Annie Pike Greenwood

by We Sagebrush Folks

  Peewee went about the dooryard next to the kitchen, emitting continually a forlorn peep-peep-peep, all the time that he was separated from me. I thought it was a pity I could not teach him some hobby, so as to take his mind from his one absorbing thought of being with me. Then one day I was absent in Twin Falls, on the invitation of Mrs. Asper, and when I came back and was just settling myself for the evening, having cooked supper, washed dishes, strained the milk, set bread, and a few other things, I became conscious of a sense of strangeness and began to analyze its cause. Ah! No peepings at the kitchen door! “Anybody seen Peewee? You seen Peewee, Walter? Who’s seen Peewee? Folks! Children! Be still a minute! Haven’t any of you seen Peewee?”

  No one has seen Peewee. I think. “Who fed the chickens?” “Charles fed the chickens.” “Where?” “Across the canal.” “Where did he get the grain?” “From the granary.” I run down to the railroad tie that serves as a bridge across the canal. I am so dizzy-headed crossing running water and climbing high places that I scarcely ever cross the canal there. I am determined to do so now, for I must find Peewee. But I am not called upon to risk an accidental bath in the canal for his sake. I find him just where the tie rests on the near side of the stream. The mute little corpse tells its own story. He had attempted to follow the rest of the flock and had been pushed from the tie by the stronger birds, perhaps his own brothers and sisters, who were now almost grown, while he remained a pigmy. Blighted affection had made him bald of feathers, and blighted affection had dwarfed him. Now he lay dead, exhausted by his successful struggle to make his way out of the water. I have seen few more pathetic sights than the body of Peewee, as it lay there on the canal-bank. Am I a sentimentalist? All right! I’ll bear that epithet for Peewee’s sake. He loved me. I would do more than that for those who love me.

  But Peewee had not died for his country, no matter how I tried to find a place for him on the roll of honor. And I had to go on taking care of hundreds of other chickens, who were just chickens, never having been named. It is a crime not to name animals. They understand, and they cannot exercise their individuality under a generic name. I don’t think you would like it yourself, to have no name. I am told that God knows us all by name, and that is a most comforting assurance.

  I can hear Gabriel saying, “Lord, there’s a woman down there keeps bothering me with prayers to You.”

  “Who is she?” says the Lord.

  Gabriel answers, “It’s a woman sitting at a typewriter, wearing a black Miriam Gross dress, with a kinda sassy look about her.”

  “Oh, yes,” does the Lord say? “I’ve seen that woman pecking around in my back yard, I mean on her typewriter. Throw her some grain. She’s always squawking.”

  It’s not that way at all. When Gabriel complains, the Lord says, “That’s my little pet lamb, Annie,” says the Lord. “I had her named from birth. Give her something better than she wants.”

  And that is what happens, dear reader, and all because the good Lord knows my name.

  BESIDES making soap and raising chicks for my country, I remodeled a dress, inspired by patriotism. I had been wearing that dress summer after summer, faithfully attending church in the school-house in it. I needed that thin white dress, for the school-house was not opened through the week, and the hot air was baked into everything, the feeling of it intensified for me by the big blue bottle flies buzzing hymns against the dusty window-panes.

  Perhaps you remember Mrs. Quackenbos, the teacher who read to her pupils my note inquiring which side of a cow to sit on while one milked her. It was at the very end of that school year that Mrs. Quackenbos was responsible for the ruin of my one best summer dress. I had bought that dress from Best and Company at the same time as the pretty wool suit I was wearing when I met Tony and Jeff. It was really a darling frock until Selma got through with it, even though the styles had gone right on without it.

