10

ALL the families came to the Christmas exercises, even to the three-weeks-old baby in the Thorson family. When the Donaldsons came in there was a little stir all over the schoolroom.

I had drawn the shades and lighted two tall red candles on my desk. There was a candle burning in each window.

We began with a Christmas carol. Mary sang the second verse alone and we all hummed the chorus. Then came our pageant of “The News of the Christ Child’s Birth” coming to a single shepherd boy off alone with his flock. Francis La Mere was the young shepherd, and the corner of the front of the room with my desk moved out of the way was the hill where he watched his sheep. Warren had brought two sheep over in the Pony Express and Francis kept a firm grip on them. One of the sheep bleated and the audience laughed and clapped.

The young shepherd wanted so to follow the star, but he couldn’t leave his sheep because of wolves. Nels made the sound of a wolf from outside the window. So the angels appeared unto the boy and sang carols. Mike kept a flashlight trained on them from behind for a halo. One of the angels guarded the flock while the other took the boy to the stable where Mary and the Baby were. The angel took the sheep out at this point and our audience was hilarious when one sheep balked and had to be pushed down the aisle.

Francis walked after the angel with all the awe and excitement I could ask for. When we were practicing this part Francis said:

“I know, Miss Webb, you mean to walk like I was out hunting and maybe there’s an elk over there?”

Mary Cassidy, as Mary, held her own five-months-old sister in her arms and Raymond as Joseph stood by them. The young shepherd had no gift, so he left his crook, which he had made himself out of aspen wood. Then he went happily back to his flock.

Leslie announced the beginning and the end of the pageant. A baby cried and some child coughed croupily so the last words were drowned out, but everyone clapped.

As Raymond raised the shades and blew out the candles at the end, the late winter sun struck in across the room in a blaze of brightness. The parents looked at the papers we had hung along the wall, spelling papers and writing exercises and drawings. I went over to speak to the Donaldsons.

“It was good of you to come,” I said.

“I guess it’s still our school. We paid our school tax,” Mrs. Donaldson sniffed.

“Don’t, Minnie,” Mr. Donaldson murmured, stooping to put on her galoshes.

“We saw you in town two nights after Robert’s death, Miss Webb. We were in the front window of the undertaker’s parlor when you went by with Mr. Harper.”

I felt my face redden. “I’m sorry I didn’t see you,” I said stupidly, but my mouth tasted as bitter as though I had been chewing alder bark.

“It looks warmer, don’t it?” Mrs. Thorson exclaimed, and I was grateful to her.

“I wouldn’t trust it yet,” Mr. Thorson said with a big laugh. He was a solid, red-faced man with bright-blue eyes.

“How old are you, Miss Webb? I don’t suppose you’re at an age yet where you’re touchy about it!”

“I’m over twenty,” I said in the midst of the laughter, and I could see Warren Harper smiling at me across the room.

“Well, you’re all right, young lady. You can have this school another ten years as far as I’m concerned,” Mr. Thorson assured me. And Mrs. Cassidy squeezed my arm and told me I was better than last year’s teacher. And then they were all leaving at once.

“Merry Christmas, Miss Webb!” the La Mere boys called out.

“Merry Christmas!” I must have called a dozen times. Mr. La Mere had fastened sleighbells on his old jalopy and they made a gay jingle through the late winter afternoon, as gay as the bells on the troikas Mom used to tell about, I thought.

I set the little Christmas tree out in the snow and swept out the litter of popcorn and paper and greens. I would be away ten days. I took a knife and scraped off the candle wax that had dropped on the window sills and tore December off the calendar. My suitcase was already packed. When I heard Warren’s car, I locked the door and went out to meet him.

“You did well by Christmas,” he said.

“Thank you. The children loved it, didn’t they?”

“And the parents.”

“I keep forgetting that you went to school here. Did you like it?”

“Oh, yes. That was all I knew. We had the sister of a rancher who lived where Thorsons do now for a teacher. She taught us spelling and reading and arithmetic all right, but I think she was over her depth in geography. The summer before I was married I got a job on a boat going to South America, and I kept thinking of the map in my first geography book here. I thought the world was my apple in those days. I wasn’t going to stop till I had been all over the world. I got stymied pretty easy, didn’t I? Maybe the war’ll give me another chance in geography!”

“Tell me something about South America,” I said quickly. I liked to hear him talk when he was interested in a thing. We rode along at seven below zero with the heater on and he told about how awful the heat was when he was unloading fruit in the harbor at Rio. He knew a little Spanish and we tried talking together. All of a sudden, he didn’t finish his sentence.

“Ellen Webb, do you know I love you?”

“Oh, please don’t,” I said. “I’m through thinking about love. It took me all summer and all this fall to stop thinking about Gil. I like feeling alone in myself. I feel free.”

“You can’t live on that basis all your life.”

“I don’t know—maybe I can. I know I can live alone. I’ve tried it this winter.”

“What about when you’re older?”

