Yes, I should be allowed to visit each school and smile on the rattled teacher trembling before me; though maybe she could teach better than I could, I could can her on a whim. For of course I would look superior, as though I could beat her teaching with one hand tied behind me. And the round-eyed, subdued children would gaze on me as though I were the President of the United States paying them a visit, sitting up like little wooden figures and tiptoeing out at recess, with serious side glances at me, instead of clomp-clomp-clomping with the emphasis of relief, chests swelling to let out a tremendous whoop even before freedom was quite gained at the door.
Of course, I wrote the Progressive Committee to take my name off the ticket. I felt pretty bad about it, too. It meant that the educational clock would be set back about a thousand years. In other words, it would remain where it was. Back to the washboard and the dishpan for me. And all that freedom for children fermenting in my brain. But as I worked there, with my blistered, cut, burned, broken-nailed hands, I saw over the top of the kitchen range a vision of the education that is to be. Experts in their lines will travel across the United States from school to school. There will be no Miss Smith in Room 12, who is stuck in the Third Grade and hates teaching the little brats. When the expert in geology comes to the Greenwood School, nothing but geology will be taught for a solid two weeks...field work...eyes, ears in use. The little tots in one division, and the big fellows in another...only two classes necessary. Let the little ones drop out when they are tired. Let them go home, if they want to, or rest where they are, with plenty of milk to drink and fruit to eat. The teaching of English, writing, reading, arithmetic is incidental to their other work. Can’t you see them joyously learning? Children are so patient. I wonder that they have not risen in a body to slay their jailers, the average teachers, in order to escape from their unnatural prisons, the school-houses. Herd them in! They are not a natural part of the whole of creation. They must be chained to wooden seats.
And our great literature—now used for the torture of babes, forced to read and commit to memory what they do not understand and therefore do not love. Only the greatest of public readers should be permitted to touch this literature, in giving it and interpreting it to the child. Let the children hear the gorgeous thoughts and language. Let them be told the magnificent imports of these things. Then let them memorize great literature as a privilege. No wonder the bulk of those who graduate from high school really know nothing of the literature of the nations! And as for other subjects, babies are not too young to be taught psychology, history, and biography. But we shall have to rewrite our history books to take the glory out of wholesale murdering, and to teach, for example, that although George Washington was undoubtedly an admirable character, he did not lick the British with six soldiers.
The truth! Nothing is so beautiful as the truth. But not the sentimentalized truth. Being sentimental brings most of our tragedy and blots out the sense of humor. I could not be a county superintendent, but I did go down frequently to the school-house. And speaking of truth reminds me of the Washington’s Birthday program in which Rhoda took part. She was a tall girl for her age, with a remarkable memory and a gift for the dramatic, so the teacher chose her to be George Washington’s father, boys of her size never having been taught to do anything in public but sing-song and forget. Bud Jean was small for his age, and he had a conscientious mother, who, the teacher knew, could be depended on to put Buddy through his paces.
All we proud mothers were present, and two fathers. There are usually two fathers somewhere at a daytime school program, who think children are important and education should be encouraged. (Or is it that they just have more determined wives?) I could see the strained intensity of my dear friend Mrs. Dan Jean as Bud marched up to position, and Rhoda Greenwood’s mother was rigid with attention. The dialogue began but did not conclude as written, for the infallible Rhoda strayed from the text and inverted the words to a meaning much more human and believable. We have all become so familiar with the cherry-tree story that we no longer actually hear it, so no one there detected the changed ending except me, and I nearly burst with the joy of it.
Buddy Jean said: “Father, I cannot tell a lie. I cut down your cherry-tree.”
And Rhoda’s reply was this: “My boy, I would rather have you tell a lie than cut down my cherry-tree!”
Two honors were bestowed upon the Greenwood family who lived on the hill above the school-house in the dark-green shingle-walled house with the toothpick-pillared porch. Charley was nominated for State Senator, and I was appointed a Judge of Election. Of course, since we had the primary system, Charley’s nomination was only tentative—any other name might be written in the nomination ballot. The county Progressive Party leaders had agreed on him, subject to the approval of the members of the party. Not so thrilling as an emotional stampede, everybody grabbing banners and marching and yelling something like this:
We’re headin’ fer th’ last round-up!
