It is the pause before the last inning. There is a heated discussion just in front of Sagebrush Lizzie’s nose between two of our Greenwood boys. “You ought to of caughten that there ball, Jerry. They ain’t no excuse fer you a-lettin’ it pass you up.”
“Well, I was away off there outfieldin’, ‘n they was two gophers just a-front-a me, a-playen aroun’ their hole, an’ fust thing I knowed, the ball come a-circlin’ aroun’, ‘n a-gittin’ ready to light, ‘n...” They pass on, and I, open-mouthed eavesdropper, sink back in Lizzie’s arms, disappointed at failing to learn the finale. But it is not so hard to guess what happened. I am sure one of the gophers caught the ball.
The last inning may have been exciting. I forget the first part, and the last part I know nothing about, for our dog Mister suddenly springs out of the car and makes a dash up the side of the amphitheater, and in and out among the sagebrush that climbs the sides, until he reaches the rim of the basin. Then Mister begins a spectacular chase around the top of the rim, with a jack-rabbit just ahead of him. Most of us become absorbed in this race. This is outdoor sport even more exhilarating than the baseball game. Around and around they go, the rabbit never having the faintest idea of getting off the rim and striking out for the desert.
When the silly thing finally does decide to change its course, it dashes down into the bowl of our amphitheater, straight for the baseball diamond. The game there is almost over. Into the midst of the players runs the jack-rabbit, still pursued by Mister. But what a jack-rabbit! And what a dog! The rabbit is so exhausted that it is barely humping along; the dog is making only a pretense at running.
The baseball game stops at once. One of our Greenwood boys steps up to the rabbit and picks it up by the ears, laying it down in front of Mister, who immediately drops on his belly, panting, tongue lolling, paying no attention whatever to what lies before him. The rabbit reclines indifferently on the dog’s paws.
Suddenly the rabbit decides to make another try for freedom. At a feeble lope, with Mister dragging slowly behind, it starts, but Red Britton, a big, gangling, homely farm hand, lifts the rabbit with one of his feet, and when it meets the earth with a thud, there is nothing left for Mister to do.
Then the game begins again. Greenwood wins, but I don’t remember the score. We crank up Lizzie and start back through the sagebrush for home. And as we glide along the dusty, weed-lined road, Charles, in his elation at our victory, sings a parody, probably city-old, but country-new:
Out where a dog fight is a weed’s sensation;
Out where there’s no air in the service station;
That’s where the West begins!
EVEN on Independence Day, work must be done on the sagebrush farm before celebrating can be begun. Early in the morning the Stars and Stripes have been run up on a wire stretched from the radio pole. Then all hands get busy to put the work out of the way so that we may take a jaunt in good old Sagebrush Liz. Besides cleaning up the breakfast and kitchen work, I can two enormous kettles of cherries and one of currants, having extracted the juice from the currants in the processer. Fruit goes right on spoiling while people are having good times, and conserving what is raised is half of the business of farming.
Rhoda, eleven, sweeps and dusts two rooms and makes all the beds. Joe, nine, feeds and waters the cows and a calf, brings in a hatful of eggs, shakes the rugs out-of-doors, and picks more currants. Charles, fourteen, picks cherries, draws water in a bucket from the cistern to fill the stove reservoir and to supply all other household needs, and then picks more cherries. Walter is taking the part of a man, milking, haying the horses, feeding hogs, and handling many other tasks. He is visiting in Hazelton today. The Baron goes to take care of his irrigation, followed by the two devoted dogs, Mister and Blackie. This means everybody occupied except Phyllis, the aristocratic white cat, who has her paws full just boxing the ears of her three obstreperous youngsters.
Joe has finally stripped the bushes of currants. They have ripened the earliest in thirteen years. All crops are ripening early, the wheat heading while still but a stunted growth.
Rhoda now has her work done and is beginning to rummage through everybody’s belongings to find a tie to suit her fancy. She comes out with her father’s best tie, to see whether it will match her corduroy breeches and cream-colored shirt that Cousin Peggy sent her. Charles enters the kitchen with the last of the cherries from four trees. And the Baron appears, the dogs following closely, tongues lolling.
