11

THEN began the days of heat; the wheat grew before our eyes. I wished Gil could see the moving forest that hid the bareness of the earth now. There was a sense of order that I liked about the wide strips of green beside the wide strips of fallow ground. It made me feel as though my life this last year had been without any pattern.

It was hard to get help on the ranch. Dad and Mom and I did the haying. We worked from sunup till eight or nine at night, as long as the sky stayed light. We cooked dinner after that and didn’t get through till nearly eleven. There was no time to think, hardly to talk. We fell into bed and were asleep.

One night, with only two days’ haying left, I woke, aware of a soft shuffling noise. I raised on one elbow. The sound came through the screen door. Then I lay back. I had heard that sound since I was a child. Dad was walking up and down because of the pain in his leg.

There was nothing I could do to help, so I lay still with a hopeless feeling. I knew Mom was awake, too. I stared across the sweet warm dark to the shoulder of the rimrock. I had learned as a child that if you stared at something long enough, it made something you didn’t want to be seem not to be.

Dad groaned softly as though he were trying to stifle it, and the selfish hypnotism I had been practicing broke completely. Dad was out on the couch now.

I heard Mom in the kitchen. The light glared across the porch. Then it was not so bright. Mom had pinned a newspaper around the bulb like a shade. I knew without seeing her how Mom would look with her hair in a braid down her back and her crinkle-crepe nightgown hanging shapeless and clean. She struck a match and I knew she was lighting the two-burner oil stove we used in summer. Then all my senses seemed to wait for the pungent smell of the flaxseed mash she was boiling up for a poultice. I knew that scent so well. Sometimes the hot mash we made for the baby chicks smelled a little like it.

I heard Mom going into the other room. The light burst from the front window and laid a path across the dry mud of the road.

“Turn off the light, Anna. There’s enough light from the kitchen.” Dad’s voice was irritable and tired.

“Too hot, Ben?” Mom’s voice was low and without any tiredness, but it didn’t sound sympathetic. Dad just murmured, then he let out his breath in a little sigh. It was so hot I pushed my cover back. How could Dad stand a hot pack against his skin on a night like this?

I thought of the fields where we had worked all day, stretching out under the gentle covering dark, and tried to think of this spot of pain here. I must have fallen asleep. I heard Dad say:

“That’s enough, Anna.” There was a long silence. Mom was already back in the kitchen when Dad said: “Thank you. You’ll be tired tomorrow.” I thought it sounded grudging.

“Come to bed now,” Mom said.

“It’s cooler here. Maybe I’ll read awhile.”

But Dad didn’t read. The house was dark and still. I could feel all our breathing and our wakefulness, and the fields that began so close to the house, breathing, growing, awake, too. There was too much life. It was like a pain to think of it; life in the wheat that could be dried out and pinched off by drought, or beaten out suddenly by hail; life in us that could suffer and ache and want. I tried to think of something still and not living. I felt better when I thought of the rimrock that was gray and too hard and unchanging for life, then I must have fallen asleep again.

Mom woke me at five. She was already dressed in overalls and an old shirt of Dad’s.

“We let your father sleep,” she whispered. “He was awake most the night. I been over by Bardiches and get Tony to help today. It’ll make your father rest up.”

I got into my jeans and shirt and shoes and washed outside the kitchen. Mom made tea for herself, but I had milk and fruit and bread. We didn’t talk lest we wake Dad, but I felt good. I could just dimly remember last night when I had tried to think of something without life. This morning seemed separated from last night by the width of a whole valley.

Once, Mom knocked a spoon off the table and I pointed my finger at her and we both laughed noiselessly like children at school. Mom tied a clean towel over her head and motioned me to come outside. There was still a pink freshness over everything.

“I go get Tony started. You stay up. I don’t like your father to wake up alone. If shrapnel hurt bad you put poultice on. This afternoon we need you, too.”

I wanted to work in the field. I wanted to be rid of the house, but I nodded. I tiptoed in and pulled the seldom-used shades in the front room. I felt shy looking at Dad. Mom had thrown a sheet over him and the white sheet made his face and neck look sallow and tired. But he was good-looking in spite of the beard on his face. How awful that he had ever had to grow old—well, forty anyway. Since I had known how he and Mom had come to marry I hadn’t quite looked at him. Now I stood there, feeling half-guilty, thinking how he must have been as a young soldier; he and Mom in love once. It’s queer that being young yourself and in love doesn’t make it easy to see how it was for your own mother and father; but in this they seemed stranger to me than people I hardly knew. I was afraid my thoughts and my looking at him would waken Dad, so I went back to the kitchen.

When he woke he asked right away where Mom was. I told him she had Tony Bardich working and that seemed to make him feel better. He limped outside and washed and I could see how it hurt him to move. I fixed him his breakfast and asked him if I could put the compress on again.