Too-ul-le-laa!...Too-laa!...Too-lee!...too...loo!
We’re headin’ fer the la-a-a-a-a-ast round-up!
Whoopee!...lemon-peel!...nobody’s business!...dust in the road!...cats on the roof!...whoopee!...Jones!...Jones!...Wow!...Wow! Wow! Wow!...Jo-o-o-o-o-o-nes!”
For that is the way we Joyce-Ulysses-brained folks nominate our Presidents of the United States.
The primary is different. Our Progressive Primary was what would be called by us farmers gol-awful different. You will understand why when I relate my adventures in the office of Judge of Election.
We sagebrush Greenwoods were at that stage just before we acquired our winded, second-hand car, Sagebrush Liz, when my only means of locomotion to Hazelton was a two-wheeled cart. Our buggy had become antiquated, so we gave it to Old Man Ferrin, whose kind old wife sometimes helped me on haying or threshing days. Charley had at that time the opportunity to get, second-hand, the Mormon white-top with U.S. Mail stenciled on its canvas and dashboard in bold black letters. As Mrs. Raine, who played the harmonica, would have said, it seemed hardly impossible that the white-top could wear out, but it did. And there it stood, out by the granary, a rheumatic old wreck, porcupines coming to play peek-a-boo through the spokes of its wheels, Russian thistles growing thickly, higher than the axles, and dying there and drying up there, in a prickly hedge which would have given pause even to the trumpet of Prince Charming had the Sleeping Beauty been cuddled on one of the ripped seats from which excelsior protruded its coarse, spaghetti hair.
The two-wheeled cart was really purchased for Walter, so that he might get to the high school, six miles away. Florry was chosen to be the cart-horse. She had changed from a bay colt to a gray horse, my astonishment at this course on her part being stunned bewilderment. Charles, eleven years old, harnessed her to the cart and was to be my driver. As we rode along, I kept thinking how hard it was to believe that the frisky little bay colt Florry had grown into this great gray beast almost sitting in our laps, for when she switched her tail, it brushed my knees.
Florry knew me well. Many, many times, when she was that little bay colt, she had forced me to burst shrieking from the kitchen door, to chase the ornery little devil away from the clothes-line. She loved to progress along the line, grasping the clothes between her teeth and dragging them down into the dirt. And when I hung Charley’s trousers out to air, having sponged them with gasoline, pesky Florry would have them by the legs, ready to walk off with them, no doubt congratulating herself on getting a suit out of the thoughtful relations’ box. For while among humans this is a man’s world, horses know nothing about the dominant sex, and not a horse would ostracize Florry had she attempted to wear the pants. Nor would she have to trot off to Hollywood to do it, either. Of course, I was not very ingenious, or I should have seized upon this natural inclination of Florry’s to train her to bring in the clothes off the line.
The dust was so deep, that Primary Election day, that the Lincoln Highway was like a river of flour; so Charles and I decided to
avoid suffocation in the cloud we should make and the denser cloud of more powerful vehicles passing us. We struck out for the desert, where the road paralleling the Hootin’ Nanny was hard and bumpy, with little likelihood of our meeting any one. As a matter of record, we met not a person, though myriads of jack-rabbits scurried out of the sagebrush just ahead of Florry, and we saw a coyote slink across the landscape not so far beyond.
It was hardly a road that we took—more of a trail, interrupted by great, sharp, black lava boulders, the sagebrush scratching at our wheels as we traveled. Florry sidestepped every rock in our way and hauled a cart-wheel over, every few minutes almost throwing one or the other of us out of the cart. Up above, the sky was a pale blue, with fluffy summer clouds, and we could see to the horizon on all sides—mountains north and south, and black buttes to the west. Tar-paper shacks, set amidst green fields, dotted the landscape at far intervals, like little black boxes with slightly curved plank roofs. The warmth brought forth the wild, pitchy odor of the sagebrush, whose bushy, velvet-gray heads crackled as we brushed past it. Jack-rabbits popped all around us, and grasshoppers fired their machine-guns, whirring over us like miniature airplanes, until I kept dodging them with the feeling that they might get into my ears or hair. Distant dogs yipped—always there were farm dogs yipping in the summer, and generally in the winter, no matter when you listened.
