A Girl from Yamhill (4 page)

When he was sixty-eight, my Grandfather Atlee decided to sell the store in Banks and retire to Yamhill. He and Frank, as he called my grandmother, had worked hard all their lives; they weren't getting any younger, and they had earned a rest.

I was sorry about the store, where I could help myself to gumdrops. Grandpa Atlee, a small, spry man with a bald head (but not as interesting as Uncle Fred's bald head) and a bushy moustache, always lifted me to the counter to sit with my legs dangling, happy and proud when he told his customers, “Yes, sir. She's the only granddaughter I got, and she's a crackerjack.”

My grandparents packed up their belongings and moved into two of the upstairs bedrooms for
the winter until they could find a house in Yamhill. I was glad to have them; so was Mother. That winter she escaped many of her farm chores to keep books for Yamhill's general merchandise store, where she was surrounded by people to talk to.

A gentle dumpling of a grandmother who worried about her tendency to “put on flesh,” my grandmother sang Civil War songs she had learned in her childhood: “Tenting on the Old Camp Ground” and “John Brown's Body.” I begged for a story. Her story was always the same:

Grandma Atlee taught me to sew. My stitches were uneven, my seams crooked, but turning scraps of cloth into blocks for a doll's quilt gave me real satisfaction.

Grandfather took me on his knee and, using my fingers to count, taught me “arithmeticking.” We progressed to adding and subtracting without fingers, and then to writing down the numbers on the backs of old envelopes.

In the spring, my grandparents moved to a house I could walk to alone, pausing at the door of the carpenter shop to say hello to Bob Perry and to watch him work with saws, hammers, chisels, and planes. At the blacksmith shop I stopped to watch the smith pump the bellows that made the coals on his hearth glow, then heat a horseshoe, bend it, and nail it to the hoof of a patient horse. Once, when he was not busy, he made me a ring from a horseshoe nail. At my grandparents' house, I paused to smell the warm red roses.

Most of all, I enjoyed time with my grandfather when he worked in his vegetable garden, which was full of wonder and beauty: fat pods of peas, new potatoes to gather when he turned the soil, brown lettuce and pale cucumbers that Grandma floated in a bowl of diluted vinegar with a bit of sugar, ruby-veined beets and feathery carrots to be harvested for winter, tomatoes to eat warm from the sun, green onions to eat with homemade bread, corn for people instead of cattle, string beans twining their way up tepees of sticks, small muskmelons the size of baseballs, round mottled watermelons, and strawberries. Wherever my grandfather lived, he grew strawberries.

Across the fence, Mrs. Roberts raised sunflowers for seeds to feed her noisy parrot. Grandpa explained that these plate-sized yellow flowers
followed the course of the sun during the day. That was why they were called sunflowers. I often stood looking up at those heavy blossoms, watching to see if I could catch them following the sun. I could never stand still that long, but by evening there they were, facing the sun setting behind the Coast Range. I was determined to catch them the next day, but I never succeeded. I was too active. Grandpa sometimes paid me a nickel to sit still for five minutes.

One summer day, my grandfather took me on a mysterious journey. He wouldn't say why. We walked a mile to the train depot. Through the depot window we could hear the chittering telegraph sending and receiving messages over the humming wires strung along poles that stretched the wires far, far away.

“When's the train coming, Grandpa?” I asked, wild with excitement.

“Hold your horses,” said Grandpa. “It'll come. Don't you worry.”

At last the train could be heard, chuffing and tooting, and then seen, trailing smoke as it pulled into the station and waited, panting, until the conductor shouted “'Board!” and we were off on our mysterious journey.

In McMinnville, seven miles away, we joined a crowd headed for a big tent and found seats on narrow bleachers.

It was a dog and pony show: music, clowns, dogs in costumes walking on their hind legs, pretty ladies leading ponies in fancy trappings, all marching, dancing around and around a big wooden ring in the center of the tent.

I was dazzled. There was so much excitement, so much to see, I couldn't take it all in. My fingers grew sticky from Cracker Jack as I perched on the narrow board and tried to grasp every bit of this grand and lavish spectacle.

The best part of the whole show was a clown wearing great flapping shoes who led a fox terrier with a stubby tail. On the end of this dog's tail was an electric bulb, and then—the light was turned on! The little dog trotted happily around the ring with the light on the end of his tail flicking on and off, on and off. I laughed so hard my stomach hurt, and I couldn't wait to tell my parents about the wonderful sight I had seen in McMinnville.

