On the very first day of school I had discovered that my children knew nothing of music, even in some primitive form. With three exceptions, the only instrument they had ever heard was the harmonica. The only singing they had ever heard was that of their own families and of the cowboys. Nearly all of them had heard a harmonica, but not nearly all of them had heard a cowboy sing, for most of their parents were too poor to have hired hands, and the cowboys were working for the wealthy cattlemen.
When I told the children, that first day, to sing with me “America,” I was horrified to hear the sound they made. In every school there are monotonists, children without ear for music, blind in their music sense. There were, of course, some of these in that old school-house, as was to be expected. But what was the matter with the rest of them? They must have tried to sing at some time. I decided that the trouble lay in the fact that they, and their parents before them, had never really heard any music—or should I say, never heard any real music?
I hatched the plan then to have the children help me to do the janitor work, which, I learned, was worth five dollars a month. With this we could begin making payments on a school Victrola, the advertisements of which had so fascinated me. I could take some of my school pay to start things, and I would buy a number of the best records obtainable. While my pupils were learning, they should learn right.
Then Revener Klyte told me we were expected to grub all the sagebrush with which we heated the school-house. I was so anxious to get that phonograph in the school-room that I saw the phonograph and not the grubbing. Not many things would be accomplished in this world if we counted the cost rather than considered the desired end. For one thing, half the marriages that are now made would never be made, and there would be very few children born. In fact, there is no more perfect example of keeping the mind on the phonograph and omitting all thought of the sagebrush than the great biological urge.
Again I was hurt when I saw those brave little children trying to help me grub sagebrush with their sore hands. As time passed, of course, their hands healed, but the weather grew increasingly cold and pierced through the cracks in that, poorly constructed building as a knife cuts through bread. The brush was no sooner in the stove than, with a roar, it seemed to have passed up the chimney.
I knew that the district was not poor, receiving, as it did, a comparatively large amount of taxes from the railroad that ran through the southern part. Of course, a new school-house was being built with some of these funds, but the more I thought of how it was being built at the expense of those children, the madder I got. Even if we had not been compelled to take an ax and chop sagebrush from the acres surrounding the school-house, the little children gathering it up and carrying it in, I should still have been indignant. The district could afford coal.
With the determination to pry some coal loose from the trustees, I stopped at the house of the Revener Klyte on my way home from school one night. He was seated, comfortably reading, in his prayerful clothes, close to a little pot-bellied stove in the front room, and I noticed near his feet the hod filled with coal. It gave me courage. As tactfully as is possible for a woman who is not tactful, I made my request for school-house coal.
“Do you have coal at your home, Mrs. Greenwood?” he asked, clipping his words carefully. He was looking out of the window, not at me.
“That’s different. Mr. Greenwood gets the brush, and can keep putting it into the stove, because he has the time. The children and I have to...”
“Do any of those children have coal on their farms?”
He knew they did not, and it made me boil to have him bait me that way.
“It isn’t the same...,” I began, when he interrupted again.
“Then,” he continued, just as though I had answered his question, “I can’t see any reason why the school should have coal. The children are not used to anything but brush. You’ll find a lot of things you’ll have to get along without here in Idaho.”
True, damnably true, but why should he rub it in? And why should he so unctuously enjoy the prospect in a kind of lustful anticipation? He was a former Baptist, or else Methodist, minister, and he was supposed to believe in all that Jesus taught; but he got only so far as “Suffer the little children..,” and he believed in letting them suffer.
I went over to Charley Willey’s then. I had better sense than to try to carry the question of coal over the head of one of the trustees. Of Mr. Willey I asked only a load of sagebrush occasionally, as we needed it. This he promised me, and it was a source of joy to the whole school when a sagebrush-pile grew beside the open shed barn, where the children kept their horses tied during the day, feeding them every noon the hay brought for that purpose, as soon as they had eaten their lunches.
Among the young men who had come to school after spud-picking was one I had never seen before. He was one of the most mischievous I ever knew, yet possessed of the most gallant manners. Indeed, he was the only one of the children who could be said to have any manners. They were not any of them rude, but they did nothing unless told to do it, though willingly enough then. Keith was different. He thought of pretty things to do. When the county superintendent visited the school, all the other children just stared as she stopped her buggy beside the school-house gate. Keith alone ran out and, with a charming smile, asked to be permitted to tie her horse to a post. Where he got this delightful gift, I cannot imagine. It was far from indigenous to the sagebrush.
Ah!...but the other side of the shield! Keith was a little devil. I mean a big devil. He was about six feet tall, with a laughing eye and a rippling tone to his voice. He set the sagebrush-pile on fire, just to see it burn. It burned beautifully. Teacher watched it, too, when faithful William came running with the dreadful news. Then she sat down to the rickety little table and wrote:
DEAR MR. QUAILPUT: Keith had a little accident today with our newly hauled sagebrush-pile. Would it be possible to allow him time tomorrow (Saturday) to haul another load for us? We have no other fuel.
