He pitchforked a mangerful of hay to the horses and left them contently chawnking as he slipped stealthily around the back of the house and carefully surveyed the kitchen through the extreme side of the open window. There was no screen. It had been one of those hot days in spring which nature means as a warning of summer’s coming. The family were all eating, his father’s great back toward the window.
Dragging the gun lightly from under the step, Reffie placed it on the window-ledge, took careful aim, and fired. Brains all over; family screaming and scrambling; green onion gripped in the old devil’s hand.
Reffie jumped on the bay mare and rode to town, where he gave himself up. The trial was very brief. He was acquitted.
AND WHAT was the Baron doing to prevent this constant smudging of his little wife’s snow-white mind—a mind which had not only been ignorant of the existence of passion, but which had to awaken, without warning, to the frightfulness of lust? Often he came between her and what might have been.
It comes back to me as I write, that morning Ben Temple dropped in on his way to town and ended by spending an hour with us. Ben came to see Charley, of course, but he liked to talk to me. Some remark of mine was the cause of a chuckle on his part, and then, as I ironed a shirt, he attempted to tell a story.
“That reminds me, Mrs. Greenwood, of the traveling salesman who went to the country hotel.”
The Baron had been tapping away on a pair of the children’s shoes. He had a tall iron last and a box of shoemaker’s tools, and he kept many a little shoe together for weeks longer than would have been possible otherwise. At Ben Temple’s words, he stopped tapping and stared across at him fixedly.
“Don’t tell her that story, Ben,” he said quietly.
Ben evidently thought Charley did not mean his warning, for he gave another little chuckle and continued, “The hotel clerk gave the salesman a room right up over the hotel office, and...”
“Don’t tell her that story,” the Baron repeated.
Ben smiled broadly and went on, “...and the salesman says to the hotel clerk, he says, says ‘e...”
“I said, ‘Don’t tell her that story!’” Charley had stopped working and was staring at Ben, who chuckled, but looked a little undecided.
“He says, says he, ‘If I should wake in the night, and want anything, I’ll just drop my shoe good and hard...”
Ironing away there, I was beginning to feel panicky. I liked Ben Temple, but if he told me any dirty sex story...
The Baron answered for me. “If you tell her that story, Ben, she’ll hate you forever!”
Ben began, in spite of this, “So the traveling salesman had a woman in his room that night...” Ben looked at me, and then at Charley, and then he concluded lamely, “It ain’t such an awful bad story, Charley...anyhow, I’ve forgotten it.” And thus he sponged the slate clean.
I could go on and tell more stories of lust and passion gone wrong. I could tell how Polly Jetter threatened her father-in-law with a butcher knife when he laid lustful hands upon her, his mind poisoned against the girl by her step-mother-in-law, who thought that because Polly was pretty she must be bad—the step-mother-in-law looked a good bit like an ambitious catfish. I could tell...but I will stop here, ending my Decameron of the Desert. The rest of this chapter belongs in my heart, for the two stories that follow affect me deeply. Especially Bessie’s. I will tell hers last.
Basil Werkman was by far the most shining gem among our young men. He aspired, and he could learn, qualities which set him apart. He and his mother, with the help of two young sisters, farmed their acres, after the head of the family had been electrocuted while helping to take a hay-derrick under the telephone and electric-light wires on the outskirts of town. Out where we were, there was no such danger, as we had neither telephones nor electric lights. Almost every year farmers near town were electrocuted in this manner.
Mrs. Werkman did any kind of work she could find in Hazelton—anything to bring in extra money, and the little family pinched and schemed to send Basil away that he might become a doctor. It was impossible to send him East. His college was near enough that he could come home at Christmas. And it was then the terrible thing happened. Folks pointed out that it did not happen to Beulah West until after Basil had gone away and studied medicine. “Him studyin’ t’ be a doctor, ‘n everthin’,” they muttered darkly to one another.
