He loved to work. He told me, with a shining of good teeth and black eyes, “I love to sweat.” And he was so clean. Every day he bathed in the upper canal and washed his shirt, socks, and underwear, hanging them on the native willows bending above the stream. His clothes were not nearly dry when his long swim was over, but he dried them on his splendid body.
He liked to sing. As he plowed, his voice rang across the acres, and his favorite was a Negro melody, of triumphant repeated line,
Sometimes I feel like an eagle in the air...
And when all the joy had been wrung from this, softly floated to my kitchen door the same melody in a minor key:
Sometimes I wish that I never had been born...
And I would stop at my work, so impressionable was I when I was young, my heart breaking with those words, for in truth, in the midst of that terrible labor, with my little, shabby children needing so much and my own ambition as a writer thwarted forever, as I thought, sometimes, I was sure that God had forgotten me and mine, and I wished...I wished I never had been born.
It was while Peewee was still alive and sadly wandering about that Gus helped me band the legs of the chicks in the runway Charley had made me. I tried always to be as scientific as possible about all the things I did. With the aluminum bands I could keep track of the generations, so as to weed out, by eating, the boarder hens—those which no longer laid eggs. I also punched holes in the skin between the toes of the chickens to mark the age of each generation. Bands and puncher were Kansas acquisitions.
Gus caught the chicks, handed them to me, and I, seated on the side of the runway, punched and banded. All around us was a wonderful green-growing world, crops pushing higher and higher, serene blue sky, close above, festooned with a few filmy clouds, the serener valley stretching below, green and gray, and, farther over, the blue Minidoka Mountains. We were both subdued to the mood of the lovely, quiet day. Gus was leaving us on the morrow.
The neighbor to whom we had sent English George was also a One Hundred Per Cent Pickled American. While George was out in the field, our friend had searched the lad’s pockets. Being without honor, as are all pickled people of every description—religious, political, professional, he felt at liberty to trespass in any manner possible. I.W.W. literature was found in a pocket of the boy’s coat, and unmistakable evidence that he was a conscientious objector. Not to be willing to murder his fellow-men told damnably against English George. He was hustled into the county jail. Charley told Gus of the matter, and that was why Gus left us—to go to the succor of his friend. George had been released, however, and was gone. But Gus was immediately locked up as a dangerous suspect. He wrote us later that he had talked his way into jail and then talked his way out again. I could well imagine his doing both.
WE WERE now down to one farm hand, who moved about the farm and in and out of the house as silently as a shadow. I could have no help myself, for the Arkansawyer cost us a hundred dollars a month and board, and yet he knew nothing of how to farm irrigated land. We were paying high for the war, yet all our prices were arbitrarily fixed by those who never thought of computing the cost of productions; consequently we were able to pay almost no debts except labor costs. Good Old Grandma Government told us we must go into debt to feed some of her sons whom she had sent out to murder her neighbor’s boys. Logical that, don’t you think?...Sane?...brainy?...Christian?...decent?
I went absolutely nowhere, and I worked from dawn until dark and was never rested. My fingernails were broken below the quick, and my heels were cracked and bleeding. I was the Great Beast of Burden of the American nation, the Forgotten Farm Woman—not just then forgotten, but forgotten throughout all history. There were times when it struck me as a terrible way to live, and, as Gus used to express it, I longed for the Open Road.
That summer, while the lads of many nations were butchering each other Over There, my children knew only happy tranquillity on the sagebrush farm. Walter and young Charles went swimming in the weir, flies droned about, myriads of birds darted and winged above, and the mountains and valley below us were visions of hazy blues, greens, and browns. The two boys were really going barefoot for the first time in their lives.
They had tried going barefoot several times before, but the cinder path, the sharp-edged lava rocks, and the stiff stubble of the cut alfalfa were too much for them. Now their father told them that they should be ashamed to wear shoes in wartime, for the Civil War, in which his Yankee father had been a soldier at nineteen, had started the fashion of shoeless urchins. Since the World War was something real that these little fellows could share with the grown-ups—and how grateful children are for such interests!—they bravely trod, if somewhat gingerly, the alfalfa stubble and the rough, sharp earth.
The two boys were working for Liberty Bonds, beginning with the War Savings Stamps. Each of them had a milk customer, there being two city speculator families, without cows, at some distance on either side of us along the Lincoln Highway. Little Charles trotted, barefoot, to one with a bucket of milk, and Walter trotted, barefoot, to the other with a bucket of milk. The stamps were bought. The boys watched with proud eyes as each one was glued in its place on the squared card. And that was all there was to it, so far as they were concerned. Our debts had to be paid. If Uncle Sam kept our prices down below costs of production, we had to get money some way to pay our grocery bill. So the stamps went for that.
It hurts me to think of those War Savings Stamps—of those little, bare, trudging feet. But I am indignant clear through when I think of my hundred-dollar Liberty Bond. My father had given me that hundred dollars with the words, “I want you to put this away somewhere so that no one can get hold of it. When I was a young man, many a time I walked the streets, desperately in need, when a hundred dollars would have meant a godsend to me.” He was a sick old man when he gave me that present, and I think his mind was already fearful of the will he finally made, in which he called my own mother by the wrong name and made other glaring errors, a will dispossessing his children of their own mother’s right in what he left. I was the one who blocked the suit to break that will. I did it out of respect for my beloved father’s memory. I could not bear publicly to accuse him of being non compos mentis when the will was made. Too quixotic? But the farm would have swallowed it all.