“I still think I could manage. I’ve seen Mom and Dad. I’m sure they don’t love each other, but they have to go on as they are.”

“That doesn’t mean that you and I couldn’t be different.”

“Don’t, Warren, please!” I didn’t mean to speak so sharply but his saying “you and I” made me uncomfortable. I didn’t want anyone too close to me again.

There were few cars on the road and the ranches were far apart. Here and there a lonely spot of light gleamed out of the dusk to show where a house stood. I wondered a little hopelessly if there were happiness back of those lights or just lives like Warren’s or mine or Mom’s or Dad’s. I said something like that to Warren; he was easy to tell half-thoughts to.

“Maybe a country settled by homesteads is bound to be made of expectation and disappointment,” he said. “So much hope to begin with settling down into so much resignation. Look at that!”

The headlights shone on a solitary deserted building at a crossroad, with broken windows covered with old handbills. “Gold Block” was cut in stone above the entrance, as though it had once been meant for the center of a city.

“Somebody had a big idea once!” Warren said.

I tried to think of threshing time when the country looked so good and everyone felt strong and full of hope, but now the wheat was deep under the snow and nobody knew how it would turn out. The snow in the lights from the car was no longer soft and fresh and white, it was frozen into hard gray banks.

Our yard light was on when we turned off the highway.

“You’re all lit up like a church,” Warren said.

“Yes, Mom loves a lot of light.” I couldn’t help thinking what a sturdy light it was in the darkness of the prairie, like Mom. As we drove into the yard I saw Mom looking out the window. Then she opened the door and stood there, thick and plain and so good to see.

“Yeléna!” she called.

“Hi, Mom! Come in, won’t you?” I said to Warren.

“I was going to drive over for you tomorrow. Your dad, he is gone back to his home.” Mom jerked her head backward.

“To Vermont! When did he go?”

“You don’t get his letter? Sure, he go last Monday. You have some coffee, Mr. Harper?”

“Thank you. That would taste good.” I could see how he liked Mom.

“Yeléna, you get the cups and some cake in the box. We go in other room.” But Mom asked it rather than said it.

“It’s fine here,” Warren said. So we sat around the table in the kitchen. Mom and Warren talked about the war and the prospects for next year. He told her how good the cake was and Mom cut him another slice.

“It’s good with coffee. You like more coffee, too?”

He said he would and Mom got up to pour it and turned her back on us as though she knew we would want to talk by ourselves. There was something in the way she smiled and was so ready to cut more cake that made me uncomfortable, as though I had done well to have somebody to see me home again—like any peasant mother with a daughter on her hands to marry. I wished Dad were home.

“When will Dad be back, Mom?”

Mom shrugged. “He get letter from his sister one day, next day he make up his mind to go.” Mom didn’t like to talk of family affairs before Warren. And then she added, as though it were forced out of her, “It cost lots of money to go back there.” She passed Warren the coffee. “You a rancher, too, Mr. Harper?” Mom looked at him with her bright, inquisitive eyes.

Warren laughed. “At heart. But I’ve been away a long time.”

Mom frowned and waited. I could almost follow her mind with my own. She couldn’t understand why anyone would want to leave here, I thought scornfully.

“It seems good to be back here,” Warren said.

“Sure,” Mom said.

“I was telling Ellen that I admire anyone who raises wheat. That takes lots of . . .”

“Work,” Mom said with unusual quickness.

“Yes, and faith, too.” Warren could see faith wasn’t a word Mom used familiarly, at least not about ranching. I could see him hunting for a better word. “You have to have plenty of patience,” he added.

Mom nodded. “We get thirty-six bushel a acre year before last,” she boasted.

Warren whistled. “That was all right! Ellen said something about bringing my little boy over here sometime. I hope you’ll let him come.”

“Your little boy? Sure,” Mom said. “I like children. You bring him this spring when we got new baby chicks. Poor boy, his mother dead long time?” Mom asked too curiously, too obviously, I thought.

“Over two years,” Warren said. Then he stood up to go.

“He’s good-looking young man,” was Mom’s comment when I came back into the house.

“Not bad,” I said. “He’s going into the Army.”

Mom nodded, her eyes secret with her thoughts. “He like you. He drive way down here just to bring you, eighty-five miles.” Mom said it so triumphantly it irritated me.

“He wanted something to do, that’s all. Mom, what made Dad decide to go way back to Vermont?”

Mom shrugged and poured a little coffee into her saucer. “He want to see that sister. Once before he went off, but he don’t go all the way! He come back when he get to North Dakota.” Her face took on that triumphant, almost sly, look that it could get.

“When, Mom? I didn’t know. I thought the only time he went back to Vermont was when I was eight and his mother died.”

Mom shook her head. “There was other time when we was married, maybe three years. We went for walk one Sunday, way over past Bardiches’. Ben carry you. He was quiet-like—you know? That was queer for him. He kep’ walking. I think maybe you get heavy and I say turn back, but he kep’ on. I ask him what was wrong.

