Annie Pike Greenwood

by We Sagebrush Folks

  ...this is fixt

  As are the roots of earth and base of all;

  Man for the field and woman for the hearth;

  Man for the sword and for the needle she;

  Man with the head and woman with the heart;

  Man to command and woman to obey;

  All else confusion.

  “Et tu, Brute!” Well, that teaches me a lesson—to Buy American, or See America First, or something. These Englishmen give me a pain in the neck. I’d hate to be one of their wives, or even two of their wives.

  My country ‘tis of thee,

  Sweet land for two or three,

  Oh, ting-a-ling!

  Land where the farmer bragged

  While his poor wife was fagged

  And agriculture sagged

  Like everything.

  Come here, my dear Holmes, with your gentle humor and your eternal Rah! Rah! spirit. I will have American. What is this?

  I would have a woman true as death. At the first real lie that works from the heart outward, she should be tenderly chloroformed into a better world.

  You don’t say! But let the dear men go on lying and lying. Well, Oliver, here is something I would have, too. I would have a man as true as life, for death is false, and at his first lie of any kind, working up from any part of his anatomy, he should be violently beheaded into some celestial garbage-pail. And that, Oliver, is what I think about men lying—and women, too. For a lie is the indication of a leak in the dike. Honesty is not the best policy. Honesty to be honesty cannot be a policy. It is the foundation character. To be strictly honest toward one’s fellowman is to be loving and just. There is no true honesty without love and justice.

  Chesterfield, de Rochefoucauld, Seldon, Dumas—all farmers, all men who feel their inferiority to some woman or who have been jilted—I will not quote here your bitter words. Sit you down beside Milton, Tennyson, Holmes, all of you here with the rest of these farmers. You need not mind me. I am just a farm woman, crippled on the field of motherhood. I am glad I cannot see your little red tobacco-cans and your bandana hankies, for your bandanas might be new and blue, and when you used them I should be watching to see whether your noses turned blue, and I do not want my attention distracted from what I have to say to you, which is that most gorgeous expression originated in this particular age by the clear sighted young. It is: Oh, yeah?

  IV—DEATH

  DEATH, of course, is more familiar to farm children than to city children. Always there are farm animals over which hangs sentence of death by violence from the moment they are born. The farm child gets used to feeding an animal so that it may be profitably killed. The farm child gets used to the idea of eating the animal for which he is so carefully providing.

  I am no sentimentalist about this state of affairs. I myself would be willing to receive instant, painless death by means of a shot in the head if my every need were gratified up to that moment. That is practically the life of a farm animal. A shot between the eyes, the scalding-tub, the saw and knife, salt and sugar, and on your plate the fragrant ham.

  Charley was an expert shot—had received a sharpshooter’s medal from the Government, in fact. My surprise was great, therefore, when I heard Eb Hall say to him, very seriously, “If you had aimed at that hog a little to the left or a little to the right, you would have missed it, Charley.”

  When kindly Eb had gone, carrying with him a pan of good, clean hog liver, which the city man scorns because it is not so fine as calf’s liver, I asked, “Did you really nearly miss that hog?”

  Charley gave a silent snort with the expression of his face. “That’s Eb,” he said. “I shot that hog squarely between the eyes.”

  The scalding-tub. Galvanized, and now black all over its outside with soot from the fire over which the water was heated.

  When we went on the farm, we laid our deep-piled velvet carpet on the living-room floor. Good furniture. A big bookcase full of books. Year after year the room changed, until at last there were but a few meager furnishings and linoleum on the floor. Curtains for the windows wore out. There was no money to replace them. The only plenty we had was mortgages.

  One habit of my previous life I refused to relinquish—my daily bath. All the years of my farm life I had to bootleg my daily bath because there was no place convenient to take it but the kitchen. So always I must bathe with one eye on the glass in the upper part of the kitchen door. Some telepathic anxiety of mine always set the men on the march for the kitchen to get a drink from the galvanized bucket that sat on the big home-carpentered wash-stand in the corner. Generally I made from three to six electric dashes for the bedroom during the course of a bath. It was my one exciting diversion, substitute for college track racing or contract bridge.

