A Girl from Yamhill (2 page)

Many words are needed to describe my mother: small, pert, vivacious, talkative, fun-loving, excitable, easily fatigued, depressed, discouraged, determined. Her best features were her brown eyes; her shining black hair, which grew to a widow's peak on her forehead; her even white teeth; and her erect carriage. She had a round nose and a sallow complexion, both distressing to her, but she made up for these shortcomings with her sense of style.

Mother was born Mable Atlee in Dowagiac, Michigan, and became a classic figure of the westward emigration movement, the little schoolmarm from the East who stepped off a train in the West to teach school.

Her father, William Slater Atlee, arrived in the
United States from England in 1854, at the age of two, with his parents, Thomas and Jane, and a baby sister. The six weeks' voyage by sailing vessel with two infants was so terrible that Thomas and Jane, homesick for England all their lives, could never face the return trip.

Ancestors are often remembered for some small incident. Great-grandfather Atlee, a miller, is remembered as a man who read every spare moment and who carried a book wherever he went. He is also remembered for admiring the fly front of American trousers at a time when Englishmen wore trousers that buttoned on the sides. One day, equipping himself with buttons, scissors, needle, and thread, he went out into the orchard and clumsily remodeled his trousers, to the horror of his wife.

Great-grandmother Jane Slater Atlee is remembered as a jolly woman, a lively talker, who once was so busy chatting that she absentmindedly knit a sock with a foot two feet long for the small foot of her husband. She bore twelve children, five of whom survived.

Little is known of the family of my grandmother, Mary Frances Jarvis of Dowagiac, Michigan. Her father, Zeduck Jarvis, was well-to-do; she loved him, and all her life took pride in his having given the land for the local school. Her mother died of “the galloping consumption,” and
at the age of seventeen Mary Frances married my grandfather to escape her stepmother.

The marriage of William and Mary Frances produced three children: Guy, Henry, and Mable, my mother. In the beginning, the marriage of my grandparents, a poor young miller and the daughter of a prosperous landowner, must have been unhappy. Mother recalled that when she was a little girl, her father drank heavily. “There is nothing more terrible for a child than seeing her father carried home drunk,” she often said. I believe her. However, my grandfather, after observing the deterioration of some of his drinking neighbors, concluded that no good ever came from liquor, and never drank again. Mother had a horror of any sort of alcohol.

Mother graduated from Dowagiac High School in 1903 after spending one unforgettable year living with an aunt and going to school in Chicago. She taught two years in Dowagiac, then emigrated west in 1905 to Quincy, Washington, with two cousins, Verna and Lora Evans, also teachers. They had been hired by mail to teach in what their teaching certificates called the “Common Schools of Washington.”

One letter to her parents, written in round, upright penmanship, exists from this period of Mother's life. It comes from “School Marm's Hall.” Mother's cousins had already begun teach
ing, and she was about to hire a livery to drive out to her school in Waterville, Washington, a school that she thought had about fifty pupils.

Her description of life in Quincy in 1905 is lively. All the bachelors and widowers had “taken to” the new girls in town. Word went around that the young women liked watermelon, and “the result was rather alarming. There are watermelons upon the floor, table and shelves, behind the doors and in the closet. We never venture upon the street, but what some designing fellow offers us one. We accept them all and do our best….” The young teachers went to dances and took in “all the little one-horse shows going. We always tell everyone we are going, start early, walk slowly and never have to pay our own way in.”

Mother saved from this period of her life a copy of
The Biography of a Grizzly
, by Ernest Thompson Seton, which had been sent by friends in Michigan. She told me that after she read the book aloud in Waterville, her pupils told their families about it. People began to come from miles around to borrow the book, which was read until its binding was frayed and its pages loosened, but Mother treasured it and in her old age wrote inside the cover in a shaky hand, “This book very soiled because it has been read by many many people, including boys and girls.”

Mother was not the only member of the family
to come west. Her older brother, Guy, emigrated to Arizona, where he mined silver and turquoise. Back in Michigan, small-town water-driven mills were being replaced by large roller mills which, my grandfather insisted, milled “all the good” out of the grain, so he and my grandmother moved west and settled in Banks, Oregon, where they bought the general merchandise store and lived in six rooms above it. My grandmother turned one bedroom into a millinery shop, where she trimmed ladies' hats with style and an understanding of farmwives' financial problems.

The three young teachers spent their summers trailing through the West in their big hats and long skirts, traveling by train in coach cars, marveling at San Francisco the summer after the earthquake and fire, the sea through a glass-bottomed boat at Catalina Island, the pin that drops silently in the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City. Those years were perhaps the happiest in Mother's life.

