In the farm-house on the hill, whose toothpick-pillared porch the moonlight reveals, we can see the orange glow of a light. I know what will happen when we go stumbling into the house, half-drunk with sleep. Walter will spring up, a fanatic light in his eyes, the head-phones still over his ears, connecting him with his homemade, built-by-sections radio, one of the first boy-built radios in the West.
“Well, folks!” he will say, triumphantly, “I just got Memphis, Tennessee!”
VII—SEX
I AM writing this chapter months after the rest of the book was finished. I am including it because I believe that without it a true picture cannot be given of us sagebrush folks. Yet it is hard for me to tell what I shall tell because some of the grossest things I must relate were perpetrated by people I liked. Out of a sort of loyalty to my affections, in some cases I shall give them other names, making them live in this book a Dr. Jekyll-Mr. Hyde existence. Now I think of it, that is what most of us live, and certainly, from my point of view, it was true of them.
The men did the gossiping, for the world’s greatest gossip is the farmer. He feeds his brain on other folks’ affairs. I was the involuntary eavesdropper.
But if it was the men who did the gossiping, it was a certain group of farm women who perpetrated a joke so vulgar, so indecent, that I cannot tell it here, although I recognize the weakness of my shrinking, for the nature of the joke was so revealing as to be important. Neither can I bring myself to relate the obscene dream of a woman in another group, although it set the whole district rocking with great belly-laughs. I regard this as my infirmity, for, being a writer, I should paint the picture as it is.
I blame this reticence on the horrifying ignorance in which I, the daughter of a physician, was reared. My knowledge of birth was this: a little girl drew me into a corner of the school grounds and told me that Ruby Dyke’s mama had a baby last week, and “she told Ruby all about how babies are born, and Ruby told me, and if you will promise never to tell, I will tell you. It’s when the baby is ready to be born, the mama’s belly-button spreads wide open, and the doctor lifts the baby out.”
I never talked with any one on that subject, and all mention of such things was carefully avoided in my home. The truth broke upon me with a sickening shock. After my father gave up the practice of medicine, his big home office became our library, books covering every wall, from floor to ceiling, excepting only window-room. Among these were hundreds of my father’s medical volumes, segregated into a forbidden group. I was an obedient daughter, but Bluebeard’s surviving widow had nothing on me when the mood strikes me. I took from his medical library a calf-bound book, opened it at random, and nearly perished. The illustration that leaped out at my eyes was my punishment. I had learned, at eighteen years of age, how babies came.
It seems incredible, but I could relate worse ignorance on my part with regard to what is now called Life. That early hedging-in probably accounts for some wildness in my blood which impels me to come out with things that are supposed only to be whispered. At seventeen, an innocent bystander, I listened to some married women warning some engaged girls of the horrors of wedlock, and I threw a bombshell into their midst by declaring stoutly, “I think I should like marriage!” and I knew no more of marriage than I knew of birth. But my instinct was true. For it is the human mind and body that poison marriage. The laws of nature are made for contentment of the individual and service to the race. They are good. Marriage is another place
Where every prospect pleases
And only man is vile.
Cultured New England spinsters were my early school-teachers, any one of whom would have fainted at the word sex. Such association made possible my understanding of the stiff Middle Western farm women, and its effects forever rendered a dirty sex joke to my mind reason for justifiable homicide.
I parted company with both the bawdy-minded and the nasty-nice in the training of my children, who, I resolved, should not be reared in the state of ignorance which passed for innocence in my youth. From birth I told them all there was to be told, year after year, making them understand that God had made no mistake and that all was right with the natural laws that govern man except when man loses control of himself.
It was not strange, therefore, that whenever any creature on the farm gave birth, the children ran to me to be present at the important event. And I think that word event is, in this case, used most accurately, for its Latin components are e, meaning “out,” and venire, “to come.”
Jersey II was having her calf on the hillside when my children ran for me, and there we stood, the five of us, watching the calf drop, wabble to its feet, look about with bright eyes, as though it had only slept overnight in its mother’s womb. The mother licked it affectionately and then began to eat the afterbirth.
When the children asked me what she was doing, I explained all about the afterbirth, but I could only guess that perhaps some medical value lay in the cow’s consumption of this provision of nature’s for the unborn calf. I had only learned that cows do eat their afterbirth through the joke that all cow-punchers tell of the farm woman who gave birth to a baby when the hired hand was her only attendant. He had been a cowboy, and after the baby was laid in bed with the mother, he swung into his saddle and rode hell-bent-for-breakfast to the doctor’s in town.
“I’m afraid she’s gonna die, Doc,” said the cow-puncher. “I been a-tryin’ an’ a-tryin’, but I jist kaint git ‘er t’ eat the afterbirth!”
I have told you these things about myself to let you know that I was neither loose nor a prude. I believe, myself, that it was worth losing Eden to gain passion. I am no sentimentalist about love. I do not need to have passion decked like a Christmas tree, but neither will I tolerate seeing it festooned with malodorous garbage. Physical love is not indecent unless it is the action of indecent beings. You can just as well change “Home Sweet Home” and hate yourself by singing,
‘Mid cesspools and sewers
Though I may roam,
Be it ever so stinging,
There’s no privy like home.
