Annie Pike Greenwood

by We Sagebrush Folks

  Now, here was a problem for me. Rosa was likely to make an excellent dressmaker—her mother showed great skill in that line. She would never make a scholar. But if I told Rosa so, Larson would consider that he had triumphed over the poor girl, and also over me. Any opinion he might have about me was of no concern whatever, but, on the other hand, her mother had not asked me to decide Rosa’s superior aptitude; she had simply asked whether Rosa could sneak through my courses. I have always considered that the unforgivable sin mentioned in the Bible, but not named, is that of meddling in the destiny of another human life. It was not my province to settle Rosa’s fate. How did I know what experiences God considered necessary to form Rosa into the instrument most efficient for His use? I would keep hands off. I would not smooth the way unjustly for her, but neither would I pile unnecessary rocks in her way. God will provide his own impediments. There is no truer passage in the Bible than that which tells, “whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth.” I thank God for every mountain he has put across my way, for every stream that seemed like to drown me. Fortunate is he who must fight to attain his ambition. Only so can he be rightly dedicated to his work, and only through such dedication comes worthwhile accomplishment.

  “Can you get your card from Professor Larson? We will soon see whether you can make it. So much of the year is gone, it would be a pity to lose what credits you have gained. Get all you can in school, Rosa, but remember that it is a splendid thing to be able to do something useful with your hands. A well-made dress may be a work of art.”

  Rosa dried her tears and left the room, soon returning with her report card. I inspected it. “As I figure it, from your average so far, if you can make good percentages in your future tests and examinations and keep your class record as high as possible, you ought to get through. Of course, it will all depend on you. I think it is well worth risking. But don’t give up all thought of dressmaking. You are the best-dressed girl in the high school. Perhaps you have inherited your mother’s taste and gift with the needle. If you have, Rosa, keep your independence by being a dressmaker. There are always dresses to be made, and not enough capable hands to make them.”

  That was not meddling. That was just sowing a seed, and it was also warming the heart of a woman who had learned to trust me, and who got little enough praise, God knows, being a farmer’s wife. Rosa’s tears of gratitude made a rainbow through which she smiled. “Oh, Mrs. Greenwood! It’s so good of you to say so many nice things. Professor Larson is sore at me because I wouldn’t get up a petition against you. That time when you and me had trouble, he told me to get up a petition against you, and when you had trouble with Herbert, he told Herbert to get up a petition against you, and I wouldn’t and Herbert wouldn’t.”

  Larson heard a rumor that unless he stopped his activities to send Wendell Troughton to St. Anthony, there would be a lynching bee; consequently his ardor in that direction suddenly cooled. He was having a bitter time with the high-school students. I despised him, but pitied his predicament. The students had never been so unruly. In order to curry favor with the pupils and parents, he graded their report cards extremely high. They had been forced to earn any good marks they received from me. Some of the most inveterate whisperers, who could have been reformed only by the lockjaw, he gave P + in Deportment. They came in laughing groups to me, exhibiting their cards in mock triumph. Not one of them valued any mark Larson might give them.

  “What does P plus mean, Mrs. Greenwood?” one chuckling student asked, passing me her card.

  I smiled. “That means Perfect Plus...and, as the giraffe said when he saw the farmer, ‘There ain’t no sich animal!’”

  WHAT BECAME of Larson? Were I writing fiction for the approval of the usual American public, I would relate how he received his just deserts by being barred from the public educational field forever. Not so. This book is about real life in the United States. Over in Denmark such a man as Larson would never have been allowed to teach at all. I doubt that in any of the more civilized countries of Europe he could have taught.

  I speak the truth when I tell you that this reprehensible, illiterate man is today superintendent of schools in one of the most important counties of a Western state. Without education, violent of temper, and unintelligent, by means of politics he is able to retain a position with excellent pay, making him supervisor over a whole countyful of teachers, most of them his superiors, none of them his inferiors. Politics in the schools reveals to all other nations, by means of these United States, to what shameful uses the freedom of a democracy can be brought. The indifference of the able and the ignorance of the masses make the election of such men as Larson to positions of importance an everyday occurrence in our free country—free to the corrupt.

