Winter Wheat by Mildred Walker Read Free Book Online

more pinched and homely I don’t know what it is. She wiped her eyes with a wad of tissue before she answered.
    “I’m sorry. I couldn’t stay over there. I didn’t go to chemistry lab, either. I just came on back here.”
    I sat down on the arm of the chair and looked at her, trying to understand how she could crumple up like that. She was for all the world like a bum lamb that’s going to die; there wasn’t anything to work on. Her face didn’t look unlike a sheep’s face as it was now. She must have felt this way all week, the room was in such a mess. I picked up the clothes thrown on the chair where I was sitting and hung them in the corner behind the cretonne curtain. I guess it was my silence that made her turn over to look at me.
    “You aren’t mad at me, Ellen, are you?”
    “Of course not. Look, I don’t work at the cafeteria tonight. How about getting dressed and we’ll go some place to eat.” I didn’t want to much, but I couldn’t leave her like that.
    She started to cry again and dab at her face with tissue. “You don’t really want to. You’re just being . . . kind.”
    And then I had to tell her in five different ways that I was crazy to. She got up finally and began combing her hair while I sat watching her. Suddenly she laid down her comb and said, “You’re pretty, Ellen.”
    I stared at myself in her mirror harder than I ever had before. I saw that my hair had a soft shine to it, but that was because I had just washed it, and I had good color because of my fast walk home. For the rest, my gray eyes and too-high cheekbones and wide mouth were so familiar I couldn’t tell.
    “See, you even think you are! I’m not. Nobody would turn and look at me twice.”
    Then I got sick of such talk. “Don’t be a goose, Vera. How can you worry about whether you’re pretty or homely when people are worrying about whether they’ll be living tomorrow!” I sounded to myself exactly like Mom. There was the time Mrs. Yonko’s daughter sat in our kitchen talking about how poor they were and Mom turned on her.
    “You don’t know nothing about poor!” she had said in a cold hard kind of a way. “Wait till you live on black bread and cabbage three year and be glad to get it! During war we don’t have that some time.” Mom’s eyes had seemed to see way beyond us.
    “Tell us about that time, Mom,” I had begged. I was about twelve then. Mom closed up tight and the fierceness went out of her; but it comes to my mind when I read about poverty. Mom never wasted anything, and she’d urge Dad or me to eat the last piece of anything left on the platter till Dad used to get angry. Dad never liked having pigs, but Mom had to have them. “They eat cheap,” Mom used to say, “and they sell good.”
    Vera was pretty when she was all ready and we had left that terrible sloppy room behind. She had on a red corduroy dress and some red shoes to match and a white lambskin jacket. Her lips matched her dress and the beanie she wore on the back of her head. She didn’t have any stockings without runs, so I loaned her a pair of my white knit socks with the red and black border.
    “Gee, they look hand-knit,” she said.
    “They are. Mom made ‘em.”
    “Pretty hot! They’re like the real peasant stuff over at the ski shop.”
    “They are peasant stuff,” I said. I thought of Mom coming in from the barn in her big galoshes and her hair tied in a bandanna. I suppose she must have been a peasant girl when Dad met her. I knew Mom hadn’t had much regular education. She could read a little and write a little, but Dad wrote me mostly. Sometimes Mom tucked in a little note. I think she didn’t want him to read them. But always they told more in a sentence than Dad’s long ones.
    “Gus Johnson was over help your father with post holes. He is real hay-maker.” Which was Mom’s way of saying he was a hard worker . . . or she would write “Your Dad don’t talk much. Wind is bad.” And I could see the