Annie Pike Greenwood

by We Sagebrush Folks

Charley laughed scornfully. “When a man has a red-hot iron in his hand, he cannot wait for it to cool to set it down. All the hay in this country is mortgaged to the banks. The banks are owned and controlled by the sheepmen, as is also the government of the State of Idaho. The banks demand their money on the first of November. The sheepmen meet each year and decide what price they will pay for hay in order to make their profit. No consideration is given to what it cost the farmer to raise that hay. The president of the Idaho Woolgrowers Association told the convention, “‘We sheepmen have thousands of dollars tied up in our investment; the farmer has nothing but a pitchfork and an irrigation shovel.’”

  When I heard that statement, I wondered if mine was the only mind that should have been condemned as blank. Yes, the sheepmen’s president was right. We had invested a pitchfork and shovel—and our lives. We had condemned ourselves to unremitting labor in the sagebrush wilderness for this reward.

  When Rhoda was born, four new members appeared in four other farm families in the Greenwood District. Also, the World War broke over in Europe. One year later the children of Europe were still butchering each other, hoping daily to have some of the Big Bugs tell them that it was time to stop mutilating and murdering each other because another group of Graybeards had been forced to cough up a piece of land.

  Also, besides the forced human abattoiring, there were the important schemes that I kept thinking up to make the sheepmen pay us a living wage. But I suppose the president of the Woolgrowers Association would have said that we farm people had to be using our time anyway, so it could not be considered as invested. It had never occurred to him that I might have preferred using mine to hang by my toes from the bell-less belfry on the school-house roof, or in sliding on my ear down the hill beside our farm. “Only that time should be counted which you are free to use as you choose,” says Charles Lamb. Time may be said to be yours when you get paid for its use, or when you have the right to decide what you will do with it, or both. Especially both. Under any other condition time enslaves us, and we are no longer free, but bond. The sheepmen were stealing our lives from us. They were glorified porch-climbers, while the farmers slept, robbing them of the coin of their lives.

  I grew tired of thinking. Besides, the every-two-years baby crop was now due again for me. The fields of motherhood were always fertile fields. We women who had borne our young when the World War broke were ready to bear again, now that the warships were leaving America’s harbors with her sons aboard, singing “Over There,” so gentle a song of hate in the mouths of boys sent forth to murder their fellow-men, and to be murdered.

  This time I went to a hotel in Twin Falls to wait, with Rhoda, for Joe’s birth. No, this meant no happy prosperity, but another mortgage plastered on. Rhoda was barely able to say a word or two, a thoughtful, solemn, pretty child, with great quantities of hair and lovely pink-and-white china skin.

  One day I began having labor pains. After some hours I telephoned for a car to take me to the hospital. Within fifteen minutes the baby was born, Rhoda standing beside my bed, gripping my hand tightly and weeping loudly in terror. I ignored the intimate event occurring to murmur soothing words to my baby girl. There had not been time to lift her to the bed beside me.

  Charley came next day and took Rhoda back with him to the farm, where Aunty Sother was caring for my family. Ten days, and I was to return with my new-born baby boy. On the tenth day I awoke so happily. Going home! Little orchard trees, not yet in bearing, but trees just the same, and my passion, trees. Perfume of the hay-fields, and the way they rolled up and then down, toward the Sawtooth Mountains, toward the black volcanic cone. Valley to the south, beginning to have little farms where was wilderness when I had come. And the blue, the serenely blue Minidokas. Skies, skies of every kind: the beauty of piled-up clouds, rippling clouds; sunsets over the black buttes, which lie prone, as though they were sleeping mourners, their cloaks drawn over them; sunsets seen through delicately penciled trees that ran a single lovely line, like a Japanese print, on the boundary of Endicott’s far eastern field. And the swelling roar, always the swelling roar of the great, gorgeous Jerome Canal, a man-made river which steals the children of man and laughs at his grief.

  So happy! Today I go back to the farm to my little ones. And to Charley, who had come in his blue serge suit of other days, looking like the handsome Charley of other days. So tired I was of work shirts and overalls. The blue serge suit brought back the lilacs of romance, the gentle sweetness of new love.