You can pollute or purify everything you look upon. You can make desirable or disgusting every natural function of the human body. What an obscene, pornographic curl of flesh is the human ear! The nose is nothing better than a phallic symbol!...And so we may slip and slink, strewing ordure over the clean path of nature.
Every child should be taught the nature of passion, and how it will inevitably become that sad thing, lust, unless he learns the power of sublimation, out of which grow the mightiest works of men. That was what was the matter with our district—there was often enforced sublimation in the slavery we endured, but sometimes that sublimation, because enforced, was maddening, so that women ran away with men, and men from women, leaving lawful mates behind, and even little children.
HAD THE STATE COURSE OF STUDY included instruction in the power of passion for good and the technique of sublimation, some of my boys in the little old rough-plank school-house might not have been involved in that Spanish-fly affair. I had heard the farmers refer to Mame Griffith as “a chippy,” and after it happened, I also heard them add that because she was that thing, a half-dozen farm youths had decided to see what would happen if they spiked her bootleg drink with Spanish fly. And what happened was that she went stark, raving mad, and they had to lock her in a room in the bleak Hazelton Hotel, with a doctor in attendance, for they thought she would kill herself. The dose had been too strong. She nearly tore down the hotel.
Some of those same boys were involved in the trial at Rupert, when we were still a part of Minidoka County. I had heard that the girls of the district were known according to their degrees of “easiness.” The Emmet girl, Katie, was said to be easiest of all. But her father did not know this, and he was determined to fix the responsibility for Katie’s kid that was coming. Who the father was Katie did not know. She accused a number of the farm boys, and since she was under age, it looked pretty serious for them. The verdict was that
any one of them might have been the father. All should have been forced to help support the child, but nothing was done.
Tillie Beerbach was full of life and laughter one day, and the next day she was dead. I know now that the laughter was to cover her anxiety, and I know, too, that the poor girl died in horrible agony. Old Man Harris was going down the road in his wagon, when he saw Tilly burst, screaming, from her married sister’s shack. Scream after scream pierced the air, and Tilly ran frantically toward the big Mormon gate, made of barbed wire, with a loop over a pole to fasten it shut.
Old Man Harris stopped his team and climbed down over the wagon-wheel. He picked Tillie up from the irrigation mud and carried her into the shack. Hanging from a nail he saw a fountain syringe, from the tube of which a dark dribbling of moisture lay on the rough board floor. Near it stood a slop-jar. Old Man Harris picked up a big bottle bearing the label “Carbolic Acid.” It was empty. He carefully replaced it beside the slop-jar. Then he went out to find some one who could go for a doctor, though he felt reasonably sure Tilly was dead. He felt he should not meddle with anything, so Tilly lay alone there in the shack, mud on her face and in her hair, until the doctor arrived.
The druggist remembered selling the big bottle of carbolic acid to Hen Beckstead the day before. Tillie’s sister and her family had gone to Burley for the day, and Tilly had refused to accompany them. Hen had ridden to the Mormon gate the night before, and Tilly had gone out in the dark for a few minutes to see him. She had come back with something wrapped in a corner of her big apron.
I heard the farmers saying she had it coming to her, she was so hot after Hen. Nobody blamed him for Tilly’s death. You see, he had not meant to kill her. He had only meant to murder the unborn child. It would have seen the light in a few months.
There was a beautiful, sweet child I saw so often at our school-house doings. I always wondered how her father and mother could have begotten any one so dear as Ellen Evans. Her sweet disposition shone through her pretty blue eyes. The family was very poor, winter and summer the seven of them living in a two-room tent. So when Ellen graduated from the Eighth Grade, she went to work for a farm family a long way from her folks. The farmer’s wife was going to have a baby, and Ellen was to be nurse for the mother, caretaker for three little ones, and housekeeper and cook for the husband.
The new baby was three days old when the husband slipped into Ellen’s narrow little room and assaulted the girl. The poor child felt the disgrace of the dastardly affair so keenly that she could only weep every minute she was alone, and she was afraid to tell any one because of shame. The next night she barricaded her door with a wash-stand and two heavy lava rocks, and, after stealthily trying it, the husband decided he might attract the attention of his wife if he persisted and actually broke in.
It was a pity that Nature could not have had mercy on Ellen. The day came when she had to confess to her mother what had happened. Her father had the farmer arrested, and the law compelled the assaulter to support the child and pay Ellen’s hospital bill.
Ellen would not give up her baby, although there were people who would have adopted it. She stayed on at the hospital, studying to be a nurse, and finally she married well, a man who knew her history and took her little one into that happy home. I will say this for our sagebrush folks: I never heard the slightest shadow cast upon the name of Ellen Evans. There was not one of us who would not have fought for her.
Luly Demorest’s was a different case. She was one of the most beautiful girls I ever saw, with abundant dark hair and bewitching, mysterious dark-blue eyes. Her figure was slim, almost childish. In the city it would have been said that she was seduced. But the hired hand knew better.
He told the story himself, his amazement carrying over into the narrative. It was a laughing matter among the farmers, that story he told.
