OUR COMMUNITY shifted its population again and again. Charley and I stayed on, sharing with a few Mormons the distinction of being the oldest settlers in that part of Idaho. Our Mormons moved over to the other side of Hazelton, and I was left at the mercy of a strict, non-dancing, rural Mid-Western farming colony, the Arkansawyers not yet having the courage to start something themselves, but, being friendly folks, waiting invitations which failed to be given.
Sunday-school continued to be held in the school-house. There were two attempts to start the dances there again, both strictly nipped in the bud by the reigning Middle Westerners. The Sunday-school passed a resolution that there be no more dances in the school-house because “it is the house of God on the Sabbath.” That last expression was incorporated in the resolution.
But, of course, at Grange or Literary or Sunday-school parties the young folks could play games. The games were all alike, except for a slight change of tune and words. The young folks took partners, swung them around, held hands, and sang loudly while they clumpety-clump-clumped around in a circle.
Chicken in the bread pan, pickin’ up dough;
Chicken in the bread pan, pickin’ up dough;
Chicken in the bread pan, pickin’ up dough;
Skip to my Lou, my darling!
Little red wagon and a harness, too;
Little red wagon and a harness, too;
Little red wagon and a harness, too;
Skip to my Lou, my darling!
Once Old Lady Babcock, looking like a man dressed in women’s clothes, was tramping and stamping around the circle with the young folks, in that violent fashion which these Christian games seemed to find necessary, when her partner lost his grip on her hand, and she went sailing through the air, a hundred and eighty-five pounds, bang against the stove. The stove was not even dented.
I love to dance, but since that exercise was denied me by the prevailing standards, I would have been happy had I been asked to Skip-to-my-Lou, even though I were swung against the stove, or the ceiling, or out of the window. Nothing would have been too extreme for me. But nobody asked me.
Nobody thought about the children, either, so I tried to forget my unpopularity and provide some pleasure for the little ones. I had them stand in a circle, holding hands, and then I turned on the phonograph which I had so long ago secured for the school through the contributions of the farmers. I had chosen the children’s-game record:
Here we go ‘round the mulberry bush,
Mulberry bush,
Mulberry bush;
Here we go ‘round the mulberry bush,
So early in the morning.
There was a sudden cessation of the thumpety-thump-thumping feet of the Christian gamesters, and there they all stood, looking reproachfully at me, while one of my best dislikers was shushing them and explaining in a piercing voice the quality of my crime. I had turned on the music. That made what they had been doing dancing. So long as they just sang, it was a game, but when I turned on the music, it turned the whole thing into dancing. I turned off the phonograph and went sadly home through the quiet moonlight, feeling very solitary as I took to the icy road. None of the rest of my family had gone with me because it was a Sunday-school party, and no one but me in my family ever went to Sunday-school.
The oyster supper pulled up my tap-root. The spirit of Skip-to-my-Lou alienated me still more. Developments in the Grange practically concluded my social life as a habit. Soon after the oysters Jack Overdonk moved from his farm. His heart never was with us. His heart was never anywhere. After the phonograph episode I no longer attended the Sunday-school parties, robbing my best dislikers of the excitement of my untoward behavior.
I had not been attending Grange for some time because my dues were behind. I never could get used to being in debt. I cannot bear to owe for anything. So it is not likely I shall ever be a successful business woman, for in business credit is money. And you cannot establish credit unless you owe somebody sometime, and then pay promptly, and then borrow again, keeping that up until they trust you so much you could skip out owing them if you wanted to, and you cannot, because your credit is good, and good credit is money, and nobody skips out and leaves money. And I think that is a pretty clear-headed business statement from a woman who has no business brains.
At my last attendance of the Grange it proved to be initiation night. I had always experienced it as an occasion of great dignity. I am hard to shock, but I was shocked that night. I practically knew the ritual by heart. We were never supposed to inject foreign matter into an initiation. Yet such things took place that night as filled me with horror. Today they fill me with smiles. And thus, if we but wait patiently, doth life strike the balance.
