Annie Pike Greenwood

by We Sagebrush Folks

  I knew I could not make a sling for a sick cow, for I never had seen one, and had even neglected to find out whether they are made of rope or of canvas. Besides, I have done a lot of things on the farm beyond my strength or understanding, but it seemed to me that stringing up a cow to a hay-derrick was a pretty ambitious project for a woman of one hundred and twelve, or so, pounds. It might leave me strung up on one end of the rope and Jersey on the other end, and what a sight that would be for a husband when he came home from electioneering around the country—his cow made well by slinging up, and his wife half dead from the same cause.

  I was determined to use every means short of slinging that cow up to the hay-derrick. A gag, I knew, was the first requisite. I had not noticed how Charley made his, nor how he made it stay in the cow’s mouth, so I had to go at the business by the trial-and-error method, the way marriages are made. I took the butcher knife and whittled a stick. Then I tied a rag to each end. With the gag and a big pail I went out to the cow.

  This Jersey was of the dehorned variety. I could not imagine how I was to keep the gag in her mouth. If I tied the rag around her neck, she would hunch about until the gag would be out of her mouth. You can’t tie anything to a cow’s horns when they have been burnt out with acid at the time they started to grow. As I looked at that long, insistent face, I saw there was absolutely nothing to which to tie the rag strings of that gag except her ears.

  She did not like this. She probably remembered her dehorning experience when a calf, and perhaps had the idea that I was trying to de-ear her. I managed, by stretching on tiptoe and almost hanging my weight on her ears, to accomplish my design. But I know now that the cow and the giraffe must have belonged to the same species when our old buggy horse Buttons was a little Eohippus.

  You see, when a cow has eaten alfalfa, she bloats. It would seem more sensible to me to bloat on dried hay and a drink of water, the thing that happens when as a child you eat dried apples and then drink and drink. But cows are far from sensible, though I think they are like a great many people whose stupidity passes for good horse-sense. It should be called cow-sense.

  After a cow has bloated, you save her life by three means, besides stringing up in a sling to the hay-derrick. First, you must hurry to apply a gag, to hold her mouth open so she can belch up the gas, because no gas, no bloat; in fact, if you had some means of degassing a cow at once, you could deflate her like a balloon. The next thing to do is to throw cold water on her flanks. This condenses the gas, I suppose, so that she is not so inflated, but I cannot see how that alone would be of much use, for to stand throwing bucket after bucket of cold water on a cow’s flanks for days and days, just to keep her alive, is one of the few useful things I refuse to do. The third treatment for a bloated cow is to walk her up and down. This moves the gas around in her seven stomachs...or is it five?...and, the gag being properly placed, she then explodes at the mouth, a very interesting performance if it might somehow be used as power to light a house, or something.

  I have omitted one method of saving the cow from death by bloating, but that method I should fear to attempt, not being very sure of a cow’s anatomy. If worse comes to worst, you take a sharp knife and stick the cow in one of her stomachs. You cannot just go at it blindly, even if Nature has arranged the cow for hoarding stomachs. Now, when a human being gets gas on the stomach, he goes to the kitchen for a teaspoonful of baking-soda. I suppose the reason soda is not used with cows is because it would take a bucketful. And, too, I have an idea that some one would have to hold the silly thing’s nose while the soda and water was being poured down her throat, and did you ever try holding anybody’s nose when the whole face was just one big nose?

  A cow may be silly, but after I got that gag in Jersey’s mouth by tying the rags to her ears, she learned how to twitch them off, and I spent every few minutes putting them on again. The cow was so interested in getting rid of the rags that she stopped bellowing, so that if bellowing had been what was the matter with her, I should have had her cured. But her sides were still inflated, and though I do not know whether politicians are right in saying that it is dangerous to have an inflated dollar, what I do know is that an inflated cow is cause for thought.