I have strained the juice from some kettles of cherries and have a wash-boiler half full of bottles covered with boiling water. The juice, too, is boiling. So Charles takes charge of the bottle-capper; his father removes the sterile bottles from the boiler and pours the hot juice into them by way of a clean aluminum coffee-pot; and soon there is a tableful of bright red bottles. I strain the juice from the currants and set it aside, planning to make jelly from it on the following morning.
I now prepare the lunch, for which I have done most of the cooking and baking the day before. Early this morning I made the strawberry ice-cream, and it awaits our leaving in the outdoor dirt cellar. I am already dressed in my knickers and shirt. Suddenly some one remembers that no angleworms have been dug for fish bait, and there is a general exodus. I apply myself to washing kettles and such, after which I lie down for a few minutes, having been on my feet constantly since dawn.
The children come back with the bait. Then each one departs, goodness knows where, as people always do at such times, on missions which they fail to reveal before disappearing; and there is a crying hither and yon, “Where is Joe?”...“Has any one seen Rhoda?”...“What in the world can Charles be doing?”...“Where is your father, anyway?”
At last, becoming persuaded that unless some one makes a start, we shall never go, I take myself to the back seat of patient Sagebrush Liz, who appears to be standing with hanging head. Charles comes with the strawberry ice-cream, which he places in the luggage-carrier on the running board. Beside it is Lizzie’s own particular drinking-bucket.
We wait, and we wait, and we wait. “Whatever is the matter with your father?” I ask Charles.
He replies, disgustedly, “Oh, he just keeps a-wandering around and a-wandering around, and saying, ‘Haven’t we forgotten something? Haven’t we forgotten something?”‘
These words conjure a picture so ridiculous that I lay my forehead on the back of the seat in front of me and laugh until I almost cry. Suddenly Joe, who has been slumped passively beside me, springs up, electrified, “And we have forgotten something!” he exclaims. “We have forgotten the bait!” And out he climbs to go after it.
At last we are all packed in Sagebrush Liz, along with the lunch. Walter, some time before, had waved a farewell and cantered down the road to Hazelton on the colt Florry. Off we go, past farms, and then out into the desert of sagebrush and lava rock. We are bound for an oasis, the Sprague place. It has upon it a pretty house, built of lava rock, a large lawn, and big trees. And trees mean so much in this desert country. Whenever I see them, I always offer up thanks to God.
“There’s darling Mrs. Sprague!” I exclaim, as I recognize her figure coming to meet us. I leave the car and throw my arms around her. She seems as glad to see me. We had thought of carrying our lunch down into Snake River Cañon, but now we decide to stay in the shade of the trees on the Sprague lawn, and we invite the Spragues to eat with us. Mrs. Sprague, comfortably plump, with large brown eyes, hurries into the house, reappearing with sandwiches, delicious jam, cheese, lemonade, and cookies. Then we all turn to and eat. Mrs. Sprague and I are near together, and Charley is soon deep in conversation with Mr. Sprague, a thin man, with blue eyes. Both the Spragues are very intelligent city people who dreamed of fortune on the farm.
I am not fond of sandwiches, yet they are as manna there on the grass under the trees, intense quiet all around us. Although there are two small boys present, our Joe and the Spragues’ Arthur, there is not an interrupting sound while Mr. Sprague tells how he got
lost in the cañon of the Snake and for one whole night felt his way over jutting boulders and crevasses, on hands and knees, trying to get home before he should freeze to death. At any moment he was likely to slip over a declivity into the deep, rushing Snake below, or into a chasm out of which it would be impossible to make his way.
I open the strawberry ice-cream freezer, and folks! I can make strawberry ice-cream like nobody’s business. We now witness the miracle of two small boys so full of other food that they can eat but one dish apiece of ice-cream. At first, young Arthur, who is seven, had refused positively to have any at all, but when I begin dishing it out, he gives a start of surprise and exclaims, “Oh, it’s pink! I guess I’ll have some.”