  As for me, these Acequia days were almost the last that I spent among the sagebrush farmers. I learned what faith can do at Acequia. I did not learn to keep the faith myself, continually, until after I left the wilderness. When I left Acequia, with the offer of the principal-ship for the next year, which I declined, I did not know that I was on the point of leaving the farm forever.

  XI—ECONOMICS

  YES, we lost the farm, thank God! It had become a case of our losing the farm or the farm gobbling us up. It was a Daniel Webster case of sink or swim, and we could not swim. My children are today fighting for their educations, for when you have to work your way through college, most of the time with scarcely any sleep, it is not just a struggle, it is a fight. The four of them, the wonderful four of them, so good to look upon; so good inside—worthy of temptation, but not yielding to it, for virtue is not virtue that is too unattractive to be worth the Devil’s time. As for me, cursed before birth with the doom of being a writer, good or bad, success or failure, I whose golden writing years were cooked into pies, hoed into vegetables, hatched into chicks—I have escaped a bed among the little drowned infants, beside the syphilitic babe, on that bleak desert hill overlooking the little town of Hazelton.

  We were not alone in our loss of the farm. Scarcely any of the farmers in that sagebrush country have been able to hang on to the land. City and rural farmers alike, nearly all have lost their farms, or are hanging on to them by a mere thread, slipping back, and slipping back, until there is no possible hope of their rescue unless...unless President Roosevelt can find the right solution. Even then, it may not be able to save them, but it will save others. If he can find the right solution for the ills of agriculture, he will have found the right solution for all the ills of the entire economic system. Agriculture is the barometer of the whole national-economics weather. The farmer is the first to go down and the last to rise, but no nation can claim a stable prosperity until the farmer is safe. Why? Because he feeds the world. It is a dangerous thing for the dog to leave Old Mother Hubbard lying there so sick in bed, and he not even barking a bark to summon help. Don’t you know that a cupboard, of itself, cannot always go on supplying bones?

  The Huberts were the only family who ever left us of their own free will. They went only so far as another part of Idaho, as wild as our own. We all loved the sagebrush country with an unexpressed and inexpressible passion. And, in return, our sagebrush farms were vampires which sucked our blood, and the blood is the life. No! It was not the sagebrush farm that visited upon us this gross injustice, but the indifference, greed, and blindness of the public at large, as represented by a Government of the people, for the people...a Government of the politicians for themselves and their friends.

  You may recall my telling of the scandal concerning my discrimination against little Willie Hubert at the Fourth of July celebration when Maizie, the city girl, ate three pies in three minutes and even more quickly performed a public regurgitation of the same. It was his mother and her family who left the district first of us all. Mrs. Hubert was a rather wonderful woman. She was the strongest member of that little family, and usually she commanded its destiny in a wise and effective manner. And she liked good music. That fact would inevitably endear her to me, beyond any possible c
avil. For that matter, all the sagebrush folks liked good music, strange as that may appear. But it was Mrs. Hubert who so generously thanked me the night that I explained the operas “Aïda,” “Carmen,” and several others, illustrating the music I described by means of phonograph records. On that night the two school-rooms which could be opened together, Primary and Upper Grades, were crowded with sagebrush farm folks, listening so intently that you could have heard yourself breathe had not the music interfered.

  The Huberts had bought their farm outright and had then erected on it a good frame farm-house of one large room, one small room, and a lean-to summer kitchen. The heat from the range was needed in the house in the wintertime, when the smaller room was used for a living-dining-kitchen room. The Huberts were the most successful farm family in our part of the project, not because of their crops, which were no better than those of any one else, nor because of any other circumstance that occurred during their life with us. They had simply not saddled themselves with debt to begin with, to add to it the cost of water and the taxes on the land. The rest of us were trying to buy our farms, as well as get out of them the expenses of farming and livings for our families. It could not be done. It is criminal to advise people to try to own land unless they have capital with which to make the start.

