Besides my vegetable garden, over which my good German neighbor Burkhausen and I used to consult, there was my gift garden of flowers. And perhaps this is the place to tell of my infant career as a writer. Alas! the child died almost aborning. But it was interesting while it lasted.
Clippings sent me from papers and magazines throughout the United States commented on my articles; letters in such abundance that I thought of dying so as not to offend the writers by not answering; letters from the United States, from Europe, from Africa, from our island possessions; letters from all sorts of people—physicians, missionaries, farmers, farmers’ wives, a famous head of a famous girls’ college, a famous governor of a notable state, a United States Senator who said I inspired him to go to Congress. Beautiful shoes came from New York; dish-mops, very fancy, from Washington; cases of honey from Canada; wonderful flower roots from Illinois, four-o’clocks whose seeds had been in a Maine family for generations; a great box of flowering hedge from New Jersey; and many other things. We had fun while it lasted, except that the letters hurt my conscience. I was especially stricken by the letters from a spinster lady in Brooklyn who wanted to come and live with us.
And there was my really wonderful collection of iris, looking like rare orchids, sent me by one who had gathered their roots for his garden from all over the world. I used to stand and look at them and worship God. Imagine having so much beauty there on that desert farm! Blue, bronze, rose, orchid, ivory, and the variegated, the combinations, the browns and purples, the light, the dark—all lovely.
One man had filled my windows with flowers that bloomed in winter. I had a shelf built midway across two windows, and the two windows, from lower sill to top, bloomed with a chorus of harmonizing color set in green. Those were the windows where I could see only out across the lonesome snow, with a view of the barn and the granary and the little hideous outhouse which no amount of high dreaming could disguise as anything but sordid, ugly, necessary convenience.
Our dark-green farm-house with its black roof and toothpick-pillared porch stood up in stark ugliness, no pitying tree to veil its face. But I must not be ungrateful. It was a warm house in winter, and only two houses in the entire district were as comfortable, and only one of these more convenient, the only house with a bathtub until you reached Hazelton. But our house was ugly. And it is a weakness of my character that I can forgive almost anything more easily than lack of beauty, just as it is also my weakness to worship brains. But let me balance my defects by confessing here that out of the whole world of women, throughout all time, I envy the career of one only, and that one is Jane Addams of Chicago’s Hull House.
Make no mistake about beauty. It is not easy to achieve except as Nature achieves it. And it most certainly does not consist in regularity. He who has instinct for balance in irregularity has instinct to achieve beauty. It is born, and can be imitated, but there is always chance of failure in imitation. Beauty is likely to fail when it becomes standardized.
A house on a hill should be white. It should be nested in greenery. I could not change the dark, dour color of our house, so I went down the hill to the barn corral, where the soil was black with the seepage from well-rotted manure. My gift garden should help me to nest the house in green. With two buckets I carried this soil and put it in a bed dug around the house. It was severe labor. But I could watch my gift garden miraculously change to leaves and blossoms; I could have a hand in creation, as though I were God saying, “Let there be light,” and there was light.
All my senses responded to that sagebrush farm. Never a day passed that I was not thrilled with the changing beauty of the vast cloud-filled skies, the purple and gold sunsets, the blue and white mountains, our gray and green valley, our own lovely, undulating farm, with its ivory wheat-fields, its green beet-fields, its purple-blooming alfalfa. I loved to go to sleep to the chorus of the crickets in the grass just outside my window, with its thorough-bass of the frogs down along the canal. The cool, delightful summer nights; the limitless stretches of clean, white winter snow.
I think, though, that my memory of my little children is the sweetest thing I have out of it all. I loved the smell of my baking bread, and I might be called an expert at baking, for Hib, the master baker, had taught me. Twice a week, eight big loaves of bread, a big pan of rolls, another of sweet bread of some sort. Pies and cakes made every day. And, too, I loved to see my golden butter. I churned in various ways for various reasons: from six to twelve pounds in the big churn with the handle like a barrel-organ; a little cream in a fruit jar; or, best of all, I churned by shaking a ten-pound syrup pail while my little children marched behind me, around and around the dining-room table, singing,
Count your many blessings,
Name them one by one,
Count your many blessings,
See what God has done!
