Annie Pike Greenwood

by We Sagebrush Folks

  Their golf-course is laid out between the barn, the granary, and the hog-pens. There are plenty of hazards in the shape of wagons, sagebrush-pile, coal-pile, and miscellaneous farm machinery. The golf-clubs have been cut from the poplar-trees that cast a long line of shade at the west of the house. Walter has recently been at Pocatello for a year at the Technical Institute, paring potatoes in restaurants, firing furnaces, sweeping out stores, and doing anything to work his way while he studied. How he ever had time to be interested in golf, I cannot imagine, but he appears to have returned with a full knowledge of the game and the enthusiasm of a veteran. Golf has been played under many conditions and on many courses, but I doubt if any was ever more peculiar than this one, laid out in the barnyard of a pioneer sagebrush farm, the participants two farm boys fresh from slopping hogs and milking cows.

  In a few minutes Charles comes in with the milk, which I strain into crocks through a clean, scalded cheese-cloth. Down the steps of the dirt cellar outside I carry these crocks, one at a time, running up and going slowly down—and remembering the time when I stumbled on the top step, fell, broke the crock, sent the cream and milk all over the ground and me, and cut a painful wound on one knee.

  With tin lids I carefully cover the crocks, ignoring the shocked admonition of every farm woman who ever saw me do it. They always declared that the cream would not rise if I kept the crocks covered. They would not believe me when I told them that nothing but a God-miracle could keep cream from rising if milk is left undisturbed in a cool place. Cream to them meant a heavy, leathery scum, like stretched skin, instead of the deep, soft, yellow film that my milk raised under those lids.

  By the time the milk is in the cellar, the Baron has come back with the dogs and children, and the two boys are absorbed in their game of golf. Charley, the two younger children, Mister, and I get into Sagebrush Liz, which always looks patiently dilapidated, like an ancient spinster in an old sunbonnet. Instead of cranking her, Charley pulls her from the gate to the bridge where the canal crosses the road and then hoists himself into the front seat just as she glides downward like a dipping gull. At such moments Sagebrush Liz is a queen of grace. Most of us may exhibit some trait of the more gifted, be the circumstances propitious. Say what you will, there is a certain amount of luck in every success.

  On this Idaho summer evening, it is remarkable that no breeze is blowing, for no matter how still the day, we almost always have the cooling zephyr that welcomes the night. This stillness gives me a curious feeling of lack, and a faint apprehension, as though there were something about which I should be worrying or rejoicing, I cannot decide which.

  Skeleton Butte lies like a black, mourning figure to the east, with rosy clouds, like banners, stretched above its prone length. I am reminded of how this butte came by its name. A valuable horse was stolen, and the owner, with a friend, traced the thief to this hill. He sent a bullet through the outlaw’s head, retrieving his own horse and also taking the thief’s horse by way of interest. A year later the horsethief’s skeleton was found where he had fallen, a friend stumbling upon it and identifying it by the watch lying along with the ribs, which the murderer had thoughtlessly overlooked—or perhaps he drew the line at picking pockets. From that day to this the long black knoll has been called Skeleton Butte, an impressive monument to a horsethief.

  We decide to turn east, and we find a road upon which the county is evidently beginning some sort of grading. There are deep ruts in the heavy dust, and Sagebrush Liz, whose mood has been so buoyant on account of gliding down that hill like a gull, finds now that, after all, she is not the gifted creature she had imagined. She bucks the terrible road as nobly as possible, but finally, with breaking heart—I heard it thump—and dragging neck—it looked so to me from my seat in the back—she gives it up. Charley is forced to get out, as she wheezes the last breath out of her lungs. He gives the old girl new courage by cranking her up, we turn back, and dodging through clumps of sagebrush, where Lizzie feels more at home, we avoid the bad road until we come to a better.

  We pass a two-room tar-paper shack. This is the home of Many-Children Brown, the man who has actually lost his Christian name, so far as we are concerned, because of the one distinguishing fact in his otherwise perfectly blank existence. Where his family sleep is one of those unsolved mysteries, along with light and electricity. It is said that Mrs. Many-Children Brown never bothers about counting noses to see if all are home safe at night. She knows they will all turn up at breakfast. The only thing that worries her is whether there will be enough breakfast to go around.