Charley and Mr. Sprague join the boys in a game of mumble-peg, while Mrs. Sprague and I clear up the things. I hear a shout of delight and loud laughter, and I look up to behold little Joe squirming on his belly as though in an inverted fit. I cannot see his face. At my amazed look of inquiry Charley calls, “Can you hear Joe mumbling? He’s rooting for the knife.” And presently Joe arises, triumphantly, knife in mouth—a mouth whose appearance justifies the word rooting. Joe hurriedly hunts for water, his expression indicating that dirt is more acceptable to a small boy where it only shows and does not taste.
The boys are begging to go to the cañon of the Snake, which must be approached by a walk of about a mile. They gather all the fishing-poles and lines and, with Rhoda, start off. We elders decide to wait until it is a little cooler, although it is rarely really hot in our part of Idaho. The two men are seated near each other on kitchen chairs, and I can hear them talking about spraying weeds to kill them, which draws my attention to two other men in the next field, county employees, who are doing just that sort of work. Next I hear Mr. Sprague and Charley on that inevitable topic, the probable loss of their farms. I dare not think of the heart-breaking labor I have endured to reach this conclusion to the golden years of my physical activity, so I shut out the thought.
We decide to follow the children. Mrs. Sprague declines to scramble over the lava rocks, so I reluctantly leave her. Through Mr. Sprague’s wheat-field we go until we strike desert, and then on until we reach the rim of the cañon, which drops down from our feet like the pit of Abbadon. At the bottom crawls the emerald Snake.
Beautiful, treacherous river! Her bed is composed of lava boulders, the edges of which have been rounded by a thick coating of creamy sediment, the same that makes the rocks lying along the very banks of her stream, at the bottom of the cañon, look like the bones of prehistoric monsters. It is no place to swim and no place to wade, for there are some holes fifty feet deep in the lava crevasses, where a man might be sucked in, and under, forever. The Snake glides smoothly along, as though anxious to escape observation, for man has robbed her of the greater part of her power. Not twenty years before the Snake was a rushing dragon, her stream high up on her cañon walls, not placid green water as now, but scaley with silver lights and smoking with mists, a terrific force which one would have said no man could tame; yet tamed she is, though it is only the taming of a nature which is treacherous still. Rarely does human being enter this river and live to tell the tale.
The Snake’s cañon is a wide split in the earth, speaking eloquently of the days when all this part of Idaho was unimaginable hell. Its lava sides, cracked in the cooling to resemble cunning masonry, might have provided the background for that Dore illustration of Milton’s epic:
With head, hands, wings, or feet pursues his way,
And swims, or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flies.
Excepting that I have no wings, my descent to the bottom of that abyss is made much in the manner of poor Lucifer’s. Mr. Sprague is a fair substitute for wings, taking my hand to help me fly from boulder to boulder, across dangerous crevasses, moving always a little farther downward, most of the time traveling along ledges so high from the cañon bottom that one false step would mean a mangled body. And I am one of those unfortunate mortals who cannot stand altitude, or even to cross a stream of water on a narrow plank, without feeling my head pulling me down to destruction.
Realizing this and not wishing to cause any change in our plans, I compel my mind to think of nothing but the placing of my hands and feet so as to get a little farther down. Even so, I almost slide from a slippery, sloping lava rock, whose flinty surface has gathered unto itself the rays of the sun until it is hot enough to congeal an egg. Mr. Sprague fortunately interrupts my fall. My heart continues its normal beating, for I am not going to smash myself if it is avoidable; and if this should occur, I could know but little about it, so why miss a heart-beat?
Down, at last, among what appear to be the huge, bleached bones of some prehistoric creature. Imagine trying to clamber over the piled-up skeletons of the ichthyosaurus, the cetiosaurus, the megalosaurus, and all the rest of the saurus family, and you have some idea of the difficulties of strolling beside the Snake River.
I crawl and pull, hoisting myself along the river’s side until I see a propitious boulder in the stream; and this I manage to reach by stepping carefully on exposed rocks around which the waters swirl. And on that boulder I sit, patiently fishing up crawfish after crawfish, with the unfearing trout gliding and flashing all around me.
