Annie Pike Greenwood

by We Sagebrush Folks

  In front of the long gray porch of Jake Solomon’s store Charley drew rein and went in for supplies. I was surprised at this, for we had spent much time listing and ordering all kinds of staple groceries from a big mail-order house, and we expected them to last us for a year, as Charley, until I came, was to have boarded with a family named Curry, living on the desert farm nearest to the uncleared eighty acres on which Fred was having his carpenter build us a house. We had exhausted our ready funds in making that big grocery order and buying the cow and calf, the team, Buttons, buggy and wagon, harnesses, and the many other things that the Kansas farmers either thought necessary out in Idaho or saw a chance of getting rid of for good money. Boys will be boys, and farmers will be farmers, and business men will be business men, and all dishonest mortals everywhere will be dishonest mortals anywhere.

  I learned later that we could get only bacon, flour, sugar, and such staples at Jake’s, there being no green groceries whatever to be had in Milner. This appeared to me an act of God to help me market my garden stuff. Experience, however, taught me not to bring anything to town, as it only wilted on the counters, the farmers who were then living in the wilds, themselves raising no gardens, preferring to feed out of cans (so easy to cook, you know), even including canned milk (no cow to bother with, you see). They were city farmers. Miles away were a few scattered Mormons, provident and wise, trusting the Lord and the work of their own hands about equally, which is no sacrilege against the Maker, since it relieves Him of a lot of odd jobs that a man ought to do for himself.

  To entertain me, as we rode along, having stowed his armful of groceries in the wagon at our feet, Charley began to relate an episode concerning Jake Solomon’s store which gave me an insight into those canned farmers from the cities who were soon to leave us for their sedentary occupations. Speculative city farmers they were, though, for that matter, as agricultural economics stand today, all farmers are speculators—the most reckless gamblers in the world, with all the cards stacked against them. Not long after we arrived in Idaho, every one of those pseudo-agriculturists near Milner was gone, but before they left, they all helped to pay for the saddle Ikey Solomon had sold to one of them.

  Ikey had been left alone, for the first time, in charge of the Solomon store, while Jake and his wife went to Twin Falls to buy an order of goods from a wholesale house located there. At that time there were near Milner, living in tents scattered more or less closely together, over five thousand men engaged in building the dam to make a reservoir that would keep water flowing through Jerome Canal, which they were also digging and blasting. There was a constant rushing trade at Jake’s store, more than Ikey could handle alone successfully. But Jake’s unmarried daughter had gone on a visit, and he did not like to trust strangers to help Ikey, who was naturally elated by the confidence reposed in him to manage things with the old folks away.

  At the end of the month, when father Solomon made out the bills, as was his custom, a fine saddle was itemized by Ikey as sold on account, but there was no trace of the debtor’s name. Jake blew up. It was not alone a personal matter. The Hebrew race had been disgraced. Ikey pleaded hard.

  “I tell you what, Father,” he beseeched, using all the hands he had and rolling his dark eyes, in his agony of spirit; “I tell you what, Father; you let me make out all the bills, and I promise you I’ll get the money for that saddle. I’ll charge it on every account. The man that owes for it will come in and pay, and we can explain to the others, when they kick, that it was just a mistake!”

  The result was that all those careless first settlers around Milner paid, individually, for that saddle. That characteristic which had made possible their leap before they looked, into an occupation of which they were in perfect ignorance, together with the fact that they were well supplied with money, made them accept their totalled bills with childish confidence.

  I confess to a thrill of adventure as we rode along, in constant danger, as I was, of spilling from my high seat with every motion of the wagon. Certainly I was an anachorism: my hat, a fine white straw, with a single red rose and dark-green foliage, a Paris model; my suit, of mixed blue-green-brown wool, straight from Best and Company, New York; my very beautiful little shoes, evidence of one of the foolish passions of my life; my gloves, covering carefully manicured hands. I was sitting on that high seat of my husband’s farm wagon for the first time I had ever sat on the seat of any farm wagon. And around me stretched a wilderness which was still haunted by the spirits of the Indians, whose eyes beheld it exactly as I was seeing it, except for the insignificant interruptions of man around Milner.