Beulah and Basil had been chums in the Hazelton High School. Basil had no money to spend on her, but her folks were very poor, and Beulah knew how to enjoy just being with such a lad as Basil. After they both graduated, the following summer Beulah would ride to town with Basil, perched on the wagon-seat beside him, he so blond and big and strong, and she so little and dark.
After it happened, Basil said he remembered how restless she was that summer, moving uneasily about and casting looks of apprehension around her, for which he could not account. He rallied her on her nervousness, but she just laughed—and ended the laugh in a peculiar frozen stare.
Basil had thought nothing more of the matter. Letters between them were not frequent. She may have been in love with him, but he was not in love with her, and, besides, he was a real student, devoting every moment possible to his work. He was baching in one poor room.
At Christmas he found his little chum very ill. Her mother explained that she had been having spells. On Christmas Day she became so violent that she was taken to the Twin Falls hospital. The doctors thought an operation would set her body right and result in healing her mind. I do not know whether cutting her open did her any good, but it did establish the innocence of Basil. A small portion of our sagebrush population believed this, but the rest still hinted, and more than hinted, at beastly things.
Christmas Day Basil was with Beulah—in fact, he had scarcely left the hospital after they took her there. “Hold my hand, Basil,” she had said. “If I hurt you, please forgive me. I know what I am doing, but I can’t help it. I feel something take hold of me, and then...”
So he sat holding her hand, and she seemed more peaceful because of it, when suddenly she screamed, sat upright, and sank her sharp white teeth into Basil’s wrist. The blood ran, and the sound she made was horrible, but he sat there, patiently, until the paroxysm passed. That night Beulah died.
Basil did not know what was being said about him until he came back. And then he met that coldness and suspicion which was like a blow upon his sensitive heart. Folks stared at him curiously, but whenever he turned to meet their eyes, glances slid away from him like snakes.
Only a few believed him innocent of attempting an abortion. Those few said Beulah must have been bitten by a mad coyote, since those demented animals sometimes bit our cows and dogs and made them so dangerous we had to shoot them. The others...the others still believed because it was what they could understand, and because Basil should not have aspired beyond the plow. And they were among the folks he had always known. His heart bled. And I know, because I know what kind of a lad he was, that it left an everlasting mark on Basil Werkman.
What happened to Bessie came to me as such a shock that I went crying up the hill toward home, raining tears down on the Segregation News, in which I had read it, and lifting my swimming eyes to the cool, blue, cloud-decked skies as I sobbed, “O Father! Forgive Bessie! Forgive Bessie!”
Of all the young people...no, of all the people of every sort that I met in the sagebrush, I loved Bessie best. Her mother had run away with some man, leaving five children to the later mercies of a stepmother. This woman was good enough, doing her duty faithfully as a farm woman, but there was no love for those children in that home.
Bessie was by far the brightest student in my little rural school, quiet, lovely, gentle, and as pretty as a sweetbrier rose growing in the cool of cañon walls. Curling dark-brown hair, black lashes and brows, low, white forehead, delicately pink cheeks, and perfect, white teeth. Her smile was shy and sweet. And I loved Bessie.
I loved Bessie so much that I have never mentione
d her a single time hitherto in this book, and I had expected to finish its pages with no mention of her. It hurts so to write of gentle, lovely Bessie. There can never be any compensation for the grief I feel for her.
After that school year with me, her folks moved away, and I never saw Bessie again. I heard, some time later, that she had married, and the man had taken her to live in a cabin up a wooded cañon where the Snake River rushes and boils downward, a stupendous stream of ever-changing violence.
It was not the isolation, I am sure. Bessie had known worse than that. It was something overpoweringly crushing to her affections, to that trusting gentle heart of my dear Bessie—something which involved her little baby, for she had resolved not to leave it behind to suffer as she had suffered.
Bessie wrapped a rope around them, tying her baby to her breast, and jumped into the Snake River. Battered and beaten almost out of recognition, they found the two when they came to hunt for them. That moment when there was no love left in the world for Bessie...when she tied her babe to her breast, looked down on the Snake, and leaped...Oh, Bessie!
