Annie Pike Greenwood

by We Sagebrush Folks

  O can we say we are ready, brother?

  Ready for the soul’s bright home?

  Say, will He find you and me still watching,

  Waiting, waiting when the Lord shall come?

  I couldn’t help wondering if, through force of habit, they would be watching till the Lord’s back was turned, in order to stuff gunnysacks in some canal running out of the River of Life.

  But Charley did make a very handsome Overseer, standing up there at the back and balancing Jack Overdonk’s handsomeness at the front. The Baron was a larger man than Jack, and that is a distinct advantage in the handsomeness of a man. They both had beautiful manners; both were witty; both were city men; both were good mixers; both knew how to turn the farmers around their fingers, and especially the farmers’ wives. As far as the two men were concerned in my mind, Jack had the advantage of not being my husband. It is only in fiction that a farm woman can glamour her husband with romance when she sees him almost all the time, and during that almost all the time he is wearing overalls and work shirt, with maybe manure under his heels. Besides, she may not have had time to iron his shirt, and she will never think what injury she is doing herself by not dressing her man up for her own eyes.

  Then, too, Jack could not be a little cross with me sometimes, for I was not his wife. Nor could he go to sleep in his chair in the evening, with me still awake, a rather dreadful crime in a husband, for he is likely to get in hideous contortions, even if he does not commit the final disillusionment of snoring off key. I think I should not mind snoring in a man if he could train his subconscious to snore something from Grieg, or maybe Bach. But just snorts and whistles grow sort of monotonous through the years of conjugal intimacy.

  Jack Overdonk was not my husband, and so it happened that his daily presence at our dinner-table made me glory in the fact that I have a certain aptness and love for cooking. I loved to mix things; loved to read new ways of doing things; loved to see the finished products cooling on the kitchen table or traveling down the men’s throats. I was not in love with Jack, but it did sound good to hear Charley tell me, “Jack says your bread tastes like delicious nuts,” or, “Jack says he never ate such lemon pie as yours...or your peach pie.” And after Jack had eaten his daily dinner with us, he had to go home and eat another dinner which his wife had cooked. And her bread was just as deliciously nutty as mine, and she could make just as good lemon pie and peach pie as I could. But she had the disadvantage of being Jack’s wife.

  No, I was not in love with Jack, but I was so near it that I trembled on the edge. The worst of it was that I can never have the excuse that I did not know what was happening, for psychologists will please take notice that I am the unhappy victim of split personality, or maybe it is that unpopular creature called Censor, whom I believe Freud discovered, or perhaps it is because on one side of my ancestry they all ran to pirates and on the other side to ministers. Imagine being born of pirate-minister stock!

  So when the pirate lass would yipp it up, not caring a damn for any one, filled with laughter and deliberate seduction, there stands the minister’s damsel, looking on with critical eyes, and not just saying, “Sinner, repent, or you’ll lose your little peanut soul!” but, If you do this thing, you will injure an innocent woman, a woman who will then be finer than you are, and you will unforgivably harm some little children.” You might think I could get around the idea of the woman, even if I were given pause by the children, but I never could.

  On the other hand, there may have been no real danger to anything but my memory of fickle fancies, for Jack probably thought of me only in the light of dinner, and yet we did have such bubbling, delightful times over those dinners, Jack and Charley and I. Jack’s and the Baron’s wit sparkled and fenced, as never happened over another farm table in that district, and I supplied plenty of laughter.

  Jack was a sort of freak farmer. We never had any one else before or afterward, come into our district to farm who kept banking hours, while imagining that he was farming, and who was so very charming.

  OUR LITTLE COMMUNITY continually showed change, though that change crept upon us unaware. The intrepid Mormons had come first, the far-apart groups of well-grown poplar-trees marking where they had settled. Next, lured by wild dreams of pretty farms on which white peacocks ranged, came the speculators who bought land because of Milner Dam. These city settlers enjoyed a brief pioneering vacation and left, after paying for Jake Solomon’s saddle. After them came both farm and city folks who had just a little money, or none at all, and who were determined to own their own land. Practically none of them succeeded, the only difference between the city and the rural farmers being that the born farmers are still there, for there was no better place to go, and no money with which to go, but the city farmers have gone back to their bakeries, their streetcars, their bookkeeping, and their other former occupations. There are just enough exceptions to both these statements to prove the rule.