The candidates were blindfolded, and before my fascinated eyes I saw the Grange members stretch a string in front of the unsuspecting initiates. It was just high enough to trip them, and it did. They were caught just in time, amid roars of laughter. I was roaring, but not with laughter. My roaring was silent.
Next, a girl was stationed beside each man and a man beside each woman. Candidates again blindfolded. A man stepped forward and kissed the men, and a woman kissed the women. The bandages were again removed. Laughter and shrieks. Terrible excitement at the thought that possibly the candidates had been kissed by a member of the opposite sex.
By this time Mrs. Smarty Know-It-All, who was also called Greenwood, for short, was seething as the volcanic cone which could be seen from her kitchen door must once have done. And then something happened to make her bomb go bursting in air with Gottstrafe explosion. As the candidates marched around the room, big, handsome Russ Stinett leaned forward and asked of one of them the password, which was obligingly given, the candidate not knowing that he had committed the unforgivable sin, not mentioned in the Scriptures. But Russ knew.
Said Worthy Master: “Is there any one present who knows any reason why this candidate should not be admitted a member of Frontier Grange?”
Russ stood up. “Yes, Worthy Master, I do. He gave me the password.”
A shout of laughter rocked the building. As it was dying away, I stood on my feet, and I kept standing there until you could hear yourself breathe, it was so quiet. I knew my best dislikers were steeling themselves for whatever crime I was about to commit. I stood there glaring at them all for a full minute. They might steal my curtain-backdrop money from me, but none of them was going to rob the Grange of its dignity. The Lecturer’s hour was the time for fun.
“Worthy Master,” and my deep contralto voice was audible on the next farm, “if any one is thrown out of this Grange it should be Russ Stinett. He is a long-time member, and he knows the enormity of giving the password, yet I saw him ask this innocent candidate for the password.”
Russ looked surprised. He had always liked me, and I had liked him. Hen Turner was Overseer. Now he rose to his feet, and since he was standing, and two of us could not be standing at the same time, and also because I had come to the end of my speech, but not to the end of my mad, I sat down.
“Worthy Master,” said Hen, his ears standing out, even without benefit of cap, “in the Woodmen of the World we always do these tricks when we initiate candidates, and I can’t see no harm...”
I was on my feet again, bombs shooting in the air. “Worthy Master, I should like to draw the Worthy Brother’s attention to the fact that this is Frontier Grange, and not a meeting of the Woodmen of the World, and if he will communicate with the State Master of the Grange, or the National Master of all the Granges, he will soon be set right as to the appropriate ritual to perform when admitting candidates to the Grange.”
A great and awful depression settled over the meeting. Mrs. Smarty had wet-blanketed the fun. Everybody sank into hibernation, or vegetation, or something equally animated. Simon Heminway had been conscientiously scratching away on a note-book. They had given him the job of Secretary of the Grange for the same reason they always made me programmer. And Simon had faithfully performed this office. Now he
looked up calmly, having been so intent on duty that the fireworks had escaped him. He was standing up.
“Worthy Master,” he said, “I would like to ask the Grange if I can have a table...just a home-made one will do...with a drawer in it...to hold my notes, and to write on. I certainly do need a table.”
He sat down. He had served them faithfully through the terms of several Worthy Masters, as nobody wanted his office. Yet I knew from the hard, cold, indifferent attitude the Frontier Grange members now assumed that they had no intention of giving him a table. They did not like Simon Heminway. At times I wondered if some of them ever bit themselves, they were so indiscriminate in the way they spread their dislikes around.
Again I was on my feet, but not bursting any bombs to speak of. Considering that I owed my Grange dues, there is a possibility that I had no right to make a motion, but I did it, anyhow. “I move that our worthy brother, Mr. Heminway, be given a plain pine table with a drawer in it.”
I had to have a seconder. I meant to draw a second out of some one if I had to use a corkscrew. But there was no need. Gentle Mrs. Ike Helms, with her big, lovely dark eyes, ever my friend, now gave me that second, though she knew she was stressing before all those other women that she stood with unpopular Mrs. Greenwood. Worthy Master had to put the motion, and Simon got his table.
