Annie Pike Greenwood

by We Sagebrush Folks

  Charley was German only in so far as we call the Prussians German. His ancestors were the ruling Junkers, as I think I have said before, and a German baron was his great-grandfather. He might have passed for a handsomer Premier Göring, there being an uncanny reproduction of the chin and mouth. We had many French at the sugar-factory, speaking that dainty, lacy language which has always been most easy for me to read, but most difficult for me to understand when spoken rapidly. French, English, German, we lived together in more or less amity. The French were our chemists, the Germans our practical beet-raisers, the English our bookkeepers and managers.

  There was no one there more worshiped by the Russian-Germans than Charley, who had a grandmother speaking almost no English. When my Walter was born, they made it a festival, presenting me with their precious hand-woven linens and bringing a platter on which reposed in splendor a whole boiled hen surrounded by little round dumpfnoodles, these edibles always being given to a new-made mother, as the Russian-Germans informed me.

  So Charley should have known his sugar-beets, for he was familiar with every phase of the sugar business, from buying the right seed to sacking the refined white sugar. In Idaho the white fly got our beet-fields during the final years of our farming there, and before we left the farm, an expert in beet-culture told me there was a fortune awaiting the man who knew how to exterminate it. Before the white fly, nobody could raise sugar-beets that compared with Charley’s. After the white fly only a fool would attempt to raise them. In our whole district there were no such fools.

  The year before the white fly came, the Utah-Idaho Sugar Company offered two prizes at the Jerome County Fair, each a hundred-pound sack of sugar. It was the year my carrots, under Charley’s name, took the prize at Hazelton. I don’t know how the judges ever made such a mistake as to give them a prize. I thought those carrots were all right.

  One of the two hundred-pound sacks of sugar was for the best essay on sugar-beet raising; the other was for the best sugar-beets. I thought it was the only logical result that the man who knew best how to raise sugar-beets should receive both prizes. If he took no prize for his beets, his essay was proved worthless, even if he won a prize for the essay; if he took the prize for his beets and could not explain how he had done it, then the prize was awarded for an accidental accomplishment, a thing to marvel at, but not to admire.

  Most men need a good laughing-nagging wife. I do not think a laughing wife is to be sniffed at, but a nagging wife who does not laugh is an abomination on the earth, who should have her endocrine glands taken out on a dissecting table and reconditioned. But what a laughing-nagging wife can accomplish with her husband is most astonishing. I do not claim to be this gifted creature, except in spots, though the laughing part fits me only too well to please everybody.

  I told the Baron that those two prizes belonged to us. He had two afflictions which were not mine—or perhaps others would call them virtues. He cared nothing for competing, even when he was sure of winning, and he and his whole family abhorred any sort of publicity. When my Atlantic articles were published, Charley went to Hazelton and bought every copy, so that his neighbors should not see him glorified in print. I have no such inhibitions. I have been in many contests, but only when I knew I could win—including, of course, the Golden Bantam fifty cents prize-money. I was sure of winning that, and I think I shall never get over the disappointment. As for publicity, I never realize that I have caused any. When folks stare at me, I always wonder if I have managed to get smut on my nose.

  Charley did not care about winning those two sugar prizes, but I did. I didn’t give a Golden Bantam corn judge for the glory of the blue ribbons, but I did want that sugar. Think of getting two hundred-pound sacks of sugar so easily! I have a very estimable sister-in-law who thought the only art I exhibited in getting my articles accepted by high-brow Eastern magazines was the marketing art. “Annie seems to know how to commercialize what she writes,” came the slightly off-odor praise. I fumigated the letter until I could get over my mad. A sister-of-the-blood wrote to say that a friend of hers who aspired to authorship wanted to know how I managed to break into the Atlantic. I wrote back that I took an ax.