  About the time the first middle-class city farmers had their farms painfully extracted from them by means of the Federal Land Bank, the hearty Arkansawyers began to swarm over our district. I have been told that one whole mountain community migrated together, or the pioneers sent for them almost immediately after looking the country over. After a slight period of caution, back there in the mountains where they had all been born, some of the older Arkansawyers farewelled all their intermarried relations, and then these elders, too, joined us, and were they a peppy lot? Lean, active, hard-eyed, straight-thinking, some of them, so I was informed, smoking pipes—I mean the women, for of course there were practically no farmers who were not chimneys except when they were chewing and spitting. I am sorry I did not learn to smoke a pipe where I might have done it as a matter of course, hobnobbing with the older Arkansawyer women. The public exhibitionism of some women’s smoking looks to me like an attempt at releasing inhibitions in a very tame way. I am capable of so much more staggering wickedness than that, should I ever start primrosing.

  We had become a farming community composed of farm folks from almost every state in the Union and Canada, all speaking our several dialects. My talk sounded more dialecty than any one else’s, the Baron adapting himself, good mixer that he always was, so that he talked a conglomerate language which was Ohio-Missouri-Arkansas-South-Carolina-Texas-Georgia-Canada-Russian-German and What-not. Yes, there were What-not dialects, those being the ones that had become badly mixed. This condition of language is already passing, the talk merging into one speech, and that speech being rapidly denatured by the radio. It passes practically unharmed through the rural schools, as the young girl teachers are the product of semi-illiterate farms or villages, with something bewildering added at Albion Normal Training School in order to get a certificate. Albion does not deliberately bewilder. The instruction is no doubt excellent. But the teachers there have yet to learn how easily instruction can slip back into home habits.

  One of my most delightful diversions was listening to the tall tales of the Arkansawyers, not tall because unbelievable, but tall because so wildly true. The feuds, with ears chewed off in belligerent encounters, the strange romances held me breathless. Hogan Stinett, keen of features and eye, could fiddle like nobody’s business, and Russ, his big, handsome brother, could call off dances with a masterly round of rhymes and rhythm such as have not been captured yet between the covers of books.

  Prominade all, an’ alleman’ left,

  And swing that gal in the party blue dress!

  Steve Drake, who would have been more at home on a vaudeville stage than on a farm, though he loved the smell of the desert ranches, Steve sang the cowboy songs in a musical tenor, with that nasal twang which is part of all good cowboy singing.

  I thought one summer just for fun

  I’d try cow-punchin’, see how ‘twas done,

  So when the round-up it begun,

  I tackled a cattle king....

  I sit here, as I dash this off on my little typewriter, singing from memory the cowboy so
ngs Steve sang for me in our ranch living-room.

  Josh Wardell, the ditch-rider, was also an artist at singing these songs. Perhaps I am niggardly, but remembering how he and Wendell Boden and Wendell Worthington sang them with Josh in the little old school-house, and knowing, as I do, that the particular songs they sang have not yet been tracked down by the Hounds of Harmony, I feel a kind of triumphant gladness. Ah, well, here I have set them on the scent, for though many of the names of our sagebrush folks in this book are for obvious reasons fictitious, the names just written are real. The last I heard of the two Wendells is that one ran a service-station in Hazelton, where his cowboy songs helped to tame the gasoline pump; the other was on a real cattle-ranch in Canada; and Josh was perhaps the most picturesque citizen of Hazelton, with his fine, bold eyes, his somewhat lank hair, and his high boots. I liked Josh, though he never knew it, and there was little danger that we would ever elope together.