Then I caught something. I jerked excitedly, and over I went, just missing being sucked into one of those bottomless holes with which the Snake is pocketed. I had scared not only the fish, but my companions too; so, as we had been there about an hour, we decided to return. I was not so anxious to go, being less upset by what had happened than the others were. It had all been so quick, and I could not see myself in the danger which so alarmed the families Sprague and Greenwood. But I was very wet, and I was not over-enthusiastic about crawfishing at the risk of my life. I should not have minded so much drowning with a few trout on my stick and a good big one on my hook.
As we rode home in the twilight, my thoughts were divided between many things: the beauty of the rose and gold sky, with lovely sky-lakes reflecting the purple sky-mountains; the memory of the roaring green of the restless Snake; the graceful patterns made by awkward cranes, into whose nests I had looked down from the cañon rim, flying to and from their big, ragged nests in the pines which clung to the precipitous walls; the ghostly cries of the cranes, echoing hollowly as accompaniment to the sound of great, slowly flapping wings; millions of sparrows high up on the cañon lava masonry, chorusing weirdly together and somehow adding to the savage beauty of the whole.
And at the same time with these impressions of the present and the past, my mind goes ahead to where the patient farm pets await my coming—so glad when I shall take them the pans of separated milk from the kitchen...several pans, washed and kept sacred to them...they will all drink together, five dogs, fourteen cats, and Pretty, the magpie. And how good bed will feel! And are we really going to lose the farm?
WE SINK into sleep as deep and peaceful as though there were no troubles awaiting any of us in this uncertain world. Toward morning the Baron will wake and lie there, eyes still closed, having what he calls “parades.” Debts...debts...how to meet them...what is it all leading to? No! God Almighty Himself could not live the life of mortal man, happily, without some higher Being to rest upon. We must have faith that all is ultimately well. I did not know that then. I was still struggling, still determined to trust only in myself, still trying to reshape the pattern of my life, which I thought had been forced out of symmetry.
Poor Charley lay there every dawn, having parades of debts, mortgages; nothing ahead but more debts, more mortgages. I had ever with me the sense that I was not where I belonged, which was false. We are always where we belong. When we have done the best that can be done with one environment, either we will no longer desire to leave it, or it will be rolled away from us like a painted scene upon a stage. But Charley’s dilemma was worse than mine. You cannot say that debts and mortgages are right, because they are not right. No man can stand up and look the world in the eye when he ow
es money that he cannot pay and can see no prospect of paying. It is a form of dishonesty which is torture to a real man, for whom it is so often involuntary.
Charley was a brilliant man in the wrong place, for brilliancy is wasted in farming of the present, as it probably was in any past day. Five thousand years ago they used to throw debtor farmers into the canals to drown and sell their children and wives into slavery. When we were on the farm, times had improved, for Charley was not forced to drown himself, except in a frightful despair which to a sensitive man is worse than physical death.
But we often forget our individual problems in some form of innocent amusement. I call going to the movies in that wilderness country a form of outdoor sport because the part of it I loved best was the going and the coming. The sunset, and the stars, and the little town of Hazelton glimmering through the twilight, the dusky trees, my darlings near me; then, after the show, the deeper night, with the blue-black sky, the sweet, fragrant air, the up-and-downness of the gliding road, the far-off farm-house waiting, and the barking of the welcoming dogs, with Mousie, my beloved little gray cat, climbing bat-wise up the screen to have me come and say goodnight to her. A sleepy murmur in the brushy bottoms of the poplar-trees near my bedroom window means that Pretty is complaining over my having been gone so long.
We discuss going to the picture-show at the supper-table on Saturday night. I decide against Hazelton’s, since my ears are very sensitive, and I can no longer stand the frightful chording of the woman who maltreats the piano there. Even the repertory of two tunes at Eden, with the drum, is better. It is ten miles away, but the faithful flivver will take us there.
Annie Pike Greenwood Page 29
