Annie Pike Greenwood

by We Sagebrush Folks

  There is nothing more contrary than a hog. It seems to study what you want it to do so that it can do the opposite. All day long it will hunt for weak places in a fence, and it does not matter whether you mean to keep it out or to keep it in, the place where you do not want it is the place where it wants to be. And always it looks at you with the vicious little blue eyes of a thoroughly bad man. The hog is the only animal with eyes like a human being’s.

  Continually, Charley had to get off his plow and herd the hundred hogs back into the field from which they had forced their way. He could get nothing done. So he set six-year-old Walter at the task.

  The child was unable to control the crafty herd, though he spent the day at it. I could not bear to see Walter’s anxiety, for the strain of responsibility on a little child’s face cast a shadow which does not belong there. Pregnant as I was, I left my housework every time I heard his voice shouting the hogs back where they belonged. I knew he could not get them back alone. They were almost as big as he and would race around him as though he were not there.

  I ran through tall alfalfa, stumbling over the ridged irrigation ditches, falling often, so exhausted by the running and so jarred by the falls that I could not rise for some time, lying there in the mud and water until I could drag myself to my feet. At such times the child within me seemed very heavy.

  I was determined to go to the hospital at Twin Falls to be confined. I had seen enough of that surly sheep-doctor, and there was no other physician in that part of the country. Besides, there was something seriously wrong with me. I suffered eclampsia after the birth of Walter, almost losing my life, and my arms were acting in the same way as they had before he came. They were even worse, for they were not only without sense of touch, but they were filled with unbearable pain.

  One evening I was walking the floor in terrible agony, cradling one arm on the other in an effort to ease them. I wore, having removed my daytime clothes, a long, flowing blue-green kimona, covered with golden butterflies. I had made it myself, before coming to Idaho, and it had a way of bringing the best out of my blue-green eyes and my fluffy light-brown hair. But as I paced the floor, I had no thought of how I looked. A woman in the last months of pregnancy does not expect to present a beautiful sight.

  The children were asleep. Early September had brought a cool night, and it was already dark. Through the kitchen door I heard Charley’s footsteps with a different, quicker spring to them. His eyes were bright as he came into the room.

  “You don’t mind if I go over to the Mormon dance at Lateral Eight with the Currys, do you? I knew you wouldn’t want to go.”

  What could I say to that eager voice? I am afraid I lied, though I did not mean it for a lie. I said I did not mind, and I did. I minded being left all alone in that quiet farm-house when I was in such pain. I minded being the one left behind because I was the one to bear a child, and I loved to dance. I walked the floor, still cradling my aching arms, crying to myself, for no one could hear me but myself, and no one ever knew it until this moment.

  Yes, Charley had failed me. He had no business to leave me there alone under such circumstances. But he would never have done it had I not failed him in some way first. We women build the foundation for men’s treatment of us. Some of our men need more love than we give them, and some of them need a right good beheading every once in a while. Many a woman wrongs her husband with too little affection. And many a woman wrongs her man with too much patience. But if there need be one wrong or the other, let it be that of too much patience. For sometimes the long road of all-kindness conquers at last.

  I had uremic poisoning. I had suffered from it ever since my eleventh year, when I contracted a severe case of measles which crippled my kidneys so that the uric-acid crystals were returned to the blood-stream. I was drowsy nearly all the time. I grew tired so soon. I never knew vigorous health. But this state had been mine so long that I imagined everyone felt the same way; so I neither questioned it nor complained, and thus was my danger the greater. I lived constantly with death at my elbow.

  It was likely to get me this time. But I went on, trying to be a normal creature, a farm woman, a super-human, believing that all I did was no more than I should do. The week before Rhoda was born I cooked for fifteen men who had come to help stack hay. And in the intervals of serving them I would creep into my bedroom to sink for a moment across my bed. I was so tired. Through the bedroom window I could see the mare and the cow, turned out to pasture for weeks because they were going to have young.

