“Now, folks, here’s a rockin’ cheer as fine as ever you see, just see how easy...to sit down on when you come in tired from milkin’...or from cookin’ for thrashers...and cheap...cheap...at any price. How much am I offered...what do I hear? Who’ll make it twenty-five cents...twenty-five cents...who’ll make it twenty-five cents? Twenty-five cents did I hear? Twenty-five cents it is! Who’ll make it fifty cents?...make it fifty...fifty...who’ll make it fifty...thirty-five do I hear? Who’ll make it fifty...fifty...That’s right! fifty it is. Who’ll make it seventy-five...why, you couldn’t get a cheer like that less’n five dollars...who’ll make it seventy-five...seventy-five...strong back, look at them rockers, last a life time...who’ll make it seventy-five? Seventy-five it is! Who’ll make it a dollar...a dollar...who’ll make it a dollar?...”
We are all dead still, staring at the rocker as though we had never seen one before. It is rather a miserable little rocker; most of us would not feel flattered to have it given to us, but somebody is going to buy it in a minute...somebody is going to get it away from us...the chance of our lifetime, and somebody will get it away from us....
The auctioneer is perspiring, his iron-gray hair falling from under his peaked cloth cap into expressionless wide eyes, mustache waggling. “A dollar...a dollar...a dollar...How ‘bout you, brother? Ain’t you gonna bid a dollar on this here fine rockin’ cheer?...A dollar it is!...”
The auctioneer wears a red and black mackinaw and overalls. He has big overshoes pulled over the bottoms of the legs, for the ground around the barn may be soggy with cow and horse manure. He was a farmer’s son on a farm out in Ioway, and he learned auctioneering when a lad. All over the sagebrush country he is in demand at sales. This being our first sale, he has not been among us before. He is not overanxious about the sale. We look like a pretty poor bunch of future customers.
“A dollar...a dollar...Won’t someone gimme more than a dollar? Once a dollar!...twice a dollar!...you!...Can’t you bid moren’ a dollar? No? Three times a dollar!...and sold to this man over here with the ear-muffs on his cap!”
As the sale is getting nearer and nearer to the fish dishes, my heart begins to throb. I cannot lose them. I know they must be antique something or other. Of course, with my poltergeist gift I shall have them all broken inside of a month, but I shall enjoy the feeling of passing them on to my grandchildren as heirlooms, even if it never happens. The sewing-machine is sold, the couch is sold, the coal-oil stove is sold, and all without my consciousness. There I stand with eyes riveted on those goggle-eyed red-and-yellow fish dishes. And now they are up. I must keep control of myself. If I appear anxious, every one of these frightfully greedy creatures close around me will bid them out of sight.
The auctioneer begs for bids on the fish dishes. Begs almost with tears in his flat, expressionless eyes. Begs with disgust in his voice. I bid. Ah, that makes Mrs. Hatch chirp up. I might have known she would try to get those fish dishes away from me. I brace myself. If we have to, the Baron must pawn the crown jewels. Or maybe a calf. But Mrs. Hatch dares not falter another chirp. Perhaps she does not like fish. And then again, it may be that those fish dishes do not look to her like antiques. Besides, I cannot imagine her going mad over antiques. Oh, I do love folks who go mad over antiques!
The fish dishes are mine, and for a fish’s song, which I think everyone will agree is about the smallest song there is. I carry them joyfully to the white-top and come back to trail the men to the corral, where the auctioneer is already shouting, “What am I bid for this here fine heifer, bred from a bull whose mother gave twelve pounds of butter a week....”
