Annie Pike Greenwood

by We Sagebrush Folks

  I was conscious that I was sitting before the humblest table at which I had ever eaten. I felt that supercilious content with myself which afflicts snooty people before they realize that everything is just whirling electrons, and that Mrs. Curry’s whirling electrons are just as aristocratic as Mrs. Greenwood’s whirling electrons, even though Mrs. Greenwood was born in the midst of the whirling electrons whose illusion is so much different from the illusion of the electrons composing Goose Creek, where Mrs. Curry was born.

  Charley’s middle name is Pliers—he could always fix anything with them; and my middle name is Scribbling. I could never fix anything with that, or with anything else—if I cannot mend a thing with gum or a hair-pin, I give up. As I sat there, my cacoëthes-scribendi personality was recording my impressions to be placed in a book some day—and here they are, but with another interpretation.

  When the meal was ended, Mrs. Curry washed the dishes in an old tin dish-pan, and I dried them for her. I marveled why she was using only an inch or so of dish-water. I did not then know that all water for the house must be carried uphill from the canal below. That was something I should learn very soon, for our house was in the same position on that same long hill which human beings were attempting to farm.

  There were two glass lamps, one tiny and squat, the other having a stem. The wicks were very small, as the less wick, the less kerosene used. And I might say here that kerosene is always “coal-oil” on the farm. We were using the smaller lamp in the unpainted house with the rough-plank platform; placed on a shelf, it cast a murky shadow over the dish-pan sitting on the still warm stove, before which Mrs. Curry washed the dishes, a trick that I there learned and afterward practised, the dish-water thus being kept warm while you wash.

  In the room we had left, Charley and Sam Curry were talking crops—the Baron Karl talking crops with a mere tenant farmer. For the Currys were renting this ranch from the Endicotts, whose home was in Burley. Endicott, a lawyer, had begun speculative agriculture at the same time that all the other city farm-gamblers had taken their little fliers by settling in the sagebrush country. Endicott was not foolish enough to throw up his law practice. But his wife, a strong character and ambitious, with a fiery streak in her, took the children, a hired hand, and a hired girl and went out to live in the brush on the farm that the Currys now rented.

  The little city family on the Endicott ranch were at the mercy of the cattle and sheep barons, who had been waging bitter feuds against each other but now united against their new menace, the farmer. The brothers Shoddy, a name thus corrupted by the farmers, grazed their cattle over four states, rounding them up only to brand them and ship them, and, after branding them, turning them out to increase and to feed at the expense of the Government. Thus great fortunes were made.

  No bankers hounded these cattlemen and sheepmen at harvest-time. Where there is comparatively little expense and certain profit, there is no need for mortgages. Sheepmen might be slightly affected by the law of supply and demand, but when the market was low, the cattlemen simply left their herds on the range, still feeding at the expense of the Government, with little or no supervision. No need of warehouse to carry the crop through the winter. And when the cattleman or sheepman needed hay, there was always the bone-head farmer. The banks in Idaho were owned by the sheepmen and cattlemen, and the mortgage was always due when they needed the hay. And there would have been no mortgage had they not always depressed the market below the cost of raising. Yes, farmers are bone-heads about selling things below the cost of production. Some day they will learn. But, even then, what can they do about it?

  At the time Mrs. Endicott was directing that farm, the sheepmen and cattlemen had been so long at the game of sucking their fortunes out of the Government that they had come to believe that the West belonged to them and every farmer was an interloper. To dispute this the price was your life. Ordinarily no fences would have been necessary around these widely separated sagebrush farms, but nothing was safe from the depredations of Shoddy’s cattle.

  The hired man on the Endicott farm confessed his inability to keep the cattle from trampling and devouring the crops. Mrs. Endicott accepted the challenge. Seizing the hired man’s hunting rifle and running swiftly into the fields, she, who had never fired a shot in her life, pressed the trigger to scare Shoddy’s cattle—and scared one to death. In court the Shoddys proved that there was a shot in the steer, but you know what wealth will do in an American court. Probably the steer had swallowed that bullet sometime. No doubt, if they had made a search, they might have found in him some Indian arrow-heads, or maybe a spear-head. He may have collected such things.