I signed it, and when Keith came into the school-house with the others, at the summons of the bell, there was still a wicked devil in his eye, slightly subdued by some apprehension in my direction. All eyes were fastened on me with the one question, “What are you going to do about this?” Even Keith looked at me, a trifle uneasily. I just stood there, gazing straight ahead, with expressionless face, for a full minute. That was not accidental, nor the result of anger or agitation. I had learned that in the school-room there are no more powerful means of discipline than quietness of manner and well-designed silences. Add to this the power of the human eye, and there is little need for any other medium of control.
But back of the straight, long, calm look you give the erring child, there must be somebody looking who has already inspired the respect of that child. All the looking in the world will not move a child if the one looking is a being whom the child disapproves. He may be held in honor by adults. But children know, and it is the children who are right. The child has some of the instincts that belong to other animals, their intuitions, and almost their guidance. We grown folks...”For a cap and bells our lives we pay...”
When the room had become so still that we could hear the dogs on the next farm yipping at the heels of some animal, then I spoke, in an exceedingly low voice, looking for the first time at Keith. “You will please remain for a moment after school, Keith.”
He was gonna git it! He was gonna git it good! Teacher had never before been so still and so unsmiling. The sense of this well-justified catastrophe pervaded the room during the whole afternoon, making my pupils very quiet. I never had any trouble with discipline. I never thought of it. What I did think about was self-discipline. What am I doing now? How am I looking and speaking? What are my actions conveying? A badly behaved, restless school-room usually means an undisciplined teacher. Pupils are nearly always the reflection of the teacher. I have qualified those last two statements because the day was coming when I should learn that the strictest self-d
iscipline is of no avail where there is conflicting authority. That day was a long way in the future—many, many years away. I shall tell you about it later, here in this book of rambling reminiscences of those golden years which gave me the right to say, “We sagebrush folks.”
Keith was free to leap on his horse and dash out of sight, as he did all the other nights. The children, as they marched out, were not any too sure of him, their eyes, still accusing and condemning, fastened upon him, seated there alone at the place he had taken for his own, before the unpainted, home-carpentered kitchen table.
When they were gone, he leaped up lightly and marched to my desk with an uncertain smile on his face. He was feeling a little guilty. He had not wanted to win my bad opinion, although he had so wanted to burn that sagebrush-pile. Most of us would really prefer to do right, but temptation clouds our better impulses and makes us blind to everything except that which we desire. If temptation be removed, or rejected, or satiated through gratification, we still feel that scrap of God in each of us which makes us wonder at our former weakness. This, so analyzed, is what we call remorse.
Because I did not answer his smile, Keith hung his head. Had I tried force on that great six-footer, he would have laughed and left me. And he would have been right. Physical force is almost never right in the school-room. It is a pitiable thing when exhibited by a woman. And generally reprehensible in a man. The exceptions prove the rule, but they require the finest judgment to estimate their justification. In any case, however justifiable, it is an involuntary admission of pedagogical inadequacy. Sometimes to do without violence requires more wit than any of us possess, and that proves we are by so much the imperfect teachers.
I handed Keith the note I had written, and I said, “Read this, Keith, and if you feel like doing so, I should like you to deliver it to your father.”
He stood reading, then thrust the note hurriedly into the pocket of his tan flannel shirt, and answered, as he rushed away, “All right!” Almost immediately I saw his horse dash by the row of windows, and I knew Keith was riding home, as he always did, like a demon shot from hell.
It may be that Keith never showed his father that note, simply fulfilling himself the obligation indicated there, for his father was most indulgent with him, as I afterward learned. On the other hand, he might have showed it to his father, and his father might have ordered him to replace the brush-pile. That is where my sex-appeal would have come in. Yes, I had sex-appeal. All women have sex-appeal for some men, just as all men have sex-appeal for some women. It is a good thing that none of us are delegated judges as to which these shall be.
What a dull, unattractive, hideously colorless world this would be without sex-appeal! Still...let’s keep our heads sufficiently not to go and throw ourselves into the river because we cannot marry the one we want. There are plenty of useful, worthwhile things that need doing in this old world which awaits remaking at our hands. Also, there is the comforting thought that we never marry the ones we thought we were marrying. Each of us marries a total stranger. The sort of adjustment we make proves how big we are.
YOU ARE probably filled with suspense as to the manner of my charming Canby Quailput, Keith’s big, stalwart, virile father, who impressed you as though he were a stallion pawing the earth. And speaking of pawing, perhaps you remember how I said of the man Blanche married that he might possibly have belonged to the genus man-goes-about-pawing-women. Only I did not put it in those words. Canby Quailput...I’ll tell the story.
One night Jeff, Tony, and little Susie came in Jeff’s wagon to tell us there was to be a dance in the hall over Gundelfinger’s bank at Milner. It was probably the last chance we should have to dance there, as the town was soon to pick itself up bodily and move to the new site, Hazelton, where a grain-elevator was to be erected.
I was delighted at the thought of that dance. I was never so tired that I could not dance all night long. That night the men and Susie went in their wagon, this time following our buggy across the wilderness through the dimming light, over the miles of snow, down the grade from Jerome Canal to the big bridge over the turbulent Snake. Night has now fallen completely, so that as we take the snowy, packed road on the other side, we can see the lights in the hall over Gundy’s bank and, drawing nearer, hear the orchestra playing,
Ev’rybody’s doin’ it, doin’ it, doin’ it!
