Annie Pike Greenwood

by We Sagebrush Folks

  Think of guarding the health of those who eat in the house. And the poor overworked farm woman—can’t we say a word here for the overworked farm woman, wasting an hour of her busy life every day chasing flies through the rooms with a dish-towel?

  AT FOUR O’CLOCK of one morning in August, that first summer, I was awakened by the sound of some one tapping on the glass of the half-lowered window in which there was no screen. It was twilight in the room. I slipped into a kimona and went to the window.

  Sam Curry was there. “Kin yuh come over to my place, Mrs. Greenwood? The woman’s sick.”

  Even then I did not suspect why she was sick. I have always been unsuspecting—a polite way of saying dumb—and so it took me by surprise when I saw that unmistakable look on Mrs. Curry’s face and observed that she was preparing her bed. She had no white sheets, just some double gray cotton blankets, evidently bought for the occasion. I knew, instinctively, that she had nothing to which to change while those blankets might he washed. I knew that there was no thought of washing them for months and months. And knowing this, I was haunted by the specter septicemia.

  All I had read of the horrors of childbirth on the farms came back to me. I was the antiputrefactive woman, and here was a dreadful example of what I had learned meant certain death. I looked around the tiny partitioned bedroom. On an unpainted old kitchen chair lay two folded diapers and two little slips, all made from flour-sacks. It was a large layette considering that it took four flour-sacks, and some time is needed to use four sacks of flour. There were no little wool shirts and no little wool bands.

  I have never been able to do much with my arms in the way of extraordinary feats, as they are very small. All my strength seems concentrated in my legs. I used to be able to run with the wind and to dance all night. When I saw that layette, I made up my mind that I could beat the stork. Without a word, I flew, on my light feet, from the Curry farm to the Greenwood farm. In an instant I had the little shirts and bands Walter and Charles had worn. I had planned to keep them always. It hurt my heart to part with them. But that was momentary. It would have hurt my heart all my life if I had not parted with them.

  I laid them, with some little dresses and petticoats and socks, on the kitchen chair beside the cheap iron bed with its sheets of dark-gray blankets. Mrs. Curry was now sitting on the side of the bed. For nightgowns she had made two more Mother Hubbards of colored percale, suitable for her to use as dresses when the lying-in period was concluded. She looked to be in much pain and was moaning a little, and I wondered why the doctor was not on hand. Just because a woman has had two babies does not mean she is an expert in obstetrics, any more than having a large family of children means being able to rear them wisely. Such ability and training are not inherent in motherhood. I knew a woman in Kansas who said to a little girl who did not want her to hold her baby brother, “Why, my dear, I would not hurt your little brother. I know how to take care of children. Why, I’ve had nine children, and I’ve buried seven.”

  Mrs. Curry was in a state too anxious to be impressed by my contributions to her layette. Sam was wandering restlessly about, or standing still, looking thoughtfully into space, listening to his wife’s moans. He loved her, but he was not worried. I never saw a farm man worried over the confinement of his wife. It may be because birth is an everyday happening on the farm. Even death seems little to impress them. Death is also the farmer’s partner.

  But I was not used to either death or childbirth. I went out on the rough plank platform, weathered gray, and looked down the road in the direction I expected the doctor to make his appearance. It was down the road to where Hazelton would be founded before another year, the whole town of Milner, such as it was, bank and stores, picking up and locating there. Sam Curry had hurried out and stood beside me. He looked as though he feared I had intentions of escaping.

  I turned to him, a sudden suspicion assailing me. “Have you been for the doctor?”

  He shifted, uneasily. “Why, I thought me and you could look after her. Me and her mother done it before.”

  Imagine comparing my inexperience with his mother’s years of midwifery! I turned on him, and I am sure there was that look in my eyes which always appalled my children, though I myself was unconscious of it. For one thing, I am told that at such times my eyes turn from green to dark blue, as my father’s used to do. “You go for a doctor,” I commanded. “You’d better hurry.”