  The horses’ hoofs began the hollow clomp-clomp-clomp across the long cable bridge that spanned the Snake, the rough brown planks appearing to rise before the feet of the animals at every step. At our right, interrupted by boiling mists, over Milner Dam hung a sheet of silver water, dropping into the river-bed, where it raged among the huge, rounded, cream-colored boulders. Some distance beyond the other side of the bridge the fearful, rushing waters sank into gigantic black-lava cañon walls, which dropped, precipitously, from the level sagebrush land.

  We started up a steep grade, and Charley explained, “At the top you will see the beginning of Jerome Canal, which irrigates our farm.”

  A moment later I was gazing into the dark depths of the placid water, so quiet that it appeared to be standing still, only a faint ripple here and there betraying that it was really moving on, out into the desert.

  “It’s deep,” said Charley. “After it leaves the spillway, the roar of it can be heard for miles. You can hear it all the time on our ranch. Now for the country God forgot.”

  The great farm horses from Kansas, one bay and one gray, Nell and Jim by name, were urged along at a brisk pace. We were traveling parallel with the Jerome Canal, hidden from us by the high bank which had been dug and blasted from its bed. There was nothing but sagebrush so far as eye could see, probably not interrupted for the Minidoka Mountains at our backs, though so blue they looked that the pastel green of the sage must have been screened in some tenderer atmosphere. Mountains that I learned so to love! As I craned about to behold you from my wagon seat, I did not know how your beauty would hearten me, day after day, for tasks too heavy and circumstances too painful.

  As we rode along, we passed the wreck of an old steam-shovel, lying among the boulders. It had settled there two years before, when it had blown up, killing two men. Skeletons of steers and sheep lay among the pale gray-green brush—bleached bones of slaughtered animals, marking the sites where the laborers had camped. Piles of twisted wire from bales of hay told of the hundreds of horses that had been fed there. Huge piles of empty tin cans, with ends gaping in ragged edges, were rusted by the rains and sunk into the buffalo-grass, those eager little soldiers marching in where space had been cleared of brush for the cook-tents.

  The road widened, separating into many lanes, evidently used during the building of Jerome Canal by teamsters driving simultaneously. And on these roads, and among the debris, clumps of sagebrush, and boulders, everywhere there leaped countless jack-rabbits, perpetual animation, giving a jocund air to the monotonous scene. This vision, full in reality of prophetic menace, was to me, in my ignorance, a source of delight, the words of Milton singing through my brain:

  And young and old come forth to play

  On a sunshine holyday.

  Great bands of sheep had browsed here, testified by tufts of white wool caught in the scraggy fingers of the sage, thus giving the landscape the appearance of a Southern cotton-field. The wilderness bore evidence that it had been desecrated by man; his justification was not yet apparent.

  Miles and miles of wilderness, and not a sign of habitation: no tree, no green, only the gray of pungent sagebrush. And, everywhere, leaping jack-rabbits. Strange that I should have felt so elated? I was going to live on land untrod by the foot of white woman in all history! I was going to make my home where there had never been a civilized home before! I was to be a livi
ng link between the last frontier and civilization! I was a pioneer!

  The road left the bank of the unseen Jerome Canal just where it begins to roar over the not far distant spillway. I did not know then, as I heard its lusty voice for the first time, that for all the golden years of my youth, day and night, indoors and outdoors, I should have the rush of that man-made river in my ears, becoming an integral part of my outer and my inner life, so that the very memory of that swelling roar evokes the sight of the lovely, serene valley that lay below our house on the bluff, or the still, clear, bright, sunny air, or the black clouds rolling up from the southwest for a storm, or the intimate smell of rain and the secretive pattering of the preluding drops, or any of the thousands of magic remembrances that charm in and of themselves, even were there no dearer human associations.

  A GROUP of bushy-topped young aspen poplars, the green, gray-backed leaves trembling in the slight breeze, seemed to spring out of nothingness to our left, surrounding a comparatively new, plain, gray, box-shaped frame house, without porch, a stone for the step in front of the door. This house presumably consisted of two small rooms. Charley stopped before the little gate, hung between reaches of barbed wire fastened with staples to cedar posts, which smell so sweet in rain, the dark-red, stringy bark still on them. The grateful sweating horses snorted and sighed hugely with relief, settling into their harness with a creak of leather bands and straps.

