Annie Pike Greenwood

by We Sagebrush Folks

  Poor child! Poor young mother! No wonder there was a divorce. Clothes affect the attitude of every one around you, and besides, with you yourself, though you may not know this truth, clothes are ingrowing. Folks must dress attractively, or dreadful material and psychological things happen to them. Psyche means soul, and to me it means something more than your little peanut soul that you bother God about saving for only God knows what. Psyche means all you are, away down under, even where you know nothing about yourself. If you dress in black all the time while you are the young mother of a little child, you blacken that child’s world, its memories of you, and cast a shadow before its future. You give yourself black dreams by night and black dreams by day. It is true that clothes are only whirling electrons and that color is illusion. But an illusion can be the truest fact there is. Whence color? Not by reason of light waves—there is no color in them, or of them. Whence color? All color is psychic...soul...the Ding-am-sich of everything.

  One morning, before the fencing had been completed, I was astonished by the sound of trampling feet just outside my kitchen door. I fairly bolted forth in my amazement, and there before me I saw the rhythmically moving backs of a herd of cattle being driven directly over Charley’s wheat-field, whose light-green blades were just piercing the rich dark soil. Two stubbly-bearded men on horseback, wearing sheepskin jackets, were urging on the animals, although the mist of green on the face of the field was apparent to any eye.

  I cried out, rather excitedly, and my voice can be heard always, “Please! Please! don’t drive your cattle over that field! Can’t you see the young crop growing?”

  The response came with a leer and a sneer: “Your man hain’t no call to fence this here land in. This here’s been a right-a-way ever sence I come to this here country! A right-a-way’s a right-a-way. The law’s on our side. Your man kin go straight t’ hell. We’re comin’ through here now, an’, what’s more, we’re allus comin’ through here, an’ you kin tell ‘im fer us it won’t do ‘im no damned good t’ fence this in, ‘cuz if he does, we’ll cut the wires. You farmers is a damn sight too smart about takin’ up land that belongs, by rights, to the cattlemen.”

  His companion had continued to drive the cattle over our crop, and the speaker spurred his horse to catch up with them. I saw the man who had talked with me ride on ahead and deliberately gather in our cow, which Charley had staked along the upper-canal bank. And was I mad? I have one of those even dispositions that is like dynamite when it gets set off.

  I ran to the barn, where I knew Charley had gone to feed the horses. He had just caught sight of the invaders and was standing outside the little shed-barn, staring in amazement. As I ran toward him, I called, “Charley! They’ve taken Jersey from the canal-bank, and they’re driving her out to the desert!”

  Where Old Buttons was, I cannot remember. Charley mounted Old Nell, one of the great, lumbering farm horses from Kansas, and off they went to the rescue of Jersey. Out in the northern desert where some day the gasoline Split-the-Wind would importantly chug across the landscape, there he found Jersey, cut her from the herd, and told the herdsmen what he thought of them. It was not any better than what they thought of him. It is a waste of time to tell folks what you think of them. They know already, and if they don’t know, it is because they don’t care. Too much talk in the world, I say.

  For Time is the answer to all things. Either you get what you want in the course of time, or you do not, and getting what you want usually means plugging away at the job and hanging on through thick and through thin, through scorn and through praise. The cattlemen could be on the job of herding only a part of the year, while the farmer was there all the time.

  There was no road beside our farm when the herdsmen drove over our crops, for there was no beside—nothing but sagebrush desert, with a Mormon farm in the far distance, recognizable by its clump of well-grown trees, and the Endicott farm in the near distance. At first, for some time the cattle-herders cut our fences with wire-clippers, which they carried for the purpose; but after awhile there were too many acres fenced in, and, besides, there came to be a well-marked road, running north and south, out to the desert. But our troubles were never done, so far as they were concerned, for year after year the cattle broke our fences and feasted at our stacks of hay.