  The hired man took the blame, and there was nothing that jury could do about it. Confessio facta in judicio omni probatione major est, as the lawyers say: a confession made in court is of greater effect than any proof. The hired man did not put it that way. He claimed to be guilty of the shot, not of speaking in a dead language. They could not jail him for that, anyhow. But they did jail him for shooting the steer, which he had not done, the steer undoubtedly having swallowed the bullet. One thing is sure. That hired man certainly fixed things for himself so that, like the hired man the poet tells about, his home was where, when he went there, they had to take him in. That was Endicott’s.

  Thus was concluded a dream of independence on the farm. In Lord Jim Conrad says that it is not good for a man to know that he cannot make his dreams come true. It may not be good for some things, but it is the incentive that forces the reform of all injustice. Some day some one with the power, who has had his farm dream fail, is going to start things moving toward justice for the farmer. But it will never be Congress, left to itself. Perhaps a gadfly, that will sting the politicians into action. Perhaps...lawmakers of another kind...representatives of industries...ah, but I, too, am dreaming, and if I do not look out, I shall be told to pack up my troubles in my old kit-bag and beat it for Italy or Russia.

  How foolish it is to go wandering into the realm of politics and economics along with all the other daffy people of the world when I might sit, in memory, in that humble rented farm home of the Currys, with its bare, unpainted pine-lumber floor, its curtainless window—there was but one in that front room—and the glass lamp with the stem casting mellow light from its position on the old-fashioned organ. Sam Curry and his wife are singing to us. I cannot get over feeling touched by the thought of that rascal standing there and singing with his patient wife,

  Some day I know you’ll forget me;

  It has to come true they say,

  But I’ll not forget you, my darling,

  Though you may be far away.

  The impression I had then of their relationship was confirmed in the years I passed near them. Sam thought his wife was wonderful, and he looked at you with proudly challenging eyes whatever she did or said. Mrs. Curry worshiped him, and to her he was the most witty and charming person in the world. Even when she had to go to live in the chicken-house, when the Aspers began buying the farm on time, Mrs. Curry never lost her equanimity or her love for Sam. And that is the only kind of marriage that is worth having.

  NEVER were nights so sweet as those nights in Idaho. The air seemed to caress you; millions and millions of stars glowed in such a depth of the heavens as I have never seen elsewhere. Every sense was awakened, and soothed. Such was my first Idaho night as we rode through the calm on that high wagon-seat from the Currys’ to our own place. Such was the last night I ever spent there. Such were nearly all the nights I saw and heard and breathed there.

  Fragrant shavings still lay in curls on the floor of the new house. Charley had been plowing, and there had been not a moment to make things ready for my coming. He and I together made the beds, and then we all crawled into them and slept—such sleep-such sleep as might have been envied us. One of the things that no money can buy—such sleep.

  Heroically I forced myself out of bed at the ungodly hour of six in the morning when I heard Charley moving around. He would have prepa
red his own breakfast before going to the field, but there were Fred and the carpenter; moreover, whenever I thought of those wealthy girls who had wanted the Baron, I gritted my teeth and went after things with all my might. It should never be said that I was not as good a wife to him as they might have been. Besides, it was a kind of lark to farm. I didn’t mind it at all.

  Fred and the carpenter were glad to see me. Men always look forward to a change of cooks. And Fred had brought with him a beautiful pure-bred golden collie. There was the most kindly indifference between the little scrub mongrel Tylo and the pure-bred collie Tag. She did not belong on the farm. At night, when the coyotes were yip-yip-yipping and wailing their insane cries from the nearby desertland, Tag would spring up from the porch floor where she liked to lie, and with bristling and quivering she would call back her horrified answers to whatever evil thing it was that she recognized in their voices. When she did this, she was oblivious to even my presence, and she loved me; but at my touch close against me would press her shuddering body. Oh beautiful Tag! Something in me responded to you! In my sweetest memories of that sagebrush farm, there you always stand, faithful, your trusting eyes meeting mine.