Mother took a side trip to visit her parents in Banks. There, sitting on the steps of the store, was a tall, handsome young man wearing a white sweater and eating a pie, a whole pie. This man was Chester Lloyd Bunn. He and my mother were married on December 26, 1907, in Vancouver, Washington.

I have few clues to my parents' courtship.
When I asked about a pair of mandolins no one ever played, Mother laughed and said, “Before your father and I were married, we pictured ourselves sitting in a hammock strumming them together.”

When I was about ten, I found, along with Mother's old
Teacher's Encyclopedia
, a composition book. I opened it and read aloud from her handwriting, “At last Lloyd came today.”

Puzzled, I asked, “Why did you write that?”

Mother snatched the composition book from me and did not answer. It must have been the beginning of a diary kept while she was fulfilling her teaching contract in Washington and longing for the young man she loved. I don't really know.

The couple moved to Yamhill, where Lloyd, as he preferred to be called, was working the farm for the Bunn Farming Company, an attempt to hold together for the family the land left by their father, who had died, gored by a bull, the previous August.

The life of a farmer's wife came as a shock to my small, high-strung mother, ill equipped for long hours and heavy work. Three or four years later, Father saw that he was doing more than his share of the work on the farm, and the Bunn Farming Company was disbanded. My father's share of the farm, eighty-two acres, included the
house and outbuildings. He was the only one of the five sons interested in farming.

On April 12, 1916, I was born in the nearest hospital, which was in McMinnville. Mother traveled there by train and lived in the hospital for a week while she awaited my birth. It was wartime, and there was a shortage of nurses, so she busied herself running the dust mop and helping around the hospital until I was born.

McMinnville was my birthplace, but home was Yamhill.

An only child on a farm, I had freedom for self-amusement, for looking, smelling, examining, exploring. No one cared if I got dirty. My parents were much too hardworking to be concerned about a little dirt. At the end of the day, Mother simply had me climb into my enameled baby tub set in the kitchen sink and scrubbed me off. The tub in the bathroom was almost six feet long, too long for one small girl.

Sunny afternoons, I sat among the windfalls under an apple tree that bore cream-colored apples with pink cheeks, sniffing the sun-warmed fruit, taking one bite, throwing the rest of the apple away, and biting into another. The first bite of an apple tastes best, and our tree was bountiful. Juice flowed down my chin. Nobody cared.

One happy morning when our crop of Bing cherries was wormy, I dug into the juicy cherries for worms, which I dropped into the mouths of baby birds in a nest I had discovered in a wild rose bush. When I turned up covered with purple juice, Mother said. “What on earth have you been doing?” and went on with her canning and preserving of fruit for the winter.

I hunted for the abandoned nests of hens that refused to lay their eggs in the hen house. The eggs were almost always rotten, and throwing them made a great stink. Father, watching me, said, “Just throw them over there in that empty field,” and went on his way to the barn.

Most fun of all was tripping chickens. Father had a long pole with a hook on the end for snaring hens when Mother planned a chicken dinner. I tripped them, one after another, tipping them into the weeds of the barnyard, leaving them clucking indignantly over their ruffled feathers, until Mother pointed out that I was unkind to the chickens. I did not see why. I often watched Father behead chickens with an ax, a very unkind way to treat a chicken. I sometimes did not understand Mother's logic. When no one was looking, I went right on tripping chickens.

Freedom was permitted because Father had taught me rules of safety which I was trusted to obey. One cold morning, I had come downstairs
to dress in the kitchen by the warmth of the wood stove. The heat felt so good I held out my finger to touch the stove.

“If you touch the stove, you will burn yourself,” Father told me.

Defiant, I touched the stove and howled in pain.

Mother, who was dishing up oatmeal, was shocked. “Lloyd, how could you? Why didn't you stop her?”

“She has to learn sometime” was all Father said. Neither parent offered any sympathy. I had to learn.

In good weather, I followed my father around the farm, listening while he explained his work and taught me the rules I must obey.

Never play in the grain bin; the grain could slide down and smother me.

Never walk behind the horses; they might be startled and kick.

If I played in the haymow, I must always play in the center; if I played near the edge, I might slide into a manger below and frighten a cow or a horse.

Never enter the pump house below the windmill alone; the floor above the tank was rotting, and I might fall through.

Never walk uphill behind a load of hay; the hay might slide off the wagon on top of me.

Never lean over the pigpen; if I fell into the pen, the pigs would hurt me.

Always shut and fasten gates to keep animals from getting into fields.

