We used a bread-board for a tray, and I fed my poor friend with a spoon while the other two women made her bed. Fresh raspberries with thick cream; little, browned, oven-fragrant rolls; Miss Butterworth’s prize butter; white slices of roasted chicken; delicate custard; and many other things we had brought, with thought of tempting her appetite and in the vain hope that some of the good things might be saved for her. They were a selfish family, the five of them all grown, Harold, fifteen, being the youngest. Perhaps we might have done friendly things for them also. They had been rendered dependent and spineless by a father who had the beating habit. In a family with a beating father the children usually lose all power of independent, elevating action. Thou shalt not lay violent hands upon the body of another human being!
My friend had almost totally lost her mind. I could see that easily, for though I was a little girl when I had lived among the insane, I had forgotten nothing. She stared at my face for a while, eating of the fresh, luscious raspberries I gave her, and then I saw that she was making efforts to speak to me. At last I made out what she was saying: “Rhoda...Joe...Rhoda...Joe...” Tears sprang to my eyes.
The Ladies Fancywork Improvement Club wrote to the Red Cross, and soon my friend was in a sanitarium where she could be given proper care. She recovered enough to enjoy sitting there, clean, well-fed, but she yearned not at all for the tar-paper shack, her five children, or her husband. One of them had been kinder to her than the others—Pete, we called him. He went to see her. And there she died. She had enough physical disabilities of which to die. But I believe she might have survived them all had there been hope in her life. She had reached the bottom from which there is no climbing up. She died as the result of the births she had accomplished: she died because of what her children had been compelled to endure and because of what they had become by reason of it. Birthing for her had been a bitter tragedy.
AMONG the sagebrush friends I most enjoyed was an elderly woman who seemed to know how to meet life with such sanity that I asked her one day how she had managed to rear her large family and keep so well-balanced. This was her reply: “I thought I’d go insane when I was younger, but, instead, I lost the hearing in my right ear. You know, I am stone deef in that ear. When that first happened, I thought I had another grief added to my other troubles, but I found out it was just a blessing in disguise, sent by the Lord. My man, Fraser, has always had the bad habit of reviewing all his troubles just before he falls asleep. He goes to bed, and then he begins to cuss. Everything he doesn’t like, he cusses. He cusses the weather, and he cusses his bad health, and he cusses his horses, and he cusses the plowing, or he cusses the price of wheat, but most of all, he cusses our boys. I could lie there, kept sleepless by him, and stand all his cussing till he got to the boys. I just couldn’t stand that, and I thought I’d go crazy. They were good boys, and they worked hard, but he was never satisfied. But after I went deef, when he began cussing the boys, I just turned over on my good ear, and I couldn’t hear him any more. I simply went to sleep. So you see, my dear, my deef ear is my greatest blessing.”
Birth was not meant to be harvest-time with the younger women, the women of my generation. Ours was the birthing-time, the bringing-forth time. Our sorrows were the pangs and troubles of the now-birthing time. So it befell with Mary Carbine. She had eloped with Mordrum Carbine, of whom her parents disapproved. They were farming people of Iowa, having prosperous land and a good home. Mary had known what was best in agricultural life in America. She was to know what was worst.
Mordrum Carbine brought his Mary to our sagebrush wilderness. He established her in the center of his dreams of affluence and in the reality of a little tar-paper shack. Her babies came often, one pushing another out of its mother’s arms. Few other young girls could have stood such frequent, unremitting birthing, but Mary Carbine was a magnificent creature, tall, statuesque, beautiful. She took her fate silently, with a quiet that was not joy. I felt that as I used to watch her suckle whichever child was of that age.
She would have been a gorgeous creature dressed in fashionable apparel. With the outdated clothes in which she had fled with Mordrum, and which had never been replaced, she was a noble figure. With no self-consciousness whatever, she would sit, broodingly, feeding her infant, a white-marble shoulder and firm round breast bared, sights to blind with their beauty. The other farm women who nursed their young, with equal unconsciousness of the nude, were not built as was she. Her regular features, bowed above her babe, were crowned with a heavy weight of shining, waving hair.
I felt she was not happy. She was trapped. She knew she could turn to no one. The deed that had ostracized her from her kin and thrust her into the hard wilderness was her own. She would bear because she was responsible, and because there was no way out. Once I heard her speak to Mordrum. Her voice was low, but I read in it all her disillusionment.
A friend of my own little family was Aunty Sother, or so we called her, an auburn-haired, sunny, capable middle-aged woman, who had cared for Rhoda in our own home when I lay in the hospital after Joe was born. Mordrum Carbine went for her on his horse. His wife, he said, had given birth to another baby two weeks before, he being the only person present to deliver her and care for her afterward. He was the kind of man who read everything and who therefore felt himself competent to do anything.
This confidence does not usually come from reading. There was Segmetter. He had helped with our potato-digging. As I called the men to dinner, he was sitting in a low rocking-chair, squeak-squawking, squeak-squawking back and forth on a loose board in the floor, his partly bald head burnt the color of his featureless face.