  Selma was a hearty country girl Mrs. Quackenbos had brought with her from Oakley, where the teacher had a farm, run by her son Cliffy. Selma was to be Mrs. Quackenbos’ maid of all work, receiving her remuneration in change of scene and a chance to attend the Greenwood School. She was graduating from the Eighth Grade that year and had no white dress to wear on Closing Night; so Mrs. Quackenbos inevitably thought of me, because on a warm September night she had seen me wearing my one best summer dress to a meeting of Frontier Grange. Folks inevitably think of me when there is anything they want that is most precious to me, and my worst vice is being afraid of acting stingily. Consequently I have spent a good part of my time regretting my unintelligent generosity. Still, Jesus said, “Him that taketh away thy cloak, forbid not to take thy coat also.” That is always the way I end.

  Selma came for the dress, and she looked to me especially fat that day. I told her she could not possibly get into it. Up the hill panted Mrs. Quackenbos, a good deal like the approach of a threshing-machine. She sat down solidly in our living-room, and assured me that I was exactly the figure of Selma. That confused me a good deal, so that I might have done anything. I have a passion for the truth. My friends had told me that I had a pretty figure. If I looked like Selma, I did not have a pretty figure. I had never accepted the statement of my friends without some doubt. My conceit is large, but not for my looks. Mrs. Quackenbos was not my friend, therefore she was more than likely right. With the humblest of spirits I gave her my best dress that Selma might be garbed appropriately when she received her certificate of graduation.

  That night, when I saw how large Selma bulked against the row of window-blinds above the home-cobbled stage I had a feeling of anxiety for my dress, but when I considered that Mrs. Quackenbos had assured me I looked just like Selma, and also when I reflected that Selma was certainly wearing the dress, I sank into the ease of an innocent bystander, beginning to form vague resolutions about dieting. My sinking was part depression. If I looked like...Selma...if I really did look like...

  The next morning the dress was hurriedly delivered, and Mrs. Quackenbos departed for her farm, faithful Selma being loaded into Cliffy’s wagon, along with a great feather bed crowned with a dish-pan, a rocking chair, two straight chairs, and a few other articles. The old school-house in which I had been Teacher had not yet been dragged to the school-house yard to be made into a teacherage. Mrs. Quackenbos and Selma had kept house in one of the school-house rooms where the hammering had gone on during my own closing-day exercises.

  I opened the newspaper wrapping around my best dress. The worst had been thoughtfully folded out of sight, so the shock was not so sudden. But when I shook out the folds, I found that the crocheted tops of the buttons had been worn away by the thumbing required to push them through the buttonholes, and nearly every one of the buttonholes was burst. Selma must have worn my dress burst and pinned in place. I remembered then that she had shown no rear view to the audience. The seams of the waist were so strained apart that she was extremely fortunate there had been no sudden explosion to expose her, half-naked, to the impure glances of the farm men.

  I decided that morning that I had to have a new dress. So I wrote something, and an Eastern magazine editor accepted it. But by the time the check came, I needed something else worse, so I patched up the old dress the best I could and went right on wearing it. At the time we went into the World War, I had again decided that it was certainly done for. God bless the Eastern magazine editors! Whenever I absolutely had to have something, there they were, patiently waiting to receive my manuscripts (they were published a long time ago, so don’t be surprised that my name means nothing to you now) and paying me good money for them. When this second check arrived, I was sure I would buy another dress. I had sent for the Best and Company catalogue and had picked one out—it was such an event that I could not bear to select one from the big catalogue of one of the two mail-order houses whose means of reaching the farmer is called the Wish Book. You see, we used to sit around through the winter, having its fascinating pages read aloud to the family and picking out all the things we would
order when the crop we were planning to plant should come to harvest. And that same scene was duplicated in almost every other sagebrush home. So hard we worked, to be paid in dreams which always failed.

  Nothing but Best and Company for me, I said, for I was small, and the young-girl things looked best on me, besides requiring very little altering. Yet while I was making soap and hatching chicks and doing a hundred other things with one eye cocked on Uncle Sam, in the back of my mind my conscience kept nagging me: “You can’t spend that check the editor sent you...you can’t spend it on a mere dress...your country needs you....You are not eating any sugar or wheat bread...but there is that check...”