VIII—WAR
THE World War was a great pleasure to us sagebrush folks. It injected into the monotony of our existence a romantic spirit which linked us with the outside world of action and emotion. Usually this very outside world showed only antagonism and greed toward us farm people. Nobody who has not actually belonged to the farming class can realize the gulf that lies between agriculture and the rest of society. It is not so much the farm disposition that causes this; it is the attitude of the rest of mankind during the thousands of years through which they have regarded with scorn and contempt the slaves who feed them.
Farm families do not like the position they occupy, and they are forever conscious of the line of demarcation. The farmer and his wife act like dyspeptics—hypersensitive to society at large. Be careful how you joke a farmer about his affairs: he has a real grievance, and he is constantly suspecting that you may be making fun of him. Under this suspicion is the yearning to be accepted like other folks. Hence, any propitious event that allows his hard hands to grasp the soft hands of the city man in some semblance of friendship is touchingly welcomed.
We sagebrush farmers helped elect President Wilson on the platform that he kept us out of war. We commended him even more heartily when he stood aside, because he had to, and allowed a Republican Congress to put us into war, his part being to act as Master of Ceremonies, wearing a silk hat and voicing seductive phrases. I worshiped Woodrow Wilson, placing him with Washington and Lincoln, and many an argument between Charley and some other farmer was applauded by me, silently, because my man was praising and defending my idol. Yet, after all, it appears to me that President Wilson was forced into the position of one who covers the questionable deeds of others with apt Words. When the deeds became openly offensive to him, and nobody cared that they were, his heart broke. To my mind he stands the most pathetic figure ever to hold the Presidential office. He was so sincere and, because of the nature of the opposition to him, so ineffective. We sent our boys to murder others. What for? “To make the world safe for democracy!” What’s that? The kind of government at the mercy, and lack of mercy, of interested politicians. I have very few illusions.
Out in the sagebrush, when our stand-pat Republicans read those words of President Wilson, “To make the world safe for democracy,” they were properly miffed. That was one of the reasons Charley spent so much time defending Wilson. Our disgruntled Republicans were sure that Wilson meant to make the world safe for the Democratic Party. “Why, Charley, they ain’t no other meanin’ for them there words! Ain’t Wilson a Democrat? And don’t that there paper as good as say that he wants our boys to go over and fight for the Democrats? If democracy ain’t a place where Democrats rule, then what is it?” And Charley might explain and explain, even going so far as to read the definition out of my big dictionary. The more he said, the stubborner the sagebrush Republicans held. “Ain’t that jest what we was sayin’, Eph and me? It’s fer the Democrats! Ain’t he a Democrat President? ‘Course he wants a democracy! Fer Democrats!”
When Wilson finally wrote the proclamation of war, at the dictation of Congress, everybody fell in line. No one would have dared to express an adverse opinion. A call was sent out over the sagebrush wilds for everybody to meet at the school-house. We had a session so moving that had any unfortunate German passed, however innocent, we would have rushed out in a body to his wagon and torn him limb from limb. Mobs are hideous things. The unreasoning beast in all of us is unchained when we act in mobs. Crowds have always seemed repulsive to me. They represent humanity at its worst, a great, flabby monstrosity, ready to devour whatever prey is drawn to its attention by whatever person takes the trouble to lift a public voice.
It was roses, roses all the way...
But Browning’s hero found out just how much those roses meant—and so did poor, tottering Woodrow Wilson.
We were a mob of patriots out there in the brush, just as the entire nation went mad with patriotism. Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled patriots...that’s what we were, pickled patriots. Somewhat superficial Alexander Pope had his moments of wisdom: “A patriot is a fool in every age,” he wrote in the “Epilogue to the Satires.” Charley completely forgot a part of his racial origin and called all those of the blood of his good old Grossmutter that hideous name, “Huns”...and I was more guilty than he, for I egged him on. Left to himself, he might have retained some sanity, for his sister Margaret, whose hair had been that lovely German blond, was a rabid anti-English, and Charley thought the world of her.