  In one of the moments when the rags were staying on her ears, I led Jersey down to the canal, forcing her out into the stream as far as possible without being obliged to go along with her. She stood quietly enough, the rags on her ears acting as a “county irritant,” as a doctor from Burley once expressed it when he rubbed the chest of one of our children with some kind of peppy salve. I began throwing pailful after pailful of cold water on her flanks.

  When I had reached my limit of endurance on this fire-brigade business, I led Jersey from the ditch, lovingly and patiently replacing the rags on her ears and the gag in her mouth, and saying a few bad words in an amateurish sort of way. I thought, as I did so, that an hour more of that cow would take all the amateur out of my profanity. Besides, the cow was holding back her gas on purpose. I was beginning to feel sure of that. Just stubborn. She had not belched a belch.

  Mrs. McKaig now came out of the house, and together we paced the driveway, the cow between us, looking as though she were laughing, by reason of the gag in her mouth. I felt very solemn, and I managed to inspire Mrs. McKaig with the same emotion. Charley and I could not afford another cow. This was no joke, unless the cow was of the contrary opinion, as I was beginning to believe.

  But no! This cow was in the last stages of bloat; I was now sure of that. She should be stuck. I wondered, if she got down, whether I should be able to stick her with the butcher knife, and how far back her five stomachs...or is it seven?...run. Just when I was getting to the desperate point of attempting this sort of tapping act, in through the gateway came Old Buttons with the buggy in which Ray McKaig and Charley were still talking politics.

  Upon my explanation, the cow was led to the barn without a word, this being out of respect for Mrs. McKaig, as I afterward surmised. What took place between the two men in the barn, I do not know. But I can tell you that I was hopping mad when Jersey’s calf was born the next week. Maybe I was dumb about mixing up the cultivator with the spring-tooth harrow, but I do think the Baron should have told me a few little things like that. I know he did not feel too modest about the matter, and if such had been his affliction, he might at least have explained, under cover of darkness if necessary, that Jersey was in a delicate condition, the way the newspapers always blush in print.

  I HAD READ so much about germs and bacteria and what-not that I spent my life making things antiputrefactive—I think that word sounds more terrible than “antiseptic.” There was a set of shelves in the little entryway to my kitchen on that sagebrush farm. On these I placed a glass for each member of the family, including Jeff and Tony, for they were boarding with us while putting up the fence. In my neatest script I wrote the name of each person, pasting it on one of those glasses. On the shelf below I put a towel apiece, to match the glasses. The water-bottle hung near, in the shade, exposed to the breeze. I had filled it, and kept on filling it, with boiled water.

  That water was the most evil-tasting stuff I ever put in my mouth. It was perfectly cold, perfectly safe to drink, and perfectly flat. Charley had warned me that men and hogs and horses and cows were likely to use the lower canal, where we got our drinking-water, for their wallowing and bathing. I do not go around smelling folks, like a dog, but it was not necessary in the case of the farmer. I was not afraid he had been bathing in the canal. Maybe it was the flavor of the animals we missed. I think now that it is a mistake to remove all the bugs and microscopical fish and flora and fauna, though fauns are not frequently found in drinking-water in Idaho. Better enjoy your drink of water, and maybe have a sick spell once in awhile, than to have to slosh it down and close your eyes to keep from tasting it.

  There was a north canal, not used by any farm-house, and in this my whole tribe of children learned to swim and dive and float. It was there that the men took t
heir baths. Our men, I mean. I, too, enjoyed its silky, steel-cool waters, the native willows dipping their fingers in its current. I loved it. The boys and men, being the privileged Lords of Creation, with nothing obscene about their noble bodies, were allowed to get into the water without cloth wrapped around them. But Rhoda and I had to wear bathing-suits. Of course, Rhoda was not on the farm that first year, but this book will sprint back and forth like an old woman maundering over her knitting. Or is it bridge these days? I have an idea old women have no memories any more.