I had given the hundred dollars to Charley to put into a Liberty Bond for me, and this he did. The Baron was as generous as possible—when he had any money. I shall never forget the beautiful dress he bought me in Boise, while he was on a trip for the Water Company. All the money he had went into that green dress—looked like spring, he said, and he wanted it for me.
The local chapter of the American Legion was building a hall in Hazelton, to be used for any public purpose of a decent character, especially for dancing. The finance committee approached everyone. We had no money in the world but that precious Liberty Bond, which my father had made me promise to keep sacred for possible future need. The committee promised Charley that if he would allow the Legion to borrow my bond for collateral, it would be safely returned in a short time.
There was a great scandal in Hazelton concerning some one who had made away with the securities pledged in this manner. I never knew whether the charges were false or true. I did not know that the Legion officials, or one of them, had stolen my bond until the need, the desperate need, for that hundred dollars came. I did not even know it had been pledged.
WE ATE strange bread those days, some of it making us sit down to the table with apprehension. It looked as though it had been made in an adobe-yard. Still, my barley and corn waffles and hot cakes were delicious. We did without wheat flour almost entirely, in order that our savings might be shipped abroad. And it made me furious if I found sugar in the bottom of the men’s coffee cups.
One day Charley came home and told me he had turned the names of the flour-hoarders in to the Government. A Federal agent had insisted on the disclosure, and Charley had felt that his service to his country required it
. For the first time I was a little shocked and dismayed, pickled American though I was.
“But they are your friends!” I said to him.
“I have no friends that are not helping the Government during this war!”
The blood of martyrs spoke there. Charley would have burned at the stake for this worthy cause—or this cause of whose worth he was persuaded. And I applauded him. I applauded him every step of the way—when he renounced his German ancestry; when he helped hound our old German neighbor into buying more Liberty Bonds than he could afford; when he turned on his former friends and betrayed them. Oh, Patriotism, what crimes are committed in thy name!
A woman is always more to blame than a man. Women are the mothers of the race, and the men are their little boys. We women must see straight, and for a long time we have been making a very bad job of it. We covet the trivial responsibilities that belong to the men, and in so doing we overlook the vital responsibilities that Nature has placed upon us. According as the women of the nation accept their job as women, so goes the welfare of the nation.
Joe was still a baby at that time, and I was still suffering from the phlebitis which had made me unable to walk the first winter after his birth. I suffered inferno as I worked. Charley was irrigating too large a farm for one man, with everything else to look after. Our Country! We must struggle on, in poverty and pain, for something we had named Our Country.
Wash-days were hardest for me. The children were always mud-grimed, from making play dams in the irrigation ditches, from sitting in them, from all sorts of dirt and water contacts. Those muddy clothes were not the worst of it. There were the men’s dreadful bandanas, stiff with mucus, and the men’s equally dreadful socks, stiff with dirt and sweat. I made washing easier by calling the socks the Dirty Berties, and the bandanas the Filthy Bilthies. I sang hymns, too, that I had learned in the school-house church, and they were all about the good Lord saving my little peanut soul. The smell of hot suds always makes me feel sick. It was not so bad when I could wash out-of-doors, though the labor of carrying water from the boiler in the house was hard for me. Yet I still love to see a line of clean, fresh clothes billowing in the breeze.
In summer I always crawled out of bed an hour before any one else was stirring, to work on my beloved kitchen-garden. I always felt very near to God there, so early in the morning, with the dew still beading the green stuff, even though I might be quarreling with Him before the day was done.
Ray McKaig was still at his work of organizing the farmers into the Non-Partisan League. He said we were to have as our head representative Senator William H. Borah, because he had put into the Republican platform a plank advocating the public ownership of electric-and water-power. And lots of good that plank did us—got the votes of the farmers, and then it was forgotten.
At haying-time Charley told everybody his help could not have supper at our place. I thought no one would come. I know everybody blamed me, for I was always playing Mrs. Smarty and trying to break agelong customs. No, Charley had thought it out himself, in consideration of me. The men did not like it, for they always count on those gorging picnics at each other’s farms, having no mercy on the women folks. I was so grateful to Charley for that. No man but a former city man would have dared to do it. Those mountains of dishes at the end of the day were almost too much for me.
Mrs. Asper had had a serious operation and was really not able to be around. Something happened that her relations could not help her—cutting their own hay, or something. She was a born farm woman, yet she broke into tears as she told me of what she had suffered as she fed that crew of men. Did they care? They never gave her a thought.
About this time Charley hatched a setting of eggs with his mowing-machine, cutting off the mother hen’s head at the same time. The children brought the bewildered little chicks to the house, and that night I put them under a broody pullet. She was distracted almost to frenzy next morning when she discovered them. At last, though, I think she was persuaded that time for setting had been shortened on account of the war. We did not have the N.R.A. then, or she would have known that she was operating on the shorter hours of the new setting hens’ code.