  Each family had its stories of other states, through which were woven customs foreign to those which must be acquired in our sage-brush community. And we had our own sagebrush sagas that would be told to the grandchildren of our children. The stills found in the desert and told about in hushed voices; mad coyotes, victims of hydrophobia, who bit horses and cows and men and made them raving mad and frothing at the mouth. Sadie Stillton, called “Blondie” by a designing young man who would have robbed her of her virginity in a vacant shack; but Sadie fought valiantly and preserved it, in order that she might bestow it, willy-nilly, on the married man she loved.

  Hazelton was a part of us, and the farmers took sides when Hobart Tanson dug a cesspool and a child fell in it. The child would have perished if some one had not pulled it out just in time. Half of the sagebrush folks blamed Hobart, saying the cesspool was not properly covered; the other half thought the child’s mother ought to have been partially on the job. As for Charley and me, we would have defended Hobart on any terms. He was always our most excellent friend.

  Then there were those who tried to attack Gundelfinger, the banker. I cannot remember whether he did or did not comb his hair to suit the farmers, but I do know that the ones who had borrowed the most money found the most fault. You see, they felt they had a right to their money’s worth if by any chance they should ever be able to pay back what they had borrowed. The Jerome bankers were most hated, however. Our farmers had borrowed more from them.

  WHEN THE ASPERS took over the Endicott ranch and began paying real money on it, with a view to owning it eventually, the Currys moved into the chicken-house, which Mrs. Curry, with cheerful adaptability, managed to make into a home. Some of the chickens roosted on the roof, some huddled reproachfully at the door, others watched their chance and crept into the house with the Curry family, but a good many of them accidentally got into the roasting-pan. Who could blame so lovely and patient a person as Mrs. Curry for feeding her family on whatever was clamoring to enter into the family circle, alive or gravied? I think no woman ever had so sweet and kindly a voice as that long-suffering but cheerful mortal, Mrs. Curry.

  Sam was born to be an outlaw, but Mrs. Curry managed to keep him from being too much of a hell-of-a-fellow. Of course, his standards remained slightly different from ours, as when one of his sows was run to death in the heat by the Curry children, who were trying to drive it off the crop and into its pen. There is a legend, believed by most farm people, that the reason a hog dies from running in the heat is that the lard in it melts and runs around inside; clogging up its innards. And maybe it is true. Maybe chickenmanure tea will bring out the measles. Maybe the moon does have some interest at planting-time in watching the farmer and getting mad if he does not plant root crops in its dark and leaf crops in its light. Sounds like I am trying to be funny, but I suspect, if the truth were known, the laugh might be on me—I who imagine myself so rational.

  When the sow was run to death, and maybe her lard melted, Sam caught up with her just as she was breathing her last gasp, and with the handy, vicious, long-bladed pocket-knife he always carried, he slashed her throat. She had done all of which she was capable in melting her own lard. No blood ran. Perhaps I am right in surmising that she was already dead when the knife reached her throat. Charley happened along just at that moment. The generous Currys chose the best piece of meat on the sow for the Greenwoods. We were very grateful. But we were eating something else that week. Strange how the Old Testament makes Israelites of us all. “For the blood is the life.” The Baron disappeared that meat, but not into his stomach.

  About this time, Sam began going around with a bony paw spread protectingly over one of his lantern-jaws. I felt sorry for him. I had always felt sorry for him in one way or another for what I had made him do when I was Teacher. One of his children appeared to be a kleptomaniac. I thought I knew the two reasons. First, he could not see the black rag of a blackboard, he was so short-sighted; and not being able to hold his own with the others, he had to have presents for Teacher. These presents were accessible in the wagon of the Raleigh man, who came around once a year selling us spices and remedies for ourselves, our farm animals, and our chickens.

  I was a great hand (as I am still) to read everything I could find on psychology, which at that time was pretty much in its infancy. I found my clue, however, and thought it worth testing. I had the county superintendent force Sam Curry to get glasses for his son Frank. Sam went indignantly to Charley, and Charley came indignantly to me, like the males they were, and I faced husband Charley with large, straight, unflinching eyes, and said:

  “I am doing what I believe is right in this case, and...I AM THE TEACHER!”