All these rules, when explained by Father, seemed sensible and interesting. I understood and never disobeyed, not once.

I walked beside Father while he plowed and watched the rumps of Pick and Lady, our plow horses, rise and fall in the sun as the blade of the plow laid back the brown earth, and the dogs, Old Bob and Scotty, trotted beside us. Father taught me the names of the flowers that hid the split-rail fence: Quaker bonnets, which some people called lupine; wild roses; Queen Anne's lace, which looked to me like crocheted doilies on long pale stems. He taught me to sing songs about “Polly Wolly Doodle” and “The Bowery.”

When he drove to the pasture for firewood, I sat beside him on a wagon seat polished by three generations of overalls while he named trees: maple, elderberry, alder, and cedar. He taught me, not very successfully, to imitate the whistle of the bobwhite. He sometimes climbed down to pick a purple thistle and a twig, which he magically turned into a tiny parasol for me.

When Father milked the cows, I stood beside him, watching his strong hands pull and squeeze the udders, making milk
ching-ching
into the
bucket. My hands were not strong enough to bring down milk. Sometimes he squirted milk into the mouths of a waiting row of barn cats.

I stood on the fence, out of the way, to watch Father work with the threshing crew as the men caught in gunnysacks the golden stream of wheat from the threshing machine. In spring, I stood on the same fence to watch another crew shear sheep, run them through a vat of sheep dip, and release them, naked and bleating, while hungry lambs searched for their mothers.

Late sunny afternoons, Mother escaped the house, and I joined her on a walk to the pasture to bring home the cows. Old Bob, crouching low, nipping heels, was capable of bringing home the cows without us, but Mother was glad of the sunshine and freedom from endless chores. These walks, with the sound of cowbells tinkling in the woods by the river, and bobwhites, like fat little hens, calling their names, filled me with joy as I searched for flowers whose names Mother taught me: shy kitten's ears with grayish white, soft-haired pointed petals which grew flat to the ground and which I stroked, pretending they really were kitten's ears; buttercups and Johnny-jump-ups to be gathered by the handful; stalks of foxgloves with pink bell-shaped flowers which I picked and fitted over my fingers, pretending I was a fox wearing gloves; robin's eggs, speckled
and shaped like a broken eggshell, which had such a strong odor Mother tactfully placed my bouquet in a mason jar on the back porch “so they will look pretty when Daddy comes in.”

If we cut across a field, I picked bachelor's buttons, which Mother said were also called French pinks. Once when Father's sweater needed buttons, I picked some blossoms and, with a darning needle and thread, sat under the dining room table, where I sewed the bachelor's buttons to my father's sweater in place of the missing buttons. Although he disliked those flowers because as a boy he had been forced to weed them from the fields, he wore the sweater, buttoned with flowers, until the blossoms withered, crumbled, and dropped away.

Mother's work in the kitchen was so tiresome we were glad of distractions that took us, running, from the house. One day Mother thought she heard an airplane. We tore out to look. Sure enough, two army planes were flying right over our farm. We stood among the clucking chickens, watching in awe, until the planes disappeared into the distance. “Mamma, I could see the aviators,” I said, almost not believing what I had seen—men up in the air.

Another time, those same hens set up a great chorus of squawking. “A hawk! A hawk!” Mother cried. “Quick, Beverly!”

All three of us knew what to do. Mother and I ran to the barnyard; Father ran to the barn. While Mother scooped baby chickens into her apron, I caught them one at a time. They were just the right size for my hands. One by one, I chased, snatched, and carefully carried the cheeping balls of yellow fluff to their triangular coops, where I shoved them to safety. Overhead, the hawk circled.

Father appeared in the doorway of the barn with his shotgun, fired, fired again. The hawk tumbled, flopping to the ground, a heap of feathers. Our chicks were safe from the talons of the hawk, and I have never forgotten my wonder at the feel of life in those chicks, whose bodies were so tiny and fragile inside their fluff. Even though I ran with them, I was careful to protect them with my curved and dirty fingers.

Winter days belonged entirely to Mother and were spent in the kitchen, where it was warm. I stood at the window watching the weather, the ever-changing Oregon clouds that sometimes hung so low they hid the Coast Range, rain that slanted endlessly on the bleak brown fields, stubble stiff with frost, and, sometimes, a world made clean and white by snow.

Because we were lonely for companionship, Mother talked while she boiled clothes in a copper wash boiler, ironed, baked, or worked at her
hated chore, washing and scalding the cream separator. She recited lines she must have learned from an elocution class in Chicago when she was a girl. “There it stands above the warehouse door”—dramatic pause, thump of the iron on the ironing board—“Scrooge and Marley.” These words from Dickens's
Christmas Carol
to me were mysterious and filled with foreboding.

