A Grain of Wheat Page 3

  Steve, however, didn’t know any girls well enough to feel comfortable about inviting one. The stringent moral code of his hometown made normal interaction of teens with the opposite sex almost impossible. In addition, there was his extreme reserve in dealing with other people in general, resulting in a lack of enthusiasm on his part for the party from the start.

  His strapping roommate Ted Bjornson finally took a hand in the matter of getting him a date. Thus, on the evening of the party Steve found himself escorting a willowy blond Swede named Sue Olson who, Ted had assured him, could be trusted to keep their secret and to inject some wit into the occasion. Steve himself felt anything but witty that night, having undergone that same day a comprehensive English examination and a test covering the first two hundred fifty pages of his religion textbook. The whole pointless nonsense of it all was still gagging him as he trudged through the snow to call for Miss Olson. During the mile-long walk into the wind to the Brennan farm, Sue made several dead-end attempts to provoke a conversation. But Steve’s terse answers never offered more than a literal one- or two-word response to her questions. He seemed much more annoyed with himself than with her.

  The spacious farmhouse was amply provided with all the attractions calculated to furnish an evening of pleasure at every level. The beer flowed from the kegs in a steady stream, as did the music from the fancy new Victrola. There was laughing and dancing—forbidden by the college—and general gaiety. Steve knew he should be having a good time, but for the life of him he just could not dive into the stream of the evening.

  As the evening progressed, he discovered that what Ted had described as Sue’s wit was really the babbling of a scatterbrain. The lithe female, who towered over him by a good three inches, insisted on dragging him relentlessly around the dance floor while the Victrola spewed forth an unebbing tide of raucous sounds. Between dances she probably consumed more beer than she had ever seen in her life before, growing more obnoxious and, frankly, indecent by the mugful. Her prattling questions and her increasingly parasitic physical proximity became for Steve a major invasion of his privacy, an uninvited intrusion into the sanctuary behind his barricade. He was rapidly coming to despise her and even more to hate himself for his inability to have a good time when everyone else seemed to be having one.

  A few hours and several beers into the evening, Lute noticed that Steve was far from his normal self. Sidling over to him during a pause in the music, he said with a facetiousness slightly tainted by reproof, “What’s the matter, old boy? You don’t seem to be having any fun.”

  Steve looked him in the eye and smiled weakly, “Yeah. It’s a great party.”

  Then the music started belting again and Lute returned to his date. Steve looked up and saw Sue wobbling towards him with another glass of beer in her hand and a foolish grin on her face. She winked at him and nodded in the direction of the bedroom from which a couple was at that very moment emerging, as if to say, It’s our turn. Sick, he wheeled about and made a rush for the door. Everyone was stamping on the floor in time to the blaring music. He pulled open the door and made his escape out onto the porch. The icy air met his flushed face. He stood there for a moment, glowering into the noiseless white night. Then, grabbing a handful of snow from the railing, he flung it out into the darkness.

  “No!” he shouted. “No! No! No!”

  IV

  The Great Northern passenger train was rumbling and swaying over the rails of North Dakota that stretched without a ripple or a curve as far as the eye could see. In the winter these rails were the scene of a continuous battle between drifting snow and the traffic of trains, a battle which was usually won by the traffic. The heaps of snow on either side lent to the tracks the appearance of two silver rivers in the bottom of an alabaster canyon. Looking out of the window of the train was like looking at a blank movie screen, and when the drifts receded enough for the passengers to see beyond them, it was only more of the same anyhow.

  The train was gathering speed now after having stopped at Minot to pick up a load of students and other holiday guests heading back to Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Illinois. Among them was a young man slight of stature whose parents had brought him a long way through the snow to meet the train. He had clambered into the last car somewhat hastily and left his parents a little stunned by omitting the usual departing signs of affection. Just now he was slouched down in the front seat of the car staring motionlessly at his feet.

  For a long time he sat there oblivious to the clicking and clacking of the coach wheels over the rails and the irregular swaying of the carriage. By offering no resistance to it, he looked more like a permanent fixture than a transient passenger. Perhaps an hour went by in which he remained deeply engulfed in another world, a disappointing world to judge by the occasional grimace or shudder that interrupted his otherwise expressionless state of torpor.

  Then without warning he sat bolt upright and peered out the window. There was nothing to see but glaring featureless white. He reached up onto the baggage rack above him and retrieved a heavy sheepskin coat with a large hood. Stepping out into the aisle he pulled it on, walked swiftly to the rear of the coach, and shoved open the door. Stepping out into the platform, he slammed the door shut and found himself in the forbidding isolation he was seeking.

  The platform was slick with ice. The gale force of the kicked-up snow in the train’s wake beat against his exposed face. He spread his feet apart, tightened the cords of his hood, and lowered his head into the blast. For a moment he seemed reinvigorated by the change, but before long he was mumbling to himself and growing restive within the confines of the platform.

  “What a vacation!” he muttered sourly. “What’s happened to everyone? They’ve all turned into masochists!”

