Annie Pike Greenwood

by We Sagebrush Folks

  Joe, aged nine, has been driving a team all day, helping to haul the red-clover hay, which is being stacked beside the barn. Charles, aged fourteen, for the past three days has been cutting hay for a neighbor, working from seven in the morning until six at night, ten full hours, for two and a half dollars a day, the going wages, as we say in Idaho.

  Charles will drive Lizzie. He is five feet eleven inches tall, weighs one hundred and forty-eight pounds, and might well pass for twenty years. And he is an expert, careful driver, although, of course, his driving is permitted only because his mother and father are present. With Rhoda and Joe also, Walter preferring the relaxation of manufacturing his own radio, the car is too full to leave space for Mister, always its guard while we are entertained. Mister does not know we are to leave him behind, and we dread driving off without him, for he is always so disconsolate at being deserted, trotting back from the gate with such a hangdog look.

  The family hurry with their supper of some of my famous Boston baked beans, bread and butter, milk and gingerbread, a terribly unbalanced meal, which I did not learn to compose in a home-economics course and know better than to provide; but sometimes over the whole countryside there is the smell of cooking beans, and then we all know that the larder is almost bare, hens moulting, garden stuff gone, hogs sold or not ready to kill. However, on this night the supper is one of convenience as well as necessity, and it is soon despatched.

  Walter, as usual, goes out to feed the stock; Charley goes to irrigate; Charles goes to milk; Joe has gathered eggs and is set to collecting his best clothes; Rhoda is busy about the same task for herself; I am washing dishes. Joe is one of those individuals, such as I was when a child, who has no clothes-consciousness. When he takes off his clothes, they immediately begin hunting places to hide from him. His shirt sneaks one place, his knickers another, one shoe divorces itself as far as possible from its mate, and although Joe is one of the first to get up in the morning, he must hunt for an hour to find enough habiliment to avoid shocking the neighbors. On this night he may go in clean overalls and work shirt, but he must wear the coat to his best suit. So Joe goes prowling upstairs and downstairs, and I even stumble over him making a search among my cooking-utensils in the bottom of the kitchen cabinet.

  I call Rhoda to the rescue. It always ends that way. And she has been on the scent only a few moments when she discovers Joe’s coat in the unfinished room upstairs. Having washed himself, Joe appropriates some of the dreadful hair-ointment warranted to give the high, patent-leather finish fashionable at this time, and although Joe has pretty, wavy hair, he manages with this evil-smelling stuff to plaster down the top of his head until he looks like a mouse that has been drowned in a mop-pail. But I have not the heart to criticize the little fellow; he enjoys so imitating Charles and Walter, and, like all imitaters, he overdoes it just enough to betray his lack of genius for the thing. I regard what he has done to himself affectionately, remembering how willingly he works about the farm from dawn until dark, with never a complaint, never a hankering to stop to play, or, if there be any hankering, hiding it deep in his true, loving heart.

  I cannot help thinking, as we speed over the miles in Sagebrush Liz, that there are compensations in being poor—not so poor that your stomach is empty and your feet bare and your back shivering, but so poor that you must ride in an open flivver. For here on one side of the road is the new-cut hay, and there on the other side is a field of white clover. If some manufacturer ever takes a notion to bottle those combined perfumes, his fortune will be made. I make mention often of Cabell’s certain place in Heaven for old-fashioned women, which smells of mignonette and where a starling is singing. I hope there is another corner of Heaven dedicated to the smell of white clover and new-mown hay, where laughing women like me can go and be with the little children.

  Miles of farmingland we pass: we see the fields of wheat, the fields of barley, the fields of potatoes, the fields of beans—here in a country where there was nothing but sagebrush when the Baron and I came. I know that if I were standing in the middle of that bean-field, looking over it, I should see a constant movement of the soil, as the bent backs of the bean-plants push their way out of the darkness. One can actually see them grow, like a purposely accelerated motion-picture. Their growth is so noticeable that there is an uncanny feeling of animal activity, as though they were stretching their bodies up out of the soil where they have been lying.