  The day came when I was packing my trunk to leave for Twin Falls. I had been cleaning the house, so as to leave it decent for the little family, and I had washed. The last piece of my ironing lay across the ironing-board, and my trunk stood open to receive it. The little baby things were lying in one of the top compartments. I thought I would feed my thirty-two chicks for the last time. They were to be fall fries.

  I had the wire chicken-house near the canal. Nine o’clock, and still light, with the long twilight of a hill-top that looks afar at mountains across a vast sweep of valley. I had set Charley’s supper for him, as he had been late in the fields, and he had just started eating it.

  I was crouched among the restless little fluff-balls, sprinkling wheat from a can, when the bag that acts as a cushion for the head of the child broke, the water flowing downhill. This should not have occurred for another week, nor until after labor. I had been working too hard. With a feeling of dazed incredulity, I stood up and turned back to the house. No chance of getting to the hospital. More than dismay, disappointment, made my heart heavy for the moment. But I walked into the living-room, where Charley sat eating and looking over an old paper, and said, “The baby is coming. You’d better go for the doctor.”

  He looked at my face, and knew. In a few moments I heard the Mormon white-top rattle past the front of the house, where we then had a driveway. By this time labor had set in, and it was not coming gradually, but with violence whose power made me realize that my time was not far off. I went into the bedroom, carrying my baby’s little clothes, made of cloth purchased from the same baby bazaar that had provided the material for the other children’s baby clothes. The school money had come in handy there, and I had sewed them myself. I had to buy little shirts and bands to take the place of those given to the Curry baby.

  Clean sheets I put on the bed, and water on the range, first filling the fire-box with sagebrush and lighting it. I set about these things restlessly because the pains were absorbing my attention. I gave no thought to the possibility of my baby being born with no help at hand. I waste very little time on possible difficulties.

  But I was not alone, after all. The rushing sound of wheels grating on the gravel of the driveway came to a stop at the porch with the toothpick pillars. Feet on the porch boards, the door-screen closing after three figures, blurred in the deepening darkness for I had carried the glass lamp to the bedroom. The sheep-doctor and “another woman” to care for me. The woman was Mrs. Rush, dark, beautiful, miscast, mismarried, repressed, quiet, with speaking, somber eyes. What she hid within her was expressed by her one child of a previous marriage, who had been in my school, a brilliant, gifted, singing, dancing little nymph, who afterwards made her fortune in vaudeville. Which sounds like fiction, but is fact. But that never did heal her mother’s life. It would always be too late for her. She was the kind of woman who never recovers from her mistakes.

  Together we hastily undressed me and slipped my white lawns-dale gown over my head. It was pretty, with dainty lace and embroidery. My other-days lingerie had not yet passed away, to be replaced by the cheap, coarse materials that for years, until too late, disguised from me the fact that my arms and shoulders were...But no one cared about them, so why should I?

  The doctor had left his ewes, which were doing some out-of-season lambing, and he was not very happy about leaving them. His attitude expressed the outrage of one who considered that I might have planned better. I was perfectly heartless. The only th
ing that concerned me was the bringing of that child into the world, and I was the helpless agent of powerful Nature, robbed of the right to will.

  Rhoda was born. “A girl,” announced the sheep-doctor, in a grudging voice. I was too tired to care what sort of voice he used. I had not expected him to break down and cry with joy. A little girl! I was glad, but so tired. She had come, and now I could rest.

  As part of his treatment the doctor used a catheter. From that moment there was a terrible pain in the back of my head. It never ceased, day or night. It was unbearable torture. Unbearable, therefore I need not bear it. It is only the little things that can hurt us. It is only the little things we have to bear. When an injury is great enough, Nature supplies her own anæsthesia. I lapsed into unconsciousness after a week of suffering.

  The fourteenth day of my lying there thus, my young husband demanded of the sheep-doctor, “What shall I do with her? She is getting no better. Shall I take her to the hospital at Twin Falls?”

