Annie Pike Greenwood

by We Sagebrush Folks

  At the end of the band of sheep were two more men with empty oblong kerosene cans, such as Mrs. Curry used for a wash-boiler, one side cut away. But not so beneficent was the use of the two kerosene cans in the hands of the two sheep-herders in the rear of the flock. The road was long and wearying for the little lambs, trying, as they did, to keep up with their mothers all the way out to the unfenced desert. The bleating of ewes and their little ones could be heard for over a mile as they were forced on their way.

  It was too much for the babies. They could not keep up. A group of tiny fellows always lagged behind, having struggled almost beyond endurance. Their mothers had to go on, and it was their affectionate, anxious cries, back and forth, that made the medley of sound, somewhat like the plaintive notes of a thousand differently keyed clarionets, all playing at the same time, and none of them in harmony. The backs of cream-colored wool, spotted occasionally with the dull black of the odd ones, ran like the slowly rippling stream of a canal after a spring rain, when the ivory-hued clay is washed down from the farms into the water. As a few of the tired lambs straggled back, the sheep-herders would throw the empty kerosene cans at them, to scare them onward. Such a can had caught Limpy, and there he lay, no doubt mourning for his mother, gone, so unaccountably, far beyond his sight and hearing.

  I held the lamb’s leg while Charley put a shingle splint on it and wrapped it around with cloth. It was a very capable job, but not quite perfect, and the name I gave him while he still wore the bandages continued to be appropriate. God takes especial care of all things that have not the brains to care for themselves. Brains? No, I cannot call it that, since man, who is most divorced from God of all his created animate things, has shown such a brainless exhibition as the World War.

  Not being very bright, for sheep are not, God supplied a time-sense to make up to Limpy for that lack. My lamb knew that the woman who fed him from the bottle would be coming home about half past four in the afternoon. He knew that she would be walking then, because all the horses were in use. He knew he could see her if he went down to the corner where the new school-house was being built—the lure held out to get me to teach...I could teach there, but a few steps from home...not in my time to happen. Every day, just as I reached the Jerome Canal bridge, I could hear the bleating of Limpy, and down the road he would come bouncing to me; and it was not just that I was the bottle-lady—he loved me. Everywhere on the farm he followed me, even as poor Peewee, the chick of later date, used to follow me. I was their mother. And why not? Animals seem to me just human beings in another form, and I have seen many human beings who seemed to me just animals in another form.

  No one knew what I thought of Limpy, and no one knew what he thought of me. The men were so busy that they never saw us together. About the only time they ever saw my actions toward my pet was when I forced him out-of-doors, for he would follow any one into the house, and that so quickly that the screen door could not slam between him and the place he loved to be. We had to have fresh meat, a thing almost impossible to get, and very expensive. You can’t just go egging and salt-porking—sow-bellying—men all through a week of spud-picking. Jeff and Tony would have remained no matter what we gave them. And there is where I came in: they were hungry for women folks. But the crew of three had plenty of women folks of their own, and although they might be on thin fare at home, they were not willing to pick spuds for you on the same feed.

  One night little Charles lifted his plate from his high-chair tray and held it out to his father. He had eaten one decotchment, as the sagebrush farmers say, and had learned that he must look out for himself. For sometimes, in our hurry, we forgot the baby until we could hear his plaintive voice complaining, “I ain’t got nothin’ t’ bite!” Then we all came to the rescue.

  His father did not notice the lifted tray, so out sang little Charles, “Gi’me some more Limpy, please!”

  Then I knew. I knew that the baby had witnessed the slaughter. I knew that I...I...had cooked my beloved Limpy for those horrible cannibals to eat, myself an unconscious accessory before the fact. To feed spud-pickers. I am not a crying woman. I have shed tears only a few times in my life, and then it was because I was so gol-awful mad that I could think of nothing to say. When I knew I had been among those atrocious spud-picking cannibals to eat my poor child Limpy, I said nothing, but my appetite was gone. From that day to this, I never said a word about Limpy to Charley. The Baron was doing the best he could. He had worked hard, and had seen the rabbits harvest all his crop except those few potatoes. I should have been a sillier woman than I am had I complained.

