Annie Pike Greenwood

by We Sagebrush Folks

  “Well, I have just ‘scovered why the sea is salty. It’s ‘cause all these ships are being sunk by the Germans, and they had lots of salt in them! Do you think I could get any money for that?”

  After the Armistice, life went on as usual. Yet not as usual. Such things leave scars. No individual escapes the blow that he deals another. All nations are suffering today from the orgy of murder in which they indulged. Oh, what a mess is this that we call Civilization! What a failure is this that we call Christianity! What pitiful savages are these that we call Mankind! I had always believed in a God who smiled and had a strong sense of humor, otherwise he would be less than man, and, moreover, he would be insane. Since the World War I am constrained to believe in a God of tears, unshed though they be.

  About that best white dress I so much wanted: I never did get it. Charley’s lovely green frock did not come until just before we left the farm forever, which was a good thing, for there was no sagebrush occasion on which to wear it—knife-pleated pale-green georgette crêpe over silk, trimmed with silver and pale-green beads, a lovely, springlike dream. I had another best dress several years later, a blue, trimmed with scalloped white organdie, the goods sent by my sister-in-law Laura and made up by me.

  But I did send my fourteen dollars to Best and Company, ordering the white dress and a Chemcraft set for Walter. I had guessed his ability along that line, though how could chemistry ever take the place of music in his heart? The dress sent me was not the right size. I managed to scrape together enough money for postage to send it back, but I could not make the little cost of insurance. I had Mr. Kelley, the rural-carrier, post it for me, for I knew I could trust him. On its return trip the package was lost in the mail.

  IX—POLITICS

  WE HAD a sort of minister, who preached on Sunday and farmed the rest of the week. There had preceded him many itinerant pastors, all blurred together in my memory. Our farmer-minister always knelt down on the oily yet dusty school-house floor when he prayed. He was an earnest man and, I think, a good man, and as he prayed, his long, bushy eyebrows moved above his little, kindly, emotional, dark-blue eyes like two animated mustachios. I think his heart really felt for as much of mankind as he thought had a right to be saved. Of course, he and the women who were my best dislikers expected to be the judges. What wonders me is how so much intolerance could occupy the same heart with so much kindliness. Or is the word kindliness out of place? It will take some one with a vocabulary to express this situation.

  We had revivals, and folks went up and sat on the front seats which are before the front desks, praying and groaning and halleluiahing, facing the impassive blackboard on which might be written such questions as What is a gerund? or Find the cube root of 75946. My feelings were torn between the desire to go up front and groan and pray and the passion to answer those questions, both being equally impossible of accomplishment for me, for I never could remember what a gerund is, and cube root is a root I was never able to dig up. And as for going up and groaning and praying, just when the farmer-minister was saying, “Is there any sister or brother here who wants to confess Christ?” I was always busy wondering how his wife was ever going to get the spots out of his pants.

  A frivolous mind is a great impediment to getting religion. But there is nothing I could rub on my head to cure it, I suppose. And there is nobody who would more enjoy doing the halleluiahing than I. I have a prodigious contralto voice, practically useless except for halleluiahing. Yet I had to sit there, glued to my seat, with the frivolous speculation as to whether the earnest preacher with the waggling eyebrows had a wife who understood how to remove those praying spots from his trouser-knees.

  Sometimes the preacher would begin to weep over the Demon Rum. This seemed a strange thing, since he must undoubtedly have had a spell of weeping over the Demon Rum before Prohibition. And now he was weeping during Prohibition. I think he was perfectly justified, if any one is ever justified in weeping over the follies of other folks when they are none of his business. Folks died of too much drinking in saloon days; during Prohibition, in the region of the Greenwood District, the boys were dying of alcohol poisoning, and both girls and men were being paralyzed by jake gin, and one of the boys had gone blind from drinking something sold as alcohol. The preacher really had reason to cry if he was thinking of those things.