Only a city greenhorn would laugh at a cow giving butter. We all knows what he means, and not a smile changes a face. We are all intent and serious. The other women gather in little groups apart, far enough removed from the men folks not to seem to be listening. But Old Lady Babcock, wearing one of her husband’s coats and one of his old felt hats, is as close to the auctioneer as possible. He is on the other side of the pole fence around a small corral just outside the shed barn, and Mrs. Greenwood is hanging over the top of the pole fence—as she would be! Oh, me! the trial that woman has been to me! Especially since the Baron is a little conscious of the fact and would have her go over where the other women are, and she knows it and never stirs. Why should she care? She is rich in antique fish dishes, bought for a fish’s song, and she doesn’t give a damn what any one thinks about her hanging over the pole corral fence and listening to the fascinating auctioneer. She means to write a book sometime and put him in it, and she must remember how he looks and sounds. And...oh, yes! He pauses for a moment so the men can feel the heifer with their hands, and look in its mouth, and maybe in its ears, and he takes out a plug of tobacco and bites off a big chaw. That is the signal for all hands to reach into all hind pockets and all teeth to bite off big chaws. The mother of the calf is standing near, and she and the farmers all begin to chaw together. No wonder Mrs. Greenwood hangs over the pole fence, watching, fairly mesmerized by all those moving jaws. The Baron is not chewing, but he cannot fool me. I know. I would never have married...And if he had known how crazy I am about writing...
I look out beyond the corral, beyond the pole fence, beyond the barbed-wire fence, and there as far as I can see lies the sagebrush desert, the horizon a line of white tents, the peaks of the Sawtooth Range. I can see jack-rabbits leaping among the clumps of sagebrush all along the line where in a short time will be laid the track for the Sage-hen, Gallopin’ Goose, Hootin’ Nanny, Gasoline Split-the-wind, or whatever other name the sagebrush farmers exercise their humor inventing for the important, puffing little train of one engine, one caboose, one car, that will ply from Bliss to Minidoka and back. Nothing is there now, the auctioneer’s voice being the loudest sound on that desert air, except when the mother of the heifer lets out a long, melancholy Mo-o-o-o!” in the faces of those tobacco-chawing males, or when the hog Old Bab is buying, in spite of Old Lady Bab’s emphatic protests, expresses a disgusted bass “Awnk! Awnk! Awnk!” waddling impatiently from under Bab’s thumping fingers.
I know that Old Lady Babcock is not the only woman watching her man with anxious distrust. Not one of us farm folks has any business to be buying anything—no, not even extraordinarily valuable fish dishes, even for a fish’s song. Yet everything is sold at last, and we are all herded around the gasoline stove, with Mrs. Hubert and Mrs. Hatch passing dozens of tin cups, rented from Daddy Ayres, the hardware man in Hazelton, and handing out the two dishpanfuls of thinly buttered buns. If any one had offered us such a meal at one of the farm-houses, we should have gone on a hibernating sulk, but to get it for nothing, out here in the open air, coming only miles to do so, standing first on one foot and then the other, there being no seats, scalding our throats with chicory—I wonder about the Baron, who has to have the best brand of coffee on the market—why, just to get it for nothing, with a cold bun thrown in—or down, if you mean throats—who could resist such a bait?
Being through first, for I cannot drink much coffee and was not sure about chicory, I went out to the white-top to gloat over my fish dishes, and as I was in the midst of my gloating, I happened to lift my eyes to see Charley coming toward the white-top, carrying in his arms that atrocious old coal-oil stove. What could I say? Nothing. Since we could not afford the kerosene, it never came down from upstairs. Charley had paid two dollars and seventy-five cents for that old stove, and I used to go upstairs and glare two dollars and seventy-five cents worth of glares at it. But every time I looked at the fish dishes I felt humbled. We didn’t need them either, even if I did get them for a fish’s song. I could not use them for fruit. There is something sickening about seeing a fish’s goggle-eyed head peering up at you through your stewed peaches.
I never went to another sale, but Charley attended them all, bringing home various pieces of outdoor equipment; but since I did not know how much these things cost, or how the Baron was ever going to pay for them, all sales being on time, it did not
worry me. I was a pretty good woman about keeping my place—if you call being a good woman spending most of my life cooking myself over the kitchen range. I was the ideal woman signified by the old German proverb, “A woman is to be from her house three times; when she is christened, married, and buried.”
