Annie Pike Greenwood

by We Sagebrush Folks

  One incident of the school-house night entertainment with our scarecrow I forgot to tell you. It was while the potato race was in progress that I could see Charley and a rangy, overalled man, bulbous of eyes, in earnest conversation. This man was called “Sul” Smith, because he had two of the balkiest horses in the district, and balky horses were said by our sagebrush farmers to sul. I suspect the original word was sullen, corrupted into sulling, mistaken then for the conjugation is sulling, from some city man’s use of is sullen, hence the verb to sul. Very expressive, I think, and worthy a place in the language. Sul Smith had a brother-in-law called “Sticky-fingered” Scott, a name requiring no analysis. The two families were what the sagebrush folks called “campers,” people who came from other states in covered wagons—the last, somewhat ignoble covered-wagon trekkers toward the last Western frontier. They camped somewhere on the sagebrush land, making their living as they could from the farmers, not less poor than they, except for a few potatoes and some garden truck. Hay for horses they begged or worked out with odd jobs.

  Charley told me afterward that this man, Sul Smith, was saying, “I hearn tell you wuz kindly a lawyer, Greenwood.”

  “Well...if you don’t care what you say,” Charley told him.

  “This here’s it. I’d be proud fer to hev yuh tell me what fer t’ do in a case like this-a-here. They’s some good jobs a-workin’ with the road crew that’s jes’ come in, ‘n I kin git one effen I kin git muh papers.”

  “Your papers! What papers? I hadn’t heard of any papers,” Charley queried in surprise.

  “Yes, a feller hez t’ hev papers t’ git work with the road crew. Carl Berger got his papers, ‘n they give ‘im a job to oncet. Now, Greenwood, you bein’ kindly a lawyer feller, kin yuh let me in on the how of gittin’ muh papers so I kin kindly git some o’ this-here road work. I gotta wife, ‘n three kids, ‘n muh sister’s fam’ly...”

  Charley was an accomplished mimic, so I could see every expression of Sul Smith’s face written on Charley’s face and hear every expression of Sul’s voice in Charley’s voice. Charley told me it flashed on him what Sul meant. “Why, man,” said Charley, “you must mean your citizenship papers!”

  Sul looked delighted. “By golly, that’s it! It’s muh citizens papers! How’d yuh know? I guess they wuz right about yuh be’n’ kindly a lawyer. Carl Berger says them very words—he says he done got his citizens papers.”

  “How long is it since you came to this country?” asked Charley, in some wonder, Covered-wagon campers are not generally immigrants also.

  “I been in these here parts dost onta six months, er so be.”

  “But, Sul, you speak English like a native. Are you from England?”

  “No, I hain’t never ben t’ no England. Do uh hev t’ be frum England t’ git muh citizens papers?”

  A suspicion struck Charley. “Where were you born, Sul?”

  “I wuz born in Oklyhomy, in the town uv...”

  “Why, man, you’re already a citizen of the United States!”

  “I be?” He looked dazed, then a broad smile spread over his sun-browned face. “By God! now, ain’t that lucky?” he exclaimed.

  The remark I make here is that if I had read this story or heard it over the radio, I should have had hard work to believe it. But it is true.

  This is a good place to state, I think, that every one of those hard-pressed farmers paid what he promised on the school Victrola. Everyone in the district loved its music except the Revener Klyte. He attended our Sunday-school, but no one suggested his name as superintendent, although everyone did look up to him with more respect than the other farmers could command because of his holy clothes and manners. He was entirely absorbed in himself and his own opinions, an affliction common to men who often hear themselves speak in public before a lamblike audience; they grow to feel their hearers subservient to them, and that superiority-complex at-tack becomes chronic and spreads to the entire group of reasoning faculties, so that such a man finally includes among his inferiors the public at large. That is one of the reasons for the general unpopularity of preachers and public speakers of every sort. Windy is the word generally applied to them, and windy they are, for words without deeds are as the wind, which bloweth where it listeth, and no man careth.

  While the early group of Sunday-schoolers were waiting for the rest of the farm wagons to come through the frosty morning air over the squeaking snow, I tried to make it happier for them by playing the phonograph against the first, important roarings of the sagebrush fire in the big, pot-bellied stove:

  Joy to the world! the Lord is come:

  Let earth receive her King;

  Let every heart prepare Him room,

  And heaven and nature sing.

  The farmers and their wives forgot that their feet were still cold in their big, heavy overshoes. Little children turned toward the music, drinking it in, as it were, with wide eyes and open mouths, little, rough, red hands held to the comforting heat of the black, ugly stove. Only one person in the room was not enjoying it. He was trying to set a better example than had been given by Teacher. The Revener Klyte was reading his Bible intently, sitting in one of the little fellows’ desks, up in front. I knew he was praying to the Lord not to count him as one who was enjoying the ungodly music of a machine on the Sabbath Day.

