Annie Pike Greenwood

by We Sagebrush Folks

  “They ain’t nothin’ wrong with the English!” muttered Bab. “My ole Gran’pop wuz English, and you never seen a finer ole feller anywheres. Wilson’s a XYZ damned fool, that’s what ‘e is, and this here League uv Nations is all a damned graft and poppycock!”

  And then he added a few more expressive words, the like of which sickened me when first I heard them, but they seemed to be indigenous to the farm, so it was not long before I heard them without nausea, bearing, but revolting, just the same. I think perhaps they should be written here, in the interest of faithfully reporting the farmer minds, without which filth very few could be found where we were. Personally, I could commit murder because of indecent words. I believe they are the resort of weaklings, as substitute for what mental and moral strength they lack. Old Bab was no worse than most of the rest.

  Old Baldy was not more virtuous in his expressions than Bab, but he did recognize the obscenity as an effort on Bab’s part to besmirch his most sacred principles with worse than barnyard manure. He was enraged, as Bab had hoped, and feared, he would be. “You’re a XYZ damned liar!” yelled Baldy, slapping Bab in the face. “I’ll learn yuh t’ say such things about Woodrow Wilson!” bellowed Baldy, giving Bab another blow. “Yuh can’t git away with nothin’ like that around me!” Whereupon Bab landed a fist on Baldy’s toothless mouth, from which he would have been forced to spit all his front teeth had not the dentist Back Home already possessed himself of them. After that both old reprobates rolled and fought like two dogs. Had they been Arkansawyers, of course, they would have arisen with all four ears chawed off.

  Just as they were on the point of ear-chewing, out burst the whole school for recess. That debasing fight was a horrifying spectacle for those innocent, immature minds to be observing. There was probably not a boy there who could not have done better. The result was that around every table in the sagebrush that night the combat of the two belligerent farmers was related with appropriate gestures.

  There was utter silence at Old Bab’s table, Old Lady Babcock having sense enough, for once, not to tell Bab what she would have done if she had been in his place; which, of course, she would not have done, for nobody can ever be in any one else’s place, and if it were possible, he would act as he himself, only, would in that place, and not as any one else would act. Let that settle this question for good and all.

  Baldy Parsons had to talk. He had come so near to licking Old Man Babcock that he was quivering with exultation. But his bragging was nipped in the bud by Mrs. Baldy Parsons, who began on him promptly: “I should think you’d be ashamed, Josiah Parsons, a man of your years, fightin’ before all them school childern, an’ gettin’ yer nose bloodied all over yer overhalls, and bustin’ two buttons offen yer shirt, an’ makin’ me out the wife of a rough-neck, an’ how kin I ever have the face t’ meet Revener Warren when he comes t’ the school-house t’ preach next Sunday, an’ what will they think of us over to Hazelton,...” and how this, and what that, until Baldy wished that Old Bab had beaten him to a pulp, so that when they dragged him home on a hay-slip, maybe his wife would shut up. But little did he know her, even after being married to her for thirty years.

  I AM NOT SURE whether I am Joan of Arc reincarnated, or just a part of John Brown’s soul. All I know is that I am always filled with burning zeal for something or other. I was the only woman in the Greenwood District who figured prominently in politics. I threw myself into causes which were lost before they were begun. I attacked people in high places and got well slapped for the same. I wrote some articles for the Atlantic Monthly, whose editor, Ellery Sedgwick, has been my good and invaluable friend. In those articles I told something which put the then Governor David W. Davis of Idaho and Banker John Thom, one-time Republican Senator from Idaho, in anything but a favorable light. It was these two who tried to discredit me, as a matter of (as they thought) righteous revenge.

  John Thom dedicated several issues of his Idaho magazine to attacking me. I am not sure whether the journal was founded for that purpose. I know only that the editor was thoughtful enough to mail me copies of the issues. Governor Davis wrote the Atlantic that I was a liar. The Idaho Statesman wrote the Atlantic, not knowing of the Davis protest, to say that I had told the truth concerning John Thom and Governor Davis, but that I had placed the Statesman in the wrong light.