  At first I had only a small granite wash-basin, which I repeatedly emptied into a slop-pail and refilled with hot water from a kettle; thus I washed the whole map of my person, a few square inches at a time. Of course, I was not very large, being five feet four inches tall, and weighing one hundred and fifteen pounds, or thereabouts. I was glad I was no larger, for I usually had to carry my bath-water up the hill from the canal.

  Next, I experienced the joys of a galvanized wash-tub. I was little and could crouch down in it when I wanted to. Then one hog-killing time the men took my bathtub and used it for scalding the hog. It was returned to me irredeemably sooty. Smut on the kitchen floor, smut on the towel, smut on my body. I was patient throughout those trying years, but after bathing in the hog-scalding tub for some time, I went on the war-path. Hell hath no fury like a patient woman on the war-path. I got my new, clean tub, and hog-killing times, when the men began wandering about in that vague tub-hunting manner, I trusted them not, but stood guard over my tub until I heard the hog squeal and saw the steam rising from some other receptacle, out by the granary.

  Then came the final luxury of a canvas bag and hose, hung from a nail on the kitchen wall—of course, where I could still keep an eye on the glass of the outside door. I could take a good bath in two quarts of water. What that meant when the buckets dragged down your arms and your knees caved in as you lugged them up that hill from the canal! I sprayed all over my body, then scrubbed enthusiastically, then sprayed all soap away. Glorious! And I could almost always make it with not more than two or three men getting drinks.

  How much that canvas sack on the wall meant to me! We had a cistern, blasted out the summer before Rhoda was born, but it was either empty, or the pump broken, a great part of the time. Water must be carried from the canal. The little boys took their turns. The Baron brought water. But there was no providing enough without my service. Heaven be thanked for the little canvas bag and the clean, new galvanized tub!...Heaven and the Baron—in justice, Charley provided both.

  Cow-killing time was different. The cowhide was valuable with the hair intact. At least, it should have been valuable, but men traveled from farm to farm buying the hides and paid fifty cents apiece for them. Think how many pairs of shoes can be made from one hide. Would you feed a cow, care for it, kill it, skin it, to price the hide at fifty cents? Or something of that kind. I may have included too much in the bill, but I know, and you know, that hide was worth more than fifty cents.

  A strange thing always occurred when a calf, cow, or young bull was butchered on the farm. Generally a half-grown bull calf, it would be skinned and hung from the arm of the Mormon hay-derrick, so called because the Mormons were the first to go to the cañons, bring back poles, and construct derricks in this manner. By the time we were in bed, every cow and calf on the ranch would be standing under the naked carcass, neck stretched upward, bellowing and bawling in so loud and continuous a chorus that sleep was impossible. There was something chillingly weird, something uncanny, in the performance.

  When Jersey’s calf died in the new orchard, she stood over its little body and cried great tears. They rolled out of her big, pathetic eyes, down her long-nosed face. From time to time the cats died, the dogs were shot, and, very sad
to me, my intelligent magpie, Pretty, came to a violent end by hands unknown. He was just learning to talk, and he loved me so much that it seemed like murder to me.

  Tag’s fate was worst of all. One day I noticed that she persistently scratched herself. Examining her hide, I found it pocketed from tail to ears with great, squirming masses of maggots. I did not realize, the number of those disgusting burrowing larvae, otherwise I would never have tried iodine. That entirely used, I thought of creosote sheep-dip. This, too, proved ineffective. Had I only known a very recent discovery of science, poor Tag need never have died. The maggots would not have injured her. They would soon have made their next metamorphic change and left Tag’s tissues clean, so that they would have healed readily.

  But this I did not know, and I pictured Tag being eaten alive, down to the bone. Together, Charles and I dug a trench large enough to receive her body. Then, while I held the attention of her big, trusting, soft brown eyes, Walter shot her with his twenty-two. I never think of our sagebrush farm without seeing that noble creature.

  DEATH forever hovered over those sagebrush farms. Winding in and out among our farms ran the canals bearing the waters of the Snake. Scarcely a week passed that those waters did not close over some baby face. This was my terrible fear. This was the fear of all us sagebrush women.

