(I smile. Charles, running a bird dairy, Greenwood Bird Butter, $1.00 a pound.)
I am writing today to the University of Idaho for a rooster. If I am successful, I want to send you some eggs. I believe with this new rooster you could use chicks from my eggs to put new blood in your flock next year. They would not be too nearly related.
Our chickens have been the best ever this winter. We have given them almost no attention—a little wheat when the snow covered the ground so that they could not forage for themselves over the wheat-fields—and they have laid all winter. We could have sold eggs at ninety cents a dozen, but we believe the home table comes first, and while we will not buy anything we cannot, or do not, produce—good reason why!—what we do produce is first of all for ourselves. No oleo on our table, with butter and eggs sold to the grocer.
Our Christmas celebrations at the school-house were notable. Each child drew a name, and they bought simple presents for one another. These were hung on the Christmas tree, and a red and white Santa Claus distributed them. Eb Hall was generally requisitioned for this office. Like most Mormons, he had a glib public tongue, for all Mormons speak publicly, and judging by the length of their services, that, to the speakers, is the most pleasurable manifestation of their religion. Eb was such a fine, good man, I loved to hear his playful remarks as he passed out the gifts.
One year we had a seventeen-year-old Rumanian boy living with us. In the winter we had no need for a farm hand, but the Baron was always picking up people and bringing them home, his heart being easily touched by any need of another. Eli wanted education, and we gave him a home while he attended the rural school at the foot of our hill.
Every day when Eli came home, Charley would ask him what had happened at school. I might explain here that Eli was a substitute for a name to us entirely unpronounceable. “What happened at school today, Eli?” Charley would ask in his friendly way.
Eli would ponder between the first word and his completion of the sentence: “O-o-o-oh...Mr. Mavis, he talk outa de book” (sounded as in spook).
Day after day Charley would ask, and day after day Eli’s education consisted of the observation that Mr. Mavis “talk outa de book.” I think that there was an opportunity for opening the windows of a human soul, and Mr. Mavis failed to take it. I am sure he would have profited as much as Eli would have gained, had he troubled himself to give some personal instruction to that lonely Rumanian lad who had ambition enough to want to learn. But I forget that teachers are teaching for the money there is in it. And Mr. Mavis became so much more successful than we did, investing his salary in a farm that paid him a fortune.
The Christmas Eli was with us, he received the name of a boy to whom to give a present. The first occasion thereafter on which Charley went to town, Eli asked to be taken along, and out of his meager savings he bought the most gorgeous necktie in the stock of Longenberger and Belmont. This he wrapped in tissue-paper and red baby ribbon, according to my instructions as to the universal American custom. And on Christmas Eve there it hung so proudly on the Christmas tree, representing the generosity of Rumania in this land of the free.
There was always great excitement in the school-house on Christmas Eve, and any Christmas Eve might have been taken as representative of how things looked and smelled and sounded. Farm men were standing around the walls, and farm women crowded tightly into the school-children’s seats, some wearing cheap new finery, but most of us in our outdated winter hats and dresses and coats. Babies, mostly fat, were hanging onto large bared breasts. Older children scurried, bright-eyed, up and down the aisles. Up in front was the Christmas tree, covered with cheap gifts.
I knew that Eli had his eyes fastened on that Christmas tree with more than joy in his own contribution. He, himself, was to receive his first American present. He would write about it, in his strange language, and send the account back to his parents, and his many brothers and sisters would chatter, telling how our boy got a Christmas-tree gift from an American child. It was...
Every nerve and muscle of the Rumanian lad was alert. The moment his name was called (he had adopted the one given him by Charley), he was out of his seat and down the aisle, his face alight with ecstatic anticipation. The box was so large that the attention of almost the entire assembled farming community followed him to his seat, and even thereafter, as with trembling fingers he untied the string and began casting aside the wrappings, being careful to dispose of them under the seat, so as to cause as little annoyance as possible.
The farm folks continued to look on as Eli continued unwrapping. Paper and string and box, and more paper and string, and more boxes. Some one had evidently hid a precious thing at the core, a thing which must not risk loss in a smaller package.
