Annie Pike Greenwood

by We Sagebrush Folks

  Just as the sun went down!

  It seems to me the composer might have worked the moon in to drop half the time, or a few falling stars. Evidently the heavens had no N.R.A. code in that song. It strikes me now like that Baron Münchausen tale of the severe winter when sounds, as well as liquids, were frozen in the air. Ours was an event during the Spanish-American War just thawing out. Perhaps even the words REMEMBER THE MAINE! might next have startled our ears.

  We were pickled Americans—One Hundred Per Cent Americans, as intolerant and unloving as bigoted churchers. It meant we hounded our good neighbor Burkhausen so that the banks, by means of Federal agents, bled the poor old man white, forcing him to buy Liberty Bonds; and he who had lived so peaceably and harmoniously among us scarcely dared to go to bed at night for fear a mob of us sagebrush One Hundred Per Cent Americans would arrive to tar and feather him and his good old wife—his good old wife who could not imagine what had happened so suddenly in this land of the free.

  It meant that there was a certain amount of unwritten discord between Charley and his sister, the one who had inherited the beautiful yellow hair from some Teutonic ancestor and who was as rabidly intolerant of the English as the Baron was of the Germans. His old German teacher in the Columbus High School, who had made a pet of Charley and had brought him home some edelweiss when she returned from one of her European vacations, she must have turned in her grave—or, since only her body was there, what a flutter there must have been in Heaven as she recounted his disloyalty to some of his Junker ancestors—perhaps the original Baron himself. Worst of all, what would that long-dead, wonderful old Grossmutter think of her favorite, who would have willingly seen her birthplace, lovely Bingen-am-Rhein, swallowed up in flames? As for Charley’s wife, the all-English girl, one generation removed, she applauded what she called his remarkable fair-mindedness, not because of her English blood, but because she was an One Hundred Per Cent American—a pickled patriot.

  One of our sagebrush heroes of the World War was Mike Gogenslide, he who supplied the school-house scarecrow with the worst hat in the district. From military pillar to military post he was shifted, until he was utterly bewildered. In the first place, Mike was not at all certain what the war was about; in the second place, he had never wanted to fight anybody or anything in his life; in the last place, he went through the whole affair in a kind of dumb unconsciousness, putting a foot forward or behind as ordered, neither resenting nor accepting—a rural patriot, who, no doubt, listens to the Armistice Day orations over his radio—anybody can have a radio—with a kind of mild, impersonal wonder. He never left American shores, and he came back to his tenant farming neither better nor worse for the experience. He might have dreamed it. I suspect we have a lot of military heroes like that. Not that I would take the glory out of war. Oh, no! I am all for waving the flag and hip-hip-hooraying while some mother’s son has his head shot off with a shell. It looks so glorious to see the blood spurt up out of his neck, and it proves we all love our country so.

  We had other heroes—some who volunteered and were not just drafted, as was Mike Gogenslide. Of course, that makes it even more glorious for a fool boy to go out and get his abdomen ripped open with a bayonet while his mother goes crazy at home. Never mind; they will pin some medal on her—a ribbon and some words. That pays her for bringing him into the world and training him and loving him? How can you doubt it? Well, this is not wartime, so I shall not inform on you.

  They came, those young volunteers, the young men for whom I sold my honor for a mess of commas. Thundering horseback up the hill in a cloud of dust, dressed in their khaki uniforms, so proudly they came to say good-by to Teacher, because I...I had explained in school what a noble thing it is to die for one’s country. Charley was Exhibit A of my intolerance; Old Man Burkhausen was Exhibit B of my pickled Americanism; these fine young fellows were Exhibit C of my unintelligent barbarism. It was really I who sent them into that war.