Ev’rybody’s doin’ it, doin’ it, doin’ it!
See that ragtime couple over there,
Watch them throw their shoulders in the air,
Snap their fingers, honey, I declare,
It’s a bear, it’s a bear, it’s a be-e-ear!”
In a moment, before we could get out of the blankets in which we were wrapped for the six-mile ride, the orchestra would probably begin playing “The Bunny Hug.” I hasten, with eager anticipation. I love...I love...I love to dance! I shall never get enough dancing before I die.
We park baby Charles on the long bench which runs around the entire hall, my coat over him and Charley’s coat under him. Walter is set down beside him, and from that instant his eyes never desert the drumsticks and the drum until we leave the dance and steer him reluctantly down the bleak outdoor stairway, his head turned backward to watch as long as possible what he was seeing for the first time in his life, a drummer snaring away on his little drum, tur-r-r-rump! tur-r-r-rump! tur-r-r-rump! r-r-rump, r-r-rump, r-r-rump!
I love drums. They get into my blood. I am as fascinated as five-year-old Walter, sitting there oblivious to the hallful of whirling dancers, staring at the drummer. I dance with Charley and Tony and Jeff, all three men looking very strange to me in their town clothes, I have grown so used to seeing them only in work shirts and overalls. Susie sits beside Walter, watching the dancers, her head turning from side to side as she follows each couple out of her range of vision. Strangely enough, these two children have never once given any sign that they are conscious of each other’s existence.
As Jeff takes me to my seat, some one looms up before me like a war tank, though more shapely. It is Keith’s hearty, so-masculine father, Canby Quailput, and he has come to ask me for this dance. To be taken in his arms is like being swept up by a hurricane. My feet scarcely touch the floor. The crowd parts for us, and well enough that it does, otherwise we would part it, leaving swaths of dancers lying prone on either side of our path.
We matched about as famously as a Spitz dog and an elephant, for size, although he was a good dancer. I had the amazed feeling that I was two-stepping with a graceful mountain. As the music gave those premonitory notes which are always recognized by dancers at the coming end, Canby Quailput looked down at me and drew my eyes up to his by reason of the curiosity I felt regarding this unknown, rather terrific he-man from the big open spaces—he was not a pinched, parsimonious farmer, but a wealthy cattleman. Then he said, with an exaggeration of the lilt in Keith’s voice, “You’re a cute little thing, aren’t you?” And with that, just as the music ceased, he lifted me to his breast and gave me a big hug.
Had I been fifty then, I might have considered it a compliment, but I was not fifty. I felt indignation as big as Canby Quailput himself, but what was I to do? Remember, this was before Keith had set the sagebrush-pile on fire. I never was a gold-digger. I think, though, that was the opportunity to be a coal-digger, by working Quailput for some school-house fuel. Foolishly, I put the moment to no use, except to be disgusted. But there was Keith. I was Teacher. I had to ignore that hug for the sake of my pupil.
As soon as he had lifted me to my seat, he sought a nearby open window and, leaning out over the sill, drew great draughts from a flask, which he then returned to his hip pocket. This fact makes me a little doubtful as to whether it was my sex-appeal that provided the new brush-pile. Perhaps, after all, I was blotted out of his memory by the Demon Rum.
We left the dance-hall long after Quailput vanished somewhere. I am not sure that dancing with me made him leave, but he exited about that time. I was not sorry. One hug, such as t
hat, is sufficient.
That dance was practically the last time Tony and Jeff and Susie and the Greenwoods were ever together in one group. The two men moved entirely out of the district, taking Susie with them. She had just begun her pathetic entrance into school. Jeff had found a cape for her somewhere, and a little close bonnet. I shall never forget the look of hope on that child’s face when I gave her a little desk of her own, and she sat down in the midst of other little girls. Her own little books, too. She had never owned anything personal, nor had she ever associated with other little girls, or any other children, except for the silent, thoughtful Walter, who had evidently found nothing in her to interest him, lonely though he naturally was. I think, from the new look of contentment on her face, that she was happy for the first time since her mother had deserted her.
When Susie came with the men to say good-by, it was the last time I ever saw her. It was the last time I ever saw Jeff. Tony I was to see later, when he would tell me some strange stories. As far as Jeff was concerned, his strange story had already begun with those letters which had meant so much to him that summer, as he had related to me. But Jeff told me nothing more, and when I learned the truth concerning those letters, I did not wonder that he was reticent with Charley and me as to where he was bound, and why. These things I shall tell you in the course of this somewhat disjointed narrative, which is really not intended as a narrative at all, being simply a cross-section of the life we sagebrush folks lived there in southern Idaho.
THAT WAS NOT the last of Keith’s tricks, when he burned the sagebrush-pile. The second prank included Homer, who worshiped him and went about with him everywhere. For their practical joke they chose a day when the thermometer was in the region of forty below zero. I have an idea that the choice of day was purely accidental, though the forty below was an incident propitious to their impulsive plan.
Annie Pike Greenwood Page 10