  There were two farm-houses where the crop was advertised for some distance by the odor of the mash, and one of these farm-houses had tried to get rid of incriminating evidence by dumping it a good way out in the field. The sheriff, who would really rather not have arrested the bootleggers, was much embarrassed when the hogs and hens came staggering toward the house, singing “Sweet Adeline!”

  He had undoubtedly arrested the bootleggers. At least, I assume he did, because, of course, our own county would have an honest sheriff; but I did hear of counties in Idaho where the bootleggers elected the sheriff they wanted. They had the money, and they desired a safe man in office. Business is business, you know. I don’t see why the bootleggers should not run their business as the other money-makers do.

  There were stills out in the desert; the children often came home to tell me of finding one when they had gone in search of a strayed horse or cow. Because of my attitude Walter and Charles always revealed the shameful news in hushed voices. Once a W.C.T.U. woman came and worked us into a frenzy, and all she wanted was a dollar from each of us, to join the W.C.T.U., so that she could take the dollar to help pay expenses to the next group of women, where she would work them into a frenzy and collect enough dollars to go on to another group of women, to work them into a frenzy and collect enough dollars...I often wondered what happened when she reached the end—whether she back-tracked, working the same women into frenzies and collecting more dollars. Once I suspected the whole thing was specious and unintelligent and emotionally orgiastic. But if she had come and I could have found a dollar, maybe between the kitchen door and the sagebrush-pile, that maybe a rooster had dropped out of his hind pocket—none of the farmers had any money—I would have joined. I considered thinking up something that would work our sagebrush women into a frenzy so that I could collect a dollar from each of them to pay the W.C.T.U. woman. Well, we all had a good cry, anyhow.

  It never occurred to me that my private practices were not harmonious with those white-ribbon principles. I made cherry brandy and peach brandy which might have been used for dynamite. I never drank any of it, so I felt perfectly virtuous. I know now it would have helped me to bear a lot of injustice if I had sampled a bottle once in a while. Ah, but that is a legitimate reason for not drinking! We should never bear injustice. We should fight, change things, or run away. Or turn the other cheek. Yes, He was right, and I am wrong. The other cheek is the way to inner power and peace. I wish I had always done that—and yet I cannot regret a single fight or a single running-away.

  One day George Buckley, the water master, called to see Charley on business. The Baron was not a supporter of Prohibition—his German-stein ancestry made that impossible; but neither was he a guzzler, nor did he make wine and brandy as did his practically W.C.T.U. wife, who lacked only the rooster’s dollar for the frenzying of other women.

  So the Baron asks his practically W.C.T.U. wife where he could find some peach brandy, and without a thought that she is breaking the law of her country, she tells him, “On the top shelf in the pantry, beside the glasses of currant jelly.”

  She goes to help him, and comes back bearing two glasses into the living-room, and stops to ask George how Pearl is, that being George’s wife, of whom he always proudly declares, “Pearl said it is so, and Pearl knows!”

  While George is answering my questions, Charley is tussling with the cork in the peach-brandy bottle, and it pops out, suddenly, with a report perhaps not so loud as Big Bertha’s; and the practically W.C.T.U. wife flies to the kitchen door, watching from its recess the drenching of the ceiling and the consequent downpouring of good peach-brandy rain, saturating the two crouching, laughing,
shouting men.

  I always wondered how Christ had the face to turn that water into wine when it would have been such a gorgeous opportunity for him to preach a sermon on the Demon Rum. I wonder why the churches never think of the fact that He said not one word about how terrible it is for folks to take a little wine. The women churchers, W.C.T.U.’s, especially surprise me. Recently it was recorded in Time that the President of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union gave it as her opinion that Christ must have miracled some unfermented grape-juice out of water. Not half the miracle that must have taken place had the wedding guest proclaimed that weak stuff the best wine yet, upbraiding the master of the house for bringing it out last, when most of the guests were so far gone they could not appreciate it. Jesus never did any unfermented, weak thing. What He did was never negative. His Unalogue was as positive with THOU SHALT! as the Decalogue of Moses was positive with THOU SHALT NOTS! And therein the Supreme Psychologist spoke the Voice of the Universe. Listen we will not, and therefore perish we must. It is the Law. Unfermented grape-juice? Don’t make me laugh!