  I am sure that Tony bathed as often as the others, but he had a faculty for looking slouchy. Jeff, on the other hand, was immaculate. And the thing that marked him out for me was that he read good books, enjoyed them, understood them. In spite of what he had said to Charley about being willing to marry me, I was not his heart’s inspiration. When he brought our mail, he always sat quietly in a corner to read a handful of letters. I could not help seeing one day that they were addressed to him in what appeared to be a feminine hand. This was confirmed by his voluntary statement, “You don’t know what these letters have meant to me this summer, Mrs. Greenwood.”

  I knew that Jeff was divorced, his wife having run away with another man, taking her baby boy and leaving poor stricken Susie behind. The young wife had fled from those black dresses, the monotony of the farm kitchen, the odor of manure, to more black dresses, more monotony, more smell of manure. But the illusion of sex is one thing that man will never overcome. For that matter, if the illusion called color is a psychic fact, and not a material one, why may not the illusion of sex be a psychic fact, and not a material one? Perhaps the reason it fails so often to mean permanent happiness is because we regard it as material and treat it so, and the soul, the psyche, is thereby lost to us. Marriage need not, of itself, spell disillusionment.

  That first summer began my love for Idaho above all other states I have known. Perhaps it was because I sat up in the clouds, like the God Doré drew for the big rose-colored Paradise Lost we had in the home of my childhood. There is something about mere altitude that clarifies the vision. It was a lovely valley, the blue Minidoka Mountains to the south, the white Sawtooth Mountains to the north, the black, sprawling buttes to the west, and, so often, the thrilling mirages of cañons to the east, where ordinarily we could see no mountains. And there was in my mind the constant sense of a limitless sky, over the surface of which the changing clouds floated.

  One day I brought a bug, which I had preserved in a tumbler, for Jeff to see. “You were telling us about wood-ticks, and I think I have one here,” I said.

  One glance, and Jeff responded, “That’s not a wood-tick, that’s a bedbug.”

  I had been taught that only slattern housekeepers ever had bedbugs, and here was I, at the business of farm housekeeping not a month, with bedbugs to show that I had failed.

  Jeff saw my evident distress and offered this comfort: “They’re right in the wood here. You can’t help it.”

  I had a sneaking suspicion that if they were in the wood, some woman was to blame for getting them there. I am a pretty omnivorous reader, and I had never read anywhere that bedbugs haunt lumber-yards with the idea of being made up into houses.

  When Charley and I were alone, I said to him, “Were you troubled with bedbugs when you slept at Curry’s?”

  “I should say we were,” he answered. “We were eaten alive. We simply could not stand it. As soon as the floor was laid in this house, we brought our bedding right over here. It was ghastly.”

  I did not say a word, I was so appalled. I have changed greatly in the course of my life. I used to feel, when a catastrophe such as that had struck a family, that the guilty persons whose intentions had been innocent enough should be saved the punishment that knowledge of their crime would cause them. Now I spare no one. It saves me from burying all those hideous thoughts within myself. If any one should be forced to share them, it is the persons who caused them.

  I imagined I could exterminate the bedbugs by catching them one at a time. Night after night I got out of bed to kill the dreadful beasts as they crawled up the walls or, worse still, bit the children. I never had a full night’s sleep while that scourge lasted. I kept them down, it is true, by this means, but they continued to appear. I hate to admit that through my inefficiency I suffered the torture of sleepless nights on account of those bedbugs for four years. And every day I took all bedding off the beds, turned the mattresses over, and searched. Certainly I found bedbugs. The house was overrun with them. But one day I traced a bedbug to its lair.

  Upstairs in the unfinished room was a bed with coil springs. Millions of eggs were in these coils, and bedbugs of every age, from little Willie in a bib to Grandpa with a cane. I stared, chilling all down my spine, the saliva beginning to run in my mouth. The latter function meant how much I was going to enjoy what I was about to do. Gasoline. Cans of gasoline. And I poured it in the baseboard cracks. We saw not another of those devilish insects until Hi Hepgard lost his farm and brought all his things to store in our upstairs. But that was years afterwards, and I was not long having them then. I had learned where to look for the racketeers.

