Winter Wheat Read Online Free PDF Page A

same shade as her fingernails and they weren’t any of the shades at the Rexall Drugstore where I bought mine. It was so much fun listening to them I didn’t look out the window once. It was as though the train were the whole world.
    But when we finished breakfast, the girl with the handsome cigarette case said, “Let’s go into the club car.”
    I didn’t say anything at first; I thought of Dad not wanting me to go tourist and Mom saying, “That extra money would be nice to have in your pocket when you get there.” I spoke right out. “I’m on the tourist sleeper. I don’t believe I can use the club car.”
    “Sure you can with us,” Marge said. “When you’re on your way to college, the train’s your apple. You can do everything but sit in the engineer’s lap and they won’t say a word.” That’s the way I felt, too, free and lucky. I wondered if the middle-aged people on the train didn’t envy us.
    The club car was a wonderful place of tan and red-purple curtains and chairs and carpet. There were mirrors at unexpected places and lamps and a writing desk and a radio. The air was clammy-cold like the root cellar in the side of the hill at home or the movie in Clark City.
    “It smells and feels like the inside of a movie theater,” I said, and wished I hadn’t because the others laughed and I didn’t feel with them for a minute.
    “You’re an original,” Bill said. I didn’t like that.
    Later in the day, we played bridge. They asked me if I played. I said that I’d played cribbage and pinochle mostly, but Dad and I had played contract a few times with Bill Bailey and his wife at the elevator.
    “The elevator?” Kay asked.
    “The grain elevator. The Excelsior Milling Company runs it,” I explained.
    “Wait till you see the huge elevators in the Twin Cities. When you see them, you’re practically having your first quiz,” Marge said.
    “Baby, can they look gray of an early morning after Christmas vacation!” Kay groaned. I wouldn’t be going home for Christmas vacation, but I didn’t mention that.
    “I’ll never forget the time . . .” Marge began. I loved hearing them talk. It was a different kind of talk. I felt part of it because I was going to college too.
    We were in the very tip end of the train where it’s all glass and separated by a glass wall from the other passengers, who were reading the magazines and newspapers. I looked in at them and thought how sober they looked. I couldn’t help thinking, either, how Dad would have loved to be sitting there talking about the country with some other man.
    “Did you know Tim Murphy?” Marge asked Bill, and then they were off, talking about people I had never heard of before. But I didn’t mind. I had always liked listening to Dad tell of the people he grew up with in his town in Vermont. I felt I knew them. When he’d start, Mom would never listen. If it was in the evening when Mom was knitting, her needles would go faster and faster and then she’d go out to tend to something outdoors, as though she didn’t want to hear. Mom hardly ever told about people in her town.
    In the shining lavatory I was a little shocked at the way the girls spread all over the place, as though there were nobody else on the train. They scattered powder and used so many of the cunningly folded towels I had been so careful of. I tried to act more as they did, as though we owned the train.
    “Is your hair natural or do you use a bleach?” Marge asked when I was combing my hair. I had to laugh.
    “It’s natural. Dad says it’s the color of a scoured pine board.”
    “Are you a Swede? Your name doesn’t sound it.”
    “My mother’s Russian, but my father’s from New England,” I said. “He has light hair.” I had that feeling I have had so often at school that it was sort of queer to say my mother was Russian, but that saying my father was from New England made up for that. I had got that feeling from Dad. I think he felt that way. He seemed