  Practically all we sagebrush folks were in the position of the young bride who learns to cook at the expense of her husband’s stomach and pocketbook. Yet our own losses from this cause were not so great as might have been expected. It did no good that you were an experienced farmer in Illinois, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Missouri, Arkansas, Texas, South Carolina, or Canada. The farmers from Utah became prosperous ahead of all others. X stands for the unknown quantity, irrigation.

  Charley knew as well as any of them how to farm in Idaho because he had sent for government bulletins and had followed every suggestion put forth by the Government, a thing which the dyed-in-the-wool farmer almost never does, one of the reasons being that nobody can tell him anything—he thinks he knows already better than the agricultural experts; and for another thing, he is not a reader, and all the government bulletins in the world cannot change his methods, for he never looks at them. As for irrigation, there was not a farmer in the whole sagebrush country who could beat Charley at that. It takes brains to make water run uphill; to make it go over a hill; to get the most out of the least water; to handle it so that the crops needing it most can have it when it is most needed it takes brains, and Charley had the brains. He was an authority, among those sagebrush farmers, on irrigation.

  When the Huberts decided to buy a farm in another part of Idaho, they staged our first farm sale, and it was the last for many years. We were all a good deal excited over it. Charley and I went to the Hubert farm in our Mormon white-top, behind two beautiful, almost black farm horses, Bonny and Bess. Our Kansas team were dead, as well as Old Buttons, but we had now also Star, a beautiful, vicious thoroughbred. Along the Lincoln Highway east we rode, then climbed a gentle hill north, passing the place where one day would live my good friend Gramma Poole, who once said to me, “You got no call to grum, Mrs. Greenwood, if folks don’t come to see you, for you never go to see no one.” And she further philosophized, “We women pomper the men too much.”

  Gramma Poole, so strong and sagacious, was not yet up from Texas when we rode toward Hubert’s. But next to the place where she would live was the tar-paper shack of Simon Heminway, housing, strange to relate, the only piano in the district, the only piano for many, many years. The wagon was gone from their doorway, so we practically knew that the Heminways were at the sale.

  From the top of the hill we could see the Hubert place, a tidy gray house, with a few young trees and a beginning row of fruit-bushes. The farm lay on the edge of the desert, barbed wire marking a line between green alfalfa and gray sagebrush. Somehow Hubert had been able to keep the rabbits from devouring his crop, which they generally do on farms located as his was. But I have an idea the fight made him leave us. We could see that the yard was filled with farm folks, their horses tied to the cedar fence-posts to the east of the house.

  All the household goods had been assembled in the back yard of the farm-house, and they were polished until they looked better than new. I hurriedly clambered over the wagon-wheel, while Charley was tying our horses so they would not bite Old Man Babcock’s mare Damyou—at least I suppose that was her name, for whenever he drove into our farmyard to borrow the seed-cleaner, or the hay-rake, or what-not, we could hear him shouting as he came, “Git up, Damyou!...If you don’t git a move on you, I’ll lick the daylights outen you, Damyou!...Git up, Damyou!...Damyou, git up!”

  I know I am writing on economics, in a rambling sort of way, but I have to pause to tell you how Old Bab got the best of Hen Turner, the Woodman of the World Grange Overseer of whom I once told you. Hen and the Baron were the only ones in our part of the country having hand seed-cleaners. The hand cleaner, of course, was used only when a farmer wanted to clean a small amount of seed, too trifling to bother putting through the threshing-machine. Bab came to borrow ours and found Charley busy with it, so he went on to Hen Turner’s in his white-top—one just like ours, except that it had no U.S. Mail stenciled on it in big letters, and Bab usually went about without the back seat in his, using it as a little wagon.

  He asked Hen if he could take Hen’s seed-cleaner home for a week or ten days. Hen was not using it and would not be using it, but he replied, “You’re welcome t’ use muh seed-cleaner, Bab, but yuh’ll hev to use it here, on muh own place.”

  It was not more than two weeks afterward that Hen’s wife was taken suddenly very sick, and Hen rode like mad over to Bab’s to borrow his white-top to take her to Dr. Berry in Hazelton. Bab eyed him a minute, and then he said, “You’re welcome t’ use muh white top, Hen, but yuh’ll hev to use it here, on muh own place.”