  Jack-rabbits scurry ahead of Liz, and I think of how the food problem was partly solved during our first summer on our pioneer farm. Rabbit pie, with little biscuits for crusts, and fried Mollie Cottontail. Sagebrush Liz groans, puffs, her heart thumps like to burst, and I expect any minute to see her turn her headlights back to look reproachfully at us. Up a hideous hill we climb, Lizzie digging her nails into the dreadful ruts and snorting like a dragon. Inch by inch we are making it.

  At the top of the hill is the Brooke ranch, and in front of the ranch shack are the parked cars. We remember that there is to be a rabbit-drive here, and as we are about to pass, we are intercepted by a long, irregular procession of men and boys, carrying clubs, which debouches from the gate leading into an alfalfa-field. They look tired, and their overalls are wet to the knees, from running through the soaked alfalfa which has retained the moisture from the light shower of the afternoon. Most of them, we observe, are Arkansawyers.

  There are about two hundred of these men and boys, and behind them come the women, who have taken no active part in the drive except to cheer, but they too look bedraggled. In the arms of nearly every woman is a baby. No wonder the women look tired, for they must have walked, carrying their burdens of heavy infants, for nearly a mile. But tired though they be, there is the glow of health in their faces, and their freshly abbreviated skirts give evidence of an attempt at keeping up with the styles, even out here in the sagebrush.

  There is an air of anticipation which requires explanation. The night before, Dan Jean had introduced an innovation which means an epoch in the history of rabbit-driving. Dan had announced a rabbit-drive, and nobody had come. Being shrewd, he pondered on human nature, and soon after this he announced another rabbit-drive, at which free ice-cream cones would be distributed. It is one of the remarkable idiosyncrasies of the human race that you could not hire a man to ride several miles to the edge of the desert, there to struggle through acres of growing stuff, throwing clubs, for a distance of perhaps two miles during about two hours time, all for a matter of fifteen or so cents. Yet he will do this identical thing, for a man to whom he is indifferent, the bait being of the order of three ice-cream cones, if he gets even that many.

  This refreshment having once been introduced as part of a rabbit-drive, never again can it be omitted. Besides, as we sit waiting for the procession of solemn, glowing, sunburnt, soaked Arkansawyers to pass patient Liz so that we may possess the road again, I remember that it had been whispered about that Dan Jean’s ice-cream was to suffer eclipse. There would be not only ice-cream, but something more invigorating would be passed around freely. We were living in a country where the law might be no respecter of persons, though I have my doubts, but there could be no doubt that persons were no respecters of the law.

  Since we have not murdered a single bunny, we cannot have the face to hang around, hoping for a cone—or something that warms you up instead of cooling you down. We therefore start off, only to discover that our boy Joe is missing. Trust Joe for smelling out where the ice-cream may be. Rhoda is despatched to retrieve him before he can disgrace the family by accepting a cone. Joe stows himself in the car, very downcast during the necessary scolding. I cannot help feeling a little sympathy for him. It is a fearful trial to be dragged away from any spot where ice-cream cones are about to be given away. Such events make up the tragedy of childhood.

  We continue to the east through mile
s of sagebrush. It is growing deeply dusk, and the lights of Sagebrush Liz refuse to work. She seems to have used up all her energy in pulling up that ghastly hill, when she dug her claws in the ruts and snorted like a dragon. It is like adding insult to injury to expect her to show a lively glow after having been given such exhausting drudgery. It would be like making a poet cook the breakfast and then demanding of her a poem, after she had burnt the bacon and her fingers too. I never thought of Sagebrush Liz as temperamental, but that must be the reason she refuses to light up.

  We turn a delicious curve and start on the road for home. It is cool—cool almost to shivering, but as calm as a sleeping babe. The sage is black blots on a background almost as dark. Then we see the canal. There is something spiritually beautiful about placid water. It gathers unto itself every bit of light and color of the sky, and it lies there smiling, like a lovely woman dreaming, awake, of her lover. It always grips my heart to see water like that. There is some ecstasy of which I am capable that I have never experienced, and perhaps never may experience, and placid water reminds me of it, without revealing what it might be. It is, even so, though it lack fulfilment, a beauty almost too great to be borne.