  The next field is wheat, with an odd appearance on account of the many dark-green barley heads raised above the wide expanse of lighter green. Through some inadvertence the barley has been sown with the wheat, and thus each barley stalk, distinctly isolated, lifts its individual banner, as though leading a platoon of wheat in the army of summer. Foolish barley, so brave, so self-deceived! So like visionary mankind, who, like the barley, shall be cast aside when the wheat is threshed. Wheat the great mass of mankind; the barley the dreamers. Dreams are needed to float the banners of inspiration, but the fate of the barley is to be cast aside.

  I am not as melancholy as my thoughts appear in print. I see the Jerome Canal in the distance, and “my heart leaps up when I behold” the beautiful, man-made river, standing up out of the valley like those mirages we so often observe on our western horizon, looking outward from our ranch. The Jerome Canal at this point is confined in rock walls, to keep it from flowing into the valley that sweeps below it. Not so far back we crossed our own Jerome Canal bridge, and there the stream is wide and turbulent and deep-blue—so much beauty flowing under that bridge, scarcely noticed each day, but now flowing over my heart forever, never to be ignored.

  I think I would rather make a canal or plant a tree than build a house. Especially in making a canal should I feel that I were exercising some of the prerogatives of the Creator. Water has a special sort of mystery which nothing else in nature holds. It is a vibrant, living thing, whose life is so much less understandable than that of plants and animals. It suggests the infinite. No scene is perfect without it, however charming. I feel close kinship to animals and plants, a kinship that is physical and mental, but there is something in my soul that yearns toward the waters of the earth.

  We reach the edge of the town of Hazelton, where our mail is distributed, and there, on his lawn, is the rural mail-carrier, feeding a lamb with a baby’s nursing-bottle. As hurriedly as may be done respectably, we go on through our town, as it is nearing eight, and always the moving-picture show in Eden has opened doors at eight. A crowd of seven people are strolling up and down Hazelton’s Main Street, and five cars are parked against the curbing. Lights are shining in our grocery-dry-goods store, in our grocery-butcher shop, in our grocery-post-office, in our restaurant-drug-store, with two or three people in each one. The hardware store, too, is still open. It is a busy night for the merchants of Hazelton.

  On we speed, the scene ahead of us growing more velvety with dusk. The sun is sinking into a lake of rose and gold, so I know there is likely to be a little sprinkling of rain, some wind, and yet generally fair weather. This forecast, which I make to my audience in the car, proves to be correct. I cannot see, in this time of governmental economy, why Uncle Sam does not dispense with all other weather prophets and employ me alone. It is a fact that my study of the sky has never failed to result in a correct prediction.

  It is a pretty road on the way to Eden, as a road should be that leads to a place of that name, nor is it guarded by even a cherub with a wooden sword; but at the edge of the little town we see a warning in huge black letters that we must not drive more than fifteen miles an hour, so Sagebrush Liz crawls into Eden on her belly, like a dog that has been scolded for chasing the neighbors’ turkeys. I wonder what would happen if we went dashing through at, say, thirty miles an hour. The only official authorized to stop us is probably working on his farm some miles away. Or maybe he leaves the farm for his wife to work, just lounging around Eden “to ketch them pesky smarties that comes hell-bent-fer-breakfast at twenty-thirty miles a-nour” through Ede
n.

  Eden seems much busier than Hazelton. I might be wrong, but it looks as though there are two more stores than we have in our town. Probably a grocery-barber-shop and a grocery-undertaking parlor. I say probably. I am not sure about it. The unusually crowded Main Street may be accounted for by the fact that the Ladies Aid of the Union Church has a table on the edge of the pavement, where home-cooked food is displayed, the guardians and salesladies being two very large and amiable-looking women of the kind that seem to bulge at all corners of public Ladies Aid affairs. As Simon Heminway had done at the Greenwood-Hazelton ball-game, these pneumatic ladies are selling ice-cream cones.

