Winter Wheat by Mildred Walker

It's just winter wheat to the people who raise it, only to me it means more than that. It means all the winter and all the cold and the tight feeling of the house in winter, but the rich secret feeling I have, too, of treasure in the ground, growing there for us, waiting for the cold to be over to push up strong and green. They sound like grim words without any comfort to them, but they have a kind of strength all their own.

Ellen Webb, the heroine of Mildred Walker's Winter Wheat, grows up in the wheat country of Montana. The mountains are not so far away, but not visible; the house her father built lies at the bottom of a remote coulee, and all around them the fields of wheat. It's a scene she treasures, but when her college boyfriend Gil comes to see her, the visit becomes tense and awkward. She sees her life from the outside out for the first time: how lonely the house in the coulee must be, how marked by hard labor and the brutal chance of the weather. Gil sees, too, something she has never really seen, a simmering resentment between her father, a native New Englander who came west to farm, and her mother, a Russian peasant girl he picked during World War I.

After Gil leaves, Ellen overhears her parents arguing, and learns a bitter revelation: her mother had pretended to be pregnant to get her father to marry her and take her to the States. This revelation colors not only Ellen's understanding of her parents, but her understanding of her whole life, and casts a pall over the life that she loves. Suddenly, the Cather-like pastoralism of the novel is tinged everywhere with sadness. Ellen reaches to her familiar wheat to understand every new and unfamiliar thing; at the college she observes that the fried eggs are "like daisy heads with their yellow centers and white petals"; she describes her disconsolate suitemate as resembling a "bum lamb that's going to die." The lovely pastoral prose of Winter Wheat is the kind of thing you might call "a love letter to rural Montana," but Ellen's dislocation from her family and her life shade them with sad and subtle layers.

The wheat harvest does not come in; Ellen's experience at college ends after a year. Instead, she takes a position as a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse in a place even more remote. She becomes close to the father of one of the pupils, and becomes entangled in their own drama of alienation and discontent--the young boy identifies with his evangelical mother and distrusts his father for his (relatively mild) drinking habit. The book is punctuated by a moment of utter tragedy when (spoiler alert) a "feeble-minded" student disappears in the middle of a raging snow storm and is frozen to death. Her attempts to find him are heroic, bordering on recklessness, but she cannot save him, and the death of the boy seems to come at the hand of the same cruel chance that kills the wheat at the root.

I really enjoyed this. I'm just a sucker for Cather, and while she is, of course, the goat, it seemed to me that Walker shares something of that keen eye that sees the fine distinctions in a landscape that might seem featureless to the rest of the world. I thought the story was simple, sweetly sad, and persuasive.