  Almost five miles to the farm-house with the toothpick-pillared porch. When we arrive there, we see from our hill that the cars are just leaving the Brooke ranch. They move like fireflies over the darkness of the valley, and there is the peculiar sweet smell, which no city can boast, of a late summer evening among the sagebrush farms. Within the farm-house Walter and Charles are playing the phonograph. I forget to ask them who won the golf game. Little Joe is begging to sleep with his mother as a special treat. Thinking of the ice-cream cone that he did not get, I make the arrangement.

  My bed is placed so that, as it were, I may have my head out of the window. This night Joe thinks he would like to sleep next to the screen. I allow him to do so. We both listen drowsily for a few moments to the phonograph in the next room playing “Crying for You.” I do not hear the last of it, for I am asleep, little Joe wrapped in my arms.

  I awake once in the night and see the stars shining as though their whole object is to look down into my window. Stars! What am I doing here in this farm-house, so far from the life I meant to live? Foolish woman!...remembering the ice-cream cone you might have had.

  BUT THERE WERE rabbit-drives whose conclusions were not so wistful. There was one pulled off, as we sagebrush folks expressed it, by Hen Turner, whose rented farm was close to the little gasoline railroad, next to the desert which was as unchanged as when the Shoshone roamed its reaches.

  It is nearly six o’clock on the Idaho sagebrush farm, and a good many other places, too, I suppose. “Hurry and get the supper on the table, Mom. Hen Turner is to have a rabbit-drive, and there is to be five gallons of ice-cream.” Nothing is said to me about anything stronger that will be circulating, because I am not supposed to be interested in such things. And, indeed, the idea seems very tame to me. I came from hard-drinking ancestors, and alcohol is practically water to me. When the men go slinking and slipping around, winking at each other, with a furtive hand on hip, I regard them scornfully. They think they are keeping something from me. Well, let them. I don’t need it, and never did. It is all I can do to keep my feet on the earth as it is. And anyhow it would take a quart to their cup even to faze me, the poor, little, snivelling, would-be naughty men. I am almost immune to alcohol, but you should see my reprehensible carryings-on when I get a couple of cups of good coffee in me.

  I have the supper ready in a short time, and in less time than that we are speeding toward the north, up and down the sweeping hills of the road, toward the Jerome Canal bridge that crosses near Hen’s farm—not the part of Jerome Canal to be seen from our farm. Sagebrush Liz is at her best, taking the road like a bird. “Doesn’t she go fine?” brags Charley. The man with an expensive car cannot possibly be as proud of it as the man with a flivver. You expect something of a car in which thousands of dollars are sunk, but when only hundreds have been invested, every perfect action has a peculiar grace. Such a car is a member of the family, to be petted, loved, defended. It comes nearest to taking the domestic place of the vanishing beloved horse.

  We pass out onto the desert road, where on one hand is Hen Turner’s rented farm, which has been cropped short by rabbits, and, on the other, the limitless sagebrush and lava rock. And on the farm, as well as among the clumps of sagebrush, the rabbits rush toward us, and away from us, by the affrighted scores. A crane rises and takes flight from among the shocks of newly-cut hay; a yellow-hammer is seated on the top wire of the farm fence, the ignored companion of a speckle-breasted meadow-lark. We can see a killdeer circling around, emitting its peculiar note of distress; a brown gull flies toward the blue Jerome Canal.

  There is a nauseating odor of putrefying rabbits, as the dogs have killed many, and there have been other rabbit-drives here. This powerfully obnoxious smell grows worse as we near the wire pen in the corner of the fence, where rabbits have been driven on other occasions, and there clubbed to death and left to rot.

  We are the first of the rabbit-drivers, as we are the first arrivals wherever we go. Consequently, I always carry a tiny book with me, in which I have jotted things I wish not to forget. If I had not formed this habit, my punctuality would have cheated me out of years of my life. I have been so long out of touch with city people that I cannot remember whether they are afflicted with that bad habit of being tardy, which seems a part of the character of farm folks.