  Mrs. Jean, running all the way from their farm to ask, “Have you seen Bud? I can’t find him.” The fear of the canal in her face and voice.

  Hen Turner, galloping like mad into our yard, his too large ears pressed out more prominently than usual by his badly adjusted cap: “Come over to Greshams. Little Bill drowned in the canal this morning.”

  Mrs. Curry: “Did you hear, Mrs. Greenwood? Armstrong’s little girl was found two miles down Jerome Canal from their place, caught in the weeds. She had been dead...”

  I tied my little Joe to one of the toothpick pillars of the scowling porch with a forty-foot rope. One day he was missing. I could not breathe. The sky curdled and then grew leaden. At last it occurred to me to trace the rope. Our house was without foundation, perched on big lava-rock boulders. Under the flooring, in the very center, there sat Joe like a bright-eyed squirrel.

  Missing again. This time the rope there, but no baby. Walter running to tell his father. I searching the place over. It couldn’t be...my heart throbbing...it couldn’t be...and yet it could be...it had been for other women. Then I saw Charley wading our canal in his high rubber boots and prodding the bottom with a pitchfork.

  At the sight, involuntarily, my hands flew to my head, I cried aloud, “My God! My God!” and a feeling of madness fell upon me.

  There flashed through my mind the words, “He is down on the school-house steps.”

  I called, “O Charley!...” but got no further, for he was shouting to young Charles, who suddenly started to run down the hill, “Go to the school-house!” and young Charles was shouting back, “I just thought of that myself!”

  Sitting on the school-house steps was baby Joe, a hammer he had found there in his baby hands, beat-beat-beating on the rough board which many little feet had worn into depressions. And yet...what modern psychologist says there is no such thing as telepathy? Or...let us not be afraid to know...we must dare to know, the truth, for there is not one world of the living and another world of the dead. There is only life, everywhere in the universe change, but no death, only life. My soul has intimations of more and greater life. What spoke to me, to Charley, to young Charles? We could not all have been impressed at the same time with the same thought from nowhere. There must have been...Why not? A tree growing, in all its beauty, is stranger than that.

  And yet it did happen to Joe at last. One night the children came from the hillside below the house, my baby streaming with water. I had intrusted him to their care with infinite cautioning. One moment’s forgetfulness, the baby seen floating down the canal. Walter in the water, frantically after him. God spared me the ultimate grief, though why I should be more fortunate than other women, I cannot imagine. My little Joe was still alive. Beneficent, beautiful waters of the Snake, winding in and out among our farmlands. Sinister, haunted by the little drowned faces of babes.

  The Currys had a farm hand and his wife to help them. They were helping the Currys as Daniel Webster helped his brother Zeke—to do nothing. The farm hand’s wife had harsh, dull, blonde hair, streaked around her face an ugly dark shade where it was growing out unbleached. The two were city people, and she was about to have a baby.

  Three days was fortunately the span of life for that babe. The community rose to the occasion by planning a funeral for the infant. It was to be in the school-house, and the men made a little casket of pine lumber, lining it with batting and satin. We all contributed to buy the materials.

  The day of the funeral my sister Florence sent us a box of clothes. It was always an event to get a box of partly worn clothing from some of our relations. In this box was a pretty hat for me, worn only one season by my sister. It was a small, dark-blue silk beaver, with one lovely narrow, flat, blue-green feather on it. I wore it to the funeral.

  I sat near Baldy Parsons, who was wearing his store teeth, as we all called artificial teeth, because he expected to join in the hymns, and he could not sing without them. They usually lived in his vest pocket. Church in the school-house, and this funeral, brought them out. Rhoda, my baby, sat on the desk before me, looking about with that solemn, critical gaze which marked her from the first.

  My heart was so shaken at sight of the little home-carpentered casket that I could not sing, and I cannot today remember what it was that Baldy Parsons was roaring with such enjoyment. I only knew that there lay a mother’s babe, dead, and here was mine, alive, in my arms.

