Winter Wheat [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION by James Welch "September is like a quiet day after a whole week of wind. I mean real wind that blows dirt into your eyes and hair and between your teeth and roars in your ears after you've gone inside. The harvesting is done and the wheat stored away and you're through worrying about hail or drought or grasshoppers. The fields have a tired peaceful look, the way I imagine a mother feels when she's had her baby and is just lying there thinking about it and feeling pleased." So begins the story of Winter Wheat, the remarkable növel by Mildred Walker that is set in the dryland wheat country of central Montana in the early 1940S, just after America enters World War Two. It is the story of Ellen Webb, a willowy, strong-willed girl who can drive a truck, thresh wheat, milk cows, pluck chickens and turkeys, sit on a tractor seat all day long, even worry with her parents about paying off the combine and the mortgage. It is a story about growing up, becoming a woman, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, within the space of a year and a half. But what a year and a half it is! Ellen finishes the harvest in the fali; goes away to college in the East (Minnesota, which is about as far east as most dryland wheat farmers get, even if they come from Vermont); falls in love with learning and a very sensitive young man with long, beautiful fingers; gets jilted in a very insensitive manner; falls out of love with her parents; teaches the following year in a one-room schoolhouse on a wind-swept plain in northern Montana; begins to enjoy her isolation; begins to love the country children who come to her school, especially one emotionally troubled boy ; then witnesses a tragedy for which she blames herself; and comes home to the family wheat ranch. If the above bare-bones story were all that happened in this növel, it would be enough. We would suffer Ellen's ups and downs right along with her. We would feel that we had read a story that cut right