Around and around the table we marched, I shaking the bucket, rhythmically, plunk-plunk-plunk, Walter following me, Charles following him, then Rhoda, and finally little Joe. My darlings! This is the joy a mother has: forever and ever and ever my little children go marching after me, singing with me,
Count your many blessings,
See what God has done!
I raised a big vegetable garden, probably the largest in the Greenwood District, and it was a distinct success. After the ground was plowed, I did all the work myself—planting, weeding, hoeing, cultivating, thinning, spraying, hand-picking worms, harvesting, cooking, canning. I had a passion for growing things. Memory again gives me that feeling of intoxication always induced in me by the sunshine, the smell of irrigation water, the sight of it crawling slowly down a new-made ditch, and the vision of green things growing. The thrill I feel at seeing things sprout from the seeds I have sown is only surpassed by that I experienced in watching the development of my babies.
Chickens I raised. White Plymouth Rocks—hundreds of them. I have voluntarily worked for hours, missing meals, in order to care for hens, eggs, little chickens. I banded their legs in order to keep track of the generations and to detect the best layers. Every spring, when the chicks had reached a good size, I would pen them in the chicken-house and put a numbered aluminum band on a leg of each chick.
One year I went into the chicken-house, luring the entire flock after me by means of sparsely sprinkled grain. I noticed about midway in the door a hole just large enough to drop a chick through. A happy plan presented itself: a chick is banded, and out it goes. This I did until the job was finished. Then I opened the chicken-house door with a feeling of satisfaction, only to confront four stolid, enormous hogs, which were crunching down the last of my banded chicks. Don’t tell me hogs are not rightly named.
It was the same with the garden. The horses pounded over it by night, and the cows ate it by day, the hogs working on it by day and by night. I think one of my most earnest grievances against life, fate, the farm, and everybody connected with it was that in spite of going on the war-path, in spite of stratagem and guile, I was never able to obtain the fence for my garden I so desired. My passion for growing things was a great disadvantage. Everybody felt reasonably certain that I would not be able to resist the spring when seed-planting time came round again.
My baked beans, strawberry ice-cream, raisin pie, and potato-cake were famous, particularly among the young people, who had to be watched when my cake or my freezer appeared at any of our “doings,” as we called our home-made entertainments. There were other cooks famous for consistently good cooking. Mrs. Epperson was so famous for her cooking that although her man was never known to pay the help he asked, nobody ever refused to go to his rented ranch to put up hay, dig potatoes, or thresh. The men always regarded work done for him as a kind of glorified picnic, without the ants, for he had only a tar-paper shack, so that their eating must be done in the shade of the house, from tables made of lumber set on a sort of trestle. And the food...! Don’t you think Heaven will be a disappointing place if they have no cooking there such as Mrs. Epperson’s? In my min
d I have no doubt that there is eating throughout the universe, whether visible to us now or not.
YES, I COULD COOK, and I was expert gardener and poultry woman, and I could make butter, though not so well as Miss Butterworth, and I was a good mother. But I never ceased to regard threshing as a kind of nightmare which must be endured and lived through until I could get to the other side of it. I had no near friend to help me, as Mrs. Baldy Parsons and Mrs. Stillton helped each other, getting fun out of it. And I had no mother and sisters as had Mrs. Jean. I did the whole thing alone, except for the help of a woman to wait on table. At times I had as many as thirty-two men to feed, some of these being agents, ditch-riders, and so forth, for wherever there was a threshing, all the men in the district gathered like flies around a screen door when a rain-storm is threatening. And it was grand visiting-time for the men, too. They were in a genial mood, and the agents could talk up business to half a dozen at once during the noon-hour or a breakdown of the machinery. For there always was a breakdown, and we sagebrush women must expect to feed the threshing crew several more meals than we had been warned about, while some one dashed to town for broken parts, and the men enjoyed a rest. Leaving out mortgages, farming is the ideal life for a man who does not know where he is going and does not care when he gets there.