That summer I walked back and forth between the farm and my grandparents' house almost every day. One day I asked if I could take off my shoes and stockings when I went to visit. “Yes,” answered Mother, somewhat absentmindedly. “Don't step on any thistles, and come home in time for supper.”

I dropped my shoes and stockings on the porch, wiggled my toes, and set off down the board side
walk between the privet hedges, heavy with fragrance, to the road. The dust, which came up to my ankles, was as warm and as soft as feathers. I kicked up little clouds and was happy.

Then my feet began to grow warmer until I was uncomfortable. I didn't think of turning back. On a farm, no one ever gave up. No matter how we felt, livestock had to be cared for, fields plowed, crops sown, fruit and vegetables canned.

My feet became so hot I was in pain. I started to run, leaving a trail of dust behind me. As I ran past the blacksmith shop, I began to cry. The smith, a horse's foot between his thighs, stopped pounding on a horseshoe to stare. Asking for help from someone not a relative did not occur to me, any more than turning back, even though my feet felt as if they were burning. By now I was covered with dust. Tears streamed down my face, leaving muddy tracks. I began to shriek with pain, but there was nothing to do but run on. “Grandpa! Grandpa!” I screamed.

Finally my grandfather heard me and came running to see what was wrong. When he grasped what had happened, he plucked me out of the dust and carried me into the house, out of the sun. “Poor little young 'un,” he said. “You poor little young 'un.”

“Oh, you poor child,” said my grandmother when she saw my red feet.

My grandfather sat me on a chair and fetched a pan of cold water for my feet. My grandmother washed mud and dust from my face before she hurried to make me a glass of lemonade. I sat with my feet in the pan of water, drinking lemonade and feeling much better. The house was cool, and I was surrounded by love. “There. That's the ticket,” said Grandpa when I stopped crying.

 

That was the year Mother had said the stork was going to bring me a little brother or sister. Suddenly, one winter day, I was sent to my grandparents' house, with my nightgown, to spend the night—a real treat for me, because Grandma always read aloud from the newspaper the “Burgess Bedtime Story,” all about Old Mother West Wind, Grandfather Frog, and rabbits that went lipperty-lop into the old brier patch. Grandpa let me look at colored pictures in his dictionary, pages of foreign flags and breeds of horses, cows, and dogs.

I stayed all the next day, even though Grandma had walked back to the farm. When she returned, she cooked Thanksgiving dinner, which she packed in a basket. Grandpa balanced the basket on his shoulder, and we walked the muddy road home. What fun, I thought, dinner arriving in a clothes basket.

At home, I was shocked to see Mother, pale
and with her black hair tumbled on the pillow, in the four-poster bed in the downstairs bedroom. I had never before seen Mother in bed in the daytime. She managed a weak smile and told me she had not been feeling well, but she could come to the dinner table.

Later that winter, when it occurred to me to ask when the stork was going to bring my little brother or sister, Mother merely said, “The stork changed its mind.”

When I was an adult, Mother told me what had really happened. She had had a difficult miscarriage. Father, with the help of “Central,” reached a doctor, who, after hours of anguish for my parents, arrived too drunk to be of any help. Furious, Father telephoned my Uncle Ray, who opened his pharmacy in the night and brought to the farm the medicine a sober doctor would have prescribed. He gave it to Mother illegally and, the next morning, forced the doctor to sign the prescription. No little brother or sister ever came to our house.

The summer I was five, farm life began to change. For the first time, the cookhouse did not come to our farm at harvesttime. No burly man with a wood stove built in a shack on a wagon bed cooked for our harvest crew. I did not get to hang around hoping, but never hinting, for a piece of pie.

Instead, Mother and Grandma Atlee cooked for the crew. All the leaves were added to the oak dining table; dishes of jam, chowchow, and pickled peaches were set out. The two women worked frantically, peeling, mashing, frying, baking on the big wood range in the hot kitchen, trying to prepare dinner before the crew began to complain of hunger. Finally they rang the dinner gong to summon the sweaty, dusty, sunburned men, who
trooped across the barnyard to wash at the sink on the back porch and wipe their hands and faces on the roller towel.

