Annie Pike Greenwood

by We Sagebrush Folks

  Sam couldn’t let that pass. Particularly with a vicious, long-bladed pocket-knife in a handy place. He dropped gracefully over the front wheel, lowering himself without haste, but malignantly, like a vicious baboon. The two men advanced upon each other, yelling threats and insults, Bab’s teeth dropping continually, and Sam’s teeth dropping continually. It looked like an occasion which might be photographed later as “X marks where the body was found.” But Charley was over his wheel like lightning, and advancing upon them with a good-sized mad of his own, he demanded:

  “What in hell’s the matter with you two fools? You make me so dod-gasted mad I could...Whoa! Stand still, Nell!” The horses had thought his voice meant something urgent to them and had begun to move on.

  “He...” stuttered Bab, pointing with a broad, copper-colored thumb at Sam. “He keeps a droppen his teeth at me to make fun of me ‘cause I can’t help a-droppen mine. Can’t no man drop no teeth at me en get away with it. Back home I knocked a man down the court-house steps fer...”

  “I can’t help a-droppen my teeth down,” pleaded Sam, still hoping the fight was not off, his hand on his hip pocket where the long-bladed, vicious pocket-knife lived. “He knows I can’t help a-droppen my teeth, en, by God! I’ll show the bloody son of a...”

  “Now you two fools get the hell away from each other,” said my intrepid mate. “Do you hear?” He was not Teacher, but he glared a glare which made the two glarees slink, with what grace or disgrace they might, to their respective wagon-seats. Then Charley mounted his seat, spat tobacco largely over the wheel, and said, “Get up!” The incident was closed.

  No, I didn’t like him to chew tobacco. He didn’t like me to write. Neither of us stopped. We each enjoyed a grievance which came in handy when we wanted to excuse ourselves for any wrong we might do each other, after the manner of nearly all the other married couples who ever lived.

  The farmers were always quarreling with one another and having fights, not as enemies, but the sort that brothers fight with each other. I remember the day when Charley, standing shaving in front of the home-made wash-stand in a corner of the kitchen, his face covered with lather, suddenly stopped his razor to exclaim, “What’s that?”

  Through the two little kitchen windows he could see Sam Curry dogging our horses. Out of the house dashed Charley, taking great strides across the orchard snow, face still lathered, the open old-fashioned razor grasped menacingly in his hand. Sam was ready for him. He had quickly drawn from that handy pocket the long-bladed, vicious pocket-knife, and he was thoughtfully whetting it on the leather of his shoe, his back against a fence post, eyes riveted on that open razor.

  So they stood and argued, shouting to be heard on Mars and occasionally flourishing their blades in each other’s faces. No two women could have gone that far without a final homicide, yet in a little while back came Charley, the lather dried on his face, to finish his shaving amid mumbled execrations in the direction of Sam Curry. And that night the Currys came over with a birthday cake for the Baron. It was five layers, very white, for the dispossessed hens were not laying, and the cake was a lard-shortened, sweetened biscuit dough, the sugar for which little Janey Curry had borrowed from me that morning. And when I moved the sleeping Curry infant on my bed to a more comfortable position, I found a large bedbug under him. Yet it was a lovely act, that memorable birthday cake, so proudly presented, with such soft, gently-spoken words by Mrs. Curry and such funny grimaces by Sam Curry, coming in back of her with the Curry infant in his arms.

  I think Mrs. Curry will make a lovely angel. She never had any decent clothes here on earth, but in Heaven she will have flowing white robes, as good as anybody’s. In my Father’s plan are many mansions, and Mrs. Curry will be living in one, and she will not have to dignify one of the Lord’s chicken-houses with her lovely spirit. There will be no tears or mourning there, nor will there be any bedbugs. If I manage to slip in past Saint Peter, perhaps distracting him with one of my silly grins, I hope Mrs. Curry will be my neighbor and that she will not ever have to borrow heavenly sugar from even me. Yes, I was grateful for those constant boxes of clothes that used to come, only a little worn. But I hope the day will come when I can send boxes. No! That thought is ignoble. May the day come when nobody will have to borrow sugar or have any boxes sent to them!