  The more I think of my sister-in-law’s sister-in-lawsy praise, the better I like it. When we get a thing to the point where folks will part with good money to possess it, we have done something. So I wanted Charley to commercialize his brains and ability by winning those two sacks of sugar. And besides, as I said before, I wanted the sugar.

  So I talked to him very gently until he reached the stage of a towering Premier Göring Junker rage, of which he is entirely capable, and I never let up until he threw his Saturday Evening Post across the room, swore at me, jumped to his feet with a great thump, strode with mighty strides across the linoleum of the living-room, across the bare boards of the kitchen, and banged to with a vicious bang the kitchen screen, where forty million flies thought they could not be wrong in expecting to get in at about that time, and they were not wrong. I smiled, and humming

  We’ll have a little nest,

  Away out in the West,

  And let the rest of the world go by.

  I inserted a clean sheet of manuscript paper in the eager mouth of the heavy old typewriter which understood me so well. Then I waited.

  I knew he would come back. If he had not sworn at me, he would have remained out in the field, getting madder and madder. But the memory of those cuss words stirred up his sleeping censor, the miserable creature that Freud discovered using the conscience for a sheepskin. He got sorrier and sorrier the more he worked on the water, particularly since that was one day Baldy Parsons and Old Man Babcock were not stealing it. If the water had not been coming down, he would have forgotten me, or maybe blamed me, sub-consciously, for his water trouble, when nagging was my only fault.

  He kept thinking what a good wife I was, so innocent and so little and so frail (I had worked like a horse that day), and pretty soon he was on the verge of breaking into mental tears, in the way all Germans do when they are away from you and have wronged you so they know it. Often they wrong you and do not know it, in the good old way of all Germans, particularly Prussians, in respect of women. I understand the famous Henry L. Mencken is an exception, but not with me, for he detests me. He once did me the honor of a long hand-written rejection. I made out the word “rotten,” though it might have been “mutton.” I sent the letter back and in my politest manner asked for a translation. I know it is hard for you to believe, but he never answered. And I had always admired him so much.

  So back slipped the Baron from the field, as I knew he would, and he was in his charming mood, when even Fu Manchu would follow him around like another Limpy. He had brought the reinforcement of Rhoda and Joe, just in case I should be in a beheading mood, of which I am entirely capable. “Oh! Smocky,” I heard him say to Rhoda, “see the cinnamon rolls Mama has made. U-u-um!...the good smell of her bread! That womern shore kin bake bread like nobody’s business. Where are you, Mama? Jodie has brought you something.”

  I could sulk, and think how I hated tobacco-chewing in a man, and if I had known when I married him...But I wanted those two sacks of sugar. The way to get what you want in life is to keep your eye on the objective and let nothing swerve you. I could enjoy my dignity and come up short two big sacks of sugar. Not I!

  Softly I went into the kitchen, with one of those bewitching smiles on my face that you are sure I can smile, and I can, and there stood before me something more bewitching even than my wonderful smile. Charley, a child on either side of him, had a big branch of native willow erected over his head, like...was it Macduff’s army that advanced on the castle where was the murderer Macbeth?...and in the arms of Smocky and Jodie were great clumps of wild goldenrod, which Charley knew I loved so well. And just as I entered the kitchen, Charley was saying, as he looked up at the bough drooping over his head, “I hear the little birdies singing in their nests,” and both those ridiculous babies were also looking up at the
bough growing out of their father’s back, expectation written touchingly on their sweet, serious faces.

  It was lovely. Besides, I knew now I was going to get my sugar. I took a crock which held water-glassed eggs in the winter and put into it the beautiful clumps of goldenrod; and I pretended that I did not see the Baron self-consciously slip into the chair in front of the typewriter, still wearing the Macduff disguise, by reason of which, of course, he was not supposed to be running the typewriter. I pretended that he was really a young tree which had suddenly rooted itself in the living-room, and I went about my destined business of piling cinnamon rolls on a clean plate and, ghost-like, passing them among the three so quietly sitting in the living-room. Click-click-clickity-clickity-click...I would get my sugar. Oliver Wendell Holmes says there are some words even in a good man that no one should stir up. Little he knew of their ultimate use.

