5

LIKE that other time I found myself watching Mom and Dad. They were so middle-aged, they said so little that mattered: whether to lease the quarter-section from Bailey again, how much to plant to spring wheat, whether the house roof could go another year without shingles. . . .

Of course, I could see how dependent they were on each other. “How you feel, Ben?” Mom was always asking. And she knew how to make Dad comfortable. Dad explained things to her. “Read what it say, Ben,” Mom would say, giving him the paper. Then she would sit down beside him, her face withdrawn and empty, listening. But love . . . love was more than that. They had just made the best of a sordid, wretched mistake. Maybe Dad’s hate had cooled in all these years, but hate, cooling, was no better than love cooling, it was like mud drying to dust.

Dad was sick a long time. “It’s good you be sick now in winter,” Mom said, trying to cheer him up.

“I don’t like you doing all the barn work,” Dad said.

“With Yeléna here I got it easy. That way I keep her from going off to town for job.” Mom laughed.

We did the chores easily. Dad stayed inside reading or listening to the radio or working on his accounts. When his leg got too painful he just lay on the couch without talking. Then Mom was more silent, too. I was glad Leslie was there. Leslie seemed untouched by the housebound feeling of sickness. Perhaps I had been at that age, or perhaps he had always lived in an atmosphere of tension. He liked school in Gotham. There were two rooms and more children than at Prairie Butte. I was grateful for his chattering through a meal and when he perched on the end of the couch Dad made an effort to talk to him. One day Leslie found that Dad had been in the last war.

“Were you really, Uncle Ben? Did you get to see any fighting?” he asked, climbing up beside him.

“Sure I did. That’s how I got this,” Dad said, touching his leg.

“Gee, I didn’t know that! I thought you just got sick.” His voice was awed and when Mom changed the poultices Leslie would sidle up as close as he could to watch. He kept a tiny piece of shrapnel that came away once, on the table with his feather collection.

The cold relaxed a little in the middle of each day. There were chickadees chirping from the bushes along the coulee and under the warm sun the snow melted to water on the low fields, but by late afternoon it was cold again. The water froze to ice and the country looked dead. I thought I had been lonely at the teacherage and I had looked forward to the week ends at home, but I was more lonely here.

One day I took down Gil’s water color. It hurt me too much to see it. I stood there holding the picture and the cartoon and Gil’s picture, trying to put them away, when Mom opened the door.

“Yeléna,” she began, then she saw what I had in my hands.

“I was just packing them away,” I said. I put them in the bottom drawer and banged it closed.

“There’s no hurry,” Mom said. “He was good-looking young man.” It was the first nice thing she had ever said about him.

“You didn’t think so till he was dead,” I said. I didn’t feel mean like that, but it seemed to say itself. Mom’s silence made it sound childish and crude.

“Don’t take it that way,” she said. “Before this war gets done lots of girls got to lose their sweethearts. You aren’t only one. You got no need to act like it.”

I was grateful for her calling him my sweetheart and I scarcely listened to the rest.

“Maybe if he hadn’t die an’ come back after war, maybe you don’t love him no more. He was lots different from you, Yeléna.”

“You and Dad are certainly different,” I said.

Mom leaned against the dresser. “Yes, Ben an’ me are different, but we are different from you an’ Gil. Ben don’t go away like Gil, an’ I don’t let him go.”

“But . . .” I began angrily.

“Look, Yólochka,” Mom said in a soft calm voice. “Soon we be outdoors working. You feel good again when you get out more.” Mom moved her shoulders as though they were muscle-bound now. “Sun an’ wind make you feel different. Same way with me, same way with Ben, too. After that time I tell you about, when Ben is angry that I trick him into taking me, even after he forgive me, we are quiet. That spring we work all day out in the fields; sometime we hardly talk a word. It was good we was both so tired. I never work so hard. I want to show him what I do for him. We plow under our bad feelings. Same with you, maybe, you put your feeling bad down in ground.”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“You wait an’ see!” Mom said. “Them baby chicks is in Clark City. You drive in town an’ get them. Take Leslie to see his folks an’ take your time. Winter will be gone before you wear your new coat.”

“Don’t bother about me, Mom, I’m all right,” I said. I felt like a big, overgrown child she had tried to comfort.

By the time it was warm enough to work in the machine shed, Dad was up again, looking thinner and paler than ever, but he was bound to get out there.

“I’ll just putter around and see what there is to do,” he promised Mom. But when he had been out there almost an hour Mom said,

“Go out, Yeléna, and see if you can help him.”

I pushed open the shed door and the early spring sunlight split on the black metal disks he was taking off the harrow.

“Put something against the door, the sun feels good,” Dad said. “You’re just in time to give me a hand here.”

“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.