I am a great hand to make speeches, privately only if it is impossible to make them publicly, for I dearly love to have a crowd at my mercy and allow no quarter. Rather a large crowd had gathered at the school-house, mostly men. You could generally count on Old Lady Babcock and Mrs. Greenwood being on hand when there was business large enough to draw the men to the school-house. It was to this group of sagebrush people that patriotic Mrs. Greenwood made a speech so thrilling and inspiring that not a soul remembers it to this day, not even the lady herself. She was filled with such passion that what wonders me, as we say in the brush, is why she didn’t mount Old Buttons and start immediately for Washington, proselyting all the way. But even Joan of Arc could not have gone very far with a baby astride each hip. The voices of the home infants have probably drowned out the voices of many a nationalistic band of angels.
It was while Jack Overdonk was still with us. He was very bad on the cornet, which he liked to play, and very good on the guitar, which he might be persuaded to play, while he sang,
O Susannah, now don’t you cry for me,
For I’m goin’ to Louisana...
I planned the patriotic program, and recognizing that Susannah was entirely out of place at this meeting, I had Jack sing what he could remember from the Spanish-American War times, while Mrs. Curry played the organ for him.
Just break the news to mother,
sang Jack so pathetically that we all wanted to snivel,
And say how dear I love her;
Just tell her not to wait for me,
For I’m not coming home.
Just say there is no other
Can take the place of mother;
Then kiss her dear sweet lips for me,
And break the news to her.
Jack was standing beside the organ, which we had placed between the two rooms opening into each other, Primary and Upper Grades. He was not a large man, as was the Baron, but as he stood there, with no other man in competitive height, he looked very handsome. A good-looking man need not have so great a voice to move women, and the men present were all imagining themselves dying on the field of battle, so Jack’s song proved heartbreaking.
By the time he had finished the last word of the last chorus and Mrs. Curry had concluded with a little more chording, for without the music, um...tum, tum, um...tum, tum, was all the accompaniment we could have to our songs that day, we were
all wallowing in sentimentality. Most of our mothers were already in a better world and therefore, I hope, past grieving about our little troubles in this unreal existence. And we need not be weeping about not going home, because in the course of an hour we should be doing that very thing, with cows to milk and chickens to feed and supper to get and children telling good on each other what Johnny did while you was gone, Ma, and Bessie took the...and Mamie went and...
Yet we were melted almost to tears. I dared not look at the stubbled face of my neighbor across the aisle, Eb Hall, for fear of blubbering, so I kept my gaze fastened on the back of Ben Temple’s sheepskin coat, of course sneaking a glance now and then at Jack, with the undercover, unpatriotic thought of how handsome he looked, as dark men can look. Once when my patriotism got almost too much for me, I was saved by happening to glance at that old hypocritical water-stealer, Baldy Parsons. It is an invigorating thing to have so lively a disapproval of some one that it can counteract in part such mushy melodrama as we are likely to build out of a suppositional situation.
Ben Temple and Old Man Babcock, with Eph Parish between, sang three solos together, there being no parting there—into bass, tenor, and baritone. They were not three different songs, but that surprising Spanish-American War ballad in which the forces of nature so kindly co-operate, the sun dropping at the end of each verse. You get a touching...sniff! sniff! where’s my handkerchief?...picture of an old mother, “feeble and old and gray”...what in the world was she doing having a son that age?...more like his Grandma, I’ll say...and then we see his sweetheart...and then...well, I don’t think old Towser was mentioned...nor Aunt Maria, her with the arched-up eyebrows and the arched-down mouth...nor the iron deer on the lawn...but anyway, after each personal mention, the old sun drops like a plummet. It is presumed that while the next verse is being sung, Old Man Sun is climbing back up into position to make true the affecting words:
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