  THE MAIL! That first summer we had no mail except when Jeff and Tony went to the desolate town of Milner and brought it back to us. I could see them coming up the road on Jeff’s wagon, Tony beside Jeff, and little Susie standing between his knees, as Walter had stood at my knees when we drove from Milner for the first time. I knew it meant mail, and my heart danced joyfully. I would run to the kitchen door and “Hoo-hoo, Charley!” so you could hear it over the eighty acres. If he could come,’ he would hurry to the house.

  At that time our only driveway was straight past the toothpick-pillared porch. We were so lonely we had to have folks come directly to us. I might say here that Jeff’s wagon was practically the only vehicle that made use of this road. There was no one else to come. Even the various kinds of farm agents had not yet discovered us. As the years went by, these would swarm about us like bees at the smell of honey. They would put us on their regular routes, and we would receive them in our home as guests.

  I could hear Jeff’s “Whoa!” and Tony calling to Susie to come down on the side of the wagon where he was standing, instead of attempting to descend alone on the other side, as she always did, in the kind of hating-the-whole-world way poor little Susie had. Can you blame her? There is not a much wickeder thing that can happen to a child than to be deserted by its mother. The outrage is not comparable with being deserted by its father. That may never affect the child. But to be torn from the breast from which it drank its life, in such confidence of continued and unselfish love, does something to a child which will affect every human relationship it has so long as it lives.

  The bright light in their eyes was for me, as they came trooping up on the toothpick-pillared porch. Susie came first, not because she wanted to, but because Tony thrust her before him as he came. Jeff had been left to bring the mail, but both men were bearing goodies for me, a box of candy from Tony and a box of sweet cherries from Jeff. I am about equally fond of chocolate creams and sweet cherries, so the gifts were much appreciated. Both of them seemed anachoristic as you saw the miles and miles of sagebrush desert through our open front door.

  For several days after their trip to Milner our house would be littered with papers and letters, purposely so, that we might read again what Cousin Joe said, or my sister Florence, or Charley’s sister Margaret, or my sister Hattie, or Charley’s sister Laura, or my brother Bert, or Charley’s brother Ed, or my father. My mother had died when I was a little girl—my wise, delightful, laughing mother. I remembered her. How could a child forget so much love and laughter?

  Rob, Hattie’s husband, sent us Eastern papers, which he, in turn, received from his brother. For years he sent these papers to us, and in the course of time they came to be shared by the whole district, children coming miles for them when they were expected to have arrived and been read by the Greenwoods.

  I was the only one who cared for the New York Times Book Review section, and you cannot know how much I cared. You see, I was transplanted there on that farm by Charley and Fred and the man who wrote about the eggs that, laid end to end, had bought a farm or something, but inside me I had always been a writer. I had sung before I could write, and I remember as one remembers first love that moment when I knew I had been born to write. I was reading aloud the first story I ever read, out of my little brown Appleton’s First Reader, and an ecstasy suddenly shook my heart. I looked up as though at the call of a vision, and I exclaimed aloud, to myself—there was no one near—“I can do that! I can write like that!” And I had never written a line, so how could I know?

  Yes, I was a born writer, but I could not write. I used to wonder as I pored over the Times Book Review whether I should ever write a book that would be reviewed there. A
nd well might I have wondered, and wondered with justifiable apprehension. I could not write, though I thought I could. I was not depending on the opinion of any one as to whether I could be successful in that field. Many born writers fail because they never really learn to write. And some, alas! succeed for the same reason. But all of them must write just the same, no matter what the outcome. They cannot stop, any more than they can stop breathing, until they die. If you do not write in that passion, you are not a born writer, but you may be very successful at writing just the same.

  The farm made me write. I was too lazy, had I been in the midst of luxury, to persist, although I should have continued to be tortured by the urge to write. Now my torture consisted in not being able to write. There was so little time for that.