  I admit to prejudice concerning Revener Klyte. I think it is because I felt his aura of holier-than-thou, and not only that, but his aura of knowinger-than-thou. I can stand an insult to my morals better than one to my intelligence, because morals have shifting standards, and mine may be the right one after all; but intelligence is intelligence, and I always felt that the Revener Klyte had not a very high opinion of my ability. So you see my wounded conceit cannot give you a fair picture of the Revener Klyte.

  He certainly was a great help in making a go of the Literary Society. He did the best he could for us, which is all any one could do, trying to teach two women, his wife and his sister-in-law, to play the violin—fiddle, I mean—when his own qualifications were...well...woman! remember your wounded conceit! It was not wounded conceit that made me scream inside while they played a trio, “Silver Threads among the Gold,” which sounded more like “Sniveling Heads amid the Cold,” or something like that.

  The cow-rangers were the best of all at those Literarys in the old school-house. Standing before the tattered old blackboard, arms draped around each other’s neck, eyes never lifting from the floor, they sang the songs you now hear over radio, only better, and many songs that you have never heard. I can see them now....Later I copied the words while Steve Drake sang them for me in our living-room at the farm-house; there is a version slightly different, but I like this one because I got it myself in the brush:

  The road that leads to the fair, mystic regions

  Is narrow and dim, so they say,

  While the road that leads down to perdition

  Is posted and blazed all the way.

  I oft-times have wondered how many

  Would perish on that great, final day?

  While we all may be rich, and have plenty,

  Who will find the dim, narrow way?

  APRIL examinations, and would my big fellows get through? I know they had enjoyed school with me, but that was not enough. They had to graduate! I had begged one month from the plowing to get them through, and they must not fail.

  When they handed their papers to me, I found them very creditable, except for one factor: those boys had actually forgotten the existence of commas. I could see how it had occurred. When they had read the questions, which came from the county superintendent at Rupert, and had seen that they could answer them, their enthusiasm was so great that they had just rushed on and on, unconscious of such punctuations. Imagine an airplane running a race through the heavens and having to stop to acknowledge a lot of comma clouds!

  I knew it was likely to prove fatal if I sent those commaless papers back to Rupert to be judged, even though every question was answe
red correctly. I now make confession of the crime of my life, which, until now written, has never been revealed to any one: sitting there at my desk, startled by shadows and creaking of boards, I deliberately sprinkled bootleg commas over their manuscripts.

  Oh, the joy of handing those certificates to boys who had rushed across the wilderness on horseback, through the spring twilight after a long day’s work, to receive them! I shall just have to be content with a lower place in heaven, for I will not pray forgiveness for those commas which I do not regret having dishonestly sprinkled over those examination papers.

  Before the boys...young men...left to work again, all my school wrote letters of appreciation of that Victrola to Thomas Edison on his birthday, and his reply is reproduced here.

  I wrote an account of how I had used the Victrola, which was published in the Journal of Education. The Victor Company republished this in an attractive booklet, “The Victor in the Rural School.”

  Dr. Albert E. Winship, editor of the Journal of Education, was to speak at a joint institute of several Idaho counties, and since the meeting was at Twin Falls, he had the train stop to let him off at Milner. From the station he went directly to the livery-stable, run by the trustee who had visited my school on the entertainment night, a red-haired, brown-eyed man of about forty. Dr. Winship told him he wanted to be taken out into the country. The man shook his head emphatically.

  “No,” was the uncompromising answer. “These here roads is snow on top and deep mud underneath. I wouldn’t take the horses across these here roads for nobody. Might’s well kill the horses ‘n be done with it. I wouldn’t take the horses out this kinda weather fer God Almighty Hisself!”

  Dr. Winship wrote all this incident, and it was printed in the Journal of Education just after my first article was published in the Atlantic Monthly. He was turning away, disappointed, with the words, “I am so sorry. I had the train stop for me just on purpose to go out and visit Mrs. Greenwood’s school.”

  He said the man became galvanized. “Who did you say?...Mrs. Who did you say?”

  “I wanted to go out and see Mrs. Greenwood’s school,” answered Dr. Winship, hopefully.

  The man grunted, disgustedly, and began throwing the harness on his horses. “Why in hell didn’t yuh say so in the first place? I’d go anywheres fer that woman!”

  Such is the potency of a little human kindness, the like of which I had exercised that night of the entertainment, taking a moment, flitting, as I was, hither and yon, to say a smiling word to the red-haired trustee from Milner.

  We held closing-day exercises in the new school-house, which I was supposed to have occupied. Men were hammering in the adjoining room, and the farmers, wives, and children were seated on planks laid on kegs of nails. But we were there at last, speaking, singing, though with no platform.

  I told no one what I am telling you now. A few days before, I had received a letter, not preserved, containing practically these contents;

  “I am naming the new school-house and the new school-house district after you because I have long admired your work. It will be known as the Greenwood School-house, and that in the Greenwood District.”

  After a few more kindly words, it was signed Ida M. Sullivan, one of the real names I am giving in this book. She was the county superintendent of schools. The sagebrush farmers have never known why the region where their farms are located is called Greenwood. They probably imagine it came about because the Greenwood farm is just up the hill from the Greenwood School—not logical, because the Endicott farm was as near.