I went back up the snowy hill alone. I could hear the cars snorting as they warmed up for a start; the wagons clattering, while harness jangled. I had to be careful of the icy road, or I might slip and fall. The stars were little white holes in a ragged black mantle tenting the sky. As I walked through the farm gate, I could see below me the valley, lights yellowing in farm-houses as the folks reached them. None of these homes had been there when first I had confidently made my habitation on this hilltop.
For a moment I paused on the toothpick-pillared porch, looking down over the winter-bound farms. “I do not belong here,” I was thinking. “I have never belonged here.”
But I did belong there. We always belong where we are. Who was I, or even the National Master of all the Granges, to dictate what sort of Grange those good sagebrush people should have? If they wanted a Woodmen of the World Grange they should be allowed to have a Woodmen of the World Grange. They were having fun in their own way; it would keep them sane.
I could have shown my love for those people in so many kindly, tolerant ways. But I had not yet learned tolerance.
VI—OUTDOORS
THE outdoor sports of us sagebrush folks generally led us away from our farms, though because of their great outdoor space and the fact that here was so much outdoor exercise, they might have been considered the sphere for outdoor sport. But when did man ever desire to get his sport on his own grounds? I shall never forget the sad disillusionment I experienced as a child when I discovered that the Sunday-school picnic at which I was really enjoying myself was only a short distance from my own home. We had met at the Congregational school-house and had gone in a body, through unfamiliar streets, to a small grove of native trees unknown to me. I was told I could buy candy at a little store not far away, and the little store proved to be Waters’ store, where I always bought my candy.
In that farming community of southern Idaho, we played baseball in a natural amphitheater right beside the spillway where Charley Willey, the trustee, used to live. He was not living there any more. Will it be inappropriate if I relate here the tragic circumstances of Charley Willey’s passing? He had been dancing with me in the big room over Dunn’s store, where the Hazelton post-office lived. After taking me to my seat, he walked out into the hall—and fell dead. Charley Willey was as fine a man as I ever expect to know. I went to his funeral, though I hate funerals; I know I shall find some way of getting out of going to mine. Jack Overdonk’s wife was there, and she would not speak to me. I wanted to say to her, “I don’t blame you. But I am really innocent. Thank God and the oyster-stew women, especially the cove-oyster-stew women, that your husband did not help me to get my rights about that backdrop and the new curtain. If he had...”
But this is no place for the would-be illicit affairs of my life. I leave all such things to my Guardian Angel, and to the autobiography that will never be written.
BASEBALL beside the Willey spillway; rabbit drives everywhere, for the rabbits were everywhere; village and county fairs; and celebrations in conjunction with school doings. Oh, yes, and the movies! The movies came just before we left the farm, kicked off by the Federal Land Bank, like the rest of the city dream-farmers. But what I write about here occurred while we still believed ourselves likely to pull through, farmers and consumptives never giving up hope, though forced to give up everything else.
We farm people were always excited over the Hazelton Fair, and then again over the Jerome County Fair, which followed immediately afterward. All the prize-winning products were taken from the Hazelton Fair to the Jerome County Fair. My vegetables took some prizes, but for some reason, though not through my design, for I am far from being a shrinking violet, my products appeared labeled with Charley’s name. Of course, it was a mistake.
For the sagebrush farm people knew that I raised an extraordinary garden. I sent to Burpee’s in Philadelphia for my seeds, and I planted a great many of them in cigar-boxes which I begged from Hank Thorson, the druggist. These had to be crowded in the south bedroom windows day-times and carried to the kitchen night-times, while our bedroom windows were open. Tin cans, with the bottoms very nearly cut away, next received the sprouts. I had plants in bloom, some just fruiting, by the time the garden was ready for them. Upstairs harbored the plants until planting outdoors, and the mice and packrats nipped them off until I learned how to deal with them.
