Annie Pike Greenwood

by We Sagebrush Folks

  It was that way on the farm. Every time the cows were about to give birth to calves, the farm pets had to be given away. Human beings went without milk and butter and cream. Two months before the vegetable garden gave forth the first delicate tip of lettuce, all the canned stuff, put up by me the previous summer, and all the cellared stuff, stowed away by the same hands, all had been eaten. We never sat down to the table alone, except occasionally for breakfast, or when we were going to a movie, or to a rabbit-drive, or such, when likely every one else in the community was rushing to be gone in the same direction. I was glad to have the farmers drop in and stay for meals. I could seldom see the women, and people have great interest for me.

  I remember only one occasion when I felt rebellious. I had been on my feet all day since four in the morning. It was nine at night. The last dish was washed, and the bread mixed for the morrow’s baking. I untied my apron strings with a sigh of relief. Bed was not enough. It never was. I was too tired to go to sleep. I would sit down to my faithful old typewriter, which Charley had bought me the second Christmas after our marriage because I wanted one above everything else. I would sit there, and gradually the ache would go out of my back, my feet would stop throbbing, I would no longer feel so tired I wanted to lie down and die. I would be writing, surrounded by an envelope of farmer-manufactured tobacco smoke, being cured as a ham or a bacon is cured in an old-fashioned smokehouse, my nerves lulled by the talk of farmers settling the Government, talk which I heard only as a murmur less insistent than the sound of Jerome Canal, always in my ears.

  There was a knock on our front door. An old man, a former minister. Selling Bibles. We needed no Bibles, but “Come in,” Charley is telling him.

  “We’re traveling. We have our own car, sleeping in it. But we’d like supper.”

  Then I hear Charley say, in the warm hospitality of his heart, “Come in. Bring your wife in. My wife will fix you something to eat.”

  Well, his wife did fix them something to eat. There was scarcely a thing left over. She had to go down cellar on knees so tired they trembled; pare potatoes with hands that ached from toil; fry them; fry eggs; warm some left-over biscuits; open a jar of pickles, a jar of peas, and a jar of peaches; set table; and look as though she liked it. And she was ready to drop tears of tired rage on the frying eggs. She was wondering how it would feel to ride all day in the lovely open air, for it was early spring, and then stop comfortably at some farm-house and have the drudge there cook a meal for one.

  The good old couple came in and ate, and poor lonesome Charley, who could not stand a word about religion, listened to the old fellow drone on in uninspired numbers. It was a strange thing that their religion never once took me into account. Was I tired? Should they have come to me to cook for them? Is it always Christian to ask some one to cook for you just because you are hungry? They said they had a cooking outfit with them but thought it would be easier to stop at a farm-house by the way. Yes, it was easier on them. But was it easier on me? What is it Shylock says? “Oh, these Christians!” And was I mad at Charley!

  I did not write that night. If you must have the truth, had I answered the door, and had they said, “Could you give us a meal?” I would have invited them in. I think I resented not being allowed to be a heroine of my own free choice. But is there anything so very heroic about choosing one’s own sacrifice?

  We had five dogs, fourteen cats, and my magpie Pretty. They all ate out of the same pans, together, taking sly slaps at each other if their mother did not catch them at it and make them ashamed. I was their mother, of course. They understood me, and I understood them. The one language understood by all creation is Love. Lady, says Ruskin, means “bread-giver.” Cats and dogs do not like bread, will not eat it if they can get anything else. These dogs, cats, and the bird thought I was their mother because I shamed them when they spatted at each other; because I said loving words to them and looked loving thoughts toward them; because I set out what they liked for food, the big pans of separated milk. The lion and the lamb shall lie down together, and a human mother shall feed them.