  I was so glad that I had sprinkled their examination papers with illegal commas. I had done that much for my country—though some years in advance, I must admit. Well, anyway, here were my hero boys, going out to murder and be murdered in this glorious way. I felt very sentimental as I stood on the toothpick-pillared porch and watched them pound away on their horses, dust boiling out of the earth to race along with them. I wanted to shed tears. In my mind they were already gloriously mutilated and dead. They would never come back. And that gave me a thrill, too. The never-nevers in our lives are always so thrilling. We love to feel that utter hopelessness which is so seldom justified by facts. They all did come back, all five of them, never having left American shores, even as Mike Gogenslide, who was dragged into the war and, because he was not willing to murder any one, is somehow not so wonderful.

  We all wanted to go Over There. Had there been nothing to prevent, the whole of America would have poured onto the field of battle, suffocating the enemy lands in a thick lava-flow of foolish humanity. My compatriots and I would have swarmed first over the battlefields of the Allies, spilled over in unmanageable masses into the German trenches, pushed on by the mad ingress entirely over the enemy country, so that the Germans would have been forced to brush United Staters from the mouth of Big Bertha before they could fire her—swarms, swarms everywhere. We would have gone there crazily, to scrap and be scrapped. We felt a kind of wild insanity, very much like being in love, and we were all eager for it, to break the dull monotony of living, even as we forever snatch with ravenous fingers at the illusion-garments of the great biological frenzy.

  Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

  But to be young was very heaven!

  It does not seem possible that we could ever go to war again, knowing, as we do, how unintelligent, how ridiculous, how mad, how criminal, how frightful is all war. But let the band play, with drums and fifes and bugles; let somebody think up some catchy slogan; let the papers headline the thing right; and watch us! Again like sheep we shall all go astray. I know how straight I think and feel now, but I should be afraid to trust even myself in such an atmosphere. I wonder how many more thousands of years will have to pass before there are Jesus Christians actually practising what He taught? I wonder how many more thousands of years will have to pass before ordinarily rational human beings will see the unintelligence and weak-mindedness and lack of ingenuity there is in wholesale murder in the name of something we call “our country”? Madness! Madness, rather than kindly, tolerant, considerate love!

  Over on Stubbs’ corner, across the way from my childhood home, the annual circus—Ringling Brothers, Sells-Floto—always erected billboards on which the pink-skirted equestrienne, my especial envy, leaped through a flaming hoop, and the blood-sweating behemoth stunned you with the size of his wide-open pink jaws, dotted on the sides with blunt teeth, which I fancied had been sawed off in an effort to make the plasma-perspiring monster of less danger to children.

  I think I might have gone into what used to be called “slow decline” if I had missed one of those circuses, though I do hold it against the memory of my father that he did not show me every side-show. The pictures on the canvasses outside the little tents looked more interesting even than the billboards. I never told my father I wanted to see the sideshows, so I cannot blame him entirely. He used to pass them with the remark, “Nothing but a lot of fakers.”

  I felt about the World War as I did about the circus. Only, in this case, I was not simply denied the sideshows. I could not even see the big top. And I have always been a pickled patriot—until now.

  Every time I heard of any one I knew going Over There, I went over with them in imagination. My Cousin Marc went over and drove a whippet, he and his best chum, the chum shooting the gun and Marc driving...and then something so hideous happened that I must not tell it here. I heard that my girlhood friend Joe Walker had gone over, his wife with him, she as nurse, he as physician. Joe used to call me “Pikie,” instead of...well, my other nicknames—I was seldom called by my own n
ame, seeming to remind everybody of something else. So there was Joe—bombs bursting in air, and here was Pikie—cows mooing in air. To me, who loved life with passion, to me it was tragedy not to be in the thick of things.

  I WAS BURSTING with patriotism, that madness of provincial minds. I kidded myself along by trying to think that everything I did was in some way a sacrifice upon my country’s altar. It was with that exalted sentiment that I made pies, baked bread, mended enough overalls to reach twice around the globe, churned, hatched chicks, and made soap. I loved to make soap....I loved to do everything I did, and therefore I had no sense about economizing my strength, nearly killing myself with less outward showing of accomplishment than a less enthusiastic, more selfish woman might have produced.