The children were always bringing me wounded beasts or birds. I had a hospital of them on my back porch. There were birds everywhere on the farm, although our orchard trees were spindling things. They nested on the ground and in the alfalfa—meadow-larks, redwinged blackbirds, mourning doves, purple martins, pheasants, orioles, hawks, canaries, mocking-birds, killdeers, kingfishers, and up above, passing over our heads in graceful patterns, the sandhill cranes, wild geese, and teal and mallard ducks.
There was almost no fruit that summer of the war. We sagebrush women had always depended on a trip to Twin Falls, where the farm orchards supplied our needs. That year the commission men bought all the fruit and shipped it out of the country. And the Government was urging us farm women to can all the fruit possible! The country women of Idaho were robbed, for they could not afford to buy canned goods.
The memory of that time, when my children tagged my footsteps like four little Peewees, is very dear to me. They were always trying to help. I had just papered the rough boards of the pantry shelves, and I dropped some casual complaint to Walter concerning the pestifurious flies (an adjective seriously used by an Idaho legislator while Charley was a lawmaker). A few moments later I was horrified to observe a trickle of molasses all over the fresh papers. Could I have been careless or absent-minded? No. Insanity was the only explanation.
“I thought it would catch the flies,” explained Walter, with innocent pride.
Whenever I went to garden, there they all were, right on my heels—little Joe staggering about over everything indiscriminately; Rhoda pulling up the young beets to nourish a milkweed, which she affectionately denominated “thome nith lettith”; Charles thoughtfully working his way up a row of beans and pulling off their heads, to help them through the ground, as he explained; Walter damming corrugations, so that there was presently a maddening network of criss-cross trickles. And Brownie, one of the stupid dogs, who always approached me with head on one side and a positive leer of almost unbridled affection for his mistress, sitting down to adore her on one of her prize tomato-plants. It was often too much.
The boys left the cover off a sack of poisoned oats, and one of my beautiful White Plymouth Rock hens, descendant of prize Kansas stock, staggered out of the granary to die. Charley was milking, and he cautioned Rhoda, “Don’t tell your mother about that hen.” Two minutes later the tale was unfolded. Rhoda could not bear to see the poor hen die, and she brought her to my hospital, although she was apparently past recovery, comb already purple. With a caponizing knife (Kansas relic) I slit her neck, then slit the crop, removed the poisoned grain, washed the interior with tannic-acid solution, poured a little down her gullet, sewed up the crop with silk, sewed up the neck skin. She was in my porch hospital for a week, then out and singing her laying-song.
Simple events of busy days. Thus we went struggling on through the war, sacrificing all our interests to a cause which nobody clearly understands and whose conclusion is equally doubtful. Through it all, Nature remained so tranquil—enough to shame the passions of man. In the winter the Minidokas were pearly white, the cañons showing in cold blue veins. And the summer evenings were heartbreakingly beautiful. As I gazed upon them from my hilltop height, I experienced a loss of personal consciousness, a blessed oblivion.
THEN CAME THE END of the World War. We sagebrush folks could scarcely believe the news. We took no part in either the fake celebration or the real celebration. We were aware of them only through the newspapers. But the war was over. The papers had no more interest for us. Eb Hall no longer came eagerly up the hill with our mail to discuss a few items head-lined on the front page while I ironed. He was such a clean, fine fellow that it does no harm to say how much I enjoyed him. I was always amused at his never-failing mispronunciation of words. He had chosen the name of his eldest son from the bio
graphical part of an unabridged dictionary in the office of the doctor for whom he was waiting to take to his wife’s bedside.
“Finest name in the dictionary, Aristol,” he declared proudly.
When he was gone, I looked for that name. It was Aristotle. There was another unique name in our district, Usona, given to his daughter by Hogan Stinnet. I asked him where he got that pretty name. He said out of Montgomery-Ward’s catalogue, name of a stove. I looked it up and found it explained in the catalogue as United States of North America.
Just before the Armistice, Eb Hall came up from the mail-boxes on the school-house corner, waving our newspaper, the ever admirable Idaho Statesman. I was ironing in the living-room, and Eb entered full of excitement. “I see by the paper,” he announced importantly, “that General Choss is in Berlin.”
I was dumbfounded. I knew my war pretty well, but I had missed this Choss fellow. After Eb was gone, I opened the paper, and there in big black headlines I read:
GENERAL CHAOS IN BERLIN
We were all crazy during the war, all but the conscientious objectors. I hereby make avowal that I am a conscientious objector for the next war, and I do not mind if it comes in my time, for I would like to suffer for Peace as much as I suffered for War.
Everybody was infected. Little children could not escape. My babies went around trying to think with their little brains how to make more money to buy more War Savings Stamps to buy more Liberty Bonds to help the Government to send more lads to murder more lads. Such a jolly insanity, that.
Little Charles came home from school, cheeks flushed and big gray eyes shining. “Mama! Don’t they give money to people who find out things?”
“Sometimes, Charles, if it is important.”
Annie Pike Greenwood Page 37