  But every day, when I reached Jerome Canal bridge and could hear the roar, close at hand, of that beautiful dark-blue man-made river, I thought I could see, far up the road, just turning the school-house corner, the little ghostly form of my Limpy, bouncing down the road to me. (Well, Limpy, I know you will never forget me, and I expect to see you bouncing toward me, and bleating your love, on that heaven-road, as I have told the folks who are reading this book.)

  SPUD-PICKING TIME over, and the children all back in school. Not only the children who were there before, but the big young men, who looked as though they could take a cow by the horns and throw it over the fence. They crowded themselves into the largest of the seats, dispossessing some smaller, slightly disgruntled boys; and there they were, stuck in those seats so tightly I did not see how they were going to be able to leave them behind when they were ready to go home. The seats were nailed to the floor, so it looked to me as though they might even carry the old school-house along with them.

  “My goodness, boys,” I said in my most unteacherly manner, I was so dismayed, “I don’t know how you ever got into those seats, and I don’t see how you will ever get out of them. Haven’t you some old tables at home, and a chair for each of you, that you could bring to school?”

  A grin covered every manly face. “That’s one o’ the things we driv Old Shavvy out fer. We ast him could we bring a table, ‘n he says if we was boun’ t’ come, we gotta take what the rest taken. Sure we kin bring a table and chairs. You got a table, ain’t yuh, Bernard?”

  There was dignity about that table at the back of the room, and I really enjoyed watching those young men, bent seriously over their books and writing away, I hope, with a certain amount of enjoyment. Yes, they did like to write. I taught them that right where they were they had most wonderful things to write about. Bernard, I remember, took delight in writing a description of that old plank school-house: “The cracks between the boards,” he wrote, “are so big that a cow could put her head through them.” So, you see, with a little encouragement, we had a humorist, right there in the brush.

  My heart was lacerated by the sight of the sore hands of the children who had been spud-picking for a week. At the look on my face, Harry, my fussy pupil, explained, “The kids all gits sore hands pickin’ up spuds.”

  “Don’t your hands hurt?” I asked yellow-haired Emily Streeter.

  Bernard made answer for her, “Sure, they hurt. My little sister cried nearly every night of spud-pickin’ with hers.”

  Faithful William expatiated, “It don’t make no mind about my hands. What gits me is the bendin’ over all day, and maybe night.”

  “Yes,” Elida hastened to say, “it gits me, too, that night work, ‘ithout no supper, ner nothin’. On Wednesday, you know it sprinkled a few drops, ‘n Ma ‘n Pa, ‘n us kids picked up spuds, ‘ithout no supper, till ‘leven o’clock at night. My! Mrs. Greenwood, I was ‘bout dead. My little sister cried the last hour.”

  “How much money will you children get for your part of the work?”

  “Money!” Homer was amused. “We don’t git no money. You can’t hardly make nothin’ outen nothin’, farmin’, Pa says. He used to be a bricklayer. He says he wisht he’s back on the job.”

  “Pa says we has t’ be a-workin’ anyways,” further explained William. “Pa says we’s lucky t’ sell our spuds a-tall this year. Las’ year we couldn’t git nothin’, so
we dug what we needed ourselves,’n fer seed, ‘n let the rest freeze in the ground.”

  “We can’t sell nothin’ but the great big spuds, nohow,” added Bernard.

  I came in with my foolish, inexperienced opinion—I was still a city woman: “I should think the poor people in the cities would be glad to get the smaller potatoes.”

  Children are so sensitive. They feel what they cannot express. They liked me, and now I had committed a piece of ignorance which made them ashamed for me. They saw, suddenly, that Teacher might know a lot about the unimportant subject of English, but she had failed in the important business of farming. They liked me so well that at once every face was averted, eyes looking away from me, in order to save me embarrassment. Instantly I knew this.