As the men seated themselves, Mother and Grandma rushed in with platters of fried chicken, mountains of mashed potatoes, great bowls of green beans simmered with bacon for hours, piles of biscuits, coffee. More chicken, more string beans, biscuits, and coffee, followed by several kinds of pie.

One thresher fascinated me. He had no teeth and ate with his knife. I stood as close as I could get to him, watching him scoop up food with his knife, looking up at his mouth to see how he managed. The other men were amused; he did not seem to mind. Later, when I tried to eat with my knife, Mother explained that only men who were old-timers ate with knives.

Finally, when the men had eaten everything in sight, they returned to the threshing machine. I helped clear the table, and when Mother and Grandma began to wash dishes in water heated on the stove, Mother said, “Beverly, never, never, serve mashed potatoes to threshers. They disappear too fast.” To her mother she said, “What will the men think of me, running out of potatoes like that?”

“Why didn't the cookhouse come?” I asked.

Mother sighed. “Because we simply don't have the money. Most farmers don't this year.”

There were other hints that we did not have as much money as we would like to have. When the Chautauqua came to town, and men in suits gave what I considered boring lectures in a big tent, town children were excited about paying ten cents to drop a fishing line over a curtain and land a present. I was eager for my turn, but Mother whispered, “You mustn't ask. We don't have an extra ten cents.” Even though I was heavy with disappointment as we left and trudged down the boardwalk toward the farm, I managed not to cry, because Mother was so distressed.

Then, one rainy afternoon, I was watching Mother try to retrim her hat when Father came in from the barn. “What are you building?” he asked, a clumsy attempt at a joke.

Mother burst into tears. “I just can't make it look like anything,” she said, “and I don't know when I can ever afford a new hat.” I cried, too, so much did I want Mother to like her hat.

As my parents grew downhearted, I grew increasingly restless. “Tell me a story, Mamma. Tell me a story,” I begged, or whined, until Mother was worn out. She had told me over and over every story she could remember: “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Three Little Pigs,” “Chicken Lit
tle,” “The Little Red Hen.” She had recited every scrap of poetry she could recall. On Sundays my father read me “The Katzenjammer Kids” from the funny papers. Grandma Atlee continued to read the “Burgess Bedtime Story” from the newspaper, even though I never went to bed afterward.

My picture books were a book of Jell-O recipes that showed shimmering pastel desserts, and advertisements in
The Saturday Evening Post, The Ladies' Home Journal
, and
The Country Gentleman
. I looked for the fluffy yellow chick in the Bon Ami advertisement. “Hasn't scratched yet,” Mother read when I asked her what the words said. The Dutch woman who carried a stick and chased herself around the can of Dutch Cleanser was a character I admired. To me, she stood for energy and hard work, two qualities necessary to livelihood on a farm. My favorite magazine characters were the Campbell Soup twins, chubby and happy, always playing together. I longed for someone to play with and wished I had a twin.

I owned two books: the Volland edition of
Mother Goose
and a linen book,
The Story of the Three Bears
, in which Mother Bear, returning from her walk, carried a beautiful bouquet of purple violets. Mother read both books until I had memorized them.

Mother, too, was starved for books, perhaps to take her mind off her worries. “Yamhill needs a library,” she said. “There is entirely too much gossip. People would be better off reading books.”

Somehow, in spite of all her work, Mother summoned energy to start a campaign for a library. The editor of the
Yamhill Record
cooperated by writing articles expressing the need for a county library “because there is no place in Yamhill where books can be obtained free,” and explaining that “a county library would cost a man whose property was assessed at $5,000 only $1.50 a year.”

Mother, too impatient for voters to raise their taxes, and probably suspecting they wouldn't, plunged ahead. She asked for donations of books and a bookcase or cupboard that could be locked. A glass china cupboard was carried upstairs to the Commercial Clubrooms over the Yamhill Bank. The community donated books, boring grown-up books with dull pictures that were a disappointment to me. Mother reported in the
Record
, “Little folks come in eager for a book and have to go home disappointed.”

With this small beginning, Mother opened the library every Saturday afternoon, when country people came to town to shop and Uncle Ray put out in front of the drugstore his popcorn machine,
where celluloid dolls bounced in the dancing popcorn. I looked forward to the walk uptown to the library, where, even if there were no books for children, I could sit in a leather chair with its stuffing coming out and be seen and not heard. I listened to talk with big words I did not understand, but I did understand when women spoke angrily about the high price of sugar and the cost of canning fruit and making jam when summer came.