  We had nothing to feed her. She had been used to fresh meat, bought especially for her from the butcher by Fred’s children. She hated jack-rabbit and Mollie Cottontail and never touched them. She would not even chase them. Salt pork was the same. There was nothing for her but bread. She used to look at the bread and then at me, with pitiable starvation in her lovely eyes. She could not understand why we were doing that thing to her.

  I began to learn to cook with nothing. One of the last things I said to Charley that first night on our farm, just before we fell asleep, was prompted by the sudden vision of a circle of pineapple with a hole in it. “Oh, yes!” I murmured, “Where are all the things we ordered to cook with?”

  And then Charley told me the devastating facts. He had hauled all those boxes in the wagon with the calf that kept falling out and having to be boosted in, and they were stacked in the unpainted Curry kitchen. It was too much for Mrs. Curry to see all those supplies stacked up there, and she with nothing to use. She could do with so little, too. For a wash-boiler she had an oblong kerosene can with one side cut away. She it was who taught me to use a baking-powder can for a chopping-knife. She taught me, also, to “taste things up” when they seemed flat. And when I helped her, she taught me to make jelly out of stewed dried-apple juice, baking the pulp in crusts for pie.

  I cannot blame her for what she did. A first she begged Charley for a little bacon. That was the beginning of the end. Box after box was emptied. But the Currys were fed, for once. Charley said the children were fairly demented about pineapple. They thought it grew on bushes, with holes in the middle of the fruit, as canned. There was one long orgy of feeding, and the .end had come with my coming—not only the end of the feeding, but the end of the feed. That summer we lived on Mollie Cottontails fried and jack-rabbit cooked in a crock in the oven, with little biscuits placed on the top about ten minutes before serving.

  A clean kitchen one moment, and bits of sagebrush and dirt from the door to the woodbox the next. Bleeding scratches on my arms and hands. The smell of sagebrush so constantly throughout the house that we can no longer smell it. Cooking with sagebrush. Breaking scraggy, scratching sagebrush over my knee, and having it lance my arms with its claws.

  The first year nobody forgot to chop sagebrush for me, for I had three men waiting on me, while I waited on them. This was after Fred and the carpenter had gone, and Tony and Jeff were helping Charley fence the ranch. To keep the rabbits out, the men said; but from what happened to the crop, I think the men just fenced the rabbits in.

  Until each of my children grew to be six years old, one after another filled me with fear of the canal below the house. But I never suspected the sagebrush. The fertility of land in southern Idaho is judged by the height of the sagebrush growing on it. Our land was good, but to the far east was better land, with sagebrush high as my head. It was there that Charley always went for our fuel, taking a hay-rack to bring it home. Baby Charles and little Walter loved to go on these trips.

  Walter always stood on the hay-rack, ready to stack the sagebrush as it was thrown up to him. Charley chopped industriously, the trunks of the sagebrush like young trees, little Charles, in his scarlet coat, darting hither and yon as they worked.

  Then it happened. One day, when the last brush was stacked on the rack and Charley was about to climb onto the load, where Walter already awaited him, there was no little red-coated baby. Not anywhere was he to be seen, although Charley climbed high on the load and looked all around, as far as eye could see. And then he began calling...calling...calling....Suddenly Walter burst into heart-racking sobs.

  Down from the load Charley lowered himself. Then he began circling the wagon, ever a little wider and a little wider. It seemed appalling that a baby could be swallowed up like that, but there was not a sign of little Charles. It was growing dark, and unless they could find him soon, the cowardly coyote would make him prey. That skulking wild dog-wolf would not fear to attack a baby.

  And then Charley saw the little red coat gleaming in patches through the thick, tall, dark-gray brush....Charles! They did not tell me at once; they were too shaken by the experience. Even when I knew, the canal was still my greatest fear.