  “I read in a paper my brother-in-law Rob sent me that potatoes are listed to cost $4.00 a hundredweight at Chicago, the crop beginning to arrive there now.”

  They all looked at me with interest. I had redeemed myself. That sounded like intelligence. Nothing sounds so dumb to farmers as the ideas about farm conditions expressed by city men. City men just do not know. You have to know the inside of things before you can know what remedy to advise. You cannot teach folks how to swim if you have never been in water. It may be that a remedy is a theory, but it must be based upon experience with the thing to be cured.

  “We sold our spuds fer forty-five cents a hundred-pound sack,” contributed Bernard. “But they won’t take nothin’ but the big potatoes fer that. Can’t never sell none but the big spuds.”

  I looked at those childish hands, scoured raw by the constant handling of dirty, rough potatoes. I thought of the little backs, bent painfully for seven days and nights, and longer if there were more potatoes. I thought, too, of the lordly men who came riding out among us in their cars, smoking their expensive cigars, and not a car among us, and the cheapest tobacco for our men. I thought of how they come out and say, “I’ll give you forty-five cents for your potatoes, and you’ll take it, or be damned.” I thought of how the price was set in order to give the middleman the greatest profit, and was in no wise related to the cost of production—the cost of the seed, the plowing, planting, irrigating, cultivating, harvesting, with every member of the family giving work that ought to have a monetary value, but which has none. Does not the cost of the water have to be paid out of the price given for the potatoes? And the taxes? And the payment on land?

  I wondered what they would think of me at Longenberger and Belmont’s if I walked into their store and said, “That pink percale over there on the third shelf. I’ll give you ten cents a yard for it, and not a cent more, and nobody else will, either, for we have combined to keep the price there.”

  Then Henry Belmont would say, in horror, “But, Mrs. Greenwood, that is the very highest grade of percale. It cost us, wholesale, ten cents. We have to make a little profit, in order to pay taxes, and the upkeep of the building, and the clerks who work for us, and me, and Mr. Longenberger, and Bertha. If we sold you that at your price, we would be idiots!”

  “Then you’ll have to go out of business,” I would say in my snippy, middleman way, “for none of us will buy anything from you except at our own price.”

  Henry Belmont would try to go on with his business, in spite of what I said, hoping that by laying in a large stock of percale, pink in color, he could make a profit. But in the meantime all the people banded with me had decided that they were not wearing pink percale this year, and that would leave Henry with the goods on his hands. Now he looks around to see how the farmer is handling such a situation.

  Well, he finds this: When the middleman will not give the farmer enough for his crop, he buys a lot of hogs, and hens, and cattle, and feeds his crop to them. Government agricultural experts call that turning the crop into meat, selling the crop on the hoof, though personally I have never yet seen a hen with a hoof. But that has nothing to do with the question, so I will not report this zoological fact to Uncle Sam.

  So, what does Henry do? He gets all the women of the family together and says to them, “Girls, you turn this pink percale into dresses and sunbonnets, and I am sure we can sell them to the farmers.”

  Pretty soon, all the windows of Longenberger and Belmont blossom with an array of lovely pink dresses and bonnets. The farmers and their wives come to buy, but what they say is not, “How much do those things cost?” but, “I’ll give you ten cents for that bonnet, and thirty-five cents for that there dress, and if that don’t suit ye, they kin rot on the shelf fer all we keer. We got a dozen other places where they’s sellin’ to us at our own price.”

  Then what happens? I hope you will agree that this is quite a drammer, though Shakespeare and Eugene O’Neill missed the plot. It could be worked up good, if they tried. Well, this is what happens. Henry Belmont cannot sell a thing, and the taxes keep right on having to be paid; the building has to have new shingles; Bertha and Mr. Longenberger and Henry are all going without any pay, eating a little out of the store to keep alive, but the clerks are hollering for their pay, and they don’t mean maybe! The family car is sold, and the family home will have to go, too.