At last Eli found it—something hard under his fingers, wrapped like his own gift, and also tied festively with red baby ribbon. Everybody watched intently. Eli laid aside the white tissue-paper. There in his joyously trembling, foreign, light-brown hand it lay...a common black collar button, such as are sent home from the laundry in the neckbands of men’s shirts.
There were snickers, and some guffaws, and heads turned back, faces grinning, to answer questions of those too far way to see the prize in Eli’s hand. And everyone there realized that a new joke was born, which would decorate many a threshing and haying table.
There was a certain Christmas Eve when little Joe sat, heart throbbing at each name, awaiting the package intended for him. Again farm men stood around the walls, and farm women squeezed into children’s desks, fat babies tugging and mumbling restlessly at large bared breasts. Suspense. Eb Hall, in his kindly, playful voice, calling...“Georgie Hunter!...Mamie Stillton!...Alice Stillton!...Janie Curry!...Morgan Downs!...Morgan Downs!...”
Here comes Morgan Downs, running into the other children who are wriggling their way down the aisles, to open presents under the eyes of smiling parents. On and on the list is called by Eb, my heart growing a little tighter as the end appears to draw near, and still nothing for little Joe.
Children unwrapping gifts. More and more children unwrapping gifts. String, paper. Oh, look! Shining eyes, flushed cheeks. Little Joe watching, watching. Little Joe’s mother watching, watching. When will Joe’s name be called? This time?...“Emma Lou Jean!...Herbert Helms!...Katherine Pool!...” The list is finished. Not one more gift on the tree? Not one. Teacher is announcing that the program is over, and we thank you all for coming out tonight, and the children have done well...at least, we hope the parents will think so.
And no gift for little Joe. He had so carefully wrapped a box of two handkerchiefs for the little girl whose name he had drawn, and having a talent that way, he had drawn a picture on the outside of the wrapper, for little Joe, as his mother had done before him, always felt an urge to draw on any beautifully bare space. The hand-kerchiefs had been carefully selected from his mother’s long-treasured store.
Outside the snow lies softly muffling everything, not cold, but intimately loving, under the light of the moon which seems somehow to belong to the Greenwood District; and there are gentle shadows lying in coulées and at the backs of snow-covered clumps of tobacco-weeds. The beaten road of milky glass curves down the hill like a strip of pale opal. The rest of the family talking together and walking together. Joe and his mother a little back of the others, both silent.
Mister comes dashing to meet the family, barking a joyful welcome, reinforced by Tag, plumey tail waving. The family are stamping the snow from their overshoes on the toothpick-pillared porch. Into the living-room, which now has linoleum on the floor, but there is a warm banked fire in the base-burner with its ugly nickel ornamentation, the designs for stoves evidently having been originated for the admiration of just the folks who admire them. Joe sitting down to take off his overshoes. His mother, who has been absent in the bedroom, kneeling beside him with extended hand.
“It’s a knife with a chain,” she tells him. “You wanted one...Aunt Hattie sent it, and you may have it tonight.”
“No!...It’s all right...I don’t mind...” And that was Joe. And...Oh, God, I thank thee!...that was any of my four brave bairns, for many and many a time in their lives has each of them answered me, “It’s all right...I don’t mind...”
I am glad to tell you that this was not one of those enormous Calibanic jokes such as sometimes spring from the soil. The child who had drawn Joe’s name was down with the measles, and because that child could not attend the Christmas celebration, his parents had never thought of the one for whom he should have bought. Little points of consideration such as that must be bred into folks through generations of good blood. No, I am wrong. I should say that it more often comes so, but Mrs. Curry would have remembered.
Little Charles, long before this time, had suffered a disappointment of a different kind—that of thwarted artistic ambition, which cannot be answered with, “It’s all right...I don’t mind...” For we can all do without the material things if we are allowed to express such genius as lies within us.