Florry, stubborn little devil—or big devil, since she was practically sitting in our laps—Florry refused to tread even the smallest fragment of flinty lava, and there were plenty of splintered lava fragments about, for not far from us was the black cone of an extinct volcano. Charles urged Florry on, and she started to cross a stream under a railroad trestle. Two long planks spanned the water, these slight bridges being intended for the wheels of vehicles. With the utmost insulting determination, Florry planted her great fore-hoofs upon them, perfectly aware, I am sure, that should she be successful in the crossing she designed, the riders in the cart would be cast out like two frozen beans among the refuse rejected by the farmer’s wife. And our fate would be worse than that of the beans. This was evidently a canal; it was axle-deep and very, very wet. Charles had to use all his strength against the horse, seesawing with the reins until a worried look came and deepened on his face.
A little later Florry received her punishment. The whole thing made me think of the struggle of poor Christian, with one difficulty after another. We were now about to enter the Slough of Despond. Florry had no way of saving herself at our expense this time. There were no rocks and no planks, just deep, bottomless, gooey mud, caused by a farmer’s waste water running on this unused road and soaking in, down to bed-rock. Muddy roads are always a part of the irrigation season, but it is a criminal thing to neglect the water as this farmer had evidently done. Certainly it might have been turned in some direction of need.
Water among us sagebrush folks was money. When a man stole your water, he committed grand larceny, no matter how much he himself might feel his crime mitigated by the hymns he sang to Jesus a-Sundays. Water in the sagebrush country is not free, as the rain from heaven. Both the just and the unjust have to pay for it, or it is shut off, though the Water Company is not hard-boiled about it, so far as I know. If your head-gate is stuffed with weeds or gunny-sacks, it may mean the loss of all the money you can make that year, for your crop will die. There is dry farming in Idaho, but our farms were not operated in that manner.
The stores will not carry you forever, though the Hazelton stores were certainly long-suffering, and they must have lost a great deal of money through the farmers being unable to meet their bills. When another farmer steals your water, he takes the clothes from your children’s backs, robs your wife of the medicine she probably needs, takes every penny out of your own overalls’ pocket. It is no wonder that almost every year farmers are killed at the head gates, one discovering another in the act of stealing water. There is sometimes, too, the murder of a ditch-rider who happens to catch the water racketeers, the answer to expostulation being a shot in the head.
Many times Charley came to the house for his gun and with it went walking away in the dusk up our main canal. I knew then that Bab or Baldy had stuffed our mutual head-gate when it was Charley’s right to the water. He said he would fire a shot in the air to scare the guilty robber, but I was never easy until he came back. Then I stabbed him with my eyes to discover his dreadful secret. Fortunately, he never had any. He did not even fire his gun. The gunnysacks or weeds had not been replaced during his absence, and no one appeared, though he sat there with his gun on the canal-bank, in the still of the long evening, for over an hour.
Florry was pretty sore at us by the time she had dragged four hoofs, weighted with a ton or so of mud to each, through that morass. I could tell by the scowl of her backward-pointed ears that she thought we were doing it on purpose. Any moment I expected her to lift a mud-laden hind hoof and lay it, pathetically, in my lap. I am surprised that she did not think of this, instead of blowing out disgusted groans and snorting several Bronx cheers at those goofs in the cart.