  Hen thought that was terrible. He came over to borrow our white-top, and that’s how the story got out.

  As I approached the Hubert house, I could see Mrs. Hubert and Mrs. Hatch fussing around a gasoline stove, out in the yard. They were heating a wash-boiler filled with water, and on an unpainted kitchen table nearby were several salt-sack bags of coffee, long strings attached for drawing them out of the water, in which they would presently be immersed. Beside the bags of ground coffee were two big dish-pans—I surmised they might belong to the two women and these were filled with thinly buttered buns, ordered from Twin Falls, a town which had not been alive very long, but which had been lively from the first gasp. We were to have lunch, and no matter of what, the fact was cheering. Especially cheering to a farm woman, who never gets to eat after any other woman, as we express it in the brush.

  Grouped together in the yard, as I have said, were all the house hold articles. I am a little mad about antiques. I am a little mad about most things. But my greedy eye goes looking this way and that—once I found a lyre-backed chair; once I found a lovely antique lamp. Mark Twain might have taken his own words from my mouth: “The very ‘marks’ on the bottom of a piece of rare crockery are able to throw me into a gibbering ecstasy....I am content to be a bric-a-bracker and a Keramiker.”

  It took me but a second to see that my only hope was among the odds and ends of dishes, all scattered about in black dripping-pans. I am a champion maker of odds and ends myself, having a kind of poltergeist gift which causes the dishes to fall out at me when I open the cupboard doors. The only time I was ever mad at Hib was when I broke a saucer after this manner, and over my shoulder he remarked, “Do you know, Mrs. Greenwood, I don’t know when I ever broke a dish.” He had that very morning broken the expensive spring-tooth harrow, and I want to tell you I bit a sore place on my tongue to keep from saying, “Do you know, Hib, I don’t know when I ever broke a spring-tooth harrow.”

  Of course, I could not just pick up whatever china I fancied. There was to be an auctioneer, and I should have to bid my bid against all comers. I saw a treasure that I meant to have: it was a fish platter, with a
goggle-eyed fish sprawling on it, in red and yellow, and twelve little fish plates for bones, each with a little yellow and red fish painted on it. It was so ugly that I could see how Mrs. Hubert could bear to part with it. Maybe somebody she did not like gave it to her. I could just fancy how fascinating it would be to watch a tableful of folks fishing fish bones out of their mouths to lay on those little dishes. Those plates would not hold an entire skeleton, unless the dish were used for the head and the tail end allowed to trail over the table-cloth in a kind of fernlike decoration. I resolved I must have that fish set.

  There were straight chairs, rocking-chairs, an old couch, a wash-stand, home-cobbled, and various other articles, among them a clumsy, big, old-fashioned coal-oil stove. I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw the Baron desert the home-cobbled wash-stand, after several lingering, affectionate glances. I knew it would be like him to fill up the kitchen with home-cobbled wash-stands for the comfort and convenience of helping farmers, though he was willing they should share one comb. I was so absorbed in the fish dishes that I barely noticed him circling the big, clumsy coal-oil stove, closing in on it as though it were a maverick at a round-up. We had a gasoline stove we could not use because we could not afford the fuel, and we certainly could not afford coal-oil any more than gasoline. So I never dreamed he could have designs on that stove.

  The auctioneer was from Twin Falls, like the buns, and he began by grabbing up two articles at a time, holding them in his hands—he was standing on a wash-bench—and talking so fast that we sagebrush folks were thrown into a flutter, sort of hypnotized, as the fakirs play on their flutes to hypnotize the cobra or something. We all began to breathe hard and fidget about, casting suspicious, avaricious glances at each other. I suspected every one there of having a mind for those fish dishes, and I feel sure that each one of us had segregated something to be fought and bled for with those farm neighbors of ours. The contagion of it, that’s all. If the auctioneer had been as slow as our brains, we could have kept a thought ahead of him; but he was a high-pressure salesman, and he knew wherein his power lay. He had no mercy on us.