  I canned three hundred quarts of fruit that year. The Baron and young Charles and Walter, in a sheep-wagon which some one had left with us, went over Twin Falls way and bought fruit for very little money, picking it themselves. The Twin Falls country was twenty-eight or thirty miles west of us, but it had been settled about twelve years before Charley and I came to our farm. In fact, we were, as I have said before, the last frontiersmen of the United States. Never again can there be what we were, the radio having tied all mankind together in what is called civilization.

  Twin Falls country should have a word here, for while we struggled, and there was much poverty among us, the Twin Falls farmers were prosperous, the little city of Twin Falls an ideal town, its public library the best I have yet found in the West. Large income from taxes made possible the purchase of the modern books of philosophy, psychology, and other nonfiction classes of which I am a dipsomaniac.

  Every time I went upstairs to get sugar out of one of those prize sacks Charley won from the sugar company, I used to stand at one of the little upstairs windows and look out upon the lovely acres of our farm—yellow where ripening grain stood, emerald where alfalfa ran, all the other crops with their coloring shading from ivory to vivid green. I thought of when I was a little girl, reading my geography book. “Volcanoes are mountains erupting ashes and molten rock known as lava,” the geography said. It did not tell of a more important thing that comes from volcanoes, for in that day nobody knew that crops, the most wonderful crops, come from them.

  All those fertile farms are fertile because of volcanic ash. And there were those fine crops because Volcanic Ash had been married to Maeterlinck’s Fairy Water. The Jackson Lake Reservoir, located away up south of Yellowstone Park, held our water, its capacity being eight hundred and forty-seven thousand acre-feet. It was supposed to solve the water problem, but it did not; only about one-fifth of the drainage of the Snake River watershed was above this reservoir, so that four-fifths of all the run-off from this great drainage basin went on to the ocean. It was found that there were years when the run-off of the watershed above the reservoir was not sufficient to fill it. So that even with Milner Dam and considerable supplementary storage capacity, in extreme drouth years the Jackson Lake Reservoir did not suffice.

  That was why they were building the American Falls Reservoir, with a capacity of seventeen hundred thousand acre-feet. Heading all this, I knew, was Russell E. Shepherd, who was called by the whole countryside, complimentary of his power and ability, the Old Man, though he was not an old man, but handsome, alert, prematurely white-haired. The name Shepherd was constantly on the lips of every irrigation farmer, and to leave him out of this chronicle, when it was he who brought us the Fairy Water and wedded her to Volcanic Ash, would be to leave the sun out of the summer sky. Crops from volcanoes—the lovely, flowing acres of green where only sage had been when we came! Crops from volcanoes!

  BESIDES our Hazelton Fair and the Jerome County Fair we had the celebrations accompanying all school events. One year the schools of Eden, Hazelton, and Greenwood joined in giving an ice-cream festival to the school-children. The trustees announced, with swelling pride, that our school-children would be given all the ice-cream they could hold.

  Our Jodie went around thrilling with the excitement of anticipation. He had never had all the ice-cream he could hold. On this happy day he meant to make that vacuum a thing of the past. He scrubbed his ears and neck until they were almost raw, and he blacked and blacked his shoes, trying to see if a higher luster might not be produced. All the way to Hazelton he hugged the dog Mister in his arms, and I could see that he was thinking happy thoughts.

  His first mistake was not getting into line at once. He waited for the end of the line to reach him as he stood midway. When he realized that the tail was getting longer instead of shorter, as some of the first to be served hastened into place again, he finally got in line.

  The local butcher was helping to serve. He did not know Joe, but he did know the little boy just back of Joe. He had given Joe the last scoopful out of the last freezer over which he was custodian. There it stood upon Jodie’s plate in creamy lusciousness, and as Joe looked at it, his mouth watered. He had been too excited to eat much breakfast.