  I had not intended to injure the Statesman, as I have always admired that paper, but I meant every word I said about Governor Davis and John Thom. I was helpless to combat them at the time, and it looked as though they might have me licked; but since that day all three of us have met defeat in one way or another, and probably if the men and I could get to know each other, we might be the greatest of cronies.

  In the midst of the desert, with lava buttes for neighbors, lies the town of Jerome, and in this town was located the bank of John Thom, the friend of Davis who was Governor of Idaho when Charley went to the Legislature as Representative from Minidoka County. Unlike Twin Falls, Jerome was practically isolated, not being surrounded by prosperous farms. The Idaho Statesman bore me out in my statement that a plan was hatched between John Thom and Governor Davis to take parts of three counties, one of them Minidoka, and create another county, to be called Jerome County, with its county-seat Jerome City, location of the Thom bank.

  We Greenwood District farmers and the farmers around Eden and Hazelton and Russell Lane were in Minidoka County. We had already helped, by means of taxation, to build the county court-house at Rupert, a thriving little town on the Lincoln Highway and also on the main railroad lines, which Jerome was not. If Jerome County were made after the fashion planned by John Thom and Governor Davis, it meant that we poverty-stricken farmers must have our taxes raised in order to build another court-house at the new county seat, and also that we must help to build a road through the lava rock desert to Jerome.

  In the Legislature, Charley bent every energy to defeat this project, but he was fighting against forces too great for him. He had been elected by the Non-Partisan League farmers, and the other Non-Partisan League legislators supported him, with the few Democrats who happened to be elected; but how could they do anything in a Legislature overwhelmingly Republican, headed by a Republican Governor?

  It was near the beginning of this session, just as Charley began his efforts for the right, like a lesser Woodrow Wilson, that Schumann-Heink was to sing in Boise. There were no radios in those days, so the coming of Schumann-Heink to Boise was a state wide event. Charley was in the Legislature, and therefore, poor fellow, making a little real cash. He sent me the money for my railroad fare. No one could be more generous, when he had money, than the Baron. And, to such a nature as his, to be unable to exercise this generosity was warping and debasing.

  I have reached that most glorious age when, as Matthew Arnold so aptly expresses it, I can see life steadily and see it whole. I am allowed the privilege, I hope, of writing of myself as though I were some one else. At last I can stand on the outside and watch myself go by, with only such emotion as I should feel in the case of another. This attitude is mistaken for egotism. I have plenty of that, or I should have been crushed by fate, but my frank description of myself and others has nothing to do with egotism. I have felt from birth that I must state the truth of human life as I see it. There is something so imperative in this that I have no free will in the matter.

  But that does not mean that all the truth of every human relationship I knew on that sagebrush farm will be stated here. Only that the impulse of my being is to state the whole truth before I die, in some form or another. It is a cruel drive, allowing me no indulgence of personal reticence and laying me open to criticism by those whose opinion I hold dear. Yet when I have been able to define a thing as it is, I feel a compensating happiness which would actually make it possible for me to cut myself off from all human relationships—nay, I say it solemnly here, such a course is rendered almost obligatory.

  This book is not autobiography, yet much is in it that will offend the sensibili
ties of those who live more strictly personal lives than I have ever lived. This must be. I do not write here of myself as myself, but only as a woman of a certain type, whose life was so ironically twisted. I write, too, of the man I married, but not fully, and in these pages I cannot do justice to him in any adequate way, for it is not a simple matter for me to explain a person so different from myself. That would require a study entirely out of proportion to the intention of this book. I regret that this must be so, for it must ever be the sincere resolve of my heart to do him justice. Who is it has said that mercy is not needed where justice is given? These bare pages cannot tell the lovely things that Charley did for me in little ways during the course of those farm years—even of the efforts he made to help me in my writing by taking over the housework himself, a dish-towel pinned around his waist, while I sat at the typewriter through the white, snowy days, plugging out a very miserable book of fiction which I had named The Lesser Man.