In the course of time, there was a sale at Simon Heminway’s, one at Old Bab’s, and one at Eb Hall’s, among many others. These were years after the Hubert sale. It took years for Eb Hall finally to give up his farm—have it taken away from him. His was the farm on which, a long time after he left, I sat eating three ice-cream cones, my back to a tree, at the conclusion of that rabbit-drive described earlier in these pages. His good wife had planted old-fashioned flags and lilac-trees around the place, and the reason I could lean my back against a big tree was because it was one of the first trees ever planted in that desert, and it had been Eb Hall’s hands that had planted it.
The Hubert sale really caused the loss of Eb Hall’s farm. Eb had come into the district at the same time as the Huberts. That was about three years before the Greenwoods settled on the hill above the school-house. The Huberts had come with capital; the Halls had come with nothing but a wagon, a team of horses, a cow, and a hog. They had managed to get trusted for what they absolutely needed, and Eb told me that for months that little family had lived on lumpy Dick, bread, butter, and milk. A sack of flour and a cow—with a very little sugar and some salt. That was all. When I asked about lumpy Dick, Eb explained that it was made by stirring white flour into boiling salted water. This made a kind of mush, impossible to keep from having some lumps in it. That brave little family made a joke of it. “Lumpy Dick for breakfast!” “Come, sit up; lumpy Dick for dinner!” “Gosh, I’m hungry! Where’s the baby? Lumpy Dick for supper! Lots of folks is starving tonight, children, but we got good old lumpy Dick!”
The whole district had seen the Huberts drive proudly away in their new car—the very first car ever owned by any of us. They had money enough to buy a new farm in another part of the state, for Miss Butterworth and her brother had bought the farm from them. We envied them their prosperity, but we would not have left our farms, not any of us, and every one of us expected, in a short time, to be driving on the Lincoln Highway in our own shining new cars.
One day I was startled by the approach toward the toothpick-pillared porch of a great Studebaker car. We still had the driveway past the very front of the house, before it was moved beyond the top of the orchard fence. At the whirring of the big machine I ran out on the porch, and there...there...was my good Mormon friend Eb Hall and his quiet, efficient wife, with their five little children fairly boiling over the sides of that car!
Charley came from the granary, looking as amazed as I felt. This was Eb’s explanation: “Well, yuh see, Charley, it’s jes’ this-a-way. I come t’ this country the same time George Hubert come here...me and him was a-buildin’ our houses at the same time. And when I see him with his auto, I figgered if he could do it, so could I! Ain’t she a bird?”
Yes, she was a bird—an albatross, hanging around the neck of poor Eb Hall. The very next day after Eb brought her in for us to see, he ran head-on into another car, and the damage to both cars cost Eb three hundred dollars, and he did not have even one hundred dollars in the world. That meant a mortgage plastered on his farm and stock, a mortgage to pay interest on while he paid for his car, his taxes, his water, and his land. What Eb had overlooked was that Hubert had begun without debts and had concluded without debts.
There was a long, heart-breaking strain to keep the Hall place, and every day Charley and I saw cheerful, fine Eb at our farm, for he always called on his way to the mail-box, or from it, bringing our mail also up the hill. It was no use. The Halls finally lost the farm, their stock, and the car. All they had left was the wagon and a team, with which they left the country, to go down to Utah, where they might farm among their own relations, getting a little financial help as needed. I was sorry to have Eb go. We used to have such grand times talking about what God must be thinking. And I still wonder. But maybe Eb knows. I heard that he died two years after the little family left us.
Old Bab and Old Lady Babcock could not make a go of it, either. All they were able to call their own in the end was a little stock, and this, sold, just helped them to reach the Oklahoma oil-fields, where some one had written Bab there was a fortune to be picked up. If there were any gushers there that could beat Old Bab when he had one of his mads on, I’d like to see it.