  I could see that he was still of a mind to dawdle around until I should forget, but I kept looking at him and in that manner looked him out to the barn shed, whence in a few minutes I heard him canter forth, and I watched him take the road to where Hazelton was to be. I went back into the house and waited, sitting gingerly on the edge of a chair in the front room, facing the open bedroom door. I could see Mrs. Curry, and I was almost as anxious as she was, though not in her pain. What if the baby should come before the doctor arrived? I went out and pushed some sagebrush into the stove and filled the kettle and the dish-pan with water. I had brought an old sheet along with me when I brought the baby clothes. I remembered my father’s expressions of disgust for folks who had babies with not even a piece of clean rag in the house. I had seen no white rags of any kind near the bed.

  The doctor came. He looked crosser than a she-bear with cubs teased by hunters. I do not think he ever saw me. I was just something with skirts on there in the house. I was already prejudiced against him, for I had heard he was a homeopath, and my father was an allopath, and I had heard my father express his scorn of the illegitimate children born to Father Hippocrates. “Six months, and you’re graduated!” I have heard him fairly snort.

  This homeop was not responsible for practising. He did not want to practise. He had given up practising. He had a fine big ranch, with a great many sheep on it, and he was generally engaged in the obstetrics of lambing. It always made him mad to be called as a physician, but what were those sagebrush farmers to do, with no cars to speed to Twin Falls, and this sheepman known to be some kind of doctor? He had to come, that’s all. Whether he had ever made a vow to Hippocrates or not.

  He made an examination and grunted that the baby was not yet due. Then he turned to me and, without looking at me, snarled, “Get me some breakfast!”

  I thought that was too funny. No man had ever spoken to me in that way before in my life. I thought that if he would only look up and see what a wonderful creature I was, and see also, as he must, that I had only dropped in and was not really affiliated with the Currys in any way, he would have been ashamed of ordering me around. I was entirely mistaken. I learned that out in the brush folks are not greatly impressed by either looks or breeding. They are not greatly impressed by anything but how much money you got for that hog. How can you blame them? The farmer gives his very life, and the lives of his family, to raise a hog. The hog means reality to him.

  The doctor himself washed the baby in olive-oil. I learned later to appreciate that doctor. He was not so bad—just eccentric. The next morning I hurried over to the Curry place. I found nothing bigger than a wash-basin in which to bathe the baby, but I made a good job of it. I am really not a sentimental woman, but I break down once in awhile. When I had that baby all clean, I hugged it gently to my breast. Something happened to me. I had received my initiation as a sagebrush woman. Until I die, I can never get away from that fact—there are great reaches of sagebrush in me.

  II—EDUCATION

  THE man who sold Charley our rabbit-proof fence convinced Charley of its merit, but he had failed to convince the rabbits. It was the end of our first summer, and all we had to show for Charley’s unaccustomed labor were a few undug potatoes, probably enough for our winter’s supply. Charley had some good cabbage in his kitchen-garden to store for our table. I was still a city woman. It had not occurred to me to raise the vegetable garden myself. I had raised flowers in Kansas, but I had an idea that the vegetable garden was man’s work.

  The thing you learn on the farm is that the cultivating of crops a
nd the butchering is man’s work, while everything, including cultivating the crops, is woman’s work, except the butchering. I have a suspicion that the only reason butchering is not included is because men enjoy doing it. Great day! Two or three men together, doing the butchering. Men love farming, and one of the reasons is that the normal human being is gregarious. Almost every operation on the farm that is considered man’s work requires at some stage a number of men to prosecute it. There is fun in working together, joshing and laughing, but it is a pleasure that the sagebrush women knew very little about.

  Mrs. Hubert and Mrs. Hatch were good pals and managed to help each other with their work, living only about a mile apart. And Mrs. Asper had a sister about five miles away and several other relations who used to help her. She was my nearest neighbor. We might have helped each other, but she had no need of me, having so many relations; there was no reason for exchange in our case.