Of course, I supposed he would get up and come to the table with the other men, but he did not. He simply hitched the rocking-chair to the end of the table, saying, “I’ll eat in this. Feels good after workin’.” His chin was not much above the level of the cloth, both soiled, gray-shirted elbows elevated at a sharp angle in order to cut his meat. Old Man Babcock had heard about the Carbine baby, and he was telling about Mordrum going to get Aunty Sother.
“I heered she’s pretty low,” said Ves Appleby, wiping his mouth with his bandana handkerchief. He had just sucked a cup of coffee through his walrus moustache.
Peter Siggins, who flowed over his belt in blue-shirted rolls of fat, remarked, “Mord took keer of her, hisself. He was sure goin’ hell-bent-fer-breakfast to git Mrs. Sother when I come along by there today.”
Segmetter was putting potatoes in his mouth very cleverly with the blade of his knife. He spoke through them: “Me, I taken keer of my womern with all our kids, en I didn’t hev no trouble only with the least one of my kids. I thought fer a little ‘at it was all up with the womern en the kid, too. He come backside fust.”
They continued talking obstetrics, which gradually led into the animal field, the undesirability of bull calves being discussed, and the low price given for them by the Hazelton butcher, the town of Milner having picked up bodily, and moved to a new location and a new name. This led one of the men to tell how his sister-in-law insisted on her children calling the bull he owned “the gentleman cow.” While they laughed with great guffaws, instantly relapsing into their food again, Eg Hammick reached across the table for his third piece of raisin pie and remarked, “Mord’s womern shore musta been tooken bad fer him to go clean over nearly to Milner t’ git Mrs. Sother.”
I did not listen to the rest of their talk. I was thinking of beautiful, young Mary Carbine. Even after the men had gone back to the field, and I was eating in the midst of the plates they had wiped with bits of bread in preparation for their pie, I still thought of Mary, and I pushed aside the book I had intended reading, as I always read in every fraction of time I could call my own.
When I had first come on the farm, I had supplied pie dishes and linen napkins, but after the meal I always found the napkins had been “trodden under foot of men.” Those farmers were used to their bandanas or the sides of their hands. And they preferred their dinner plates
for pie, the pies being placed on the table segmented, so that they might help themselves to as many pieces as they desired. I was a good pie-maker. I had learned from Hib, the master baker who had come to farm on shares with Charley; they had divided the profits at the end of the year, which were nothing divided by two.
It was Swinburne I had opened to read. I got no farther than
From too much love of living
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be,
That no life lives forever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.
That afternoon Aunty Sother stopped in on her way back from Mordrum Carbine’s. She would not stay there. This was her story:
“When we reached the shack, Mordrum threw open the door. The five little children were huddled about, their faces dirty, their hair uncombed. The one-roomed shack was filthy. Mary Carbine had been sick before this last baby. She could hardly drag around.
“But what made me stop in my tracks was the terrible, unmistakable odor of septicemia. I took care of lots of women with their babies before I came here, and I knew what that meant. So I turned to Mordrum Carbine, and I said, ‘I can’t take this case,’ I said. ‘You’ll have to get some one else,’ I said. ‘Your wife has blood-poisoning, and she looks to me like it was pretty bad,’ I said. ‘You’d better go to Twin Falls as quick as you know how, and get a good doctor and a trained nurse, or you’d better take her right there to the hospital,’ I said.
“I didn’t care what he was thinking,” Aunty Sother continued. “The men get a craze for coming out to these sagebrush farms, and nothing will do till they drag their women away from the city, to live out here without anything. I know Mrs. Carbine was a farm girl, but I know her folks, and they have money. I couldn’t help thinking how it would kill her mother to see what Mordrum Carbine has done to her.
“Angus would be just as inconsiderate with me and Bernice. It changes men to get out here. The life is good for them, they farm as they want to, but, maybe you don’t know it, they talk most of their time away. The other day Angus came in and asked Bernice and me if we would help him with a little hoeing in the onion-field. We went out. Pretty soon Ben Temple come along on his wagon. Angus stopped his horses by the fence, and for over a solid hour, Mrs. Greenwood, those two men talked.”
“They were settling the Government,” I interjected, somewhat flippantly, I am afraid.
“Well,” she smiled, “whatever it was, I said to Bernice, ‘Don’t do any more. We worked hard all day yesterday for him, and I’m tired. We’ll just lie down here in the shade of this shed, and we’ll watch, and when he goes back to work, we’ll go back to work.’ And we did. After about an hour he noticed that we were not working, and he took a tumble, and started in himself, for he could see that we had our eye on him.”
Two years after these words were spoken, Bernice was made the victim of our sagebrush agriculture. She married a farmer to get away from drudgery on her own father’s acres. And she went to worse, for she became the slave of that farmer’s exacting old mother, who hated the girl because Bernice had been educated. I am not writing fiction. The rewards and the punishments cannot here be bestowed according to the agreeable stories you read in some of the magazines. What I write is the true stories of lives lived.
