Winter Wheat by Mildred Walker Read Free Book Online Page B

mind. I remember the shallow feeling under my feet of the steps leading up to it, and the weight of the front door, and the worn marble stairs inside. I know each room with its subdued shuffle of papers and feet, the smell of books that is different from the smell of periodicals and papers, and the sound of the light switching off in the stacks and the tinny tread of feet on the steel stairs of the stacks. I remember the sun across the study tables, the sun of that spring shining through green and the paler sun of that winter whitened by snow. I remember the feeling of excitement at ten o’clock when half the lights in the reading room were turned off as a warning of closing time, and I would go down and meet Gil.
    I always studied in the library, never in my room at 1112. There was a table in the corner between two long windows where I usually worked, but if I sat with my face toward the window I kept looking out, studying the weather the way we do at home. If I turned toward the door, I watched people coming in and out. But I learned to look at the window and think about what I had been reading, too.
    It was in October that I met Gil. I saw him sitting at a table halfway across the room. I watched him when he went over to the encyclopedias against the wall. I met his eyes and looked away. Finally, I turned my chair toward the window. It was better to be distracted by the weather than to keep glancing up at some boy. But after that I always looked to see if he was there when I went in.
    One day I went over to the lib. after Mr. Echols’ class to work on the next assignment. Mr. Echols wanted us to write autobiographies. “Begin with your family. Make me see them with your eyes, then make me see you growing up, your town, your house, your religion, your school.” It must be interesting, I thought, for him to know all about each one of us sitting there in his classroom.
    I thought it would be easy. Things I wanted to say sprang into my mind all the way over to the lib.: I would tell how the warm, melting breath of a chinook felt after days of dry cold; how it felt to pull the harrow or drive the combine; how it felt when a cloudburst struck after weeks of hard bright heat and I stood out in the open and let it drench me; how hail felt, too, when I ran out in it to get the chickens all in. I wanted to bring my whole world and set it down on paper.
    But now, sitting in front of a pad of empty paper, it wasn’t easy. “Begin with your family,” Mr. Echols had said.
    I started in: “My father and mother are very different. My father came from a small town in Vermont.” I knew that town almost as well as Gotham. I could describe some of the people and the house where Dad was born, he had told me so much about it. The house was three stories tall and had a long two-tiered porch. I knew just how the parlor looked with its horsehair and walnut furniture and I knew Dad’s room when he was a boy. His windows looked out into green maple leaves that sometimes woke him in the night with the noise they made, louder and more scary than the sound of the aspen leaves by the creek, Dad said. There was a big picture of the Day of Judgment that scared Dad, too. He told me that when I said I wished we had more pictures in our house and he said it was better to have none than the kind that scared you.
    Dad’s father was the principal of the high school and I think Dad stood in awe of him as a boy. He died while Dad was in the Army. When Dad went back with Mom only his mother and sister were there. I felt I knew a lot about Vermont, too. Dad so often talked about it—how different it was from Montana. Trees grew easily there, the way they do here in Minnesota, and there were picket fences and neat garden plots and all the houses were painted and every village had a church with a white spire on it.
    Dad used to tell me about skating parties and corn roasts and the fun they had in the high school where his father was principal. Once he was