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loads of wheat. Sometimes they stand parked in line till midnight. Bill Bailey can see them coming all day. There is nothing to hinder his view from his little window. I wondered if the ranchers far back on the prairie roads don’t make him think of ants.
    I went on writing: “I love the wheat and I hate it. I love the green blades of winter wheat in the spring. They show through the snow on the ground and make the only bright color in that winter world of grays and blacks and whites. I love the spring wheat that always seems trying to catch up with the winter wheat. It is like a person without much education or background trying to measure up with a person who’s had years of both. The beardless wheat always seems to me like a young boy, and the shaggy bearded wheat like an old man.
    “When the wheat is an even ripeness, the color of the crust of the fresh-baked bread it will go to make, and the wind sings across it, I love it so I could sing too, just to look at it. My mother says the wind in the wheat makes her think of the wind in the forests of northern Russia, only this is a sharper, thinner sound. When I was a little girl, I used to lie on my back in the field of wheat where my mother and father were working and play I was in a forest. The trees of wheat reached high above me and the wind sang in their tops; only my forest was golden instead of black like Mother’s forest. Perhaps mine was the forest of the sun and hers was the forest of the night.”
    I could have gone on and on. I wanted to tell about harvesting and riding the combine when you feel as proud as a king on a chariot at the start of the day, but you can’t feel and are like a piece of the machinery itself by the end of the day. But I liked the sound of the words I had just written: “forest of the sun” and “forest of the night.” So I stopped there. It’s funny that you can put down some words on a tablet and have them leap up from the page and carry you with them. I felt like the woman in the fairy story who baked the gingerbread boy that came to life.
    I knocked on Mr. Echols’ door and opened it. He was sitting behind a littered desk. His eyes looked so sleepy when he glanced up I thought maybe he couldn’t remember my name.
    “I’m Ellen Webb,” I told him.
    “Yes, I know. Won’t you sit down, Miss Webb?” He was hunting in the pile on his desk for my theme. I saw it before he did, telling it by the way I’d turned the corners down to fasten it together. He picked it up and looked at it as though it were something strange he had never seen before. I wondered if he had even read it. The sun came in palely across his desk. The sun is always pale here, never out-and-out bright as it is at home. I could smell the heat in the radiators and outside I heard someone calling.
    Mr. Echols was turning over the pages the way you do a newspaper you’re not going to read through. He came to the last one.
    “‘The trees of wheat reached high above me and the wind sang in their tops; only my forest was golden instead of black like Mother’s forest. Perhaps mine was the forest of the sun and hers was the forest of the night.’”
    It sounded terrible when he read it aloud. I felt my face going red. He took off his glasses.
    “Very interesting, the way you see the land. Do you . . . Are you fond of Montana? I take it you come from there.”
    “Yes,” I said. “I’ve always lived there.”
    “You don’t have cattle?”
    “No, we have a dry-land wheat ranch.”
    “Do you want to go back and live there?”
    “I love it there, but I can’t live there, because I want to be a . . . a linguist.” Our Spanish teacher in high school called it that.
    Mr. Echols took up his pipe. He looked at me while he lighted it. I could feel how hard he was trying to look into my world, into Gotham, Montana. He couldn’t know how different it was. I felt so safe from being looked into. I wondered if that was the way Mom felt sometime when people