Free Winter Wheat by Mildred Walker

the back seat arranging parcels.
    “So you had a hankering for perfume and silk stockings. You’re growing up. Nobody would think it to see you in your jeans. What do you think of that, Anna?”
    Mom didn’t answer and Dad let the matter drop. He had another idea. Easter had gone to his head.
    “Why don’t we stay overnight and go to church on Easter like civilized people?”
    I held my breath.
    “We’ve got the stock to take care of,” Mom said doggedly.
    “They can wait. We’d be back by two o’clock. It would do us good. We haven’t been to church since . . .”
    “Since we went with your mother,” Mom said. That was before I was born, I was busy figuring to myself. Church wasn’t part of our living. But I wished Mom hadn’t said that. It was suddenly too close to breathe easily, even though we sat in the truck on the main street. Dad started to drop the idea and close up and then he didn’t.
    “As I remember, you were a good Greek Catholic once. We don’t want Ellen not to know what the inside of a church looks like.”
    The air cleared. That was the most exciting trip we had ever made to town. Mom and I bought nightgowns in Montgomery Ward’s and we packed them in a little straw suitcase Mom carried her parcels in. We stayed at the hotel where Dad often sat and talked in the lobby, a big glittering place that awed Mom and me. We had a room I can see now. The carpet went from wall to wall. The furniture was big and shining, with a full-length mirror in the door. There was a bathroom between the rooms, with the first big white bathtub I had ever used.
    I couldn’t remember a time when Dad had been so gay. He called up and ordered ice water sent up to the room and tipped the boy who brought it, as though he were a king.
    “Remember the hotel we stayed in the night after we got into New York?” he said to Mom. “I told you we were having our honeymoon and you thought ‘honey’ was the word for ‘hotel,’ Anna!” I walked into the bathroom and drew water out of the shiny faucet, feeling good because they were laughing.
    It was a wonderful night. We didn’t eat dinner in the beautiful dining room; that cost too much. We went out to a cafeteria, and I thought of that cafeteria some days when I was serving in the one here.
    I lay awake that night looking at my room until I knew every object in it. Light from the alley came in the window and shone in the mirror like the moon does at home. It was better at night, because you couldn’t see the dust along the edge of the carpet or that the rose-silk lampshade was punched through. I liked listening to footsteps in the hall and cars out in the street, and my body felt delicious after its hot all-over bath.
    When I woke in the morning I had a funny feeling. I was afraid something would go wrong. Dad came into my room all dressed in a new white shirt he had bought himself. He’d had a shave downstairs in the hotel barbershop and he looked as though he didn’t know wheat from barley.
    “Well, Ellen, how do you like it?”
    “All right,” I told him. Something in me wouldn’t let me sound any more pleased for fear . . . fear. Maybe it’s because I was born on a dry-land wheat farm and I know you’ve got to be afraid every spring even though the wheat stands brave and green, afraid until the wheat’s cut and stored, afraid of drought and hail and grasshoppers. Dad is, always. Mom used to say to him, “If you’re going to be afraid of drought all the time, you might as well be afraid of planting in the first place.” Yet Mom is the one that feels it worst when the drought comes.
    When Mom came into my room to braid my hair she had on her new silk stockings I’d given her and the scent of the perfume was on her. The stockings fitted her ankles and legs better than skin. They were too fine for the black laced low shoes she wore, but they were beautiful. Such a pride came up in me it almost drove out the little fear. I think that’s why folks