  Six cars are parked in front of the moving-picture house, the proprietor of which stands outside in his shirt-sleeves, and a-few-other-things, loafing and inviting his soul. No crowd seems to be jamming into its precincts. Upon inquiry from the shirt-sleeves, and a-few-other-things, we find that the crowd was late in coming the previous Saturday, so the time has been changed from eight to eight-thirty. We have at least twenty minutes to wait. The bill is Lon Chaney in “The Phantom of the Opera.” A little later, as we kill time walking down Main Street, I overhear a conversation between two highly illustrated young ladies, the artist’s superscription alone being omitted.

  “Goin’ to the show t’night?” (Vigorous gum-chewing. Cleans your teeth—forget which brand, but of course other brands do not.)

  “Y’ bet! Wouldn’t miss seein’ that bird.” (Gum here, too. Cleans her teeth too, I suppose, but they do not look it.)

  “What’s the show?”

  “It’s ‘The Panthom of the Opry.’”

  THE FIGURE that now rises before us might be considered a “panthom” from the past. It is the fat, good-natured person of Tony Work, so long, so very long gone from the field of my life. He looks just the same, except more fat, and he worships me with his eyes in the same faithful-dog way, though I am sure there is not as much to please those eyes as when first he saw me. Or is there? Perhaps more.

  Tony tells me that since he left our neighborhood, he has worked in many different parts of southern Idaho. Now he is located as hired hand on a fruit-farm near Eden. He is what is called a prominent man, in the Idaho farm sense. I overheard Simon Heminway asking Charley if he knew where he could get a prominent man to work for him. I thought that Simon was getting pretty ambitious, as well as impractical. Most prominent men I know would make very poor farm hands. After he was gone, in answer to my surprise, Charley explained that he meant a permanent man.

  Tony begins talking, and with what he says, and what is flashed upon the screen of my mind by remembrance of things the Baron has told me, I find a story more interesting than the strained, improbable action of “The Phantom of the Opera.”

  I did not know until after Tony had left us that he had ever been married, or that his wife was dead, having left him a baby daughter, who was living with his wife’s folks in some Middle Western state. Although Tony had perfect features, beautiful, large brown eyes, teeth fit for advertising dental paste, nobody thought of him as handsome, for he lacked personality. He had come back from the Spanish-American War only to enter a hospital. In this environment his pulchritude registered well, since he was not able to exercise much personality in any case. He fell in love with his young nurse, and it is presumed that she did the same with him. They were married.

  It did not take a year for her to grow tired of looking at that meaningless perfection. When her baby was born, she was ready to fall desperately in love with her physician. She would have fallen in love with almost any one who happened to be on terms of intimacy with her at that time. Love is not a destiny unless it is allowed to grow roots too deep to pull up. At first it is always conditional. It might have been any one who was good to Tony’s wife, because her affections and her instincts were alive and famishing. Hunger knows no laws. The biological urge is so much stronger in women than in men that it is a wonder women have not shattered the universe in fierce rebellion against the bonds of nature which so seldom mean satisfaction for them.

  Doctors are used to female patients falling in love with them. Most doctors are not vain. As a whole, it is a most admirable, merciful, sane profession. If the poor woman had been grounded in psychology from babyhood, as some day all persons capable of education will be—oh, say, nine thousand years to come—she would never have done what she did. For that matter, she would never have married Tony in the first place. Suicide is a poor way out of anything. You can learn to endure any one if you have the Kingdom of Heaven within. And a mother cannot get away from having been born a mother even though she become invisible to fleshly beings.

  And now Tony is telling me that since he lived near us, he has had a mail-order wife, found in a matrimonial paper, a woman a good deal older than himself, with a little money. She had come to Idaho to her bridegroom. The union, though it may have been registered in Heaven, lasted not six months on earth. Jeff had introduced Tony to the matrimonial paper that introduced him to his bride.

  Uncle Sam, with little borrowed wings, and a quiverful of arrows, and a bow, which maybe he stole, was no more successful in Jeff’s case. Jeff had been divorced from his first wife, the woman who had always worn black, as poor little Susie, her deserted child, had described to me. He got the divorce, for she ran away with another man, taking her baby and leaving Susie behind. She had gone to more black dresses, more smell of manure, more drudgery. But the face at the table was different, and maybe the new husband thought, once in a while, to bring her home a few yards of gay percale.