  IN SPITE of Charley’s open razor and his frequent scraps with the other farmers, I was a far more discordant member of that farming society. They could understand him. He managed to be like them. They all fought and growled together, and they all came up smiling together. When I did not like things, I withdrew and forgot the offenders, or I was Mrs. Bossy, determined to dictate or not play. I was certainly an objectionable person, as I look back and see myself.

  Until the Arkansawyers came, I was the only woman in the Greenwood District who danced. Oh, there were three or four Mormon girls, but they were considered pariahs, anyway. And I was bossy. I thought I knew it all. It would be hard for those sagebrush people to believe me when I say I loved them and today think of them fondly, as being my own in a way that no others can ever be. But I was continually getting in bad with them.

  I had been invited as a guest to attend a meeting of the Ladies Fancywork Improvement Club, and there I sat, in the two-room tarpaper shack of Mrs. Throckmorton, yawning over one of the Baron’s socks, which yawned back at me with a big hole in the heel.

  “You must be sleepy,” remarked Mrs. Babcock with surprising penetration.

  “I am,” I answered. “I went to the Masonic dance in Hazelton last night, and we didn’t get home until three this morning.”

  Beginning on my left with Mrs. Babcock, I felt the women freeze in a solid circle. Lovely Mrs. Landrum Poole, pretty as a pretty picture, leaned forward and fixed her leaf-brown eyes on me. She had Indian blood. “Why, Mrs. Greenwood,” and her voice was reproachful, “a nice little woman like you, dance?”

  “My father danced until he was fifty and too sick to dance any more.” I am afraid my voice was flippant.

  “But you would never let your daughter go to a dance,” said Mrs. Stillton.

  “Let her!...I would take her there, and I should hope to dance as much as she did.” The very devil was rising in me.

  “Well,” said Mrs. Baldy Parsons, her face screwing in a multitude of wrinkles, “my folks wouldn’t never allow me to go to no dances. They was Methodists, and they didn’t believe in dancen.”

  “They missed a lot,” I remarked, impertinently.

  “It’s my opinion,” said Mrs. Babcock, her thin lips snapping together and her black eyes snapping above them, with, of course, her nose in between not snapping, though I believe it would have snapped had it known how, “It’s my opinion that all a married woman dances with a man for is to get some other woman’s husband to hug her.”

  Then I damned myself with this retort: “If that is the way you feel about it, Mrs. Babcock, I think it would be very wrong indeed for you to dance with some other woman’s husband.”

  There was a shocked silence. I do not know how many conventions I shattered by that remark. I do not believe they were quite sure what I had intended to insinuate. But they knew it was something foreign to their standards, and once again, there in the midst of them, I was outcast. So it was again and again; I felt the exclusion of myself from the circle of our sagebrush women by reason of something maverick in my own mind.

  But before this awful day of Middle West Methodism and United Brethrenism (our preacher’s faith) there had been a time when the Mormons held dances in the school-house; when Mrs. Curry played the organ; when Hogan Stinnett fiddled like nobody’s business; when Russ Stinnett, big and handsome, called off the dances:

  Prominade all, an’ alleman’ left,

  Swing that gal in the purty blue dress...

  Even so, we meant to be very virtuous in our dancing. Our men asserted their authority by trying to catch the younger generation “ragging,” a very innocent, rocking-boat sort of dancing, supposed to ri
val the hoochi-koochi, only worse, being team-work, though, to tell the truth, I think it a cowardly threat to scare people out of wickedness by warning them that the sins they do by two and two they shall pay for one by one. The only way to sin pleasantly is by two and two, and the only decent way to pay is by yourself—not dragging the other fellow in just because he was overpowered by Nature and your blandishments.