  Several efforts were made by incoming farmer’s wives, the men being indifferent, to change the name of the district back to Pleasant View, or forward to Buckeye, or What-not, though not many supported the latter, if any. I kept my mouth shut, a strange matter for me. The name could not be changed, as they imagined, by general vote, or even by secret propaganda, the actual device they employed. It was a school district. Only another superintendent can change it. But look what happened to Hoover Dam!

  So, until some one changes the name of the Greenwood District to something else, I am going to be glad within myself that those wonderful acres of land, extending on the north to the little Hootin’ Nanny gasoline railroad, and on the south to the great River Snake, and on the east to the outskirts of Hazelton, and on the west out into the wilderness yet unconquered—that all this wonderful country is named after me. The honor cannot last long. The name will be changed, blotted out, and I long forgotten. But now...there it is.

  Dr. Winship wrote me, “I have spoken of your work from the platform of every state in the Union.”

  I tell you these laudatory things to balance the rest of this book, which is an account of the downfall of a self-opinionated woman—incidentally, but still mostly of my beloved sagebrush folks.

  III—BIRTH

  FARMING is giving birth. That is why nearly all men yearn for the soil. In spite of pain, giving birth is the most ecstatic experience possible to a normal human being. Man unconsciously envies woman this privilege. His surrogate is cultivation of the soil. He thrills for the earth at the receipt of the seeds. He feels her gestation, with anticipatory bliss, anxious fear, faithful preoccupation. The harvest is for him the birth.

  Birth is a continual process on the farm. The land is for borning; the animals are vessels of reproduction; the woman steadily, even as the seasons, births forth the farm family until all its members are in being. The crops are of short duration; animal life ceases to have conscious continuity; only the woman gives that which never ceases—joy in springtime, companion in summer, fellow-worker in autumn, comforter in winter.

  Birth is something which city folks connect with the word control. Not to control it is accident, mistake. We sagebrush women bore our babies regularly, every two years, sometimes at shorter intervals. Always a number of us were pregnant; always some of us were nursing our young. Only the sterile among us were simply housekeepers.

  Out of birth came nearly all the troubles and delights of us sagebrush women. The joys were without dramatics. If you had a good man, it was happiness, no matter what the pinch of poverty. Among the children there were no neurotic twists to result in tragic maladjustments. No child was so long the baby that it formed complexes of jealousy and hatred when the next baby appeared. The children helped to rear each other; all helped to make the family living; all were responsible. No idleness. No money spent foolishly.

  My children! I feel the hair damp on their heads from swimming in one of the canals. I smell the sweet drying alfalfa in their clothes. I see their bright eyes and their sunburnt skins. I all but taste them.

  And we loved things together, my children and I. Pretty, the magpie, with intelligent, very blue eyes, hiding the bits of cottage cheese I gave him, in the binder, the spring-tooth harrow, and other farm machinery, and coming back avariciously for more. Outside my window he practised talking as he heard us talk. Joe had found him out in the sagebrush desert and brought him back buttoned in his shirt as he drove home the wandering cows.

  The kitten, Clara, with the largest purple eyes I ever saw in an animal, sickening unto death because of the mistaken kindness of the children in feeding her all the little, naked sparrows she would eat, gathered from the rafters of the granary. Walter brought Clara home from Hazelton, where some farmer had dropped her. He carried her buttoned in his shirt.

  Always I had a hospital of birds and beasts, brought by the pitying children from the fields. A family of baby pheasants whose mother was killed by the binder. A cat who had lost a leg, cut off by some farm machine. The stray dog that I did not like; he had a sneaky air, and I let him die of pneumonia, attempting to save the poor creature when too late, only to regret it all my life and be haunted by that pitiable hound as though I were a murderer. I had finally taken him into the house, out of the winter, making him a padded coat and rising in the night to give him warm milk. But it was too late. Forgive me, poor dog!

  Tag, the pure-bred collie, added t
o the birthing on the farm every season—litters of beautiful puppies which could not be told from pedigreed animals except that there was always one little mongrel beast among them to shame the others with the blot on their escutcheon.

  The cows always went dry some time near the end of February, calves being upon the verge of birth. There would be no milk to feed our pets, and they must be given away. Skeezicks, the mottled, clownish dog who was the family skeleton among three snow-white collies. Walter comes home from the field where he has been plowing. Skeezicks was the only pet dog he ever had. Whistling here, whistling there...my heart vibrating. At last, to me, “Where’s Skeezicks?”

  “The cows are not giving any milk...your father gave all Tag’s pups to the Montgomerys when they came today. Mr. Montgomery wants them for his sheep...”

  “But Skeezicks was my dog. I could have fed him part of my meals...”

  “Yes, I know...”

  I see him sitting on the front porch with the toothpick pillars, looking down at the ground. He sits there a long, long time, looking down at the ground. That end of the porch is where Skeezicks always came scrabbling out to greet his master, wild with joy, wagging his body with his tail. Walter will not cry. He is not that kind. His tears flow inwardly. He just sits looking at the ground.