  Well, it ended with my hunting up some scraps of organdie and some dainty old embroidery, and once again I became a creator. Nobody else in the world knows as much as a farm woman about how God felt when he created the universe. She is forced to create all the time, and, like God, generally out of nothing. I took my dress money and bought a Liberty Bond. I learned by chance, from a letter of my stepmother, that my father had invested thousands of dollars in Liberty Bonds. Yet I dare to say that what he did was not as much as what I did, though I am not belittling his act in any way, naturalized citizen that he was, a patriotic American who could still parade the floor, looking very handsome, and sing in a fine voice,

  For he is an Englishman!

  and,

  Rule, Britannia! Britannia rule the waves!

  Britons never, never, never will be slaves!

  I ask you where...please tell me!...where have we a United States song that will make Americans stride their library floors, with flashing eyes and lifted chests, singing defiance to Destiny? One only song worthy of my beloved country we have, and that by a woman known only to school-children, and when sung, apathetically sung. Oh, for a song, a marching song, worthy to be sung by men and women and children marching together with flashing eyes and lifted chests, a song of our glorious native land! Must such a song be born only of beastliness and bloodshed?

  I finished my poor best white dress, and it then figured in one more brief but feeling episode. There was a picnic of the county Grangers in a grove near Eden, and Ray McKaig came to orate into us the consciousness of our despair and our power. On chairs, widely spaced, plank seats had been laid before a temporary rough-plank platform, on which Ray McKaig stood to speak. But before his oration we spread our lunches together on plank tables. Cloths were stretched the length of these tables, and then they were adorned with the pride of accomplishment of every farm woman in the county, from Mrs. Greenwood’s famous potato-chocolate cake, walnut-filled, and with caramel icing, to Mrs. Hatch’s famous pickle lilli. Each of us farm women had something for which she was known far and wide, and there were all those prize edibles waiting for the eating. We ate with our eyes as well as our mouths, and I pity the poor city folks who never have the opportunity to sit down in the open air and eat all they want of such cooking as was laid out on those impromptu tables under the trees of that grove in Eden.

  After we had eaten, Ray McKaig stood up before us and told us what fools we were and how we might redeem ourselves. When he had reached the highest pitch of his fervor, our good friend Hank Thorsen, the druggist at Hazelton, in a moment of lapsed consciousness, stationed himself at Ray’s feet and began passing out advertising balloons. Children swarmed from among the plank seats toward the druggist as though he were the Pied Piper of Hamelin, and even the eyes of the grown folks became fixed on those globes of red, green, and yellow.

  Ray McKaig is a fiery man, and he grew more and more exasperated as he felt that he was losing his fight for the attention of the crowd. Had he come all the way from Boise to talk, unheeded, over the tops of a bunch of colored balloons? Suddenly, startling our somnolent, balloon-occupied minds, Ray asserted himself, emphatically, somewhat after this manner:

  “And you can see for yourselves, by the figures I have just quoted, how you have been cheated and...Mr. Balloon Man! will you please move some other place?”

  We were all a little shocked. The druggist was held in great respect by us simple farm folks: his store glittered so, and we could not imagine any one unsuperhuman being able to buy so many things at once. Ray McKaig did not know that he had to win us back again in the face of our sympathy for Mr. Balloon Man, who carried with him, I am sorry to say the attention of a good many of us, eyes still following the colored balloons just around the side of the platform.

  When Ray McKaig was done—and I hope it did some good, though I cannot see that Idaho farmers are any better off than any others, which means nothing very optimistic, at best—we sat there visiting a few moments, we women, the men leaving the plank seats to hobnob in groups, calling each other by Christian names and slapping one another’s backs, things we women would never have dreamed of doing. We always observed the utmost formality with one another, even after years of acquaintance, and even friendship.

  I was sitting beside the Southern bride of Kerry Rawson, son of a wealthy Boise lawyer. Kerry, that one summer, was playing at farming on his father’s ranch, bought as a speculation. His bride was having a great time of it, imagining she was really doing something because she could make sour-cream biscuits. She was an attractive young woman, a college graduate, but oh! so ignorant of real things. And real things are the stuff from which life is made.