  Without preparing me, “Oh, Jeff!” called Charley, “Oh, Tony!”

  We had evidently been expected, for immediately a flock of white chickens blew toward us like a cloud, obscuring the approach of two men and a little girl. The chunky man came first, beaming broadly. He had beautiful brown eyes, perfect teeth, regular features, and a rose and tan complexion. This was Tony. Jeff was tall and thin, and when he smiled, he revealed a row of bad teeth. Jeff’s little Susie stood back, with an air of hostile withdrawal, yet regarding us with sullen and inquisitive suspicion. Her long, shaggy bangs hung down into her eyes like those of a Shetland pony, and those inimical eyes of hers were as blue as cornflowers, and as cold as icebergs.

  The little girl had been dressed in her best for this meeting, a red and gray figured percale. Immaculate were Tony and Jeff in work shirts and overalls. I did not know then that the shirts were washed and ironed by the men, and that their midweek donning was entirely in my honor. I saw at once that Jeff, lanky, nondescript of nose, and colored like Indian pottery, was, for all that, a personality; while poor Tony, a little too plump but handsome as a god, was just another man, in no wise significant.

  “Meet the Missus!” introduced my young husband, the first time I ever heard that expression, so familiar everywhere now. I do not mean that Charley introduced this vernacular into the language, but that out in the brush he had picked it up from some one. It made me feel very strange, as though I should have been fat, forty, beamingly complacent, with broad fingers holding onto the infant Charles, then close in my arms.

  The men seemed extraordinarily glad to see me. More admiration than I deserved glowed in their eyes, although I was not unused to that glowing, finding it a rather delightful emphasis to my sex. But my thoughts kept turning to Susie. What could be the matter with that pitiful little creature? To be so filled with hate for every one that it brims over in cornflower eyes! If I had only known then the psychology that I know now, I might so have helped Susie. I might have helped her to help herself. The psychology of mind and behavior should be taught to children as soon as they can talk. That would abolish most of the tragedies of life; for mistakes mean failure, and if we knew what we do with every act and thought, few would dare to violate the psychological laws that mean successful living or failure.

  The horses bent their heads to the rising road. On the top of a bluff I could see my future home—dark-green shingles with black roof, a frowning porch with white toothpick pillars under the southeast corner of the upper story. I never got over the ugliness of that dugout porch, which gave the house a glowering, sullen face. The dark-green upper story looked too heavy to be resting on those slender sticks of wood which supported it, appearing to keep it from sinking down onto the porch floor. I am not fond of any kind of front porch, and this front porch threw the whole house out of balance.

  For years I planned how that porch might be included as a part of the living-room. I have a passion for remodeling almost everything I see. Many a chance moment I spent blue-printing our house in my mind. But it was, after all, rather a wonderful house for that wilderness, well-built, comfortable, though it had for foundation only some lava-rock boulders at the corners and also at far intervals along the sides. Some years later Charley banked it with dirt, but until that time you could see under the entire structure.

  We did not go at once to our home, Charley announcing that we were expected for supper at the Currys’ rented farm, where the three men had been boarding. Fred and the carpenter had gone to Twin Falls on business, but I should have them in the morning for breakfast; and it would be my job to board them from that time forth until the house was complete, only two rooms downstairs being finished.

  As we approached the Curry home through the dusk, we could see pale yellow light shining in its windows, and Charley made a remark which I was to hear several times within a short period, but of whose significance I had no suspicion. “Mrs. Curry is so glad that another woman is coming to live out here,” said my husband.

  The home in which the Currys lived consisted of two big rooms, with partitions in each to make bedrooms as well as a kitchen and a living-dining-room. From the outside it looked as though two small houses had been pushed together, one painted gray, the other unpainted and weathered dull brown; though I could not see these details that night as we approached, after my clumsy clambering over a wheel into Charley’s waiting arms. It was so very, very quiet out there. Stars were pricking the dark sky, and there was the feel of a new-born world in the delicious cool air. I always feel night through the pores of my entire body. It intoxicates me.