  For a while I would not have to work. Aunty Sother was there. And Hib, the master baker, was there. Hib would bake wonderful bread and cake and pies. There would be collie pups running about. The cow I liked would come bawling up to the kitchen door for me to stroke her neck. Sometime she would likely begin purring, and what a purring there would be! A full, cow-sized purring.

  “All night,” I say, casually, to the head nurse, who has come to help me dress, “all night I had such a cramp in my leg.”

  She became suddenly rigid as iron, a look of alarm on her face. Then she said, “I’ll have to telephone the doctor. Perhaps you can’t go back now.”

  Can’t go back now? Can’t go back now? No, I couldn’t go back. First one leg, and then the other. Phlebitis. My legs elevated on a sloping board, on hinges, made by a grateful carpenter who had spent a year under the care of these nurses. He had fallen down a grain-elevator shaft and broken nearly every bone in his body. When he recovered, out of gratitude he had made these hinged boards for phlebitis patients. There were two men in the building with phlebitis, after operations. Seven weeks I lay there in one position, my legs stretched on that board, feet far above my head; ichthyol at five dollars an ounce used as an ointment; removed every day; hot-water bottles. Another mortgage.

  I did not like my nurse but was too timid to protest. She used to rip the bandages from the ichthyol, almost tearing my flesh away. I yearned for my pretty, curly-haired nurse who had been with me when I was insane, after Rhoda’s birth. But shortly after that time she had gone up the cañon of the Snake and, seated with her back against some native willows, had drunk poison. Her trousseau had been ready, and she was so blithely happy. Then the man told her he had been engaged to another girl in another city when he had engaged himself to her, and that the other girl would not let him off. He was married the next day. And that afternoon my pretty nurse took poison. The Boy Scouts found her, just as pretty as ever, sitting there dead. That poor, miserable weakling of a man could get two women desperate about him. That poor fellow did not need love. The women needed love. But what he needed was a right good beheading.

  The biological urge is far more powerful in women than in men. And the ravages of repression are proportionately greater. No men ever endure the torture that love-starved women suffer, pretending, as they are forced to do, that no terrible hunger gnaws at every act of their lives and at every thought. And no children to partly compensate. For the man and the woman are one, and one without the other is a cripple. So is the woman more a cripple, for the woman is more than the man. Her nature is driven by two powers. Fatherhood is acquired by propinquity. No woman can escape her motherhood. She is born a mother when her babe is born. It is to her either blessing or a curse. Birth!

  PHLEBITIS! Seven weeks with both legs elevated on a sloping board, high above my head, and covered with ichthyol at five dollars an ounce. More mortgages on farm and stock. Seven weeks of lying in one position. Magazines. Books. Nauseated at the sight of print, I who had been a reading drunkard.

  Homesick! White collie dogs prancing around. Sound of galloping hoof-beats on the hard roads that wound through the farm. Smell of alfalfa, drying in the sun. Blue sky, so much blue sky, heaped-up white clouds, purple Minidokas, white Sawtooth Range, black buttes, red sunsets drowned in sky lakes of golden liquid. My children...my children...my children....The lonely hospital. So much silence. Four square walls. Softly padding feet of nurses in the hall. Homesick!

  Charley, in the blue ser
ge suit I loved, came and took me home. Phlebitis! I could not walk a step for months. Just sitting there by the window. Two babies. Snow across the fields in an unbroken sweep. Silence. No women. Miles away the women, all overburdened with work. Watching from the window the two little boys, trailing their father through the deep snow as he cares for the hogs and horses and cows. Following him back to the house from the shed barn, steam from the warm milk in the pail rising on the icy air. Walter and Charles bundled in dark plaid mackinaws, caps pulled over ears, high overshoes, Brownie and Blackie, the two most faithful, most stupid dogs in the world, following the little boys. The colt Bony, short for Bonaparte, with his magnificent head set upon ridiculously short legs.

  Squeak, squeak, squeak, their feet on the hard-beaten snow outside. Yawp! Yawp! Yawp! Brownie and Blackie barking importantly as Eb Hall goes rattling by on the road of ice, his spotted dog, tongue lolling, trotting wearily, as though a part of the mechanism that makes the wheels go around.