  So our young folks would dance stiffly for a moment or so and then rocking-boat devilishly a few steps, the hawk eyes of Eb Hall and Charley watching to catch them at it—and hoping they would do it, not consciously, of course, but warming up inside as soon as they saw a chance to stride across the dance-floor and touch, say, Wendell Worthington on the shoulder. “No ragging here,” would say Charley, or Eb, very severely.

  We always had at least one fight at our dances. Once a jealous husband, just a little drunk, or maybe a little more than that, fought the object of his venom over the top of Rhoda’s go-cart, she sleeping peacefully within. I was practically included in the fray in my endeavor to save the child. I dodged in and out amid the pattern of flying fists, pushing the go-cart a little this way and a little that way, the whole dance company gasping in alarm, folks stopping their dancing, but the fiddle still fiddling and the organ still wheezing, the belligerent farmers ever on the point of bestowing upon me the punches intended for each other. It is the only time I was ever really in a fist fight.

  Charley and Eb Hall, being floormanagers, and Sam Curry, being husband of the organist, all came rushing importantly, hiding their delight in the affray behind severe countenances. Hogan Stinnett stopped fiddling and hastily put his instrument in its case, his eyes never leaving the fighters. Russ quit calling off the dance, and in the fraction of a moment every man in that hall was mixed up in the fight, Rhoda and I in the center of it. And then, looking like a swarm of bees on an apple-tree bough, such as Abel Asper used to hive, wearing his wife’s sunbonnet, the swarm of men moved slowly to the door, taking with them the assailants and leaving Rhoda and me behind, much to my disappointment. I always want to be where the men are, not because I want to be with the men, though I like that, too, but because the men are always seeing something interesting, while the women have to stay where they are and just sit. And I am not the sitting kind.

  We women were left looking at each other, a great silence settling over the two rooms, Upper Grades and Primary, which had been thrown together. It was like the silence of the threshing-machine when the men come trooping across the fields to dinner. The organ had stopped, and the fiddler was outside, maybe showing the fighters how to chew each other’s ears off in the good old Arkansas manner.

  I wanted to be out there. Of course, I could imagine it, but you get sort of tired of living so much in your imagination. If you are like me, you enjoy living most of your experience. The mass of men would be out in front of the school-house, the moon shining softly down. The moon shines softly whether it is a fight or a kissing encounter. Old moon has seen worse things than those and shone softly through them all.

  All the men would be crowded on one another’s backs, breathing into one another’s necks, eager for more and more fight. And something like this would be heard:

  “You did, too, you blankety blank blank blank, XYZ you!”

  “Lemme at him! He can’t say nothen like that t’ me! I’ll make ‘im swaller them words, the XYZ blankety blank blank blank!”

  “Now, see here, Parley, you gotta quit...”

  “Somebody get a-hold of him there...”

  I never really want to be a man unless there is a good fight going on. I cannot decide whether I fancy myself in the rôle of peacemaker or of the licker. Of course, I should not care to be the lickee. There is too much fight in me to be a very good alibi-maker. I might crawl off to die, but it is more likely I should just be crawling around to get a better bite out of the other fellow’s leg.

  The Arkansawyers helped bring more tolerant times to pass. At first our Middle West Methodists and United Brethren were not going to accept the Arkansawyers. And it did take a long time before the first Arkansas woman was allowed to dribble into the Ladies Fancywork Improvement Club.

  The Arkansawyers liked house dances. Before our school-house was available, the Mormons had held house dances, even in shacks. Then the beds and stoves were set out in the yard, and you approached your destination through an aisle of furniture. When the Arkansawyers danced in the houses, not so many things had to be set outside, for generally their houses were larger than those first shacks.

  The Arkansawyers had come from a country of moonshine whisky. They took their liquor freely and regularly. The only time they paused was when occasionally they might get a spell of religion. But when the intoxication of conversion wore off, they found salvation in moonshine instead.

  And they were great sweaters. They were hearty folks. Something about them appealed strongly to me. Yet sometimes at the Arkansawyer dances I crept out under the stars alone and sat down beside a pump or something, slightly intoxicated from breathing my dance-partner’s breath, and more than a little asphyxiated by the odor of sweat.