Mordrum Carbine went for no doctor, and Mary Carbine did die. In all her superb beauty she lay here in that squalid tar-paper shack, dead of her romance. To me there was in her death little of the consolation of resignation Swinburne suggested that day I sat facing the dirty dishes of the farmers in the field. She would not have cared to live forever, but she had children. Well, she could rest at last, and maybe that was what the poet meant, for
...even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.
They were beautiful children. I kept one of the little girls until word could come to send them all back to Mary’s folks. I would have adopted the little girl if they had not wanted her so much. I have always wanted to adopt some children. I am sure that motherless children need me even more than my own do. And what are motherless children for but to be adopted? And what are childless homes for but to do the adopting? Or, so much more fortunate, the homes where there are already children? It is an indictment of all women that there are little children in public institutions. Their pitiable, wistful eyes reproach me night and day. These children might turn out bad? They would for you if you are the kind of women who expects them to do it. You did not mean it. You had not thought. For the ones that might turn out bad are the ones that need you most of all. They need love, and more love, and nothing asked in return, not even love. For only women with great hearts, who can love without demanding return, forgiving everything, have any right to the blessing of being allowed to adopt children.
Mordrum Carbine did not come to a bad end. You will have to forget the Pollyanna love-magazines and get down to life. All true values are eternal and cannot be measured in simply material ways. He married two other women after Mary, the second being thrown from a horse and breaking her neck. And he earned a little cash in nickels and pennies from the farmers, preaching a cast-iron creed each Sunday....Jesus forgive him, for he knew not what he did.
I was well acquainted with Mordrum. He used to drop in to see Charley and end by talking to me. He had a dabchick mind, surprisingly agile, diving into deep water with ease, and just when you expected it to bring up some pearl of great price, lo and behold! a little, unimportant fish. But such as he was, the sagebrush farm people willingly gave him their Sabbath nickels and pennies, because there was no one else in the vicinity claiming to bring them the sacred wahoo, which their souls were eager to acclaim the burning bush.
PREGNANCY is a natural state for a woman whose condition is natural. But it is not desirable for a sagebrush school-teacher. My pupils never suspected those five months during which I carried another body within my own, growing daily, demanding more of me daily. I was slim of figure and appeared only to put on a little more flesh. I taught eight grades; conscientiously studied and prepared the class plans for them all; kept house for the family, for Charley was now busy with the spring plowing; and I walked to and from the school-house, for all our horses were needed for farm work. I was tired, always tired, ghastly tired.
The food! We were living on potatoes, salt pork, cabbage, and apples. I wanted other food, but there was none, so I made no complaint. I wanted desperately to rest, but there was no hope of it, so I said nothing.
And I was sick with anxiety about the little ones left at home, for Walter was caring for the baby. One day I felt sudden panic and went swiftly to the open door of the school-house. In the midst of the recitations I walked rapidly to that door, trying to pierce the distance between the school-house and our farm with my eyes. Something was wrong. I totally forgot the school-children, could not recall what we were discussing, and abruptly dismissed them. Then I locked the school-house door, after shooing the last child away, and started breathlessly for home. I knew it was my children.
There they stood, in the cold blue sunshine of early spring, five-year-old Walter looking anxious, and baby Charles, his red coat removed that the sun might reach him better, dripping and shivering. The baby had fallen into the canal.
Charley was over the hill, plowing, and the children were out of his sight at the house. We always thought Walter practically grown after Charles was born. He had such a serious face and never by any chance did anything that required a rebuke. He was most dependable. But he was a little child, just the same. And he had the thoughts of a little child.
He had been engaged in digging wells with a spoon, and every little while he would send little Charles to the canal for a canful of water. So intent was he on his digging that it was some time before it occurred to him that Charles should be back. Running down the hill, there he saw floating
on the top of the swiftly flowing stream little red-coated Charles, who was grasping with his baby fists the grass on the banks. As the grass gave way under one and then another hand, he would reach for a firmer hold. He had been doing this for some time, and his endurance was about ended. Walter had come just in time. He pulled the little fellow out and led him, shivering, up the hill, the red coat running a stream of water as he walked.
Walter knew that he must get the baby dried and warm. It was as cold within the house as without, so he decided he must build a fire. He crowded sagebrush into the kitchen range, standing on a chair to do so. It would not catch the flame from a match, as it was very damp. He remembered how his father overcame this difficulty, and dragging the kerosene can over to the range and onto a chair, from that vantage-point he poured the oil down among the brush. Then he tried matches again. Only a miracle kept the brush from igniting, for he tried them over and over again.
Something had to be done quickly. He removed the soggy coat from the baby and coaxed the good little thing out into the pale sunshine; and there Charles stood, blue, teeth chattering, when I arrived. Within the hour death had stalked these infants three times—the canal, the kerosene, exposure. But no harm came of it.
We had a large amount of hay that second summer, but hay was only five dollars a ton, less than it cost to raise it. And there was no market for any other crop. So Charley decided to do what the Government agricultural men were preaching just then: if he could not sell his crops from the fields, he would sell them on the hoof. He bought one hundred little pigs and planted two fields for them, one of peas, the other of mangelwurzels. Each, in turn, was to be fenced for hog-corrals, alternating with the alfalfa-fields.
Annie Pike Greenwood Page 14