  I can hear them stamping the snow from their feet, the swish of the broom to remove what cannot be stamped off. In they come, bringing a gush of crisp, cold air with them. The spotted dog did not go by, as I had imagined. It is Eb Hall. And it is Hib, our good friend through all the years, always with us at Christmas, ringing the Santa Claus sleigh-bells that so excite little Charles, philosophizing real words of wisdom from a life that has been given so many sordid knocks ever since childhood. A poor little lad, weeping into his pillow because his mother and father were divorced. God pity people who know not what they do to the innocent when they marry...and divorce.

  Eb Hall is also a good friend of mine, a Mormon. He comes sympathetically into the room where he knows I sit all day, mending, looking out at the snow, caring for the two babies. Eb Hall is a Mormon who lives his religion, and a member of any church who really lives the best part of that church is a good man or woman. Eb helps his wife with her house-cleaning and her canning. That is not the habit of farmers in general, although I have seen Mrs. Jean’s husband sitting with a pan on his knees, patiently paring peaches while she canned them. And he “the workin’est fool” on the farm, too.

  Eb just missed being handsome by reason of the odd placement of his eyes, almost too close together. Sometimes Nature likes to play a joke on us. We have always believed eyes too close together mean dishonesty. There never was a more honest man than Eb Hall. Nor one with a heart more tender. Now he was saying to me, “What you need to cure your legs is fer to get some sheepmanure, an’ put it in water as hot as you can bear, and keep your legs in it. Ain’t nothin’ more better than sheepmanure fer curin’ lameness. Now, fer bringin’ out the measles when they have went in on a child, you jest give it a tea made outen chickenmanure. It sure brings out the measles.”

  Perhaps the reason my bad legs have never been entirely cured is because I did not soak them in what the Arkansawyers would have called a “decotchment” of sheepmanure and water. Two years before, when Jack Overdonk, a bank cashier from Chicago, had come to farm his acres next to ours on the north, he had told us about being cured of white swelling by poultices of fresh cowmanure, while on his uncle’s farm when he was a boy. Some people are so stubborn about taking advice. They pick and choose, and go on suffering, as they deserve. I admit that I am one of them. I have had measles twice, but even to ward them off, or, rather, to bring them out, I will not drink chickenmanure tea. Just a little idiosyncracy of mine, I suppose. Announce it over the radio, and we shall all be falling over each other to drink it at the soda-fountains. Of course, the best way to get it started would be to have Congress pass a law against it.

  I sat there at the window, gazing sometimes at the long, almost limitless reaches of snow, sometimes at the yawning sock I was mending—later Miss Butterworth taught me how to patch them; sometimes I would look at the babe in the clothes-basket beside me, sometimes to see that Rhoda was not attempting to cut off her tongue in an effort to find new uses for my scissors, patient Tag having moved out of her vicinity with an unsightly cropped spot in her beautiful tan coat. Farmers come and go, speaking to me and then forgetting me in their talk; filling the room with smoke from their pipes; squirting brown, evil-smelling juice into the coalhod, among the lumps of coal; mud from their boots sizzling as it bakes on the sides of the base-burner. They are settling the Government.

  Dialects from many sections sound in my ears—Oklahoma, Iowa, South Carolina, Canada, Texas, the Arkansawyers not yet among us. And we have our good German neighbor, Old Man Burkhausen, who brings the Vaterland over to read scraps from it to me. Burkhausen is an expert gardener, and he and I both have a passion for growing things. In the summer we stand together in my garden, talking old-world wisdom regarding the raising of plants.

  There never was such a community of farmers in the world’s history. And what am I doing here among them, a laughing, dancing woman who had never prepared to cook; who was ignorant of motherhood; who could do very little that was useful...what am I doing here? I loved those people. I still love them.

  There is a knock at the door. Eb Hall and Hib cease their little argument about what is the matter with the Government, and Charley opens to Grant Parish’s father. He is asking for turpentine for a sick horse, and Charley is replying that he has none. “Come in, Parish,” Charley is saying. “Just sit down. I haven’t any turpentine, but here’s a doctor book. I’ll see whether anything else would do.”

  “Some says to use turpentine,” says Eb Hall, “and some says to use ferhyldemay. Now, fer me, I uses turpentine, but on the South Side a feller told me that ferhyldemay is the dope to use to cure a horse when it has spasdemic fits.”