  When the services were over, Charley came near, and with him a city man, a handsome man, with dark curling hair, dark eyes, and a dimpled chin. I saw the Baron draw the attention of this attractive stranger to me, and then...that look of swift, glad surprise at sight of me! I had not seen that look of glad surprise at sight of me in the eyes of any man, excepting only Tony and Jeff, in almost two years. I am a vain woman. It brought a wave of nostalgia that shut out my love of the wilderness under the warm, caressing sun, shadows of clouds lying in patches across the sagebrush, or the millions of stars that rush upward into the vast depths of the desert sky, arrested in their motion for the infinitesimal moment of fifty billion centuries. I liked to have men look at me with that glad surprise in their eyes. It awakened in me sparkling pools of laughter, winged feet, and a heavenly abandonment to the innocent moment. Oh, I was not a farm woman—not a real farmer’s wife! Just an impostor! It was the dash and verve of my sister’s pretty hat that made this man see me as I had been.

  But I was a real mother. I gathered my baby to my breast, as Charley and Jack Overdonk, that Chicago dream-farmer who had come to his reality-ranch, moved away. I left the solemn, packed school-house, for I had work to do and could not follow the little corpse to its grave.

  Passing through the hall, I overheard subdued conversation between Mrs. Stillton, very fat and very kind in a pale, blonde way, and her friend, Mrs. Baldy Parsons, little, like a tiny bird, her face always working sympathetically while you talked to her.

  Said Mrs. Stillton: “Yes, I did go fer t’ lay out that baby, but after I seen it, I was a-feared t’ tech it....You know...”

  She paused significantly.

  “What fer wuz the matter, Mrs. Stillton?” Mrs. Baldy’s face was agitated, as though ready to draw in whichever direction the answer pointed.

  “It was...” Mrs. Stillton raised an overstuffed paw as partition between her and any outside listener.

  But I knew already, although the news had not sunk in until that moment. Some there are, cursed before birth, for whom three days are enough of living.

  But the syphilitic babe was followed to its first and last resting-place by practically every farm family in the Greenwood District, in their wagons and buggies, none of us having cars at that time. The c
emetery was on a baked knob which was dedicated to the purpose of its use because it was good for nothing, there being no water that could be made to reach its ugly barrenness without too much trouble.

  And there they laid the syphilitic babe among the little drowned babes, who made no objection, unless perhaps, at midnight, they may come forth to register wraithy indignation at such contamination. But it may be that the babes have long since deserted that selfish, heartless spot, particularly since around all their graves are the holes of gophers, while over those graves on moonlit nights the coyotes stand and laugh hysterically at what the gophers are busy about down below.

  V—RECREATION

  KNOWING the direction of my unswerving ambition, and also the circumstances of my life before my marriage, the casual observer might have discovered little joy in my existence on that pioneer sagebrush farm, which demanded unremitting labor from one who had been an invalid child, a delicate young girl, and a prey to uremic poisoning over a lifetime. It is true that I was a miserable housekeeper—negligent of dust and grimy windows and such-like breaches of the code, that most of my work in the house was accomplished by such will as measured in horse-power, or electric watts, might have moved one of the lesser stars out of its course. Yes, my house was far from a model. I might have had it so much better with less effort on my part had I known how to manage as did Mrs. Jean from South Carolina. But, alas, I had not been born of useful female ancestry. My little wrists and ankles betray the fact that I came from a race of parasite women, pampered by their men. So, after all, in a way I can blame the men.

  But I had my incidental recreations. When the garden made no demand, I would slip out of the house at four in the morning with my big, clumsy, trusty old typewriter, a load for a man, and going into the orchard, with a few sheets of paper and an old alarm clock to check my leisure before breakfast, I would enter Heaven. Pretty, the magpie, was usually my companion. He would steal my pencils and, in great delight, fly away with them, while I followed with almost a flight paralleling his own. And he was so delighted by his trickery of me, coming back to sit on one of my extended shoe toes and chattering madly—yes, and laughing. “If anything is human, all is human; if anything is divine, all is divine.” In Pretty was what is in me.