  Mrs. Asper did not come until the second year. But when I came, the Huberts were already there, unknown to me, several miles from our ranch; and Mrs. Hatch came at the end of that first summer. She was an extraordinarily capable woman, with a sharp tongue. Extraordinarily capable people usually balance the scales by being extraordinarily uncharitable toward those who are not so efficient. Every virtue has its vice on the other side of the shield.

  Charley had really worked—worked to the limit of his strength, and the rabbits had eaten his labor. A mere blush of green showed where his crops had been. I had worked harder than I had ever done in my life, but I have to smile now when I look back on that first summer and meditate on what I considered work then. I did not know that three miles away Jonathan Bradstick’s wife had that summer ridden a two-way plow, one baby about to be born, another clinging to her lap. They lived in a little tar-paper shack. I never saw her that she did not have a smile on her face. I saw her for the first time at the end of the summer.

  The summer was ended; we had no crops to sell; we were neck-high in debt at the grocery-store; we had no money. Then something occurred which looked to Charley as though sent straight from God, or wherever things are sent from to men who do not take much stock in the kind of Creator, if any, that the churches bother about their little peanut souls. I was not a churcher, but I had a churcher’s untrusting faith in God—the kind of faith that prays and prays and is never sure a prayer is answered until it is answered. And that is not faith. Charley bothered God not at all. Our temperaments were very different in one thing: he had never given any thought to God in his life, whereas I was obsessed with the thought. I was always wondering what it is all about, and who did it, and a great deal of the time my wondering about who did it was so I could place the blame. I had yet to learn gratitude for small favors, and that is the beginning of faith.

  What was like a special dispensation to Charley was to me a bolt of lightning out of a clear summer sky. I was enjoying farming. I had taken on my shoulders none of the worries that were harassing Charley. They simply had not sunk in. I hate debt with an overwhelming hate. I shall never be able to branch out into business, because I will not go into debt sufficiently to demonstrate my right to credit. I believe, too, they use arithmetic in business, and that counts me out. As yet, I was not conscious of our grocery debt.

  I was soon to have my come-uppances, as we say in the brush. Nemesis was about to catch up with me. One day Charley Willey came to the house, met my Charley outside, and strolled with him to the shed barn, where my Charley was about to milk. I saw them, casually, through the window. After you have been on a farm for a few years, you do not see any one casually through the window; you see them with absorbing interest, noting the new shoes, or the old hat, or the sentiment telegraphed by the movement of the body. I knew a farm woman before I went on the farm, and I used to condemn, with conscious superiority, what I thought her extreme curiosity. I did not then know that you can have such a hunger for your humankind that you learn to know every wagon as it goes by on the road below by the dog trotting underneath, the dog being the easiest point of identification of the person seated in the front of the wagon.

  Charley Willey, who was a trustee of the district school, and the other two trustees, at their meeting the night before, had decided to ask me to teach the school the coming school-year, which was to begin not three weeks away. The contracted teacher had broken her contract and was not coming. The procedure of the trustees in their effort to acquire my services ran true to rural form, though I did not then know this, and I was much surprised that they had not come directly to me. Farmers never ask a farmer’s wife whether she will do what they want. They always ask her husband, and husband, of course, is obsolete as a word, the reference always being to her man. There are no verbal wives either. Each is referred to as the woman. Adam, who was the first agriculturist, began it. You will remember that he answered the accusations of the Lord by saying, “The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.” (The big coward! And that’s the kind of first Pa all of us had!)