  The way you place the emphasis on these last four words is not to shout them—quite the reverse—but to say them with one long, straight, steady look, and finish the sentence, and end it there without another word, but not to end the look, but to keep right on looking the look until the lookee is looked away by the looker. And the lookee will be looked away by the looker if you are right, especially if you are right, not for yourself, but for some one who is too weak to help himself. You need not be afraid of being murdered. I have never been afraid, nor have I ever been murdered. Of course, if the lookee is your own husband, it is a nice thing to catch him just before he has been looked around the corner of the house, reach up around his neck, and draw his face down for a smiling kiss. But there must be no relenting. You must not mix up this husband-and-wife business with any other business to the detriment of the latter, especially if children would suffer as a result. Remember, when you are caring for the welfare of little children, to say very firmly to those who want to save their purses, or to family dictators: “I AM THE TEACHER!”

  I knew Sam could afford the glasses, for he had just sold a suitcase of bootleg white mule. It was the only thing he could raise, so why blame him? And now I want to say right here that as long as the glasses lasted, Frank Curry never stole another thing. A miracle? Yes...to those who do not know the law. A miracle is the result of laws unknown to the beholder.

  Sam Curry had a most vile toothache and was going around with one bony paw covering his left lantern-jaw. I felt sorry I had been Teacher to him, and now I felt sorry for his toothache. I liked Sam Curry, and I believe he liked me. He had a sense of humor, and I cannot help loving folks who have real senses of humor.

  Sam went to a dentist in Burley and came back with the joyful news that this dentist had offered a bargain of two sets, lowers and uppers, for both Sam and his wife, if they would take the sets at once; and both were to cost the total sum of only fifteen dollars. Of course, Mrs. Curry did not need any other teeth than her own, but it would be only a few years before she would need them, for no farm woman much over thirty can hope to be in possession of her home-grown teeth.

  So Mrs. Curry went with Sam in the family wagon, the Curry children, very happy at the adventure, tucked here and there in the straw with which the wagon-box was lined to make it comfortable for riding. And both Currys had all their teeth drawn. If the dentist had offer
ed bargain sets for the children, no doubt the whole family would have taken to store teeth. Mrs. Curry’s teeth fitted reasonably well, but Sam’s were continually dropping.

  Nearly every one in the community wore store teeth, but a great many had preserved their own by chewing tobacco more than the others chewed tobacco. They told me so, and it seemed to be true. Sam’s teeth kept dropping down almost as badly as Old Man Babcock’s, the only difference being in the way the two men accepted this inconvenience. Sam bore it with humor, making an asset of it, laughing each time his teeth slipped, and encouraging you to join him in the laugh. Old Man Babcock got mad if you noticed the slip-slopping of his mouth-furniture.

  One day Charley had to take some grain to town to the elevator, and Sam asked to go along with him. Just beyond the Jerome Canal bridge they met Old Man Babcock coming back from Hazelton. Once, when Bab had been chasing some horses from his haystack, he had tried to climb through a barbed-wire fence, but got stuck there, caught by the barbs. He was so mad that he had roared and cussed and struggled and jerked until his clothes were in rags. He had not the vestige of a sense of humor, and he could not endure a word of ridicule. He was that type of unfortunate who leaves the tail of his feelings lying around, like a cat’s, to be stepped on. Suspicious of everyone’s opinion of him was poor old Bab.

  Now, good-natured, villainous Sam Curry was possessed of the devil to hail Bab with some facetious remark which no mortal would have noticed except that hot-tempered individual, who probably had something poisonous the matter with all his mutually spiteful endocrine glands. Bab stopped his team. He clambered down, clumsily, over the front wheel on his right and began to run after Charley’s wagon. Not understanding the import of this action, Charley reined his horses, and then he could hear Bab yelling at Sam, “You come down offen that seat, you XYZ blankety son of a female dog! Can’t no man say nothen like that t’ me. I knocked a man down the court-house steps back home fer sayen lessen that t’ me, ‘n, by God! you come down offen that wagon so’s I ken knock yer XYZ blankety teeth down yer throat, you XYZ blankety blank blank blank blank...”