We threshed several times each summer. With a crop in which wheat, beans, and oats are ripening at different times, there are at least three threshings. Just before one of these events Charley thrusts his head past the screen door of the kitchen, where I am scalloping the edges of pies with a fork, preparatory to putting them in the oven just hot enough to make you withdraw your bare arm when you have counted ten slowly...it is twenty for bread. “We’ll have thrashers day after tomorrow,” he says.
I have so much to do with the day’s ordinary routine, interrupted continually, as it is, by insistent demands of one sort or another, that not until the dinner dishes are done and I have carried the heavy crocks of milk down into the outdoor dirt cellar, can I give a thought to threshers. Then I look to see how much bread there is—decide to set sponge and bake on the morrow. That night, when I finally get to bed, it is not to sleep. I had not then learned to take no thought for the morrow, but all night long I lie there planning, cooking five or six, sometimes eight days’ meals in my head.
I do all the cooking possible the next day. By putting on the range a gallon of soaked beans, which have turned into a gallon over night from two quarts of dried beans, I can soon have them baked and ready. I use a hotel pressure-canner, my only real convenience and luxury. After the beans have been cooked under pressure, they are ready to go into crocks on the following morning, with slabs of ham laid upon them, to be given the final oven-baking which completed the sum resulting in my famous beans.
The pies I made the day before have been eaten by the six in my family and our several hired hands. So now I make raisin pies, cream pies, fresh-prune pies, apple pies, and Jeff Davis pies, the recipe for the last having been given me by Mrs. Jean. No, my night’s sleepless planning has not resulted in dementia piecox. The men love pie, lots of pie, and all kinds of pie, and are disappointed when they do not get it. The first two or three years I made one dainty dessert, served threshers with my precious linen napkins at their plates, and did things in style, with flowers as a centerpiece. But the flowers were exasperatingly in the way of the swift passage of dishes, and you could see that the men were wondering how on earth that garden stuff got in one of the vegetable dishes. I would not have been surprised to have had them put gravy on the flowers and eat them. My lovely napkins had no identifying fingerprints in case of murder, but they did have manure sole-marks, and the murder in this case would have been performed, gladly, by me, had any men lingered, to become preys to my wrath, after their dainty dessert. The Baron gave the hint that helped. No napkins; no garden stuff; pie segmented in the tins, as the other women served it; pie, and more pie, and then some more pie.
There must be enough salad-dressing for three quarts of chopped cabbage—I chop it with a baking-powder can. When I have made the dressing according to a recipe of the Boston School of Cookery, I run out across the baked, weedy back yard to my garden and, with a stroke of my butcher knife, secure the largest head of cabbage; but I delay chopping it until the morrow, putting it in a bucket of water, where it may drink and become very crisp. I carry this down the rickety board steps into the dirt cellar. It is always cool there. But after rains the dirt is likely to come sliding in an avalanche down the walls.
While the big white cake, which is to be covered with chocolate frosting, is baking, I dig with a steak fork, relic of pre-farm days, enough potatoes to fill a gallon kettle when pared, and I proceed at once to pare them, for, covered with water, they will not only keep in the cool cellar, but be crisper, and crisp vegetables cook best. You must have plenty of water inside a vegetable, as well as outside it, to have it cook to perfection.
Word is sent by one of the children that everybody is to expect a cold supper on this night preceding threshing day. As for me, there can be no thought of eating. While the others satisfy their hunger, I continue with my preparations. Late that night, having forgotten that I have not yet eaten, I drop into bed, too exhausted not to sleep.