  I did not mind so much the lack of vegetables and fruits and milk and cream and butter during the very early spring, almost into summer, excepting for two things. Nearly always the pork became rancid, and the potatoes had by that time developed every disease to which potatoes are heir. The pork was well enough for some months; and when put in our cellar, which was just a square hole outdoors, roofed over and with steps, the potatoes looked perfect. Charley dipped his crop in a formaldehyde solution, and our potatoes showed less disease than was general in that part of the country. But by February the black rot had put in its appearance.

  I could scarcely bring myself to touch those black-rotted, stinking potatoes. I must struggle up the outdoor cellar steps, a heavy pail full of potatoes in my hand, and pare all of them in order to get enough for dinner. After they were cooked, I could still detect the odor, and I could not eat them myself. In the springtime, before the garden came, I slowly starved. But that made the raising of my garden more of a passion with me than ever, if that were possible. For growing things from the soil is for me a bliss which I cannot adequately explain. Birth. The glory of helping the earth give forth. The glory of watching the miracle of growth, lettuce seed always producing lettuce, and kernels of corn, always corn. How could anything but man come from that norm which was meant to be man? Who or what meant these things so to be? What is the meaning back of it all? And how can we doubt that there is a meaning?

  BIRTH meant to the older women of our sagebrush community what some day it would mean to us younger mothers. They had long passed the physical operation of birth, and theirs were now the ineradicable results. Sometimes it meant for them a harvest of pain. For it was their harvest-time, and when they should have been feeling the joy and the peace and the plenty of harvest, they were suffering the tragedy of things gone wrong with their fields, the grain laid low with the scourge of rust, and no more time for growing.

  The father of a sagebrush family is its god or its demon. There is no escape for the wife and children. In The Doctor Balzac wrote, “Anything may happen on these isolated farms.” He meant the farms of France, but no European, nor any Eastern American farm, can compare in its state of isolation with those sagebrush farms of ours, green gems set in the midst of long stretches of desert land.

  There are more city women in insane asylums than there are farm women. Statistics tell us that, and we must believe statistics, because men devote their lives to compiling them, and because the figures are all put down there in print. Figures always seem to me as convincing as God. Besides, we all believe what we see in print. “I saw it in an article the other day” is proof convincing enough to clinch any argument. In the case of insane farm women, we need not refer to any article, or even to be overcome by the arithmetic of the statistics (which I always am), for it is a fact that there are more city women than farm women in insane asylums. I was personally acquainted with this truth in one mental hospital, having lived in this asylum for years—in “luxurious apartments,” according to the Salt Lake Tribune—when my father was medical superintendent of the institution. In that asylum there were more city women than farm women.

  The reason mentally deranged farm women are not in the insane asylums is because they are still on the farms. I do not write this to make you smile. The sanest women I know live on farms. But the life, in the end, gets a good many of them—that terrible forced labor, too much to do, and too little time to do it in, and no rest, and no money. So long as a woman can work, no matter how her mind may fail, she is still kept on the farm, a cog in the machine, growing crazier and crazier, until she dies of it, or until she suddenly kills her children and herself. More farm women than city women kill themselves and their children. You read of such cases so frequently that it seems strange to me if this explanation never occurred to you. No need for statistics to prove it.

  I was recovering from the birth of one of my babies when th
e first insane woman of our sagebrush community was removed to the State Institution at Blackfoot. I had been too overwhelmed with work to get acquainted with her, and I never knew certainly the cause of her mental lapse.

  The second woman to go insane lived not far from our farm. Her name we will call Mrs. Goodinch. One day, when her entire family of children and her husband were trailing her as she worked out-of-doors—chopping sagebrush, among other things—suddenly she seized a hen and chopped its head off. Then another, and another, and another. She was very agile, and she had no difficulty in capturing the silly fowls. All around on the ground were bloody, flapping, headless chickens.

  Her children stood aghast. But her husband was yelling and cussing and hopping in and out among the flopping chickens, all of them together like corn popping in a skillet. He dared not go near her, for she was larger and stronger than he, having done most of the work on the place herself, and there was that bloody ax, brandished in her big, muscular, rough, raw hands.