Simon Heminway gave up farming some time before he left. Simply could not make any money at it. So he went with the truck he was buying on time to Twin Falls, peddling vegetables which he bought from wholesale produce-dealers in the town. When he had the truck paid for, he let his land go back to the Water Company, sold what little stock he had, made the truck into a house, and started off for the orange-ranches of California. The family would live in the truck until, by some miracle of God, they could own an orange-orchard.
SAID MARK TWAIN about the farming of Henry Ward Beecher, “He was a very inferior farmer when he first began...and now he is fast rising from affluence to poverty.” City farmers, city dreamers—Old Bab and Simon Heminway, the Greenwoods, Hib the baker, all city dreamers. But there was Eb Hall, and all the other real-farmer dreamers. It may possibly take dreams to make money, although usually the money does not go to the dreamers. What is certain is that it takes money to fulfil dreams. My sister-in-law had a dream of my raising white peacocks, though what for, heaven only knows. To a farmer they would have seemed a horrible waste of meat and feathers, and no one else would ever see them, however they paraded in that sagebrush wilderness. And she wrote to the Baron about sometime having a grilled iron gateway to our farm with the name in large letters above: GREENWOOD. Well, I never punctured her pride in the supposition that our rural district had its name from her brother. Until I wrote this book, I never told any one but Charley of Mrs. Sullivan’s letter.
It is just as foolish and dangerous for a city man to take his family out in the sagebrush to farm as it would be for the local barber to attempt an operation for gall-stones with a razor and a shaving-mug. And yet, we city farmers did very well alongside the born farmers, and we might have succeeded entirely were not the world of agriculture ruled by the middlemen who know no law but that of profit to themselves. I cannot understand why we think we have reached the perihelion of civilization when the state of national economics is in the dark ages.
After we lost our farm, I watched from the living-room windows the sale of the stock. It was all that belonged to us, except our shabby household goods. I saw Florry led out for inspection, beside the octagonal barn-red granary. She was now a big gray mare, turned that way from a bay colt, but I do not think she turned gray from being on the farm, as I have heard this is the habit of bay colts. She was sold, to whom I did not notice and did not want to know; I felt a pang that I had ever been cross with her about chewing the sheets off the line.
Napoleon Bonaparte, or Bony, as we generally called him, with noble head and ridiculously small body, had been sold some time before the farm sale. But there were led out to the auction-block our other faithful slaves, Abe, Bess and Bonny, and the thoroughbred Star, most beautiful and brilliant and unmanageable of all. Sold!...sold!...sold!...Strange faces, strange hands, strange stalls, strange fields. They would not like it. How could they?
All the cats and dogs had been given away, carried off with questioning, reproachful, backward looks at their mother, and that was I. “How can you do this?” they seemed to say, “and how do you know that we will be treated considerately?” I did not know. I had to shut out the thought of my poor animal children.
It was not right that we should fail, Charley and I, and yet it was right. It was not our just reward, but it was our best reward. There is a saying among the sagebrush farmers that the first settlers clear and plow the land for those who are to own it. Not only did we fail from lack of capital, but we had pioneering problems such
as no other frontiersmen ever had.
My young mother and father had been Western pioneers, but every one in the whole West was a pioneer then, and the East was a foreign country. We in the sagebrush were surrounded by civilization, touched elbows with it at every turn, yet we lived under conditions much more primitive than those my mother and father endured. For grandfather and his brother were men with money; their wives, who were sisters, had never done any manual labor in their lives. They were both musicians, and their melodeons came to Utah with them by οx-team across the wide plains. Grandfather at once built a comfortable house, so comfortable that it could compare favorably with houses of today. My father, a young pioneer physician, took my mother to a home almost, if not quite, as comfortable, not long afterward building her a mansion, the home in which my childhood and early youth were spent. Pioneers! I was the one who knew what pioneering means!
My father was a pioneer physician, and we were just farmers. Even the farmers of my father’s day were more fortunate than we, because their market was where they were—their own homes and the town near them. We planted for a mythical market, which rose or fell as the middlemen dictated, practically all the time to our disadvantage.
Annie Pike Greenwood Page 50