Charles could draw, too. All my children have the talent for line and color, come down through the ancestry that decorated Windsor Castle and yearned to paint masterpieces on the side. There were a few artists, a few musicians, a few writers, a notable wrestler, mixed up with those pirates and ministers who have always warred within me, and no doubt go on warring within my offspring.
But what Charles loved best to do, and perhaps also his mother, was to speak in public. I had taught him to say,
Here I stand, fat, ragged and dirty...
If you try to kiss me, I’ll run like a turkey.
And though he was really neither fat, ragged, nor dirty, standing there in his pale-blue checked rompers, with yellow curling hair and gray eyes and rosy dimpled cheeks, he was certainly kissable.
I well remember the night when he recited his little piece in the Primary Room. Our Literary crowd was not yet large enough to need the two rooms thrown together. Mrs. Benson, whose husband later fought across Rhoda’s go-cart in jealous rage of her, recited “Curfew Shall Not Ring Tonight.” It was right off the press, so far as that crowd was concerned, and pretty, fair-haired Mrs. Benson “throwed” herself into the part of the sweetheart, or the curfew bell, or something, so that we all sat listening with bulging eyes and open mouths. And such applause as we gave her as she sat down on the front seat, shaking, with beads of perspiration on her somewhat prominent forehead!
Next came a song by Babcock. Yes, actually, some one had persuaded ornery old Bab to sing, and that was one time all his endocrine glands were working harmoniously, the hormones going peacefully about their hormonious occasions. Can it be possible that inhibiting his desire to sing may have been at the bottom of his chronic grouch? He sang about thirteen verses concerning some ram of Derby with such gol-awful long wool....
Oh, the wool upon that ram, sir,...
And then the verses told what happened because of that long wool, ending with,
Now, maybe you don’t believe me,
And maybe you think I lie,
But just go down to Derbytown,
And they’ll tell you the same as I.
What a send-off we gave him! The young fellows stamped and whistled, and only the women with the bared breasts and the clutching, whimpering, gnawing infants...only those women of us all remained torpid.
Next, Mrs. Raine obliged on the harmonica. She placed a chair up front (there was no platform), and crossing a plump leg over a plump knee, she beat out the time of her tunes on the floor. Few sights were more interesting than that gray-haired farm woman in full swing, um-huh-huhing “After the Ball.”
Then little yellow-haired Charles recited his:
Here I stand, fat, ragged and dirty...
If you try to kiss me, I’ll run like a turkey.
Even Mrs. Raine got no greater applause than my delighted baby.
That was why his heart was so broken at the Christmas celebration following. Excitement. Farmers standing around the walls. Fat babies apparently wreaking cannibalistic intentions on quiescent mothers. Most of the light seeming to shine on the newly erected, rough, unpainted plank platform at the end of the Primary Room, and there on the platform stood smiling, amiable Miss Hartley, pretty and young, whom all the littlest children worshiped. She was their Teacher.
Suddenly baby Charles sensed that here again was opportunity for the artist within him to express that inner soul of harmony, be it painting, writing, music.
And that one talent, which is death to hide,
Lodged with me useless...
I am not sure whether I have Milton’s lines as they should be, but I know how that feels, and Charles, remembering his former triumph, also knew.
I was not aware that he had slipped away from me until I saw his aureole of yellow curls turned back, under Miss Hartley’s elbow, to show his eager, raised face. I could hear his words as he tried, vainly, to pierce her preoccupation with the program, which was about to begin.
“I can speak a piece!” he was saying. “I can speak a piece!”
His father, thinking that Charles was bothering Miss Hartley, took great strides down the aisle and, seizing the little fellow from behind, lifted him into the seat beside me. There was a moment of devastating silence, in which a heart was broken. Then the baby pressed his yellow curls within the sympathetic circle of his mother’s arm, sobbing over and over again, “I can...speak...a piece! I...can...speak...a...piece! I can...speak...a piece!”