  We had other pests. Folks might have bedbugs in the cities, but they could never have packrats and mice with donkey ears and hairy tails. I do not know that this is anything to brag about. We should never have had them either had not the man who built the chimney accidentally left a brick out.

  Those mice were the strangest-looking creatures. Twice as big as a city mouse, and with long, hairy tails and ears like a donkey’s or a rabbit’s. They chewed the fronts from my best dresses before I even knew about them. We slept so well in those days. No worries—we were on the road to fortune, and nothing could stop us. Charley had no parade of debts then, and I did not lie awake wondering what was to become of my children. So the mice could eat the fronts of my silk dresses and I not know until I took them from the nails. It was a good little house, but I should so have appreciated even one clothes-closet. I suppose even a clothes-closet could not have kept out those donkey-mice.

  The mice did not wake us, but the packrats did. They evidently had not learned that the Greenwoods had come until after the mice read it in the paper. But we knew they had come without having to read it anywhere. They lived between the ceiling and the floor of the unfinished upstairs, and they were night-lifers, like the people of New York City, as I have been told. But their night life was not a matter of theaters, cabarets, speak-easies, dances, or city whatnots. They were evidently college rats, training for the packrat Olympics, for they woke us up running, hurdling, pole-vaulting—I am sure it was pole-vaulting—in fact, everything but rowing was practised, and maybe they were planning that. Sometimes there would be a fight, and from the sound I am sure they were using boxing-gloves. We could always hear the squealing of the one getting licked.

  We did have wood-ticks, too, in spite of having more than our share of bedbugs. The wood-ticks did not claim to have come in the lumber. They were content to be brought in on the hairy leg of a piece of sagebrush. I had to look the children over daily, and frequently I found a wood-tick, swelled blue, all Greenwoods having nothing but blue blood. On common folks, of course, they would swell red. Still, I suppose there are scientists who would contend that the peculiar gray-blue was intended as camouflage while the wood-tick was living on the sagebrush. Nature is not so clever. Otherwise she would have taught the wood-tick to turn pink on baby Charles.

  August brought the flies. I had no screens except at the doors, so all summer long the windows were tight shut, except at night: Now I think of it, there were two windows in the bedroom with screens. But I needed all the windows so I could open them. I needed especially to have the dining-room windows open. It was years later that I bought mosquito-netting and tacked it in place myself, even in the upstairs windows, because some one always had to sleep there.

  When I went on the farm, the Government was just the Government to me. It had never done anything conspicuously good
or specifically bad for me. At the time of the Spanish-American War I jilted two young men because they would not volunteer on account of the Government already having its quota. And I nearly married two others because they paraded up and down the main streets of my home town, with other willing college fellows, banners—star-spangled banners—flying. Of course, the Government did have its quota, and I might have been arrested for bigamy, there being a prejudice against anything but progressive polyandry in the United States. It was glorious while it lasted, and no damage done, for none of the fellows went to war, and I did not marry any of them. So that was all the Government meant to me.

  Something about farming makes you want to “settle the Government,” as the farmers say. You see, the Government allows the city man to go right on living as though he were able to do so, but the Government is the friend and helper of the farmer. The Government sent us hard-working farm women the plans for making homemade screens. Market our crops for us? Heavens, no! Why, woman, that’s socialism! Well, what is socialism? Is it anything that will help the farmer and feed the starving poor in the cities? Don’t talk that way, some one might call you a communist! Let’s talk about flies.

  There were plenty of flies to talk about, swarming around that dark-green farm-house. Every morning, as soon as he was up, Charley went out with a gasoline torch and burned flies on the outside walls and under the eaves. Inside, by noon the ceilings would be black. It cost me an hour of my life every summer day, all the years that I lived on that farm, to drive out the flies so that the men could eat in peace.

  I was not a good housekeeper, therefore I could not demand that the manure at the barn be hauled daily to the fields. But it would seem good business to me that this should be done.