  The letters that Jeff had said meant so much to him that summer had come from his mail-order fiancée, to whom he had become engaged through the matrimonial paper. She had considerable money, and an old mother. It seems incredible that she sent her money on to Jeff, sight unseen, but it is even more incredible that he invested it in a tidy little farm. The foolish girl and her old mother came out to Idaho to live with a perfectly strange man. She and Jeff were married, and they had a baby, but the poor young woman was afflicted even as Tony. She had no personality. Jeff was very intelligent, capable of appreciating, and also of interesting, a superior woman. Not having been grounded in the kind of honor that considers the unattractive as worthy of sacrifice, he left his wife. But he did have his own kind of real manhood. He did not steal her money from her, or take anything that belonged to her except her affections, and affections that need not be won are rarely appreciated.

  It seems opportune to tell of Jeff’s father, who had been a widower several times, and who was in one of those periods when Jeff brought him the precious matrimonial paper. Through this strangely sordid, strangely romantic source, Jeff’s father secured himself another wife, with money, from Alabama. What wonders me, as the Idaho farmers say, is whether a hometown man could have won this moneyed widow so easily, or whether the thought of the romantic West may not have added to the lure of an unknown correspondent.

  The Alabama woman was a homely, motherly-looking being, willing to do all the drudgery while Jeff’s father talked socialism, anarchism, and all the other isms so fascinating to men who love to settle the universe while their wives chop the sagebrush. Why this match ended in divorce, Tony did not say. I suspect, from what I know of Jeff’s father, that he had such easy success in getting this wife that he could not resist trying out a new one. And why not? It was little or no expense to him.

  The new wife, also with some money, survived him. I often wonder what such men as Jeff’s father do when they step out of the flesh and find they are not dead, after all. It would be such a surprise to Jeff’s father, who always referred to God as “Old Uncle Billy.”

  It is eight-thirty, so we part with Tony and go at once into the picture-house, passing shirt-sleeves as he watches the crowd arriving, counting them to see whether to open at eight-thirty next time or eight, as formerly. The interior has the familiar odor of unwashed bodies; the pianist is ready with her two tunes and forgets only twice during the evening—once when sh
e played “I Love You Truly,” intended for all the sad parts, while the foolish boy sat down on the lemon cream pie; and once when she played the other tune, “Red Hot Henry Brown,” when the old mother was dying on her son, as we sagebrush folks express a passing away. There is a drum which rolls ominously, sometimes loudly, sometimes softly, but always rollingly.

  The show is over. I step into a foot of irrigation water which flows between the sidewalk and the dusty road. My low shoes are full of water, but when I reach the car, I pour it out and forget it. I have no thought of dying because of wet feet, and I never take cold, being careful to eat only germs like the ones already roosting despondently on my lips or lying in wait for the kind of physical weakness that I do not have.

  We sail the ten miles home through air that one would like to carry about forever, to sniff at every once in a while as an intoxicant. I have seen sunsets I shall never forget: one in Michigan, as I stood with my back to the University Law Building; one in Kansas, facing a limitless green alfalfa-field; one in California, looking over the bay from San Francisco; one...no, myriads, here in Idaho, the land of the most glorious sunsets of all, with plenty of sky room to stage them and no intervening obstructions to shut off the view. But nowhere have I felt more strongly the beauty and mystery of the night than in Idaho.

  I feel it, something calming and soothing, as we ride those ten miles. My nose tells me what fields we are passing, for the road is perfumed all the way. It is good to be drawing near home. Rhoda and Joe are both fast asleep, and my own eyelids drop drowsily now and again. Over the Jerome Canal bridge Lizzie hits the uneven planking. The Greenwood School is dark before us. There is no light in the Teacherage, the residence that was made out of the little rough-board school-house in which I taught. It had been hauled the mile from its former position and painted gray, and no one would have dreamed that thus the homely old school-house had entered Heaven and become an angel.