Read Online Winter Wheat by Mildred Walker - Free Book Online Page A

Then I remember Mom coming in and lighting the wick again, her eyes thin and her mouth tight.
    “What have you got in your church a child can see?” Mom asked in a voice that was so cold and scornful it was like ice cracking in the water bucket.
    “Please don’t take the picture away,” I begged, and Dad didn’t say anything more. Mom took the saucer away next day and never lighted a flame again, but the icon has always been in my room ever since.
    I began writing again. “All the animals on the ranch were mine, or I felt them so. The cows, the team of horses that I rode bareback whenever I wanted, all of the series of dogs; only the sow I never laid any claim to nor the tom turkeys that always looked too bloody to me with their bright-red wattles. I think I have never been lonesome.
    “We went to town often, but seldom on Saturday, when most of the ranchers went. I had a feeling that Father didn’t like it when the streets were filled with ranchers in clean work shirts, the little tags of their tobacco bags dangling out of one pocket, the color of their faces and necks giving away their occupation. Yet people must have told easily that we were ranchers. Dad always wore his best suit and a city hat, never the broad-brimmed Western hat. He carried cigarettes in a case that I was never tired of watching spring open at the pressure of a thumb. He wore oxfords instead of high shoes. Perhaps they couldn’t tell Dad was a rancher unless they looked at his hands, but he had Mom and me along.
    “Mom wore a plain cotton print in summer, a dark wool dress in winter. She bought it in “The Big Store.” She never liked a hat on her head and never looked quite right in one. She never wore gloves in summer, and her hands were the color of the red-maple furniture you see in furniture-store windows; only her hands had fine lines of black that no amount of washing with the vegetable brush at the sink could quite take away, and her nails were always worn down at the finger tips. She was big-boned and solid, with broader shoulders than Father’s. Her lips of themselves were—Why do I put it in the past tense?—her lips are now red and full, and there is color on her high cheekbones. Her face is so calm and still it stands out from the animated or worried or cross faces of the town women, hurrying by on their eternal shopping. I guess I was thinking, too, of the contrast with women I had seen on the streets downtown in Minneapolis.
    “For years I was a slim child with pale-yellow pigtails to the waist of my clean starched dress. I never wore a hat unless it was winter, and I wore socks and oxfords that Dad took pride in buying.
    “Every time we went to Clark City Dad and I stopped to have our shoes polished at the Greek shoeshine place. I think it was one of the high spots of the trip for Dad. He would sit there, reading the paper he had bought, and feel like a city man.”
    I held my pen still, remembering all those trips: the trip to the grocery store and to the hardware store or to the McCormick-Deering store for a piece of machinery, the briefer trips to “The Big Store” for some needles or thread or cloth. Usually we separated and Dad dropped into the lobby of the hotel to talk to someone. Mom and I went together, Mom walking along the aisles of the store, scarcely looking at the things that didn’t interest her, I hanging back as we went past the perfume counter, the fine soaps, then the pocketbooks and gloves and stockings. And yet, I really only wanted to look at them; I didn’t covet them; they would only have been a clutter around home.
    I remembered the time when we did go to town on Saturday, the Saturday before Easter. All the women in Gotham had gone to town and bought new clothes to wear to church Easter Sunday. In the beginning, Dad had not intended to go. But Saturday came off so warm the winter wheat showed bright apple-green. We had left the breakfast dishes and gone outdoors to work. Dad set off with the