  And then the butcher said, “Wait a minute! There is some better ice-cream over there in that freezer where that lady is dishing up. Here! You give your cream to this little boy, and go over there and get some more from that lady.”

  With one sweep of his scoop the butcher passed the ice-cream on Joe’s plate to the plate of the little boy behind him. And there was Joe with nothing but a smear of cream across his paper plate.

  But Joe was a mild little fellow. I never heard him say a mean thing about any one in his life. He always believes everybody’s intention is for the best. So he took his dish hopefully over to the other line, getting in at the very tail, to begin all over again, standing patiently in the sun which beat down like a hammer that has been in contact with white-hot iron; and he moved by inches, slowly forward, until at last he could lift his dish expectantly to the flushed lady who was dishing out the ice-cream. One glance at his smeared plate was enough. “Go on away, little boy!” she exclaimed indignantly, before the whole gaping crowd, who looked at Joe as though he were too vile to exist. “You can’t have any more,” she yelled.

  “I ain’t had any yet,” said little Joe timidly, never believing that she would refuse him.

  “Yes, you have!” she cried in outrage. “You can’t lie to me. I can see the smears on your plate.” And she cast that look of triumphant shrewdness around the crowd.

  Joe, not being combative or a whiner, retired, to slip his permanently empty plate into a dry, weedy ditch. Out of those hundreds of children he was the only one that did not get any ice-cream. But more surprising, I think, is the fact that he did not tell me until he was going to bed, and then very quietly, with that dignity so pathetic in a little child. Our children never asked for money because they knew what a hard struggle we were having. I knew they did not ask, but the reason I did not know until after they were grown, when they confessed to me. My darling children!

  But there were happy times for little Joe and the rest of our children when we rode to Hazelton or Eden to an occasional picture-show, the dog Mister coming along with us and guarding Sagebrush Liz as ferociously as though he were a pure-bred Airedale, instead of a cheap copy. I had taught him to walk on his hind legs. I believe that only a little patience would have been required to teach him anything. He loved us so, and he was so intelligent.

  In both the picture-houses, Eden’s and Hazelton’s, camp-chairs and kitchen chairs were used. Hazelton’s movie palace was in a former place of business, and here the shows were hardest for me to bear because the pianist thought that the prime necessity was noise. She could chord the most frightful chording I ever heard. And she did not do more because nothing could be worse, and the worst was not too good for her.

  Hazelton possessed a stronger reek of barnyard manure, and there may have been Forgotten Men there, but it smelled to me more like forgotten baths. Perhaps it was just that the v
entilation was better at the Eden house, for many of the same farmers frequented both. I recall the pictures I saw in those places to the accompaniment of the heavy, stifling odor of cow fertilizer and well-ripened sweat.

  The Eden house had two tunes, which were played on the piano and on a drum. Or perhaps the drummer just went along with the tune. One of the tunes was for all the sad parts, and the other for all the gay parts. I like to remember when the gum-chewing pianist had an absent-minded spell and played the sad and glad tunes at the wrong places.

  I have mentioned that we had our baseball team, and I mean to tell you more about that later. But the rabbit-drive was probably our most distinctive outdoor sport, a sport which will be lost to the world in the not far future.

  It is not hard for me to recall these events. As I think of them, I get the feel of the quiet summer evening settling down on our farms.

  I wash the dishes and tidy the kitchen while I hear Charley’s whistling gradually receding toward the land called the gooseneck, where he is on his way to look over his water sets. A short distance behind him tag Rhoda and little Joe, together with the two dogs, Mister and Blackie. I can overhear the conversation in the next room. Charles, aged fourteen, is saying to his brother, aged seventeen, “You take care of the hogs, and I will milk the cow, and we can still have time for a game of golf.” Then the boys come into the kitchen, Charles seizes the milk pail, and they both leave.