“After while, he say he going to take trip back home. We had good crop that year an’ some money in bank. We plan to buy pair horses and a new harrow with that money, but I say, ‘Sure, you go ahead, Ben. Why don’t you go tomorrow?’

“So he go. Next night after that I was calcimining the whole house. Everything piled in the kitchen an’ me in old dress, bare legs, and my head tied up in flour sack, when I hear someone step on porch. The door open an’ in walk Ben.

“‘I caught train back from Fargo, Anna,’ he say.

“I say, ‘Where you goin’ to sleep tonight, Ben? You ain’t got any bed.’ I show him how I had it piled up with things.

“‘Where you going to sleep?’ he say.

“‘Oh, I sleep anywhere when I get done.’

“‘I can sleep where you can,’ he say.”

Mom laughed telling me. Her eyes were bright and soft with fun.

“But this time I guess he go all the way.”

I traced the squares on the oilcloth cover of the table. My throat ached. I could see how it must have been. Dad must have started out because he was homesick, starved for things and ways he was used to, and then he must have felt he shouldn’t do it and turned back home. It made Dad seem younger to think of him wanting something so much. Mom thought Dad had turned around and come back because of her, because he wanted to be with her. She couldn’t understand that it must have been his own hard sense of duty, making him feel he shouldn’t take the money and go away, that made him turn around. It must have been the same sense of duty that made him marry Mom and take her back to his home and stay with her even after he knew she had fooled him. I knew I shouldn’t feel that way about my mother, but I couldn’t help it.

“This will be first Christmas without Ben,” Mom said, and suddenly I was filled with pity for her. She had tied Dad to her by her rights, by his sense of duty. I thought a little proudly that I hadn’t said even one little word to hold Gil.

“I got forty-five turkeys to dress to take into town tomorrow, three more than Thanksgiving. I better get at ‘em.”

Every year except last year I had helped Mom fix the turkeys for town. Mom’s regular customers wrote her every year. Mom raised a special duck-breasted kind that had more white breast meat than others. People had them quick-frozen and shipped them East, they were so good. Mom charged three cents more a pound for dressing them ready to stuff and roast. She always felt she put one over on people charging for that, but she said, “Town women are that lazy an’ they faint if they see blood.” Mom never counted her own labor as costing anything, so the extra cents were so much pure profit.

I used to catch the turkeys for her, with a long wire bent into a hook at the end. I could hook the wire around the turkey’s leg so swiftly he didn’t have time to get away, but he made such a squawking you could hear him out to the highway. Mom bled them. I only held them for her, but I helped pick them afterwards out in the shed. Sometimes my fingers would be so cold out there I’d bury them in the soft feathers of the turkey’s breast or under the wings where the body heat of the turkey still felt burning-hot. We would fill big cartons with the feathers by the time we were through.

Many a time I have gone to bed with Mom still hard at work fixing turkeys and waked up hours later and found her still working. She wouldn’t let Dad help, but he never went to bed until she was through, even if she worked till two or three in the morning. He would sit in the next room and read and call out from time to time that she mustn’t do this another year.

“You get yourself something to eat and then you can help,” Mom said now.

There were soup and fresh bread Mom had made, and her own butter. After all these years, Mom still made her bread in round loaves. There was nothing so good. I was glad of this vacation, I thought, as I sat there eating. I missed Dad, though. Coming home was cut in half to find him away. I said so to Mom.

“He took idea to go. When he get all that money borrowed it go to his head. Next year when we don’t have no crop he’ll think a little,” Mom said darkly, pulling out a mess of bright-colored entrails from the big carcass in front of her. I watched as though I hadn’t seen all this a dozen times before.

“But we will have, Mom. Look at all the snow we’ve had already this year, and we put in more winter wheat this time!”

Mom shrugged. “We see.”

I don’t think I realized until that night how fast and deft Mom’s fingers were. They seemed to know every hollow of the turkey’s carcass. She would hold it up to the light and peer in and nod when she was through. When she laid the finished turkeys in a row on the table, hens in one line, toms in another, they were beautifully clean, the powerful legs crossed and tied, the big wings folded underneath, a string of red uncooked cranberries around each neck. Dad laughed at her for that, but I believe her customers liked it. She had her necklaces all strung and ready in a bag. Mom was systematic without thinking about it. I picked up one cranberry ring, half-expecting Mom to tell me to leave it alone as she always used to, but instead she said:

“Cranberries are awful dear this year!”

It was after two o’clock when we had the tags with the weight marked on them tied to each turkey. We piled the turkeys carefully in two big clothes baskets and a tin tub and set them out in the shed to keep cool. Mom scoured the table and the sink board and I did up the pans we had used. Then we sat down and had some coffee and another slice of bread. When we were through, Mom opened the kitchen door and let the cold air sweep into the hot kitchen till it was freshened of all its odors. She sniffed the air.

“Feel like chinook tomorrow. We better get them turkeys in early.”