  “Foolish expense,” muttered the sheep-doctor, who was really not a bad-natured man, but an eccentric. “Foolish expense. If she’s going to get well, she’ll get well right here. If she’s going to die, you’ll have all that useless expense.”

  For years I held that against the sheep-doctor. I thought he was heartless. But as it turned out, he was right. The doctor into whose hands I fell at the hospital was far less competent than my sheep-doctor, even though he was of the school of medicine practised by my father, the allopath, and the sheep-doctor the despised homeopath. For when the hospital doctor had not guessed right after several tries, he said I was just having an attack of hysteria. He thought he could bring me out of it the way he had cured another woman patient. When she had failed to respond to his treatment, he had turned down the covers and spanked her, and she had been so mad she cried, and was well at once.

  That was a far crueler implication than any made by the sheep-doctor. After all, the hospital doctor did not cure me. He had no hand in my cure whatever. He did not even know what was the matter with me. But the manner of getting to that hospital was interesting, had I known anything about it.

  There was but one motor-car within a radius of seven miles. This Charley hired, wrapping me in blankets and holding me on the seat with his arms as we crossed the six miles of, as yet, sagebrush desert. He had telegraphed ahead to have the train stop at Milner, with a cot provided for my use in the baggage-car. There I lay, unconscious of the trap-trap-trap and the rushing sound beneath me, as well as the swaying of my bed with the motion of the train.

  The hospital doctor experimented on me. They tell me I stared at the nurse and the doctor, but I saw neither of them. The doctor was wrong. I was not suffering from hysteria. I was insane. I was living in a land of unreality with whose difficulties I had no power to cope. And that constitutes one form of insanity.

  I do not know why having been insane should brand a person. My own condition has diverged widely from true sanity four times in my life, and looking back I cannot see a time except the present when I was entirely sane. Even in this present I am living, there are one or two subjects which throw me out of balance. I am generally so sane that I can recognize these facts.

  Everybody is insane. Those people who exhibit bovine calm under all circumstances are among the most insane. For quick emotional reaction, under control, is a sign of sanity. And no person is sane who has not an active sense of humor. No person can become much less than normal for any length of time who has an active sense of humor. It is probably the most precious attribute possible.

  The hospital room was not my environment. I had none. I was simply something which was required to stare at an imaginary bright light in one corner, near the ceiling. I was not allowed to take my eyes from it. Torture. And a truck kept backing up to wherever this was that I was imprisoned. My one impulse was to escape to it.

  November rain was the sound of that truck. The sweet November rain in Idaho, fragrant, musical, soaking the ground in preparation for winter, running in streams from eaves—intoxicating delight of calm, delicately gray November days. The melancholy days are not for Idaho, nor her November days the saddest of the year, for those rains are cheering, and the ugly, windy, violent weather of spring is here rebuked with a gentler spring, preceding winter. In Idaho, if summer comes, spring cannot be far behind, for the spring of November follows the heat of August and September and the faint chill of October, to shower everything with warm, abundant rains.

  I was lost in that terrible world of unreality, where a torturing light must be watched through an eternity marked only by the backing up of a truck and its driving away, continually, continually, hopelessly. That ignorant doctor, under the cloak of his diploma, tried everything on me. Filled my system with medicines that were unnecessary, plastered a blister on the back of my neck. “And if that doesn’t bring her out of it,” he informed my anxious young husband, “I’ll turn down the covers and spank her, and she’ll come to.” I am sorry that it was not necessary, for I hope that he might have been right, because I have the further hope that I should have bitten him until his glacial blood ran in streams. Further to console my poor Charley this doctor informed him, “I might as well tell you that it is very doubtful whether your wife will live, and if she does, I must warn you that her mind will be a perfect blank.” That was a sweet thing to tell a young man who had three perfectly new children on his hands.