Rangey and fairly good-looking, he was not crazy about girls. Luly watched him, saying nothing. She slept in the house, and the hired hand slept in the granary. One night he awoke to find Luly astride his loins.
I often think of Blondy. Her hair was like pulled molasses candy, her figure full and shapely. As for her mind, she would have made a first-class stenographer or a very good teacher. What happened to her was not along these lines.
A stone’s throw from her father’s tar-paper shack, over the barbed-wire fence on another farm, was the tar-paper shack of two brothers, Harry and Lew Whitehead. Both had been barbers in Twin Falls, but, like the rest of us, they were farming in the sagebrush with the idea of plowing up a fortune. They made the effort only one year, selling out to a city family from Des Moines, the daughter of which distinguished herself in a pie-eating contest, as you have heard.
It was natural in that lonely wilderness that Blondy should fall in love with one of those young fellows, and it happened to be Harry. There was no one for her to be with after the Whiteheads left, her solitary adventure being an invitation to the deserted shack, indignantly refused by virtuous Blondy. Nobody knew of this propositioning from her. For some curious reason it was the young man who told. He did so with the declaration that he was sure he could get her next time.
There was no next time. Blondy went to Twin Falls to do housework. On the street she met Harry. He had been married for some time. Nobody knew how many times they met after that. It was the nurse in a certain doctor’s office who told a friend of mine the rest of this incident.
“The first I saw of this girl was when she staggered into the Doctor’s office, white as paper. She had tried to induce an abortion. We took care of her.
“The very next year, here she came again. She had done the same thing. I said to her, ‘Well, who’s the man this time?’
“She said to me, ‘Same man.’
“And would you believe it?...Here she came in the same fix the next year. I said, ‘Same man?’
“She said, ‘Same man.’
“‘My God, girl!’ I said, ‘what do you let him do it for?’
“She said, Ί can’t help it.’”
I heard that Blondy had married a farmer, and then I heard that she was divorced from him. Shortly after that I saw her. Blondy’s bright mind had been subdued to her body. She was pretty no longer—a large, shapeless woman. I had liked Blondy. I had liked her very much. It makes me wonder whether Schopenhauer is right, that we can do what we wish, but we can only wish what we must. And I think of those words of Einstein’s and apply them, as excuse, to Blondy: “Our future is predetermined...without doubt my own career was predetermined beforehand by a multitude of factors over which I had no controlling power whatever, determined first of all by those mysterious glands within which nature, as in a laboratory, prepares the elixir of life; namely, the hormones of internal secretion.”
The whole countryside was shocked by the news that Old Man Branch had been murdered by his fifteen-year-old son Reffie—short for Ralph. Shot in the head, he was, with his own gun. His brains were shot out, and he was still gripping the green onion he was eating when they moved his body away from the table. Folks said they were not surprised. That Reffie Branch was too quiet to come to any good. He always acted like he was trying to keep away from folks.
I know now that the boy was living in hell, and when you are living in hell, you cannot be very sociable with other people. Old Man Branch was a brutal slave-driver; no one could doubt that who once saw that subdued family when he was near. We had very little chance to see them, for he kept them there on his isolated farm, working day and part of the night. They never came to our good times.
There was a girl older than Reffie, a pretty, rounded girl with lovely brown hair and dark eyes. She was very shy and modest. Besides this girl and Reffie, there were seven younger children.
One day Reffie was about to plow, when he noticed that one of the cows was missing from the piece of pastureland. He crossed the field, looking for it, and instead found his mother, groaning and sobbing behind a strawstack. She had come there feeling certain of secrecy.
Reffie demanded the reason of her tears, and at last she told him. The story came out at the trial, just as she had related it to him. Betty, the eldest girl, was in the habit of collecting the eggs from the barn in the evening after supper. One night she found her father there. He seized her, caressed her with ferocity, and finally, there on the hay, her own father forced the poor child of barely seventeen years. He threatened to kill her if she told any one, and he commanded her to return every evening. He also formed the habit of bringing her little cheap presents from town—beads, rayon hose, and such. The poor mother had been glad at this manifestation of affection.
Reffie was crying, too, when the story was done. And he was swearing—“Damn him!...damn him!...God and Jesus Christ damn him!” Then he said to his mother, “Don’t cry no more, Ma. It don’t make no mind. I should ought to of killed him long ago. He’ll get his come-uppances.”
His mother hardly heard him. What could a fifteen-year-old boy do to right this horrible affair? She dragged herself up from the straw some time afterward. It was time enough for Reffie to go to the house, get his father’s shot-gun, secrete it under the door-step, and begin his plowing. The lost cow had strayed back to the pasture while he was with his Ma.
That night he made no move to come in from the field until his father shouted in exasperation from the kitchen door. Then he took his time, unharnessing deliberately, knotting up the straps, and leading the horses to the canal with the ends dangling. There is nothing more peaceful than the sound of horses drawing up great soughing mouthfuls of water in the quiet of a desert evening. Reffie was not thinking of that. He was remembering now how his sister Betty’s body had changed...he knew now...she was going to have a baby...her own father...
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