  When the last chicken was done to death, she turned her frenzied face toward her children, pointing with her left hand to her husband and exclaiming, “Go get the old man and hold him while I chop his head off!” And she would have done it, without their help if necessary, but he was through the barbed-wire fence and down the road before she could move in his direction.

  He was stumbling down the road, mouth sagging in terror, eyes bulging, when he met two of our good sagebrush women, driving their buggy toward him. At sight of his frantic excitement they stopped, and he related his tale of horror, climaxing it with, “And all them there chickens with their heads chopped offen um!”

  Thinking they might pacify Mrs. Goodinch, the women drove on, out to the rented farm where the Goodinch family existed miserably; and as they went, they decided that seeing the old man sitting around all winter, with no food and no shoes for the children, probably had something to do with the matter. They met Mrs. Good-inch. She had left behind her ax and her children.

  “Goin’t’ Burley t’ git a job,” she told the women.

  She was dissuaded from walking the twelve miles to Burley. Instead of that trip, a few days later she was taken to the insane asylum at Blackfoot. I cannot see why. The chickens had nothing to eat. There was no more wheat. It was best to chop their heads off at once. Maybe the old man needed a good beheading. Certainly the family needed someone to go to Burley and get a job. I think her actions were very sane, though too rebellious for a farm woman. Maybe rebellion in a farm woman constitutes insanity.

  “Anything may happen on these isolated farms.” There was another woman who lost her mind but was never taken to an institution for mental disorder. She had borne six sons. One after another she had seen them unmercifully beaten by their father until they ran away from home, writing no word as to their whereabouts for fear he would have the sheriff bring them back. It was the last son that did for her. When she witnessed his brutal beating, she suddenly lost her mind. But she was not violent. She laughed all the time. She had not laughed since she was married. But from the moment she heard the piteous cries of her young son, she began to laugh, and she never ceased. The boy ran away, and she never knew it. She was spared the agony of thinking of those six sons she had borne, out in the world, God knew where. She just laughed all the time.

  Her man had money. He had wrung it out of the unpaid labor of his sons and his wife. Why he should have wasted any of it on her, I am sure I cannot imagine. Some twist in his nature compelled him to take her here and there to specialists, always with the same result. She just kept on laughing.

  One case came nearer to me. I could not visit my friend Mrs. Howe, though I heard she was ill. I could not walk. I had phlebitis after Joe’s birth. The day finally came when I could go with Miss Butterworth and Mrs. Jean in our two-seated vehicle known as a Mormon white-top—I suppose because all the Mormons had them, and the top was covered with white canvas. Ours still had U.S. MAIL in big letters on it. I don’t know what its history had been. Charley bought it second-hand, giving what was left of our narrow-gage buggy to some one more needy than we were. After the white-top came the cart, and after that our second-hand Ford which we called Sagebrush Liz.

  We took with us to my friend’s home as many dainty edibles as possible. “These things ought to last Mrs. Howe a long time,” said Miss Butterworth, “but they won’t. That tribe will clean them up within a half hour after we leave.”

  “That tribe” were my friend’s children. And I knew what Miss Butterworth said was true. But they might be excused a little, for they lived on boiled potatoes, lard gravy, and corn syrup with their bread.

  When Mrs. Howe had come to Idaho, she was beautiful, with dark eyes, rosy cheeks, and a great rope of chestnut hair wound in a coronet around her head. But she was not well, and never had been. At her home in Galesburg she had been able to get along, but her husband had thrown up his good job and put their savings into sagebrush land, persuaded by speculators to that madness.

  She had come to a shack in the wilderness, tar-paper covered, like so many other shacks, cold in winter, broiling in summer. There were no conveniences. But these were only material hardships. The thing that killed Sally Howe was seeing the gradual degeneration of her family. They had come with books, and one of the most modern of phonographs, and good furniture. She lived to see them existing in a state lower than the farm animals, because when a human being no longer aspires, but simply lives to eat and sleep, he is lower than the beasts whose habits are the same as his. The father, too, had the beating habit. A whole family can sink into debasement under the hands of a father who lays violent hands upon them.