After my experience in failing to take the prize for my Golden Bantam corn, I never entered anything again. I should not have minded if I had been beaten. I had raised perfect corn, and I looked the patch over for two ears, the entry required, that would be the exact counterpart of the illustration on the front cover of Burpee’s catalogue. I found them, just a few inches long, every kernel as it should be, even to the end—plump, perfect ears. I should have adopted the stratagem of fastening them to the catalogue cover, right over the illustration, but the judges would not have believed their eyes. They were the kind of judges whose only criterion of excellence was giantism. They had not learned that vegetables have the equivalent of hyperactivity of the thyroid gland and that oversize is always at the expense of some other important attribute. The Golden Bantam corn that took the prize was at least a foot long, almost snow-white, a thin cob, kernels diminishing and disappearing at the end. It was certainly not the loss of the fifty cents prize-money that left me stunned. It was what this abysmally ignorant award implied of the people who had me at their mercy.
Oh the years we waste and the tears we waste,
And the work of our head and hand,
Belong to the people who did not know,
And now we know that they never could know,
And never could understand!
Moral: Never be a specialist in truck-gardening when the judges of your products are village Babbitts.
But there I do the Hazelton men injustice. There was not a farmer in the Greenwood District who would not have made the award as it was made. At least I think I should have received an award of a tin spoon for being the only person in that part of Idaho who really knew how Golden Bantam corn should look. If I wrong some other Golden Bantam expert at present unknown to me, I will gladly share half of the tin spoon that I did not get with him or her upon receipt of proof, which shall be two perfect ears of Golden Bantam corn tied with green baby ribbon to the illustrated cover of one of Burpee’s catalogues.
The Baron was expert at nearly everything he tried to do. I suppose he would claim potatoes, too, but my memory of paring stinking potatoes afflicted with black rot makes me stubbornly refuse him an award there. A United States Government man, what his office may have been I have forgotten now, judged Charley’s spectacular stand of w
heat as the finest in the State of Idaho. Charley had been willing to make the experiment of raising a certain kind of wheat which the Government was anxious to introduce to the Western farmers. When he told me what the Government man had said, I went out and stood on the brow of the hill, looking toward the volcanic cone and the white Sawtooth Mountains. There were acres of the most beautiful grain, waving its ripening heads in the breeze. My heart swelled at sight of it. Glory! Glory! for the beauty of it. Glory! Glory! for the use of it. Glory! Glory! for a perfect thing rewarding the long toil of my farmer’s days.
The next morning I was too busy to look out-of-doors. The Baron was gone about a half-hour after breakfast. Then he came back. “Look,” he said in a low voice, drawing me outside the kitchen door. I looked. I looked at the volcanic cone, standing black in the middle distance. I looked at the white Sawtooth Mountains, like a row of tents. I looked...”Charley! where is your wheat?’
“Flat as the pavement of Hell,” he answered.
“Flat!”
“Rust got it in the night. Total loss.”
The ignorant farmer thinks rust is the result of too much dew. As a matter of fact, the wheat did look rusty, but that appearance was caused by a fungus which came from weeds along the ditch bank. Little was known of its nature or habits at the time our wheat was laid low. But such wheat cannot be used by man or by beast.
Charley’s sugar-beets were perfect. There were years when the white fly got the crop, but the year I lost the Golden Bantam prize his sugar-beets were perfect. They should have been, for if I knew how to raise Golden Bantam, he certainly knew how to raise sugar-beets. His beets were the product of knowledge, of science. For seven years he had worked for the million-dollar sugar-factory in Garden City, Kansas, where I made my home in the midst of a remnant of that colony which Queen Catherine of Russia had transplanted to teach her people the agricultural trade those Germans had known for generations. The United States Sugar and Land Company had imported a portion of this colony to raise beets for the million-dollar factory. So while I was becoming acquainted with a mixed dialect known as Russian-German, having acquired enough college German to understand these people fairly readily, the Baron was the center of their worship, speaking, as he already did, fluent German.
Annie Pike Greenwood Page 25