  Christmas of the year before Charley went to the Legislature was marked by a great event in my life. I received my first check from the Atlantic Monthly. To be published in the Atlantic had been the aim of my ambition almost from childhood. As I write, an amused remembrance thrusts its head into the midst of this statement. After the article for which I received this check was published, a professor of English in Columbia University came striding into his classroom to meet a class of which my cousin Nellie was a member. He bore in his hand a copy of the Atlantic, and holding the magazine up before the class, he began:

  “My wife is a college graduate. She has been trying for years to get into the Atlantic Monthly...and yet here is a mere farmer’s wife who has done it!”

  And then he read the article by the mere farmer’s wife to those students who were training, and also straining, perhaps, to get into the Atlantic. There were a few things that professor did not know about me.

  After the article was published, Dr. Winship, of the Journal of Education, wrote me: “Fame is yours! The article is better than I could have imagined! Do you really know what you have done? William Allen White, who had already published books, when an article of his was accepted by the Atlantic Monthly, wrote me, ‘I have at last reached the goal of my ambition!’”

  Sarah Comstock, the novelist and magazine writer, whom I had met in Garden City, Kansas, wrote me: “There is not a writer here who would not give his or her head to have done what you have done—you are in the Atlantic!”

  Something of the feeling of these writers I had as I stood in that poverty-stricken living-room, which the years had robbed of every amenity and grace, gripping that hundred dollars the Atlantic had paid me and the letter from Ellery Sedgwick, my ever kind and patient friend. Such transcendent moments as that I have learned to suspect. Things do not always follow on each other’s heels as we think they will.

  But it did mean a real thing. It meant I could have my teeth cared for, as they so badly needed. I had begun to wonder whether I too must pay the ultimate sacrifice of my pretty teeth—that which was taken for granted by every farmer and his wife in the district. And I could buy me a new hat! Heavens, what an extraordinary event!

  Before I went to Boise, I cured the Devil Sow and another hog. This was after they were dead, and the curing was done with salt and brown sugar. I had never cured the meat before, and it looked like such an undertaking that I could scarcely sleep after I saw all that pork spread out, so pink and clean, on newspapers laid on the dining-table, with all its leaves put in.

  I had heated the water in my wash-boiler, but I looked perfectly blank when I saw the men hunting for my galvanized tub. This I had secreted in the cellar, so that I might have it clean for bathing purposes. It was mean of me, and my conscience smote me, as I watched them fill the barrel by the granary with the boiling water and drop into it the hot stones they had heated with a sagebrush fire.

  The Devil Sow had little, mean, human eyes, and she twitched her tail in the most vicious manner. She was always somewhere that she had no business to be—down on Steve Drake’s, or Earl Andrews’, or over on Dan Jean’s. It did me good to salt down that old girl. Jeanette Bennett came and helped cut up the fat for lard. There were sixty pounds of it, mostly from the Devil Sow. And her hams and bacons were enormous.

  I left the children with Jeanette and her family while I went to Boise to hear Schumann-Heink and to get my teeth fixed. The Bennett family moved into our house until I returned. My children could not realize that their mother was about to cross the stretch of snow that reached out into the desert, to where the Gallopin’ Goose cut across, importantly puffing its way from Minidoka to Bliss. Walter went with me, on Old Buttons, so that he might carry my suitcase. I walked.

  I was wearing my great, heavy farm shoes, and my city shoes were in a paper, under my arm. The snow was deep, there was a road only part of the way, and there was more snow falling. At the station...but I must explain. There was really no station—just a big box which one might climb into from behind, but without any fire. I sat outside in the snow, the suitcase serving for a seat, and changed my shoes. Walter took the heavy old farm shoes, tied the strings together, and threw them over the saddle, back of the horn. Old Buttons, much disturbed at being tethered in the snow-storm, pawed at the frozen ground in worried distress. At last he broke loose, and we lost sight of him in the wall of falling snow, my heavy shoes dangling and bouncing on either side of him, the last thing we could see.

