Winter Wheat Read Online Free PDF

not to like to mention Mother’s being Russian. I used to wonder how they had ever come to marry. He must have loved her very much I thought then.
    “How exciting!” Marge was saying. “Where on earth did your father ever meet her?”
    “In Russia. My father was with the Polar Bear expedition during the war.” I finished my hair and brushed off my dress. It took too long to explain.
    “How perfectly thrilling!” Kay echoed in the same tone. Both girls talked so much alike I wondered if I would talk like them by next year at this time.
    “Well, if the war keeps on, I’m certainly going to get in it somehow. I’d love to have a war romance,” Marge said.
    “And marry some English commando,” Kay suggested.
    We went along the narrow polished little aisle to join Bill for lunch. I had never thought of Mom and Dad as being part of a war romance.
    The day on the train was the shortest day of my life, and the most idle. We had dinner together again. I spent more for it than I meant to, because Bill was writing down our orders and he came to me last. The other girls were ordering fried chicken, so I did too. I wondered what the diner has to pay a pound for them. We sold some of ours last week at 37 cents.
    Afterward we went back to our end of the club car. The light was fading out of the sky. The rails stretching on forever beyond our train were the only point of brightness against the pale blur of the rolling fields. The porter came through and turned on the little lights and they made it seem more luxurious than ever. I was glad we wouldn’t get off till ten-thirty. We’d sort of run out of talk and just sat there, listening to the radio. I began to watch the country. It was different. The ranches—farms they were here—came closer together, the houses were larger, even the barns were all painted. Trees, not just windbreaks, grew easily in the dooryards. Smaller fields were neatly fenced, as though wood was easy to get. Sometimes a river flowed across a field. There were no irrigation ditches and no dark strips laid to fallow.
    “We’ve been in Minnesota for ages, you dope! We’ll be in the Twin Cities in three more hours,” Kay was saying.
    Brilliant flame sprang out of the dark. Against a sagging wire fence three figures raked up the weeds and brush and tossed them on a bonfire. The figures were dull and lumpy: a man and a woman and a child. Only the tin clasps on the man’s suspenders gleamed bright. The woman’s arm was outlined in red. The firelight touched the towhead thatch of the child. Somehow, it made me catch my breath. It was so familiar. It was beautiful, too—red fire against the wide soft dusk and the figures touched with red. I had never stood outside and seen it before.
    Perhaps Dad and Mom would be burning the weeds at home tonight. I had been the towheaded child when they used to do it, holding my hands out to the fire and then running away from the heat, screaming when the flames went very high. The tight windows shut out the sharp smell of smoke and the burning grass, and the ice cakes underneath the car somewhere shut out the fierce heat, but I couldn’t help breathing more deeply to try to catch it.
    Sometimes we had guarded a bonfire like that in the evenings when the Great Northern train passed through, all lighted up and unreal as a picture on a railroad calendar. I had seen the rich inside of the train and the little lights and the people facing each other in the club car or eating in the diner or the drawn curtains where Dad said the beds were. I hadn’t known then how much more brilliant our bonfire must have looked to the people in the train. Something sharp rose in my throat, and a hurting loneliness.
    “Someday, you’ll be riding in there,” Dad had told me, “eating a steak in the diner and never looking out to see the little dark town you go through.” I think he always wanted to be on every train he saw. He never quite liked belonging in a little dark town like