  That day she was wearing an exquisite frock of peach-colored organdie, with an ashes-of-roses pattern blossoms running over it, and it was lined with soft, peach-colored taffeta. She was a brunette, pretty enough, with mountains of assurance. I felt that shrinking inferiority engendered by my old, patched, Liberty Bond white dress, and of course I would refer to it, as all folks do to any subject they would prefer unmentioned, once they lose their poise. Normally I have very little self-consciousness, being almost entirely unaware of myself at practically all times, a statement which may amaze people who consider me egotistic. I am. I am so egotistic that I can forget myself.

  “It looks as though my dress were about to burst out again,” I remarked fatuously, grasping at anything to make conversation with this city woman—pathetic, though I did not know it, in my eagerness to conciliate this glorified being from my lost world. Her attention was drawn to the shabby dress—no shabbier than the dresses of all the other farm women present. Then I added, “I suppose it is time for it to burst, or something. I have worn it for years.” And I smiled, flutteringly, as though I had made a humorous speech which she must recognize.

  She stared in contempt at my pitiful dress and remarked, turning cold eyes away, “Ah couldn’t stand to wear a frock mo’ than one season.”

  I deserved that blow, that terrible, cruel blow, for my foolish effort at toadying to a city woman. It was like a dash of cold water, invigorating, even baptismal. I stared, in my turn, at that magnificence of colored rags which had so awed me. I looked around at all those sagebrush farm women in their antiquated, faded, even patched, best summer dresses. Most of them had babies in their arms, as I had my Joe, and every face to me was firm and self-reliant and noble and wise. They could do things that the world needed. They made excellent, clean, properly fed homes. They brought large, useful families into the world without complaint. Talk about the salt of the earth! They were the backbone of the earth. Without those patient, hard-working women the world must perish. For no man would go on farming alone, or even working as the farm woman does, for any reason whatever. And once the farmer lays aside his tools, the world starves. And I don’t mean maybe! Oh, wonderful, self-sacrificing, self-immolating, pioneer farm women! Oh, precious, invaluable farm women on every farm! Oh, blind and greedy world that rewards them only with forgotten graves!

  But I must not be too intolerant of that young bride, so haughty in her sense of superiority, the swan...no, the jackdaw there among us swans. Her eyes were not opened. I knew how she had come there that day. Her young husband was trying to look at ease with a group of red-leather-colored farmers. Both of them were playing at going to a farm
picnic. They thought they were really living it, but they had none of the reality—just dreams. They knew they could escape any minute. Dad was up there in Boise with the money ready for their transportation, and a beautiful home was waiting for a worshiped son and his bride.

  How different it was with all of us—yes, all of us—for we were trapped not only by our poverty, but by our passion for the land! Passion of any kind places you at a disadvantage in life. You can never be free to make other choices.

  My father was what might be called a wealthy man, wealth being a comparative matter. At least, he owned two beautiful homes, as well as a cañon home better than our farm-house, a cañon home with running water, tub, sink—things which would have made me feel rich to have. He had other property with houses, interests in many mines, and a drug-store which my brother Bert managed and made profitable.

  He might have helped Charley and me, but he did not. He was a very sick man, his mind scarcely in this world at all. I had a stepmother, about the same age as my older sister, kind enough to me, but not as a mother would have been. My father had one horse from Kentucky which alone cost him a thousand dollars. Yet I never expected help from him. I am glad it did not come. We might have held on to the farm, and I should have been a worn-out drudge, with no strength to write this book about farm folks—the first book to be written from the inside by a pioneer farm woman, and, hardest fate of all, a pioneer farm woman of a type never before known—touching elbows with civilization, serving a mythical market which never by any chance could be in favor of farm folks. I thank God that my father had not the heart, because of sickness and other factors, to see how his daughter and her little children were suffering. It is the long run that counts in life.