  I danced and whistled, stopping only to encourage Walter to do the same, for it was bitter cold, and the snow was falling faster, and in such big flakes that it was like the cotton strung on threads that is used in Santa Claus store windows. The Hootin’ Nanny should be coming along soon, so Walter stood on the track waving a dirty piece of cloth fastened to a rough stick. This operation was called “flagging the train,” but it looked to me more like ragging the train.

  When I had whistled everything danceable, I decided to stand still and freeze, and the conductor of the Gasoline Split-the-Wind could chop me away and load me like cord wood. Remembering my “Bluebeard,” I kept calling to Walter, “Sister Anne! Sister Anne! can you see anything coming?”

  Thicker and thicker the flakes fell. Nothing visible beyond an arm’s length. Even sounds were muffled—if there were sounds. Dead quiet; dead white; a faint whistle; a faint clanging of bells; Walter leaping from the track just as a great dark bulk suddenly emerges from the thick white screen, with its constant, dazzling, whirling motion. Out of a black side oozes Old Man Babcock, a shining new pitchfork over one shoulder and a shining new shovel over the other—in the middle of winter! I was glad Walter would have company.

  Charley met me at the Boise station, and I saw a quickly disguised look of shocked surprise flash across the handsome face of the Baron. I knew before he spoke what was the matter. “Is that the best hat you have?” he asked.

  You see, he had been away from the brush for a few weeks; he had seen other women’s clothes; he had not seen me during that time; the sight of me under those circumstances was revealing. The first thing he did when we reached the hotel was to hand me a ten-dollar bill from a folder which had so long forgotten the feel of a bill of any kind. “Be sure to buy yourself a hat today,” he said.

  What a day! Actually to go from shop to shop, trying on this hat and that...to be young enough to have bright, fluffy hair and eager, shining eyes. I bought a black-satin hat, perfectly plain except for some silver ornaments, also severely plain.

  I was ready early that night to go to the Schumann-Heink concert, and while Charley was gone from the hotel room, I stood at the window and looked out on the busy streets, the shop windows dazzling with color and light. I was so happy—so happy! I heard the Baron close the door and sink into the big, comfortable rocker, and I turned, still smiling with happiness, and seated myself on his knees. He put his left arm around me, and took both my hands in his one big right hand, and gazed thoughtfully at them. There had been a peculiar stillness about him ever since his shocked mome
nt of our train meeting.

  I was embarrassed at the look of my hands, and I doubled them up quickly; but with his big fingers Charley opened them, still gazing in that strange way. I wondered if he were remembering when they were pretty and white and well manicured, for at the time I met him they did no manual labor of any kind, except for the dressing of myself. The fingers were still long and tapering, but the nails were broken below the quick.

  The Baron still stared at my hands. There was a scarlet, leaf-shaped burn at the base of my right thumb, and lower, on the little wrist, a duplicate. At the base of the index finger of the left hand there was a fresh, deep scar: the sharp butcher knife with which I was cutting around a ham bone had slipped. On the back of the right hand were open, raw blisters from bacon grease, which had spat at me from the frying-pan. But worst, worst of all, I hated those stubby, painful nails, broken below the quick.

  The Baron was speaking, and I could see a faint mist in his eyes. “Poor little hands!” he was saying, “how could I do that to you?”

  I knew that his heart was swelling with remorse. One of my hands I withdrew from his, to put my arm around his neck, and I kissed him. It touched me deeply to know that at last he had seen those hands which had so faithfully served him through so many months of toil too great. I had never pitied myself, yet I was glad of his pity just the same—glad, yes, but I knew he would forget.

  That night we had to sit on the stage of the Boise theater to hear Schumann-Heink sing. Charley had not been sure of my coming, and when he was sure, it was too late to get reserved seats. There were so many people on the stage that from my seat I could almost touch the gray-haired, motherly-looking singer. The audience loved her. I was enchanted. It was the first entertainment I had heard outside the Greenwood District. I kept saying to myself, “At last the door is opened...I will write and write...and my little family can hear things like this...” If I had only known how many years would pass before...