“Oh, not for a while, but the old Adam surely did try to get out last night!” It was what he used to tell me when I was little, about the tiny sharp pieces of shrapnel that worked their way up to the skin from time to time, festering and hurting until they finally came out. He was too sick in Russia for the doctors to try to get them all out and all these years he had carried them.

“I wanted to finish that southwest piece today. With two of them working they won’t,” Dad said.

“After I get your lunch made I’m going down and help,” I said.

Dad nodded and lay back against the pillow with pain. I washed the dishes and cut vegetables into the soup kettle and swept out the kitchen. Then I went in to tell him I would go and help with the haying now. I leaned over the back of the chair.

“Feeling any better, Dad?”

He was looking over yesterday’s paper again.

“Yes, thank you, Ellen.” He said it differently from the half-grunt he had managed in the night. “Just reading about the war. We’ll be in it by next spring, all right. We’re working up to it just like last time.”

I was glad Dad felt enough better to talk, but I wasn’t much interested at first. Then I remembered how he had said to Mom that night: “If there hadn’t been a war, we wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t be a physical wreck.” My mind felt stealthy and sharp.

“I wouldn’t think you could forgive the last war for . . . for this, Dad?”

“Why not? You have to take a chance. Other men had lots worse things than this.” Dad’s voice was mild and unresentful.

“Do you wish you had never been a soldier, Dad? You would be back in Vermont, wouldn’t you?”

Dad lit a cigarette. “Yes, I presume I’d be still in the East; probably be teaching somewheres. There are things I wouldn’t have missed, though.”

I felt a little ashamed, but I asked anyway. “What things, Dad?”

“Oh, a lot of things, Ellen. It was a pretty big thrill sailing for Europe when I was nineteen, feeling the world was counting on me. I felt sorry for the boys back in Plainville whose parents wouldn’t let them go. You had to have your parents’ consent if you were that young.

“Oh, it wasn’t all patriotism, I don’t suppose. My family was very strict. When I was home I couldn’t miss church or stay out with a girl after eleven o’clock or drink or smoke. I liked being free and on my own. Some people wouldn’t think of the Army as letting you be very free, but I did.

“And I had a good time with the other men in my company, fellows I would never have known in Plainville. There was a fellow named Josef Podoroski, a Polack from Hamtramck, Michigan. He’d worked since he was fourteen in a factory. I wouldn’t ever have met him if it hadn’t been for the Army. I never liked any man so well.”

“Where is he now, Dad?”

“He was killed in that fracas Armistice Day when I got this bird shot in me.”

“Oh,” I said softly. I wanted him to go on. Then, because I wanted to get back to Mom, I said, “Did Mom know him too?”

“No. They took him on a sled to Seletskoe. It was forty degrees below zero, and he died on the way. On our way out to Montana your mother and I stopped in Detroit and hunted up his family. They were poor Polish people, living in a tenement. Anna could talk some Polish, but I couldn’t understand much of what they said. Anna told them he was my best friend. They wanted to give me everything they had.”

“Do you wish you were living back in your old home, Dad?”

“Oh, sometimes, when I don’t feel good, I’d like to be back in my own room. It was always cool there in summer because of the maple trees.”

I felt sorry for Dad because the sun was burning down full-force now on the low roof of the house. In spite of the shades being drawn the front room was hot. There wouldn’t be any coolness till late tonight. Suddenly, I wished we weren’t out here on a dry-land wheat ranch under the burning sun. I wished we were in Vermont and that Dad was a teacher and that I had never worn jeans in my life. When Gil came to see me Mom would have served tea out on a green lawn. I went over to the couch and sat down beside Dad. I couldn’t think of anything to say. I looked down at the white, thin places in the knees of my jeans.

“Well, it was a great experience, even if I paid for it. A third of the men in our company lost their lives. I think I would have, too, except for your mother.”

“You didn’t know Mom very long before you were married, did you, Dad?” I asked him as I had asked Mom.

“No,” Dad said, “I didn’t. Things are different in wartime, though, especially over in Europe.”

“I don’t think it matters how long if you love a person, do you?” I couldn’t look at Dad, but I had to say it. Maybe it was the heat and Dad being sick and the way I felt about Gil . . . everything pressed on me. I wanted to force Dad into a corner and say: “I know you didn’t love Mom; Gil felt you didn’t love each other. That’s why I lost him; because of that and this naked little ranch and the way we live. You could have been like Gil’s father, but you came out here and tried to be like a peasant, too. You never read anything but the newspaper and a magazine or two; you can only talk about the last war or the weather or the wheat!” The words crowded at my mind to be said. “I don’t blame Mom as much as I blame you,” I would like to have told him.

Dad put his arm around me and I writhed inside, wanting to get away.

“Ellen, stop thinking about Gil. He isn’t worth worrying over. You don’t want to let him ruin your life.”

I moved away from the couch. “He isn’t ruining my life,” I said, and my voice broke shamefully. If I had known how to get out of that room I would have run. I couldn’t stand to have him pitying me. He had no right! The room was so tight and still. I had to say something.

“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.”

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.