In spring, Mother shared Chaucer, as much as she could recall: “Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote the droghte of March hath perced to the roote…” I learned to imitate every word, every inflection.

Mother also told me everything she could recall about her childhood in Michigan—sleigh rides, sledding, gathering sap for maple syrup. The Oregon maples in our pasture were a disappointing lot when compared with Michigan maples that gave forth sweet sap to be boiled and poured on the snow to cool for children to eat. I longed for the deep snows of Michigan. If we had snow like Michigan's, I could coast down our hill, if I had a sled.

Never mind, I could find substitutes. I took the broom to the top of the stairs, laid it on the steps with the handle pointing down, sat on the bristles, and descended the steps with terrifying speed, bumping every step and screaming all the way.

“How on earth did you get such an idea in your head?” asked my weary mother as she ran to pick me up and wipe my tears.

At Christmas I was given an orange, a rare treat from the far-off land of California. I sniffed my orange, admired its color and its tiny pores, and placed it beside my bowl of oatmeal at the breakfast table, where I sat raised by two volumes of Mother's
Teacher's Encyclopedia
.

Father picked up my orange. “Did you know that the world is round, like an orange?” he asked. No, I did not. “It is,” said Father. “If you started here”—pointing to the top of the orange—“and traveled in a straight line”—demonstrating with his finger—“you would travel back to where you started.” Oh, My father scored my orange. I peeled and thoughtfully ate it.

I thought about that orange until spring, when wild forget-me-nots suddenly bloomed in one corner of our big field. The time had come. I crossed the barnyard, climbed a gate, walked down the hill, climbed another gate, and started off across the field, which was still too wet to plow. Mud clung to my shoes I plodded on and on, with my feet growing heavier with every step. I came to the fence that marked the boundary of our land and bravely prepared to climb it and plunge into foreign bushes.

My journey was interrupted by a shout. Father
came striding across the field in his rubber boots. “Just where in Sam Hill do you think you're going?” he demanded.

“Around the world, like you said.”

Father chuckled and, carrying me under his arm, lugged me back to the house, where he set me on the back porch and explained the size of the world.

Mother looked at my shoes, now gobs of mud, and sighed. “Beverly, what will you think of next?” she asked.

More rain fell. I stood at the kitchen window whining, “When's it going to stop, Mamma, when's it going to stop?”

Mother, who was as tired of rain as I, and worn out from being shut in with a restless child, fed wood from the woodbox into the stove and answered, “In Michigan, people say that when you can see a patch of blue the size of a man's shirt, the rain will stop.”

I stared and stared at the gray, shifting clouds, watching. And then, just as if we were in Michigan, the clouds parted and I could see a patch of blue the size of a man's shirt. “Mamma!” I cried. “It's going to stop raining! I can see blue like Daddy's shirt.” The blue patch enlarged. An arc of colors appeared. “Look, Mamma! Come look!”

Mother left her work to see the miracle.
“A rainbow,” she said, “Isn't it beautiful? They say there's a pot of gold at the end of every rainbow.”

The fragile colors contrasted with the soggy earth and the leafless trees of the pasture. Gradually the rainbow faded and disappeared, along with the shirt-sized patch of blue. Rain fell. This was Oregon, not Michigan.

 

Real spring came at last. On Sunday, we walked through misty rain down the muddy road to the white church, where I attended Sunday school in the basement and learned that Jesus loved me, and Pharaoh's daughter rescued a little baby boy she found in a basket in the bullrushes. Then the children joined their parents upstairs for the hard part of church, the endless sermon. Hymnbooks had no pictures. Finally, when I thought I could not stand it one more minute, the sermon ended, and we were released into watery sunshine under a ragged sky. There, once more, was a rainbow that ended not far away, at a wild crab apple tree blooming by the side of the road. I ran down the steps, past the buggies and restless horses, past automobiles, and on down the road.

“Beverly!” Mother called out. “Where do you think you're going?”

“To get the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.” Silly Mamma. Couldn't she see the end of this rainbow was close enough to reach?

“Come back this minute,” ordered Mother. Reluctantly I returned to face the affectionate laughter of the dispersing congregation. Mother explained that a pot of gold was something you read about in fairy tales.

In Yamhill we did not have fairy tales, but from bits of overheard adult conversation I was beginning to understand that gold was something like money, and money was needed to buy all we did not grow.