  Kidnapping and racketeering were not the result of the Eighteenth Amendment. I have not kidnapped any one, nor have I racketeered noticeably, yet I have been many times since Prohibition in desperate straits. I have not even bootlegged. I had a good mother! She never said a Thou shalt not! to me in her whole loving life. But every night I knelt in my little white gown at her knee, and I prayed, and she was always there in the home where I could find her.

  The United States of America has failed the mothers of America, and the mothers of America have failed the American home. The mothers who have failed are of two classes, those who have been released from responsibility, and those who have been enslaved. The women who imagine they are free, because they spend money lavishly, produce the legal racketeers and kidnappers who use our nation as a happy hunting-ground. The illegal racketeers and kidnappers come from the homes of enslaved mothers of the slums, and they are what they are because they envy and would emulate the legal racketeers. We have not the pitiful, unknown infant wreckage of the slums upon our minds because they are unknown—sacrifices upon the altar of a greedy and blind nation as truly on the road to perdition as ancient Rome...unless! When those children of enslaved mothers manage to survive through such torments and degradations as would warp the soul of any of us, what do they see? Diamonds glittering; women in gorgeous clothes with careless, conscienceless men, riding, dining, dancing, living in unparalleled luxury.

  What can be done in a brief time may be done by the Man we have in the White House. But the years that have built up the degradation of the big cities since we were a hardy pioneer people will have to be matched by years of tearing down and building up in the right way. The slums must go! There must be a living wage for every man, and a good home for every man, woman, and child! And before we get through with it, the people have got to know that God lives! This I have learned through extremes of such pain and joy as mortal woman can know!

  Careless women, women who today spend their thoughts, their time, their money, on themselves alone, they are already dead. And yet...is there yet a flicker of life? What have you done this day for some child? It may be too late for those who are grown, but on you hangs the responsibility of having failed in your life unless you help to change conditions for those enslaved mothers of the slums and the unfortunate spawn that swarms the city streets of the vilely crowded areas. When any nation shows such extremes of want and riches as there are today—even now—in the United States, its doom is written on its forehead. “Cain, where is thy brother?”

  AND AFTER FREEING the mother of the slums, her who needs first all that we can give, let us next free the Beast of Burden of the nation, the American farm woman. How? Any way. Politics? Yes. Any way!

  Out in the sagebrush the farm women had their farmer-preacher, but, as elsewhere in rural America, the religion of most of the men was politics. Of course, though Baldy Parsons and his like sang hymns a-Sundays and stole water a-weekdays, most of our sagebrush men never troubled their minds over whether they would meet their loved ones anywhere, let alone Heaven, or whether there is or is not a God. But most of them practised the religion of politics. They had their spells of emotionalism, even as the churchers, getting even more worked up, or perhaps it was just the different form of expression. For while the churchers were groaning and praying and halleluiahing, the politicos were fighting each other with the good old fists.

  They themselves, however, were doing the fighting, which is more than can be said for our world’s brightest statesmen who brought about the beastly shambles of the World War. Our sagebrush farmers were fighting to reinforce opinions which meant very little so far as their condition was concerned. What they should have been pugnacious about was the fact that when they could have sold their farms for big profits, they clung to them to serve their country by feeding the world. At least, that was the reason Charley turned down an offer which would have left us free of debt and with eighteen thousand dollars to the good. Not much to a millionaire, but eighteen years of living for us, or a home and ten years of living—and living well, with all we knew of economizing.

  After the Armistice there was the terrible let-down of realizing that our land was worth less than it had been before the war, that there was nothing to do but to worry over the mortgages. The price of wheat had been arbitrarily fixed, but not the price of labor or of anything else that the farmer used. We could have paid off our mortgages and kept even with our expenses had the law of supply and demand been allowed to operate, as in every other field of business. Millionaires were made by the war, and the American farmer was impoverished.