  I LOVED IDAHO. I loved the vast, unspoiled wilderness, the fabulous sunsets, lakes of gold, and the dreamy, purple mountains that appeared in the sky along their rims; and when these gradually dimmed and vanished, a million stars in the dark-blue sky—a million stars, seen at a breath.

  It was not all beautiful. Idaho’s wild winds raged for days at a time, lifting the earth in great clouds of dust. Fields were literally transferred by the power of those winds, some of the land having to be sown over again. On everything within the house lay a thick gray powder, like that on a moth’s wings exaggerated ten thousand times. Hair was transformed to dun color, eyebrows shelved with it, skin thickly coated, eyes red and smarting, teeth gritty.

  The soul of the desert, I used to think that wind, making its last protest against being tamed. Through my kitchen window I could see an enormous cloud of dust pass, two pairs of horses’ ears just pointing above it. Somewhere in that cloud I knew was Charley, engaged in leveling a field. When he came in for supper, he was masked in dark-gray powder, the ash of ancient volcanoes, one of whose craters was visible from my kitchen door. At Charley’s request, I brushed him down with a broom outside the house. Then basin after basin finally made him recognizable.

  I pitied him that summer. He was not used to farm work, and he was so exhausted at the end of the day that right after the evening meal he would fall asleep in painful and grotesque postures in the chair we had bought for our pretty bungalow because it would be so comfortable for him. Jeff and Tony were helping to fence the ranch, and so they ate two meals with us and always spent the evening with me, while Charley slept in his chair near us. They afforded a fascinating new entertainment for me, with their wild tales of this wild country.

  New entertainment, in that the tales were about Idaho. But out in Kansas, Buffalo Jones had told me many a story as we sat by the base-burner in the Keep home, where Charley and I then roomed. And I remember Buffalo Jones said to me, “You ought to meet Zane Gray. He likes to write, too. I am taking him to the 101 Ranch to pick up some stories. No, he hasn’t had anything published yet, but he keeps on trying.” It was Buffalo Jones who killed thousands of buffalo; who founded Garden City, Kansas; who finally lassoed lions in Africa, before the motion-picture camera.

  Our two new friends were pathetically appreciative of my cooking. “The womern what hooks up ‘ith me,” said Tony, “kin be either chuffy er skinny, but she gotta make spud salad like this here o’ yourn, Mrs. Greenwood.”

  They brought Jeff’s little gramophone, with its wax records, and there is no way of estimating the abundance of cheer that happy little instrument brought to our l
onely farm-house. Things that I hear I somehow feel that I am also seeing and smelling and tasting and absorbing through my skin. Such were the songs that the swiftly whirling cylinders brought me. One was “The Button-hole Finisher,” ending with the words, “I’m a nice Yiddisher boy!” And there was “Good morning, Judge,” a narrative, with song, which showed us a tipsy Irishwoman brought into court before a judge she had known since he was “nothin’ but a pup,” as she said; she sang some rollicking come-all-ye’s, among which was one beginning,

  As I went out one marnin’,

  Down by the river side,

  I met a young maiden,

  And coal black was her eye.

  And there was “Below the Mason-Dixon Line.” And Ward, of Ward and James, reciting, very well, a scene from Macbeth. Shakespeare on a pioneer sagebrush farm! I sang with the gramophone, and I danced with it, habits which I have never relinquished; for even now I sing with the grand-opera stars, and the famed symphony orchestras play for me to dance. When I have reached the stage where I can no longer dance and sing, I shall have to have a certificate from some one proving I am really I.

  Susie always came with the men, and she was always freshly scrubbed, but still with her scraggy long bangs in her eyes. I took a few hair-pins and pinned them back. She was really pretty, except for that cold hostility, repellent seen in any eyes, but so sad in the eyes of a child. Wistfully she stared at the light-blue dresses I wore mornings and the white for afternoons. “My Mama didn’t never wear no pretty dresses like you,” she said. “She didn’t wear nothin’ but black, all the time.”