The next trial bothered Florry not at all, for though she was in the utmost danger, little did she know it. Right perkily she shook the mud from her hoofs and began tromping and stomping on a condemned bridge. Of course, the County would have been blameless had she stomped and tromped the bridge down into the very wide and deep canal over which we were passing. There was a law in Jerome County at that time (and there may be now, for all I know) that whenever a bridge was about to cave in, the County need not replace it until it did cave in and some one was drowned, if the responsibility of the drowning were shifted to the shoulders of the drowned by posting the bridge in big letters with the words:
THIS BRIDGE CONDEMNED
That’s all. After that you might consummate your own unwilling suicide if you dared. It might be Hen Turner dashing for the doctor, or it might be little Buddy Jean being taken for an appendicitis operation. To go back to the main road would mean a loss of three miles and then the recovering of those three miles, with perhaps fatal loss of time. But it was your funeral if you crossed the bridge. And at next election the county officials could brag of how economically they ran the County when they were in.
Well, we did not burst through. Florry felt so happy that she tromped and stomped her hardest, and lifted her head joyfully, and waggled her ears just to show that she didn’t give a damn for those two idiots in the cart. Yet for all her exuberance we did not go through into that drowning-deep canal. It was not meant to be. I was meant to be a Judge of Election, and not a citizen of that little silent camp on the barren hillside, which we presently passed. There it baked under the pitiless sun, the little mounds of drowned babies and the little syphilitic babe, pocketed, every mound, with gopher-holes.
We entered the little town of Hazel ton, for which I have a particular affection. We passed the tiny frame eating-house of Mrs. Reynolds, who declared that she had once been a servant in the home of President Taft; Longenberger and Belmont’s; Daddy Ayer’s hardware-store; Hank Thorsen’s drug-store; the telephone exchange, in a tiny box of a building; Dunn’s store, where was, in a corner, the post-office from which Mr. Kelley brought our mail; the bank, of which Gundelfinger was head, and before which, after we left the sagebrush, one boy would be murdered and another incriminated, through the machinations of a despicable county official, planning to collect a reward. On the corner opposite the spot where this crime would be perpetrated stood—and still stands, the last I heard—the ugly, bleak, frame hotel.
Charles stopped the cart in front of Hank Thorson’s, and I climbed, very gingerly, around the muddy wheel, thinking for a moment that in order to save my best dress I might be forced to seize Florry’s coarse black tail and pull myself up over her broad flanks. I never did get that white dress I wanted so badly, and the dress I was wearing in that cart was my first and last best summer dress while I lived in the sagebrush. Charley’s sister Laura had sent the goods to me, light blue, with love
ly, fluted, white-organdie scalloping for trimming. I had made the dress myself, and I was almost bursting with the pride I felt in wearing it. Laura will never know what that fresh, new material meant to me. Everything else I ever made on the farm was cut out of something already used. One of my dresses was made of twenty pieces, and you could not see where I had joined them. The result of those days is that now I cannot see a dress without making it over in my mind.
Having said good-by to Charles, I stepped up into the drug-store and asked Hank the direction to the Progressive headquarters. I know he misunderstood me, for he would never have sent me where he did deliberately. It was the drab, gray hotel. I crossed the street to that homely edifice and opened the front door. There was a long, unpainted pine table the length of the dismal lobby. This table was surrounded by men, practically all our local business men except Hank Thorson, although the only faces I can remember were the handsome visages of Charley Barlow, who was manager of the grain-elevator, and Gundelfinger, the banker—both men comparatively young. If the others could have arranged to be handsome, I might have remembered them. But I have an idea they will not die of this disappointment.
As I remember, it was the two men mentioned who arose, smiling, and one of them took a step toward me. They must have thought instantaneously that I was a rebel from the Progressive camp. Yes, I am sure only two of them stood up. If it had been all of them, I should have remembered that. My dress was pretty, and I did look well in it, and there had been a day when I was able to get all men on their feet with such a combination. But I was only a farmer’s wife now, and my skin was burnt, and I had lost that look of easy life which is so seductive. Yet one thing I do remember, and that is that every one of those men smiled most beautiful smiles at me. Still, there are two smiles almost indistinguishable—the admiration smile and the political smile. After all, their smiling might not have been a tribute either to my dress or to my personality.
Annie Pike Greenwood Page 41