  There was a platform at the back of the unpainted house, but Charley led me to the side door of the painted section, where there was a block of stone for a step—a little too low, for you had to lift your foot high on to the door-sill. As I did so, the light from a glass lamp fell through the open doorway on my beautiful little new shoes. I noticed that, but without pride or interest, for Charley was introducing me the next moment to the Currys.

  Mrs. Curry, a patient, pleasant-voiced blonde, was dressed in one of those flowing atrocities which used to be called Mother Hubbards, gathered to a yoke and effecting a most slovenly appearance. I thought they had been obsolete long since. I never wore one myself, and nothing could have induced me to do so. Indeed, I was always amazed that Mother Hubbard’s dog could have fixed his mind on a bone, no matter how hungry he may have been, if she wore that sort of garment. There was a reason in the case of Mrs. Curry, however. That she was pregnant was unmistakable.

  There were three children, a little girl with dreamy eyes, rosy cheeks, and tight braids, and two older boys, without identity in a shadowy corner. Curry himself was dark, lantern-jawed, shifty-eyed. I knew he could not be trusted, but he always amused me. We have to value people for what is precious in them. He had a sense of humor and was good company. The first words he said to me were, “I’m so glad another woman has come.” Mrs. Curry had not heard him. As she put supper on the table, she said in her gentle, musical voice, “I’m so glad another woman has come.”

  We had fried potatoes, fried sow-belly, boiled navy beans, and canned sliced pineapple. A curious intuition made me pause as I ate the pineapple. I will not say that the pineapple was trying to tell me something. But certainly there was a message in the air that was endeavoring to reach me with regard to that pineapple. I felt a little bewildered, but forced my mind away from it.

  Later I learned that the frontiers have been pushed onward with this diet of fried potatoes, sow-belly, and boiled beans. Add bread to these, and coffee with
canned milk, and you have the typical meal of the cowboy, the sheep-herder, and the first settler. Indians of today also use this menu. I have an Apache Indian friend who complains to me indignantly, his handsome face stern, “Wherever I go and they have sow-belly, they always give me the tits. I don’t like ‘em settin’ there on my plate!”

  I was not accustomed to fried potatoes, boiled beans, and sowbelly, being first-generation American from English roast-beef-and-Yorkshire-pudding ancestry. My maternal grandmother had never done any manual labor in her life. She was a musician, a singer, and we had servants in my own mother’s house, where she saw to it that they set before us the kind of table called “groaning” by every well-regulated village paper in the United States. We lived in a village, but only in such respects as a groaning table did we live like villagers.

  I am sure our table groaned groan after groan, and not just on holidays twice a year, as in modern degenerate homes, where only collapsible cats and dogs can find room to be pets. Our table groaned every day in the year, loaded, as it was, with roasted beef, or roasted turkey, or roasted what-not; several kinds of vegetables, cooked perfectly; hot bread of some sort, usually biscuits; several kinds of jelly and several kinds of pickle; for dessert, pies and pudding and what-not—a sweet what-not this time; and the festive note of bushy celery, standing straight up in those adorable fluted glass celery-holders (I love antiques), the tops of the celery blossoming in such a bouquet of ivory leaves that guests, with napkins in necks or on laps, had to dodge around it to see each other. Ordinary flowers can never express the holiday spirit of a bouquet of celery.

  So I was greatly amused at my sitting there, attempting to eat fried potatoes—which Charley loves, that being the German of it, and which, at my mother’s table, I had eaten very infrequently, that being the English of it. More amused was I at the boiled beans. I hated boiled beans, and never, never ate them. I should have been most amused at the sow-belly, but I had never seen it before and did not know what I was eating. I wondered, though. I wondered what the buttons were on my meat. I did not know that my salt pork had been a mother. My feelings were spared what my Apache friend has to bear. Even had I known, my reaction would have been different. Horrified blushes would have flooded me from my beautiful little shoes to my fluffy blonde hair, probably hennaing it slightly. In my childhood such salt pork would never have been allowed to come to the table without brassières.