  There was excuse for my not being able to do on that farm all that was forced upon me by circumstances. I had been an invalid child, psychic, somnambulistic, and I had suffered through childhood so that I was not expected to live. I had suffered as a young girl, and I made no complaint, not through bravery, but because I took for granted that everybody else felt as I did. I had no self-pity, but I look back with deep, impersonal pity now at that young girl, suffering uncomplainingly, with no one who had sensitiveness to help her bear her pain. Ah, well! who suffers in youth reaps the power to understand in age.

  I was an extremely good housekeeper that first summer. That, or my cooking, or possibly just that I was the only woman they ever saw, led Jeff and Tony, separately, to confide solemnly to Charley, “If I could get a woman just like your wife, I would marry tomorrow.”

  Charley told me, with that air of sanctification which bespeaks the sense of proprietorship a man feels when his wife is praised by other men. As for me, I was slightly chilled by the word “tomorrow.” Why not today?

  I did manage well that summer, for my duties were only slightly increased over those I had handled in our bungalow. That was not farming. It would be farming when I should rise at four to work in the garden and continue working all day, without let or stop, until ten at night—or possibly, with luck, until nine, with a precious, precious hour after nine to sit at my old typewriter and write the tiredness out of my aching back and my cracked-heeled, burning feet.

  When we really farmed, I did not know how to manage. I took too much on myself, as I have done in every occupation I ever followed. Had I not astounding vitality, I should have killed myself many times over. Mrs. Asper managed well. She planned everything, and she put everybody to work. The supreme art of managing is to keep other people working and leave yourself free to think and plan. Mrs. Curry taught me brave adaptability, but Mrs. Asper was an example to me of good management—an example by which I did not profit then, but which some day I hope to use.

  It would have been a matter of good sense for me to have saved myself. After there were farms around us, and the farmers used to flow to our living-room to hear Charley talk (he is an excellent talker), rain pouring outside, instead of allowing them to “settle the Government,” as they called their informal conventions, I should have appeared among them with scrubbing-brushes and soap and rags and set them to work, for that was something they could do; for so far as settling the Government is concerned, it looks as though God Almighty would have to dip his sponge in the Milky Way and wipe us out and begin again. The way things look to me, I have a good mind to stop this writing right now and go out and begin building an ark with grocery boxes I can get free from Tom the grocer, in our neighborhood. I have two cats with which to start the animals. And it looks like rain.

  That first summer we went to Lateral Eight to a dance in the Riverside school-house. It turned out to be a most solemn occasion. A handful of young people in new Twin Falls clothes moved solemnly about. I felt entirely out of place. Not because I was not dressed as well, for I was even better dressed, my New York clothes, ordered in Kansas, as I always bought, bearing very well the comparison. But I did not belong among those sad-faced young dancers. I love so to dance that I cannot help smiling. And I cannot help smiling most of the time. To be truthful, R.L.S.’s little jingle should be revised, and then it might apply to those dancers:

  The world is so full of the changing of things,

  I’m sure we should all feel as upset as kings.

  Jeff and Tony and little Susie went in Jeff’s wagon, and Charley and Walter and little Charles and I went in our narrow-gage buggy, riding high on one side, either Charley’s or mine, because the ruts were broad-gaged, Old Buttons jogging along, the harness making that soo-soo-soo sound that harnesses make when horses jog. I had such good babies. Night or day they never cried, and always they gazed around, too busy taking everything in to want to be the center of interest. At the school-house Charles had slept on a desk, and Walter had sat near him, serious, as always, yet with a mine of humor within him, which of course we did not then know.

  Jeff took the lead there, his wagon bumping and rattling ahead, and going home he did likewise. Suddenly one of our front buggy-wheels struck a big piece of broken lava so forcibly that my sleeping baby was thrown from my arms, out into the brush. There followed not the faintest cry, and my heart stood still at the implication. My baby must have struck his head on a piece of the lava that lies about in that region. He must be dead. I sat there stupefied, unable to utter a sound, trying to realize the horrifying calamity that had befallen me in that second of time after the buggy had struck the boulder. This was how such tragedies came to people. Unsuspecting, they go out for pleasure, and come home to mourn.