  Through the winters following the World War our living-room was lined with farmers discussing national issues, while they smoked their cigarettes and pipes, and spat tobacco juice into the coal-pail, and cooked the mud and manure from boot-soles on the sides of the base-burner. They had no solution for their own dilemma, the dilemma of all agriculture, but every one of them knew what the Government should do about the railroads and other debatable problems. And I sat there in my corner, tapping away on my faithful typewriter, both of us turned into misty ghosts by the tobacco smoke. I heard the farmers, and I did not hear them, as I wrote the little things which brought the meager amounts so precious to the children and me, the only money I ever handled.

  The men generally ended by agreeing with each other there in our living-room, but outside it might be different. Baldy Parsons and Old Man Babcock once went to the school-house corner for their mail and ended by having a terrific fight. The mail-boxes were arranged on an old wagon-wheel whose axle had been set on top of a post, a most ingenious and practical convenience for the rural mail carrier, who was able to sit in his cart in muddy weather, or his car in good weather, and fill all the mail-boxes quickly, with a twirling of the wheel.

  Bab and Baldy both took the Segregation News from their boxes. This paper, published at Hazelton, was eagerly absorbed by the women folks especially, from motives both of pride (when they were mentioned) and of derision (when they were not mentioned). For one of the Brooke girls was the reporter, and the locals usually ran something like this: “Nellie Brooke is visiting with Mrs. Herman Badger for a few days....Bertha Badger was at the Brooke home for dinner Thursday....Among those who went on business to Twin Falls during Fair Week were Aleck and William Brooke...Grandpa and Grandma Heller were visiting their daughter, Mrs. Henry Brooke, during Saturday and Sunday. The old folks are feeling well, and report a good rainfall at Oakley, where they have a farm....John Heller and Aleck Brooke were transacting business in Jerome Saturday.”

  I might add a note here that John and Aleck were seven years and nine years, respectively. What business they could have been transacting at that immature age may be guessed from the item that one day I proudly read in the column: “Joe Greenwood and Bud Jean were transacting business in Twin Falls Saturday.” The two boys were about seven years old, and they both came home wit
h toy fire-engines, which they bought at a chain store for ten cents apiece. The Segregation News paid our Greenwood reporter a not too exorbitant sum, space rate, so the long word transacting not only looked important, but padded the line.

  After the local News, Bab and Baldy dragged out the Back-Home papers, Bab’s being Republican, from Missouri, and Baldy’s Democratic, from Ioway. Both men went to the school-house fence and sat down on a little rise of ground, opening their Back-Home papers simultaneously. Old Man Babcock struck a match on his boot-sole and puffed the flame through tobacco grounds, which, through this alchemy, turned from brown to glittering copper. Then the two men read aloud to each other the identical big black headlines in their Back-Home papers:

  PRESIDENT WILSON APPROVES

  THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

  Bab continued, while Baldy paused, “What wonders me is why fer this dunderhead Senate can’t git t’gither on this here League uv Nations thing.”

  Baldy Parsons could only mumble, having left his teeth at home in his Sunday-vest pocket: “The Senate is right! Wilson is locoed, fer sure. What wonders me is how any bozo with guts kin see England lick us.”

  “Wha’d’yuh mean, England lick us?” demanded Old Bab, neck feathers rising like a game-cock’s. “Wha’d’yuh mean, England lick us?”

  “I mean ‘at them damned English is alwuz lookin’ out fer a chancet t’ git our goat, that’s what I mean! I knowed a Englishman back home, ‘n he wuz the orneriest dog-gone son-uv-a-gun the Lord ever let live. He oughta a ben tooken out ‘n shot. Why, when my ole lame mare, Nellie, got over in his field of corn, ‘n et till she ‘most died, that ole whelp says, says he, ‘Mebby that’ll learn yuh a lesson t’ keep her outen my field!’ Them’s the very words he says, says he. All them English is alike. I got no use fer the English. I’d like t’ see ‘em all in hell!”