  With that his mind moved in turn from one of his former high school cronies to another.

  Take Gus Gunderson, for example. What on earth had come over him? All of a sudden now he was your aspiring student! Gus! The same fellow who only last spring had joined Steve in making elaborate plans for this coming summer to take off for California in Steve’s Model T! The whole idea had been to get away from schools and farms for once in their lives and see the world. Gus had been just as fed up with the whole business as Steve was. And now here he was, loud-mouthing about all the opportunities for a career and advancement to be found in some new field called sociology. All you needed was your doctor’s degree and a pinch of curiosity and you’d have the world by the tail. Oh sure! As far as Steve was concerned, Gus could collect a hundred doctor’s degrees to hang on the wall of his stuffy office and spend the rest of his life in a lousy classroom if that’s what he wanted. Let him slave away and die! That was his business. But Gus!… Why Gus?

  It was hard for Steve not to feel betrayed.

  And Al Holte and Miles Holverson and even the little Bohemian Johnny Maier, all of them going out of their way to impress the folks back home with how educated they had become. They had all run around town with a disdainful “Did-you-know-that-such-and-such?…” expression on their faces, for which they forfeited all the good times they had delighted in a few short months before. They couldn’t be really enjoying now what they detested then! They seemed almost like robots, as though the more they tortured themselves the better they liked it. What had got into them?

  And what do you make of the Hansen twins? They used to be just about the wildest fellows in the old gang! They had always been game for anything. Sometimes the rest of the fellows even had to restrain them or they’d have got into real trouble. Now what had happened to them? Steve would not have believed it if he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes. They had gone into the funeral business as junior partners with Mr. Lien! Steve had gone over to their place one evening to see if they wanted to have an old-time reunion with some of the boys at the Maier farm. Their response to his invitation was still haunting him.

  “We’d really like to, Steve, but imagine the bad publicity if word of it got out. We can’t afford the risk.”


  Bad publicity! Those black suits they always wore now and those mustaches they were trying to grow said it all. They were draping themselves in a living death from top to bottom.

  At least Pete Jorgensen hadn’t changed, thank goodness for that! Or Shorty Samuelson or Bob Wolfe. Several times during the Christmas break the four of them had got together and made a noble effort to resurrect the past. Or so it seemed to Steve. The other three had no trouble enjoying themselves as they always had; but, of all things, even in this setting Steve could not shake off the black cloud that had been hanging over him ever since Thanksgiving. The fellows talked about the same things they had always talked about before—horses, women, pranks, cars, sports, and the like—but now there seemed to be a gulf of some kind between Steve and his pals, for no good reason that he could figure out. Oh, he had lost himself in many a good four-handed game of poker and had laughed heartily at many a good joke the fellows had cracked, but in the long run things just didn’t seem quite right. Perhaps the absence of most of his former chums made a deeper impression on him than he realized, but perhaps there was more to it than that. The jokes often related to things that had happened since Steve had left home. The conversation often wound through dry trivialities about which he had not thought for many months. But it was more than that, a trace of something in Steve lurking way beneath the surface. What was it? A shadow of contempt? No! Surely not contempt. How could he ever be contemptuous of them? They weren’t choked by inhibitions, they didn’t care what people thought of them. They were Steve’s own kind. They did what they felt like doing. They avoided drudgery. Life would be an enjoyable affair for them. They had been born, they would have fun, and they would get old and die. How could you be contemptuous of that? You couldn’t! You couldn’t look down on them!

  “Well, in that case, old boy,” Steve demanded of himself out loud, “what in the world were you feeling?”

  Could it be that he himself had changed? Maybe he would never again know what it meant to free himself from the strait jacket of dull routine and fly away into real freedom. Curse the institution, the people, the way of life, the secret forces that kept driving him further away from the one solace he knew! Curse them all!

  “It’s robbery!” he shouted into the cold air. “Downright robbery!”

  Just then the train gave a lurch and Steve, who had momentarily let go of the railing, was nearly thrown off the slippery platform. He grabbed it and jerked to a halt inches from disaster. Pulling himself along the railing, against the sharp blasts of the wind, he made his way back to the center of the platform and braced himself in place.

  Recovering his breath, he muttered to himself, “That felt a lot like what Mom and Dad did to me during the break. Only she was trying to push me off one side of the platform and he was trying to push me off the other side. And I was hanging on to my railing for dear life!” This led him to muse for a little while on what his parents had just put him through.

  Steve had never known his mother to be so animated. From the moment his parents picked him up at the railroad station, she had not ceased introducing him to everyone as her wonderful son who was studying up at Christiana College to prepare for a life of Christian service. This introduction had never failed to evoke ohs and ahs and no little amazement from the simple town and country folk who had known Steve before. For his part, Steve made no effort to conform to her new image of him; but he was already used to being passive in her presence, neither affirming nor denying anything she said. To the continuous round of questions she kept posing him when they were alone, he offered short inconclusive answers which she seized upon and magnified in her imagination all out of proportion to what he had actually said. If this had been the extent of her impositions, he might even have borne them with a measure of charity.