  Eph Parish answers him, settling into a chair, squirting a stream of brown liquid into the coalhod, sizzling the bottom of one huge boot on the side of the base-burner. He had brown eyes and must have been a good-looking young fellow, but, seeing the deep creases in his face and the restlessness of his glance, I remembered his wife’s blessing of a “deef” ear.

  “Ain’t no one can’t tell me how to cure nothin’,” he said. “I ain’t had but this one horse tooken bad in two years. I uses turpentine with the others. I’d a-ben proud fer t’ git some ferhyldemay, but I couldn’t git none. I taken the last I had and put it on my wheat. That there county agent done tole me how much ferhyldemay to use on my wheat, but I didn’t take no stock in what he said, not in a pig’s ear, I didn’t. I thought I’d try that ferhyldemay stunt, fer you know I got plumb ruint by smut the year before—not a pokeful of good wheat. So I taken that there ferhyldemay, an’ ‘steada the full amount the county agent said, I jest tuck halfen it. When I done it, I didn’t think it wouldn’t do no good. An’ that there grain was plumb et up with smut. I think it was becuz I never planted it at the right time-a the moon. I allus plant my spuds ‘n beets in the dark-a the moon, ‘n things what grows above the ground in the light-a the moon. I remember the year I was keerful to plant my wheat in the light-a the moon. I hed the best crop I ever raised. Thet’s the year I got my seed from you, Charley. I didn’t hev a mite-a smut.”

  “Nothing here,” comments Charley, closing the doctor book. Then he resumes the subject just concluded by Parish. “I treated that grain I sold you with formaldehyde.”

  The obvious implication made Parish lose interest in the subject at once. “I tell you, Charley, we done a bad job when we put Mrs. Sprague on the School Board. We don’t want no woman there. What we want’s three men.”

  Feet stamping on the front porch as these words were being spoken. Rat-a-tat-tat on the door. “Come in, Ben! Come in, Ben!” Charley likes Ben Temple, and his voice has a particular warmth for this friend. Ben is like me and Tag—a sort of misfit. He sings cowboy songs with a charm unknown to the present-day radio singers, his laugh is delightful, and he laughs a great deal.

  “Well, Mrs. Greenwood,” says he, “I see you’re still here.” Then he laughs, for he means that I am here because there is no possibility of my being anywhere else, since I cannot walk. I smile a
t his joke. And then Parish speaks again.

  I was jest tellin’ Charley we done a bad job when we put a woman on the School Board. We oughta of hed three men.”

  “Well, ‘n maybe you ain’t so far wrong, at that,” agrees Ben, tamping down the tobacco in his pipe and tucking the red can in his hip pocket. “Look at her a-buyin’ them there books fer the kids ‘ith fairy-tales in ‘em. Us let’s talk about this ‘ithout no bull-con. My ole woman says t’ me, she says, ‘Jes’ listen t’ thet there youngun a-readin’ thet there trash thet don’t mean nothin’,’ says she. Benny, the least one-a my boys was a-readin’. What we want is fac’s in the schools, not a batch-a fool things thet unsettles the kids’ heads. Fairy-tales didn’t never milk no cows.”

  Feet again on the front porch. I am used to this. Hib is hungry. So are the little boys. So Hib leaves and goes to the kitchen, just as Charley opens the door to Stillton, called Still, a very suggestive name in prohibition days, but nothing he could ever say or do would be even exhilarating. Charley gives a chair to Still, who sloughs his sheepskin coat and wipes the icicles from his moustache with a bandana handkerchief. This seems to remind Ben of his blue bandana, upon which he at once blows his nose loudly, returning the handkerchief to his hip pocket. It has left his nose blue. That is the way with new blue bandanas. I have warned Charley to buy nothing but the red. I hate either kind, and washing them is to me a grievance and a humiliation of the flesh, crumpled and stiff with mucus as they come to the tub. I always shrink from them as I do from the stinking potatoes with the black rot. I am no angel.

  Charley’s mind has not quit the School Board question. “But we ought to have at least one member of the Board who can read and write...oh, they can sign their names, I suppose. But Abe, by his own confession, never got beyond the third grade of a country school in Texas. And Brad was raised in the wilds of Canada, where he had no education at all.”