Such little incidents are hard for me to bear. They go on being hard for me to bear every time I think of them. My Charles is a young man now, but I never cease to feel the bitter disappointment of that little fellow, cuddling under my arm and trying to find such consolation as he might in the knowledge that once he had been a success. That experience epitomizes so much of the tragedy I have seen in the lives of others—we will leave me out—and the worst of it is that those words really have no consolation in them, only a sharper defeat: “I can...speak...a...piece!...I can...speak...a piece!” You can, little fellow? Oh, yes! But it is lodged useless with you, for you may not. Fate has lifted you from behind and placed you where it is impossible.
WE HELD a murder trial in the school-house. There were real murders among the farmers, who sometimes killed each other or the ditch-riders over the water, but the murder of which I speak was imaginary. Yet we had just as enjoyable a time out of it as if it had been a real, sure-enough trial.
I was generally at the bottom of all these imaginary things that happened...or didn’t happen...however you wish to state it. This time I supplied the broken-handled butcher knife with which the murder was committed, though, to tell the truth, that knife had been the bane of my existence, being so dull, and so recalcitrant to the grindstone by the granary, that it would not have murdered even a pound of soft butter.
I sacrificed one of my beet-seed towels, and I bled a hen I later stewed, letting the gore fall on towel and knife, while the fowl tried, in realistic victim fashion, to escape my criminal hands. Hen blood looks very interesting if a story is well started that somebody’s wife has been murdered with a butcher knife and the gore mopped up with a towel.
Old Man Babcock was chosen to pose as the uxoricide. I chose him. I thought he ought to look guilty enough, since he stole our irrigation water every summer. And don’t forget what a hit he always made singing about that Derby ram, for we had insisted on his repeating it at a meeting of the joint Granges and on several other occasions. It may have occurred to whoever seconded my choice that any one who could sing like that could commit murder.
That was one of the most exciting nights we ever had. Farmers came for miles to the trial, and the school-house, Upper Grades and Primary, was packed. They all got so worked up that they left their seats and crowded down to the front, standing on anything and craning around each others’ necks in order to see the bloody towel and my mean old broken-handled butcher knife. I enjoyed it all immensely. I have known a great many people who needed a good
beheading, and since my hands are tied, as you might say, I have to take it out in imagining murders.
Bab was acquitted, but he had always shown such a bad temper, and the crowd was so worked up, I was afraid they would take him out and string him up to the school-house windmill, just on general principles. Mrs. Babcock was present, or I don’t know what might have happened. Folks kept looking at her as though they were trying to believe the sight of her against their very wills. I think most of them went home convinced by the bloody towel and the brokenhandled butcher knife that old Bab had really murdered her and that they had just imagined her ghost.
It was Baldy Parsons who nearly failed my play, which I directed and leading-ladied to get a backdrop and new curtain for the platform. And it was Sam Curry who saved that play the night it was given before Frontier Grange. I did not write the play, although I have written seven very good plays, if any movie magnate should care to inquire about the same. This time I staged William Dean Howells’ farce The Sleeping Car. I wrote our experience with it to Ellery Sedgwick, editor of the Atlantic, and he said that he was going to read the account to the author on his next visit. I never heard how Mr. Howells enjoyed it.
While the thing was happening, it was anything but a source of enjoyment to me, though I can recognize its points at this late date. I had showed the farmers how to build berths, which we covered with green curtains, and the result was supposed to look exactly like the interior of a Pullman sleeper. Since only two or three of us had ever been in a sleeper, this served the purpose very well.
Eb Hall was the Stranger. With money I received for a poem, I had sent away for a black beard for him, expecting, of course, to be reimbursed when the ticket money came in. There was to be another play of one act preceding The Sleeping Car, a play which some one else engineered and in which Eb Hall had a small part. If you have read The Sleeping Car, you will remember that the high spot in the play is the surprise of seeing a black-bearded visage thrust out from between the curtains of a lower berth just when you are expecting a baby to appear. That ridiculous man Eb Hall became so infatuated with the black beard that in spite of all I could do, he would not remove it for the first play, and in a kind of furious despair I had to witness his entrance as a minor character in that curtain-raiser, wearing the property I had been at such pains to procure for the surprise moment in The Sleeping Car.
Annie Pike Greenwood Page 23