  One day, as I sat by the window unable to walk, I had asked Tom Howe about her condition. “She just lies in bed,” he had said. “She used to be the kindest woman. But now when I try to wait on her, she says, ‘Don’t come near me, Tom Howe, or I’ll scratch your eyes out!’”

  And Emily Howe, eighteen, the eldest girl in the family of five, told me, “We surely thought Ma was dying yesterday. She told Frank to tell us all to come to her bedside. We did, and Pa was even shaking. He thought the way we did, that it was her last words. We stood in a line by her bed, not saying a word, and hardly breathing. She started looking at Pa, and she went down the row, slowly. Then she said, ‘You’re a fine-looking bunch!’ And then she turned her face to the wall.”

  I could picture it, all of them standing there, slovenly, sunburnt, and she had been so immaculate and dainty. She had no desire to get out of that bed. Of course, she was really ill, too, and nothing was being done to make her better. There was no money to pay doctors. She was a farm woman, and she would have to live or die as nature saw fit.

  Mrs. Jean was one of the best managers in our district. She and I were probably the frailest of all the sagebrush women. She had the advantage of me in many ways. Her people had all been farmers as far back as anything was known of them, down in South Carolina. She knew how to do everything and do it well, but she did not do it all herself—she set others to work. I admired her greatly. She saw to it that her children had musical education, taking them to Twin Falls herself, in the car she and Dan managed to get—a good one, at that.

  But Dan was a very good husband and father. He was called among us “the workin’est fool ever.” That meant he worked whenever possible and did not spend three months of every winter just sitting around settling the Government. When the other men started settling the Government, Dan always allowed he would be “gougin’ along.”

  It was Mrs. Jean who organized the first women’s club in our sagebrush community, the Ladies Fancywork Improvement Club, as the women called it; and it was a decided credit to her, for those women often did things for the members of the community much more important than mere fancywork. It was they who had planned this ministration to Mrs. Howe, Miss Butterworth and Mrs. Jean being the acting members of the committee. I was included in the visit because I was a friend of Mrs. Jean, and also because they were borrowing our whit
e-top; very courteously they asked me if I would like to go with them.

  We were taking some delicious eatables with us, for not only was Mrs. Jean proficient in cooking, but Miss Butterworth had taken prizes at the Fair for her butter and other things. She was pretty, gray-haired, and had given her life to her brother’s motherless children. She often wore dainty lavender clothes, and she had a sense of humor and was “plunk and chuffy,” as Tony Work would have said—Tony, so long gone from our neighborhood.

  I was shocked when I saw Mrs. Howe. That glorious hair was a solid, dingy, repulsive mat on her head. It could not have been washed or combed for months. We women dared not cut it off, for we had not the right, but that is what would have to be done with it. As Miss Butterworth turned back the covers to bathe her, there scurried across the grimy undersheet literally scores of big dark-red bedbugs. They had been feeding on the helpless sick woman. Miss Butterworth had brought a box of insect powder, which she instantly puffed over the vile vermin.

  Somewhere we found two clean sheets. We placed Mrs. Howe in a big chair while the bed linen was changed. I had been shocked by the condition of her hair; I had been shocked by those scurrying bedbugs; what next I saw shocked me more than the other two put together. Under the hips of the suffering, sick woman a hole had been rotted entirely through the mattress by the uncontrollable flow of the excrement from her body, for her bowels and bladder were paralyzed.

  We twisted the mattress around so that the uncomfortable hole would be at the foot of the bed on the other side. And while Mrs. Jean and I were so engaged, Miss Butterworth puffed the insect powder over every inch of the bed-frame and the mattress that she could reach. It would mean temporary relief for the sick woman, but the house was alive with the verminous pests.