“Pheasant day!” jubilantly announces the fourteen-year-old hunter of the family. Fourteen he is, but he stands five feet seven and a half inches tall and wears a number-eleven shoe. It may appear from this chronicle that one of my children has been given thyroid extract or something, and has suddenly sprung up from infancy to full size. But I am not writing a chronological report, only random impressions of life among us sagebrush folks, and I shall weave the shuttle back and forth, as old women are likely to do.
“There’ll be no hunting today,” countermands his father. “You are to stay home from school and run errands whenever we need you.”
Young Charles looks somewhat crestfallen at not being able to hunt on the first day of the season, especially since during breakfast we could hear the dull percussion of gun after gun, which betrayed that city men were invading our posted farms. The law is that if we farm people post notices that no hunting is allowed on our lands, the public is bound to respect the notices and commit no trespass. Citizens obeyed that law as they obeyed the Eighteenth Amendment. In hunting season they loaded their cars with bootleg liquor, to serve for refreshment on the way, and with utmost boldness hunted as they would on our posted farms.
Breakfast over, the little daughter Rhoda is set to washing dishes, and the youngest son, Joe, to carrying water from the canal. It is reasonably safe for him to do this because the irrigating season is over, and the water is not as high in the canal as formerly. It is less dangerous for the little fellow to go to the canal for water than to try to draw it from the cistern. The pump is broken, and there is no money for new parts; so it is laid on its side, and all water must be drawn from the inky depths below through an opening large enough for four people to pass through at once. As the cistern is twenty-five feet deep, there is grave danger that a nine-year-old boy may be dragged into that pit of liquid blackness by the heavy weight of the full bucket. I had come upon the two little children, Rhoda and Joe, drawing up water several times that summer, but never without a shock that hurt me in the breast.
The children have now gone to school, and I am preparing the fifteen-pound roast of meat, chopping cabbage, putting the beans in the oven, and keeping myself out of mischief with a few odd tasks like these. I am so absorbed in my work that I am surprised when I see, through the obscuring orchard trees, what appears to be the whirring of a gigantic wing. A puffing monster crawls slowly into sight, moving past the top of my vegetable garden. It is belching smoke, not from its stub nose, but from one horn on its head. Two men ride its back under a horizontal umbrella shelter, and it drags behind it a dormant red dragon with blunt head resembling that of a short-faced horse. The dragon’s tail curls over its back after the manner of a scorpion’s. After the dragon, at funeral pac
e, moves the unromantic red tank-wagon, drawn by two discouraged horses. And after this combined imposing spectacle follow the grain-wagons, the buggies, the cars, the saddle-riders, all the crew who are to help with the threshing.
Even as I look, a knock on the front-door screen draws me to the toothpick-pillared porch, where I find the wife of Hen Turner, dark, almost pretty, very taciturn, very clean, her hands already knobby-knuckled from hard work. She has come to help me serve the threshers. There is never a moment of stopping for us two women. We can hear the hum of the machine, and through the living-room window, where the table is set the length of the room, we can see the monster spewing forth the ivory straw, which the sun tips with silver glitterings like Christmas-tree tinsel. A cloud of dust, like smoke, hangs over everything.
We do not talk, we two women. We must rush, rush, RUSH! There is no such pressure on the men out-of-doors as there is on the women in the kitchen. Everything must be ready on the very dot of time when the threshing-machine stops with a great silence. Probably the earth would change its orbit, and a few planets crash, if it should ever occur that the threshing meal was not exactly ready when the first tableful of men was ready for it.
As I see them strolling in from the field, during that great silence of the threshing-machine, it is like a command in battle to go over the top. Nerves are stretched taut. I begin adding, in my mind, the different parts of the sum that makes the dinner, peeping into every steaming kettle, prying with a fork, scalding my fingers, burning my arms, turning on the pet-cock in the pressure-canner, looking in the oven at the beans, stirring the gravy, putting hot rolls on plates, seeing that the butter is all right, and a thousand other last-minute tasks.
Annie Pike Greenwood Page 19