Mother persisted. She arranged a silver tea to raise money for the library, and someone gave a luncheon at which a woman played a saxophone solo. The library now had sixteen dollars! Mother called a meeting for the purpose of securing a traveling state library for Yamhill. The
Record
reported, “Twelve ladies were present who made up in enthusiasm for a lack of numbers.”

Mother wrote that the library had sixty-four permanent volumes, including Dickens, Scott, Eliot, and Hawthorne, and concluded her article with, “It is said that a young girl who reads George Eliot's
Adam Bede
will never give her parents much cause for worry.” She also cautioned, “Let every person donating a book first ask himself if the book contains anything that might cause young people to form wrong ideas.”

Next Mother reported that a hundred people
had asked for books. Men wanted adventure, a boy asked for forestry, an old lady who was ill sent in for cheerful stories, women who lived in lonely places asked for books. She concluded this article by saying, “Our children need and are entitled to the use of a library just as much as city children are.”

Crates of books began to arrive from the Oregon State Library in Salem. At last Yamhill had books for children—and what good books they were! The first I recall was Joseph Jacobs's
More English Fairy Tales
, which included a gruesome little tale called “The Hobyahs.” I was so attached to that story that Mother had to pry the book out of my fingers at bedtime.

Books by Beatrix Potter were among the many that came out of those state library crates. My favorite was
The Tailor of Gloucester
, not only because I loved the story, but because of the picture of the waistcoat so beautifully embroidered by mice. I studied that picture and knew that someday I wanted to sew beautifully, too.

Mother wearied of reading aloud so much. “I'll teach you to read,” she said.

“No.” I was firm about this. Little girls who were to enter the first grade in the fall had spent a day at school in the company of big girls. I had such a good time that I wanted to learn to read
in the real school with other children, not in our kitchen alone with Mother. I could hardly wait.

That brave little library brightened the lives of many of us that winter, and in the spring, when flowers bloomed again, the library had a hundred and forty-two books in addition to sixty-two state books.

One Saturday was particularly pleasant because we combined picking flowers with walking to the library. Yamhill's war hero, George Welk, who had captured thirty-two Germans single-handedly (“I think he just got excited,” said Mother), had written to the
Record
asking the people of Yamhill to collect blue pinks. The blossoms would be sent to Portland for sea color on the U.S. Marines float in the Rose Festival parade. “George Welk takes pride in knowing Yamhill can do it,” wrote the editor. Mother and I, along with others, gathered armfuls of blue bachelor buttons, which we left in buckets of water in front of the store on our way to the library. This was the last time we picked wildflowers in Yamhill.

That summer everything changed. Father was proud of his bountiful harvest of heavy wheat, laden fruit trees, woolly sheep, fat hogs, cows that gave rich milk. This was followed by bitterness because he could not sell any of it for enough money to meet expenses. We stopped subscribing
to
The Oregonian
because, as I understood it at the age of six when I missed “The Katzenjammer Kids,” the
Oregonian
did not say nice things about farmers.

Someone had borrowed money, Father had agreed to cosign, and when the person (perhaps an uncle) could not repay, my father had to assume the debt. Years later, Mother recalled that year with sorrow. “We had everything,” she said, “everything except money.”

Money was needed for things we could not grow, that mysterious, invisible mortgage payment, a pretty hat.

One day Father, looking worried and exhausted, came in from the barn. “I've had enough,” he said. “I'm quitting.”

Mother, who had been standing at the kitchen stove, dropped into a chair. “Thank goodness,” she said.

Father found someone to lease the farm, and our livestock was sold at auction from the wagon in the barnyard. When the animals were being led away, and Mother learned the amount of money they had brought, she said, “Oh dear.” I was sad, without understanding why.

Our possessions were loaded onto a truck. We left behind the beautiful walnut wardrobe because, as Mother explained, city houses had closets. Then, with Grandma and Grandpa coming
along to wave goodbye, we walked to the depot to catch the train to a new life.

Leaving Yamhill did not distress me, for home was wherever my parents lived. I looked forward to Portland, where I would have children close by to play with, school, a real teacher who would teach me to read. Even though adults had troubles, I was secure. Yamhill had taught me that the world was a safe and beautiful place, where children were treated with kindness, patience, and tolerance. Everyone loved little girls. I was sure of that.