  But the crowning imposition came the day before he was to leave for college when his mother presented him with a brand-new seminary catalog that had just arrived in the mail. Only the joy that lit up her beaming eyes when she coyly presented it to him prevented him from exploding on the spot into a volley of profanity. She winked at him and kissed him on the forehead, leaving him to fondle his new treasure in private. As soon as she was gone, he stumbled into the big chair in the corner of the room and sat there sulking for a full half hour, holding the stupid thing enclosed in his clammy hands.

  His father had been an even greater enigma. In the span of his life up to that point, Steve had probably not been with his father or heard him speak to him so much as he had in the past two weeks. Lars took an uncharacteristic interest in everything Steve had been doing while away at college. He asked him all sorts of questions about what the farms were like in the neighborhood of the campus—their size, what crops they grew, how many cattle they grazed, etc. When Steve happened to allude to all the wood lots around the college, his father exclaimed in disbelief, “You don’t mean to tell me there are actually trees out there growing on good farmland! What’s the matter with those people?”

  It was a funny thing. Throughout the Christmas holiday, Lars had gone into town only once on business. The fourth day that Steve was at home—it was Christmas Eve—his father put his massive arms around the lad’s slender shoulders and took him out into the barn. They walked about in the drafty building for a while, surveying the horses and cows and examining the equipment stored in there. Then Lars suddenly stopped right in the very middle of the barn and said in a low rumbling voice trembling with emotion, “Steve, my son, you know that in less than four years all of this will be half yours.” Once again he put his big arms around the shoulders of the dismayed young man and they both walked over to the barn door. Surveying the snow-covered expanses that stretched beyond the meandering line of willows in the creek bed beneath the barn, Lars squinted and declared with conviction, “That will all be yours before long, my boy, as far as you can see. It takes a good man to run a huge estate like this, a better man than I am. I’m glad you’re getting an education. You’re learning how to think better than I can. Of course, your old man will be able to give you a few helpful pointers when you get back here. But I’ve always said the day was coming when farming would call for an educated man!” He gave Steve’s shoulders a big squeeze.

  Steve’s shock at his father’s self-assured words had been tempered only by his shock at his father’s apparent affection for him. But inwardly he was no less angered by his father’s assumptions than by his mother’s presumptions. He would like to have had a dollar for every time Lars had suggestively dropped a comment about Len Carlson, one of Steve’s boyhood buddies, and his dad going into partnership on their farm, which wasn’t half the farm Steve was in line to get. And, by golly, if the young fellow wasn’t planning on marrying the Pedersen girl in the spring! Didn’t Steve think that was dandy? Steve had nodded his assent and mused to himself that this was the same Len who had cursed farming as a boy and dreamed of moving to a big town when he grew up.

  There goes Len, he had thought to himself.

  Thus the vacation had limped by, a dark memory to be forgotten as soon as possible. Steve’s ruminations left him exhausted. He felt deserted by some of his friends and strangely alienated from the rest of them. He felt tossed into the frying pan by his mother and hurled into the fire by his father. All he had wanted to do was to fly away anywhere like a bird, but he was caught in the snare of his parents’ dreams for him. On top of that, it felt as if his wings were broken from all his internal flapping to get free of the snares. If so, he would never have what it takes to rise into the air again. Surely his spirit was not broken beyond repair! No! No! Maybe it would still heal.

  “But how can it heal when it is being forever savaged?”

  With that, his thought wound down and his mind was left more with the taste of what it had just chewed over than with its substance. It was bitter and pungent, but slowly it melted away. He fell into a depressed trance, blindly staring at the snow whizzing past him.

  After a few minutes the door opene
d onto the platform and an elderly conductor stepped out, bucking the wind with the top of his cap.

  “Say, young man!” he shouted over the shrill blasts and the clacking wheels. “Don’t you think you’d better come in before you freeze to death?”

  Steve looked around him and for the first time realized how terribly cold he had become. His face was numb. He started to shiver all over.

  “Yeah,” he said stiffly. “I guess I’d better.”

  V

  It was a mock sun that rose and fell over the January drifts, slicing through the brittle air and glaring off the fresh snow, a cold impersonal glow illuminating the fairyland world outdoors. The sheer storybook beauty of those days, their visual enticements coupled with their physical remoteness, lent an aura of unreality even to the places that were very familiar to the students in more clement weather. Deep snowdrifts buried their favorite haunts and obliterated the meandering woodland paths down which young lovers aimlessly strolled in the springtime. At times, though, the new-fallen snow accentuated the delicately suspended objects on which it fell: each tiny black twig supported an identical white twin so that from a little distance, the branches looked like so many pairs of matching doilies not quite perfectly lined up.

  All of this physical unreality out of doors had the effect for most students of helping them concentrate on the very real demands of their studies indoors. Adding to this effect were the approach of final examinations and the heavy load of assignments given by some professors in a scramble to complete the prescribed courses. The month of January was truly a time of intellectual ferment on the campus of Christiania College.