  So what happens then? Well, Henry and a few other merchants who have had to fail on account of selling to the farmers at their own price, or refusing to sell, all of them write letters to the Congressmen they cast their votes for at election-time. With what result? One of the Congressmen raises the tariff on pink percale, so that none can be shipped to where Henry is at a lower price than the cost Henry has figured on his percale. How does that help Henry, when the price that makes it impossible for him to realize expenses is set by the farmers and has nothing whatever to do with the foreign merchant? It just means that neither the foreigner nor the hometown man can sell pink percale at a profit.

  Another Congressman puts through a law to inflate the dollar. But what’s that to Henry when he cannot get hold of even a flat dollar? They can puff the dollar up until it bursts, but it just doesn’t mean a thing to Henry, because no one will buy from him with flat dollars or puffed dollars except at a price below the cost of production.

  Then another Congressman passes a law to fix the price of percale so that it will be fixed. There is no other true reason, for this does not change the situation at all. Either the farmers will not buy at the Government price, or they will secretly force the price down where they want it. And the answer is: Has the Government done away with kidnapping? And did it do away with bootlegging? And how about racketeering? You can never law anything in or out of existence.

  Good old Government! Means well, but all the politicians have their hands in their own pockets, in order to put there what they can grab from the Government. No! Not all! There are still men among them who will not sell themselves for anything, and there is a man in the White House whose integrity is undoubted. In the course of our brief United States history we have had several nincompoops in the Presidential chair. Getting elected to a job does not give a man the capacity to fill it.

  Congressmen mean well, and Presidents mean well, but the last and most favorite answer to Henry Belmont and the other suffering merchants is:

  “Dear Henry, et al.: We have made a law to let you have all the credit you need to carry on your business at present. But, of course, you must pay us back soon, and with interest.”

  Henry is desperate; so, like the farmers, he allows good old Grandma Government to pay the mortgages on the store building and his home. He gets hope of buying another car. And good old Grandma Government lends him money to buy more goods. He has CREDIT! Now his business can get out of the hole.

  What happens? The farmers still hang together, setting their own prices, and Henry not only cannot make expenses, but he cannot get an edge with which to pay back good old Grandma Government. He is in the hole worse than ever. AND HE SEES IT.

  There he is different from the farmer. The farmer always suspected there was something crooked in the deal he gets, but he has not thought it out, and he is too short-sighted and too wea
k to hang on with other farmers until he forces the middleman to accept his terms.

  No, he can never do it alone. What’s a Government for but to help its weaker citizens out of the clutches of predatory interests? S-s-s-sh, woman! that sounds like socialism, or communism, or something. It is! It is! It is something the farm woman who writes this gave the golden years of her life, her health, the well-being and education of her children, to learn. Not voluntarily. No farmer’s wife does these things because she wants to do them. Yes! I am shouting it now! I have found out SOMETHING, and it is in this book.

  GRACIOUS! but I’m hoarse. And what good will it do? I did not shout these things to those pitiable farm children. I was still a city woman, just stirring in my sleep. What was it all about? I did not yet know. The nightmare that I, myself, was doomed to be that tired, round-shouldered, red-handed, ridiculously dressed farm woman whom I had seen clambering over the wagon-wheel at Provo, while I sat in our fringed-top phaeton, conscious of the fact that I was her superior by the Divine Right of Kings—God’s little pet lamb—the nightmare of seeing myself gradually become that woman had not yet troubled my dreams.

  It turned bitter cold. Before the winter was over, the thermometer had dropped to forty below zero. We had to heat the open-work school-house with brush. And that sagebrush must be grubbed and dried by the children and me, for we had begged for the job of being janitors. I had not then been made aware that we should have to supply our own sagebrush fuel, or the plan that had given us this responsibility might have fallen through.