  Hearing Charley’s shout as we struck the boulder, Jeff drew rein and called back, “What’s the trouble?” He did not wait for a reply, but was down over the side of his wagon before Charley could get out of the buggy. I was too stunned to follow their conversation, but I could hear them scraping through the brush, looking for little Charles. In a moment they would bring my dead baby to me. I would have to carry him thus all the way home. I was turned to stone. A few seconds, and Jeff laid him in my arms, perfectly well, perfectly sound asleep.

  HOW WE SLEPT that night, after our ride through the brush to the school-house, dancing, and riding back again through the brush! In the night, while we were asleep, the canal overflowed its banks, making a lake of the coulée below our house, and a very deep lake it was, formed of the V-shaped coulée. This was a strip of land very difficult to farm; hence Charley had decided that it was just the place to stake out Jersey. In the night, at the back of my dreaming unconsciousness, I thought I heard a cow bawling. But a cow bawling meant nothing to me at that stage of my life. There comes a time on the farm when you develop antennae of sensitiveness all over your body. You feel that things are wrong out at the barn, or the chicken-house, or what-not, and to hear a cow bawling even in the back of your dreams will bring you stark awake with the swiftness of light reporting a long-dead star—a dart, and you would be running down the hill to that cow, clothes or no clothes.

  It was too bad that poor Kansas Jersey had been forced by fate into the hands of city farmers. Of course you know what happened. It haunted me. I thought I should have saved that cow’s life, though probably my idea of saving a cow’s life at that time might have been to float the ironing-board out to her so that she could cling to it with her hoofs. One thing I did. I vowed that no cow ever again should lose her life on that farm if it were in my power to save her.

  I was put to the test late that summer, when Ray McKaig was proselyting for members to support the Non-Partisan League. His very lovely wife, Leah, came with him, and I was rejoiced at seeing another woman. She said her feet were hot and tired. Had she paid me this call in the city, I should have let it go simply with expressing my sympathy. But we did things differently in the sagebrush. I expressed the sympathy, and then I went and got a foot-tub, and a really-truly Kansas towel, instead of the beet-seed sacks the men used, and a bar of toilet soap, and she drew off her shoes and stockings and sat there bathing her poor feet while we talked. She and Ray had tried farming in North Dakota. S
he had been a teacher of English, and he was a young minister when he met her. They had not been able to bear, without protest, the wrongs of agriculture. So they had given up the farm.

  We sat there talking together while she bathed her feet. I was so happy in being with another woman that the new cow had a hard time making herself heard, although she was bawling at the top of her voice, and her long, hairy, lugubrious face was almost pressed against the window-pane. Suddenly I remembered my vow, which I considered as sacredly given as that old one of Hippocrates, sworn to so solemnly by my father when he began his practice of medicine. Here was a cow in distress, for some reason. Perhaps I could save her life.

  I told Mrs. McKaig the tragedy of our first cow’s Ophelian death, though not with flowers in her hair, and asked her to excuse me while I investigated the cause of Jersey II’s woes. She said she would put on her shoes and stockings and help me. One look at that cow was enough. I had seen her before, when Charley had treated her for bloat. I could well see that unless extreme remedies were given, and that at once, even slinging her up to the hay-derrick could not save her. I had heard the farmers say to Charley that when a cow is sick and lies down, if you can only keep her on her feet she will not die. So they make a sling, wrap it around the sick cow, and string her up to the derrick, just high enough for her hoofs to touch the ground. If she dies, it means you did not get her up there soon enough. Medical science does so much experimenting with animals for the sake of humanity....I pass on this slinging-up business to physicians, who could maybe save many a life by slinging up all the sick folks so they would have to stand. I leave the details to the doctors, whether they sling the sick people up to the chandeliers or have hay-derricks in all the city streets.