  The doctor had just taken the blister off my neck and was exercising in some gymnasium in preparation for his next indoor sport, when I disappointed him by falling out of bed. I struck my head on the iron framework of the bedstead and immediately came to my senses as much as I had ever known them. I heard a cry, “Oh, Mrs. Greenwood, what are you doing?” and I looked up and saw my pretty young nurse for the first time.

  PRAYER is a strange thing. So is a tree. One no stranger than the other. One as natural as the other. Nobody had to train the heart of man to pray. In prayer there is a force to move the universe out of its orbit. All the sagebrush farming people met at the school-house and prayed for me. They were told I was dying. Probably I was. But their prayers pushed me out of that bed; their prayers crashed my poor little head against that iron framework.

  Slowly I grew well enough to be taken back to the farm. I have a very dear cousin, much older than I, whom I have always called Cousin Joe; my Joe is named for him, as Rhoda was named for his wife, my Cousin Rhoda. When Cousin Joe heard that I was able to leave the hospital, he sent me a check for seventy-five dollars “to take a trip somewhere.” How could I go away somewhere and leave that forlorn little family of mine any longer? I sent for a second-hand, reconditioned phonograph and a great pile of the very best records. And thus my sagebrush children, in the heart of a wilderness, the last frontier of the United States, heard the greatest singers of that day, symphony orchestras of four hundred men, famed violinists, and works of the genius composers. That was unparalleled among pioneers. And it will never happen again. Now there is no longer any frontier, and the radio has come, with its necessary commercial announcements and its instrumentations which often sound as though a cat were chasing a mouse through a litter of pans, crashing them to the floor. The baby bawls, a pig squeals, and a man sings that his heart is practically beyond repair, or the Punk Sisters do close harmony which makes everything sound alike, and that is Music. That is the heritage of childhood that will be passed down to another generation. And because this requires no attention, but insists only upon being heard, children everywhere do not listen to what is really worth concentration.

  I was so weak I could not even read, so I did much thinking with my perfectly blank mind. We go on thinking, just the same, sane or insane, the only difference being that insane thinking concerns itself with unreality. I was sane enough to be thinking of nothing but reality. I sat by the living-room window, staring idly out at the fields.

  “I was just wondering,” I said to my young husband, “how you got along without me when it came time
for you to cook for thrashers.”

  “I didn’t have any grain to thrash. The rabbits got it all. I fed alfalfa, mangelwurzels, and peas to the hogs and then fattened them on wheat.”

  “You’ve sold the hogs, Charley! And we’ve got our start?”

  “Start! Yes...a start backward! By the time the hogs were fat, the market price had dropped to four cents a pound.”

  “Couldn’t you have kept them until the market went up?”

  He answered me emphatically: “Every day you keep a hog after it is fat, you are losing money. The packers simply depress the market whenever they want to, and use some current event to make it seem plausible.”

  “The market price of pork dropped,” I murmured, trying to realize our calamity with my perfectly blank mind.

  “Dropped!” repeated Charley, “it dropped to forty cents a pound, made into bacon! As soon as they had robbed me of my hogs at four cents a pound, I went to Longenberger’s and asked the price of bacon. It was forty cents a pound.”

  I turned my face away from him as far as possible, to hide the tears which had welled into my eyes. I was very weak, you see. And then there was my perfectly blank mind. I was trying with it to reason out what was the matter with farming.

  I kept right on thinking about it, and a year from that time, when most of our eighty acres was ready to cut for hay, I had a brilliant plan. “Don’t you sell your hay until you can get a good price,” I advised my husband.

  The hay had cost Charley eight dollars and fifty cents a ton to raise. The sheepmen were offering the farmers six dollars. Charley’s hay was mortgaged to the bank, as was the hay of all other farmers in the district.

  “You hold your hay for a better price,” I told him. “The sheepmen have to have your hay, and if you do not sell hastily, they will pay you a price that will give you a fair profit.”