  We had plenty of clean, white lard for cooking, so I saved other drippings for making into soap. A can of lye, a stick of sagebrush, the wash-boiler, and the fascinating job was ready to begin. I stirred and stirred, mixing grease with lye, lifting the scraggy sagebrush every once in a while to see how the mass dripped. When the mixture finally ran honey drops from the tip of each little twig, the soap was done. It looked delicious enough to eat, but the smell was different. It penetrated everything and killed all the delightful odors of outdoors with which the little house was saturated.

  I think I have said before that my sense of smell is keen. While I was pouring the soap into wooden grocery boxes to mold, the stink—I can’t help it, that’s the word—was ferocious. I had to fix my mind, frantically, on the beauty of the hot, amber mess. When it was almost hard, and the worst of the...yes, the stink had faded into the air and turned into nothingness out on the desert, because where there are no noses there can be no stink—but you can’t make me believe it—when it was almost hard, I had the delightful pleasure of cutting the now ivory, solidified soap into bars of equal size. City folks cannot return to the pleasures of childhood as farm folks can.

  City folks do not create in the imaginative way of children. You have no idea how soothing, yes, even charming, it is to take a butcher knife and cut into bars your own home-made soap when it has reached cheese-like consistency.

  The whole operation, step by step, has its rewards—except smelling the stink; I was never able to extract enjoyment from smelling the stink, and I would rather be haunted by a persistent polecat than forced to smell boiling soap. The boxes have been standing outdoors, and I have the men carry them upstairs and turn the cakes out on the floor of the room where old clothes hang from the bare rafters. All around the walls are little windows, through which I never fail to look at the lovely, untamed valley, and the mountains, every time I go upstairs.

  Now I have the fun of building the bars of soap into ivory towers, in order that circulating air may be about the business of curing them. Not only have I had the pleasure of creating something—a thrill almost entirely lacking in city life, but every time I go upstairs to make the bed in the partly finished room, I can glimpse those ivory towers, and I get such a feeling of wealth from having so much good laundry soap that John D. and J. Pierpont might envy me. What good is it to be so rich you cannot feel it all? There is a limit to the amount of emotion a human being can experience. No one could feel more richness than I felt when I used to see those symmetrical piles of my own home-made soap.

  I suppose the joy of making that soap should have been its own reward, but I did so want to work in my country some way. To be really inspiring every concrete task should have a trimming of abstract principle. I had to make that soap, but I wanted lace on the panties of my necessity. I think most of us who were left Over Here had that same hunger. Which reminds me of the rotogravure of an actress in a magazine my brother Bert sent me when Joe was a little fellow. The child gave a cry of disgusted modesty at the sight of the ruffles of lace high up around the lady’s thighs. “Mama!” he exclaimed, “that lady’s panties are too short!”

  I was in the predicament of trying to array my daily tasks in patriotic panties that were too short. We One Hundred Per Cent Americans were so proud of the lace on our patriotic panties that we cast all other clothing aside and took to snatching the clothes from other people’s backs, to shame them publicly should they be wearing simple B.V.D.’s.

  About this time my dear Aunt Nellie came to see us. She is my mother’s youngest sister, and her voice was even lovelier than that of my charming Grandmother, who sang in oratorio in England and brought her melodeon by οx-team across the North American continent. My mother died when I was a child, but she is vividly living in my mind. How could any one forget so much of loving, laughter, and music as was incorporated in my mother? Those three things constitute a charm which humanity, made aware, never willingly allows to perish, the most seductive charm of all.

  We had no musical instrument in that poverty-stricken farm-house, but we must hear my Aunt Nellie sing. It is a dreamlike, enchanting summer night, with a great moon mellowing the cloudless sky, the valley, and the mountains. Crickets chirp sleepily in the grass, and frogs croak softly along the banks of the canal that flows below the house. On the edge of the toothpick-pillared porch sit the little family, Aunt Nellie standing in front of us, a queen, with that highbred poise of her head, the clear light of the moon shining down on her. Between the Baron and me are seated the four Kinder, pretty Rhoda, her father’s arm around her, Charles next to her, then Walter, then Joe, leaning on his mother’s lap. We sit there entranced, while Aunt Nellie’s lovely voice floats out across the great, broad, quiet valley. She is singing of a river that flows through the district of Württemberg:

  Never! never! can I forget that night in June

  Upon the Danube River!