  It is not just because there are chores to be done. In the winter the chores may be done at the discretion of the doer, yet Grange and Literary are begun nearer eight than seven, although everybody has voted for seven. There is something about farm life that seems to make the populace who embrace it act slowly, think slowly, and, I was going to say, feel slowly, if you will allow me to put it that way. But the last is not true. Farm folks go around with their feelings sticking out all over them “like quills upon the fretful porcupine.” That sort of feeling, to my mind, is arrested development, a never-ending adolescence, if not childhood.

  We stop our car at the agreed meeting-place, but we are driven away from there by the odor of decaying rabbits. So Sagebrush Liz is urged closer to the bank of the Jerome Canal, where we sit and watch the rushing waters which seem as much at home as though native to this region, instead of having been led by the hand of man from the Snake River seven miles away.

  It is now three-quarters of an hour past the time set for the drive, and the men are arriving in cars and on foot, each with a club in his hand. When the time comes to get through the barbed-wire fence, I fervently regret having worn a dress instead of my knickers. Charley straddles the fence, pressing down the wires with one hand, so that by seizing him by the collar and doing some acrobatic climbing, I manage to get on the other side.

  Eleven-year-old Rhoda walks with her father and me, but little Joe and young Charles have raced ahead. Mister, the dog, stays with us, as he is afraid of the clubs. As the men throw them at the fleeing rabbits, I think I can read his face. He loves to kill the poor, screaming little beasts in our own fields, but at a rabbit-drive he cannot be induced to take part in exterminating the very creatures he delights to destroy at the home place. His eyes say to me, “How do I know that these ferocious men will not turn on me when they are through with the rabbits?”

  Rhoda is talking: “Don’t you hate to hear the rabbits screaming when the men are killing them, Papa?”

  “Well, I’d rather hear them screaming than to hear you screaming for food.”

  “I could never kill one of them.” She shudders as she speaks and shakes her curly head.

  I have reason to remember this conversation later. Charley picks up a corn-stalk and hands it to me. “You’d better carry a club if you expect any ice-cream,” he admonishes facetiously, for, of course, the corn-stalk could scarcely brain a moth. But I carry it, as it looks dangerous, making me appear more in keeping with the scores of men and boys
now hurrying across the field, and it is light enough to offer no impediment to walking. For walking here is not easy, as we zigzag among the shocks of hay and alfalfa stubble and climb another fence, into a discouraged wheat-field which the rabbits evidently thought was planted for them. About this time Rhoda begs that we walk more slowly. “A pain in my side,” she explained.

  “This is the way we cured a pain in the side when I was a boy,” says Charley. He picks up a piece of lava rock, expectorates on the other side, and carefully replaces it where he found it. “You must always stoop,” he directed.

  Whether or not this is a sovereign remedy for a pain in the side, I never know, for immediately we are caught up in the excitement of nearly two hundred men and boys hurrying toward the bank of the canal, where the lovely silver-green water is rushing past the islands on which the native willows bend before the breeze. Just before we reach the bank, the order is given to spread our line and begin driving the rabbits before us, which we do, the little creatures dashing frantically ahead of the clubs.

  It is a scene of the greatest confusion, men shouting at their dogs, which are racing about and barking, clubs flying in every direction. The rabbits begin to turn back, in their efforts to escape, which proves good strategy, as the man who has thrown his club is powerless to harm a rabbit dodging back between his legs. The situation is indeed ludicrous.

  Farmers from Arkansas never used a club. They were expert shots with rocks, having used them to kill squirrels from the time they were babies. I stand with my inoffensive corn-stalk, helping to draw the line closer toward the wire trap. Now the men have begun yelling like Indians on the war-path. I presume this makes the attack more effective, though I should think that a rain of clubs would be sufficient to terrify any animal pursued by another beast about forty times bigger than itself. The circumstances could be paralleled only in the pursuit of a caveman by a megalosaurus. Surely no vocal exercise would be needed by that prehistoric carnivorous monster should he take after one of our little forefathers. Of course, I do not include our foremothers. I am sure they would soon have old meggy turning tail and fleeing into the boggy lands, where, a few millions of years or so later, his skeleton would be discovered and carefully fastened together, to be stared at by students in universities.