gil laughed. “That’s an idea!”

It was snug in there with the rain on the cab roof; the seat was as comfortable as any in the house. “This is like Pop’s Place,” I said.

“Quite. Do you want to drive into town?”

“Oh, no, Gil, not tonight; you just got here.”

“Okay.”

But Gil was quiet so long that I said, “What are you thinking, Gil?”

“Nothing, really. What were you thinking?”

“Nothing much, I guess. I . . . Gil, I love your being here.”

“It’s nice. It’s different from the way I imagined a ranch would be.”

“You’ve seen too many ranches in movies. This is a dry-land wheat ranch.”

“I should think people would go stark, raving crazy out here in winter,” Gil said.

“Why?”

“Well, there’s nothing to do, except the work, I suppose. You’re so far away and dependent on each other. Take your mother and father; I would think they’d have been talked out years ago.”

“They’re pretty busy, of course,” I said.

“But in winter.”

I had never thought about it before. “There’s work to do in winter, too.”

“It makes you think of some novel or play you’ve read, something Russian, Gorky for instance.” Then he stopped and I knew he had just remembered that Mom was Russian.

Dad came to the kitchen door and switched on the yard light. It was a big light mounted on a tall pole so it flooded the house and the barn. Mom loved it. She felt it made the place so safe. From the highway you could see an aura of light spreading up above the shoulder of the coulee. People said, “That’s Webb’s ranch.”

Gil and I sat in the truck and looked at the house and the shed and the barn. It looked bare in the electric light. Maybe it was bare; I had never thought of it before. But I tried to be funny.

“And there’s the stage set for Act I of a Russian play,” I said.

Gil was looking at it. “How do people stay in love with each other after years alone in these places? I should think they’d end by hating each other.”

“Why should they, Gil?”

“They shouldn’t, but . . .”

“Well, look at Mom and Dad,” I said.

“That’s right,” Gil said. He leaned over and kissed me, but there was something kind of sad about it, as though he were sorry he had said anything.

I loved the rain when I lay on the glider on the porch. The porch was so narrow I only had to reach my fingers out a little way to feel the drops. I lay still so the glider wouldn’t bump against the house and disturb Gil. I had turned down the bed for him the way I had seen the beds turned down at his mother’s house. I wished the electric-light bulb didn’t shine so hard on the bright peach walls and blue floor.

I was so wide-awake I couldn’t go to sleep. Gil must be too. Somehow, I wasn’t satisfied with the day.

“Gil!” I called softly. Then I whistled. He whistled back. “How’re you doing?” I called.

“Just fine. Good night.”

“Good night.” I shucked deeper under my blanket, ashamed that I wished he had come out to sit with me on the swing.