  And then, to the little family so filled with the hunger for music, she sings,

  Boy of mine!...Boy of mine!...

  And there sat I, moved almost to tears by that sympathetic, golden voice—she had preferred to be the mother of ten children rather than give the world a voice, beautifully trained though it was.

  So the Danube River flowed through the very Germany I was aching to destroy—a beautiful river, which love could never forget. But hate could; hate can do anything vile. Woman! how could you sit there in the moonlight, holding on to your own little boy, eyes damp because of “Boy of Mine,” thinking of those three boys of mine and enthusiastically condemning to murdering, and to being murdered, the boys of mine of other mothers? Mothers, you and I and all other women could put a stop to this thing called War by rebelling against it! Let’s refuse to participate in anything so senseless and horribly destructive, not only of material things, but of those loving ties which make life worthwhile. THOU SHALT NOT KILL! Do we need another Moses to tell us that? There was Jesus. But what good did that do? They were Christians who fought the last war, forcing the heathen to help them.

  I hatched chickens with an eye on Uncle Sam—surely it was patriotic to bring more food into the world. Of course, it would have been necessary for me to hatch those chicks had there been no war—the very same number of chicks; but I must feel that I was doing my bit to the bitter end—things which I think go together, as you can readily see. What amazes me is that I did not stick an American flag in every nest where a hen was setting, or maybe a touching legend, such as “Doing her bit for Uncle Sam,” or perhaps “Setting her sit for Uncle Sam” would have been better.

  Charley had made me a wonderful chicken-run, a square frame of planks partitioned into long, grassy runways, the whole covered with chicken wire. At one end was the trap-door through which the hen and new chicks could be inserted. Thus there were sunshine and liberty for the mother and children.

  Before I went on the farm, I thought vastly amusing those Easter cards with an old hen stretching her neck madly from a slatted coop toward her wandering balls of yellow fluff. Why should not a hen be the object of protection by the Humane Society? The most faithful creature I ever knew was a hen under whom I put her own and another hen’s chicks; she hovered that too-large tribe until she died, her comb faded white f
rom worry, a martyr to motherhood if ever there were one. There is nothing more perversive of a hen’s natural instincts than to make her a prisoner when nature is inspiring her to wander about, in order to teach her little ones how to look out for themselves.

  After I had all eight runs tenanted with families, one chick, more independent than the rest, decided to See America First, before settling down in the old home run. I found him huddled against the plank separating him from his brothers and sisters, and I took the prodigal son and dropped him in beside his mother. No one has ever told the story of the prodigal’s mother, but if she acted as that hen did, his father would have been forced to kill more than a calf to keep him at home. In the poultry case, which was not a parable, the hen pecked that unlucky youngster until I had to iodine him practically all over.

  Hens have such flat, inexpressive eyes—very ineffective, I should say, in registering the emotion of love—that I have always underestimated certain of their mental faculties, among them arithmetic. When the hen and her chicks were settled for the night, I slipped the little outcast under her wings with the rest. I am sure she must have counted her babies before hovering them, for in the morning, as soon as she looked over her brood, with a cry of vengeance she dashed at her adventurous son and began to do him to death. Fortunately, I was at hand and saved him.

  I named him Peewee—the only chick I ever honored with a name, and he haunted the kitchen door, in order to follow me wherever I went as soon as I came through. Out to the garden, out to the sagebrush-pile, out to the granary, hanging the clothes on the line, always there was poor little Peewee trotting after me, anxiously stepping as I stepped. All his brothers and sisters grew beautiful white plumage, but Peewee became naked, losing all his down except for a few white feathers on his wing-tips. He was so naked you could see his heart throb, and all his other organs were visible through his transparent skin. I call that the nakedest naked there could be. Even a nudist colony would have blushed for him. He wore a perpetual blush himself, the sun baking his delicate body a dark red, which in no wise prevented the exposure of his internal mechanism.