  It was a good thing the trustees did go to Charley first, for had they consulted me, I would have answered most decidedly in the negative. The one man I would never have married was a farmer, and the one thing I would never have been was a teacher. It is a mistake to object to any shift of fate. Today I know that among my richest experiences are those acquired through being a farmer’s wife and through being a teacher. Perhaps, too, there was a place for a laughing, foolish woman, who had a passion for writing, in both the fields of agriculture and education. Those who easily conform, who have no decision as to what life should give themselves and others, are not the ones to discover and fight injustices perpetrated by men, or women, who know they can wrong their fellowman because they have the undisputed power. A teacher who does exactly what she is told, either by trustees or by a course of study, whether she believes what is to be done is right or wrong, is the teacher who in the school-room insists upon implicit obedience, whether she is right or wrong. No human being can be positive he is right until he listens patiently and tolerantly to the other fellow’s side. And that goes in every walk of life.

  Charley must have cogitated how he was to approach me, although he was never notably tactful where I was concerned. Few husbands are. It is the wives who have to exercise this gift, generally because the money is where they can get at it only in that manner. It is a gift which passes down from mother to first, second, and third daughter, and to as many more daughters as there are, and from them down to other daughters. It was a worse affliction in the Victorian era, but it has certainly not passed away, in spite of woman’s thinking she is a free human being because she has the right to vote wrong, as I did in the last election. (I think. We’ll see what that admirable man in the White House does about agriculture.)

  “Well...” began Charley, taking a scalded cheese-cloth square and straining the milk into a Kansas crock—an office that he almost always performed for me, “Well...Mama, we can pay our debts at the grocery-store now.”

  “You’ve sold something!” I exclaimed joyfully, getting ready to execute an impromptu dance, a thing I was always glad to do.

  It must have given Charley a pain to see my lack of realization of our situation. But then, there was my side of it, too. I had felt shuddering horror at the very thought of a farm, and the persuasion of Charley, together with that wonderful chanticleer weekly, had put me there, in spite of every instinct I experienced that I, of all women, should never go on a farm. I had been taught to believe, by Charley particularly, that a fortune was just waiting for us to come and pick it out of the soil.

  “I have not only sold nothing,” said Charley, placing the milkrag in a tin of cold water, “but I have nothing to sell. Use your eyes. Does that look like a crop out there? The rabbits got it all. I have about five dollars worth of potatoes. That’s my crop.”

  I am pretty silly at times, but sometimes I have to stop to think a little, so I was silent for one thousandth of a second, a long season for
me. I did not even have time to formulate my question as to what magic means he could employ to pay our bills.

  “It’s just this way,” said Charley, beginning to wash his hands in the granite wash-basin which sat on the home-carpentered wash-stand some farmer in Kansas had sold the Baron. “Charley Willey says that the trustees want you to teach the school this year. The teacher they had failed them.”

  “How do they know I can teach?” I demanded, my green eyes, I am sure, turning to that black-blue they do when I am powerfully moved. At least I felt black-blue at his words.

  “Oh, Jeff and Tony have told them how much education you have.”

  “But I never tell any one how much education I have, for I have had just enough education to know how little I have.”

  “You speak good English, don’t you?”

  “Only when I feel like it....But arithmetic! I can’t do arithmetic! Why, when I was working...or looking like I was working...for my Bachelor of Letters, I failed in both geometry and algebra, and if it hadn’t been for Leo Bird, I could not have graduated. And the worst of it was, I didn’t care. Leo was the one determined that I should get through. And it was just a chance. I just happened to know how to answer the things that were asked me in my special examination. And, Charley, you don’t know this, but Malcolm Little was on the faculty then...he was working his way through by teaching Spanish...you know his folks lived in Mexico...and when my name came up for discussion, as to whether I was to graduate, some one said, ‘Has she passed in mathematics?’ And Professor Tanner said, ‘Yes,’ and Charley...Charley, that whole faculty burst out laughing!”

  “But they said you had the best graduating thesis; they told you so.”

  I wished that in a moment of vainglorious bragging I had never told him so. I had never been impressed, myself, by that judgment. You see, I had cribbed a little here and there, and I was not much impressed with the stuff myself. I could write just as good if I had not been too lazy.