  Without exception, the Arkansas women were notable house-keepers, seamstresses, and cooks. As Mrs. Curry had done with the chicken-house on the Endicott place, they also could take any granary or shack and make it into a presentable, attractive habitation. These were our tenant farmers. When I lived there, none of them owned property, nor were they making any effort to own any. And therein they more than probably showed their good sense. They had cars, money enough to be comfortable, no taxes to pay. The load was on the owner of the farm, just as the load was on the would-be owner. The Southern farmers and the Middle Western farmers and the Canadian farmers were all trying to be owners. Taxes and water-payments and help keep them stripped.

  THE SCHOOL-HOUSE was the center of our social life always. Not long ago, rummaging in my manuscript trunk, I found a carbon copy of an old letter. I am always amazed when any writing of mine survives the destroying years and my neglect. On the back of this letter, written in pencil, is a list of things I must do: Monday, mend, iron; Tuesday, mop house, make yeast, water-glass eggs, mend; Wednesday, wash and iron, pick over beans, make butter; Thursday, bake bread and cake; Friday, sandwiches and beans; Saturday...

  Nothing recorded for Saturday. But make no mistake. It was not a day of rest. I was undoubtedly interrupted in my planning. And make no further mistake of supposing the items jotted were the only tasks I had to do. I recognized by those brief memoranda that I was planning toward something. A recipe for caramel ice-cream on the other half of the back gave me further evidence. And the letter itself provides the full story. Here it is:

  Feb. 10, 1921

  MY DEAR MRS. FIELD:

  I must tell you how pleased the children are with your valentines. I thought Walter might consider himself too mature for lace and hearts. But the child-soul lives in all of us—more than is thought. I know my heart was nearly broken when I was eleven years old and my folks thought me too old for a Christmas doll. Walter worked on his valentines all last evening while his father read Huckleberry Finn aloud to us. (Picture me with a mountain of mending.)

  Charles took his valentines to school to make, and during recess was the center of a crowd of child-observers. Rhoda enjoyed so much making hers. She thought they were so beautiful that she was in an agony of vacillation as to whether she should give them away or keep them. At last accounts I believe she had decided to divide what she has between others and herself—not to leave herself out entirely is the child of it, too.

  Walter is now ready to finish making Joe’s valentines. Joe was afraid of spoiling them, as he would probably have done, and therefore he wants Walter to make them for him. On Feb. 14th they will take turns slipping out of the house at one door and running around to the other, to rap and call, “Valentine night!”

  We are to have a pie social in the school-house Valentine night, when our pies will be auctioned off to the highest bidd
ers. Very exciting for us old married women to wait, expectantly, for the cowboy or young unmarried farmer who will become a bashful partner in demolishing a pie.

  There is also to be a program, the Greenwoods appearing prominently. But then, almost every member of every family in the district will help furnish the entertainment, so the Greenwood efforts sink somewhat into insignificance.

  I think we get the best of it right here at home. Charles and Rhoda are learning a dialogue, and Charles eats large bites of innocent biscuit, while Rhoda expostulates with him about consuming such rich fruitcake. The best of all is little Joe, in his long-legged nighties, standing on my kitchen stool and singing,

  I dreanth that I was Gran’papa,

  An’ Gran’papa was me....

  We all stand around ready to applaud as he sings, so seriously, delighting his mother with that “dreanth,” which she hopes none of the older children will notice and correct. And then the half-wistful smile on his baby face....

  “I want some bread,” says Joe at dinner.

  His father, thinking to teach him a lesson in politeness: “What else should you say?”

  “Bread and butter,” says Joe.

  We thought that spring had come at last, but once again the cold winds blow and the snow falls. We had just heard the first meadow-lark, and it cheered us greatly. Charles, who is making a bird record at school, was delighted.

  “And I heard a blackbird the other day,” he exulted, “so now I have a blackbird and a meadow-lark for my bird dairy!”