Meaning a Life Read online

  I loved dressing up. Raymond and I would buckle on swords we had whittled and go out to play at being Knights of the Round Table; Robin Hood was also a favorite hero, who robbed from the rich to give to the poor. When Mama sang “My Little Old Sod Shanty” or “Sweet Betsy from Pike,” I imagined myself crossing the continent as my grandfather had done, walking from New York State to Montana after the Civil War. He had stopped in a tavern one night to find that Jesse James was spending the night there too; Grandfather went outside and buried his Army discharge pay beside a fence-post before he slept, but in the morning Jesse James was gone.

  I made my own hoop-stick as a child, from a lath long enough to reach the ground from my hand, to which I fastened a cross-piece. I then removed from an old wheel the iron hoop which bound it. I would give the hoop a little push to start it, and then I ran touching my hoop lightly with my stick to slow it or guide it. It now seems like a very small pastime, but it was elegant. I rolled my hoop when I ran on errands for my mother and I rolled my hoop to school; I hung it on my coat-hook in the cloakroom and leaned the stick against the wall. In cities years later I saw children, accompanied by nursemaids, rolling large hoops with sticks—and I had thought it to be a forgotten pastime!

  When Wendell bought me a bicycle with his pay I do not know which of us was more excited at its arrival. I got on the bike and Wendell pushed me for blocks, until he could run no more. “When you can carry a pail of water around the block on your bicycle without spilling it, you may go for the milk on your bicycle,” Papa told me. (It was my chore to get our milk every evening from a household which still kept a cow in the town.) In summer Raymond and I rode our bicycles on the only paved street, racing and circling around the Courthouse and then riding to the dairy, where we bought five-cent ice cream cones and rode home no-hands, feeling expert and elegant.

  * * *

  *A Montana word, meaning a cut, wash, or gully.

  My Brothers’ Wanderings

  1917–1925

  Two brothers were drafted into the army during the first World War, but Wendell was rejected because of an eye defect. Paul trained in Minnesota the year of the influenza epidemic, and without winter clothing he nearly died of pneumonia after the flu, so he was sent home. In Kalispell, Mama volunteered as a nurse; whole families were laid low by the flu, and many died in the massive epidemic. In the streets people wore gauze masks; funerals were held every day. Fortunately, in my family Paul was the only one who had the flu.

  Work and pray

  Live on hay

  There’ll be pie

  In the sky

  When you die.

  The adventures of my brothers were the first stirrings I felt of the world outside Kalispell. When they first went away, I was the little sister left at home. The war and the following economic crisis threw many men out of work, some of whom became hoboes, “riding the rods” under box cars on the railroad, looking for work in all parts of the country or following the harvesting of crops. It was also their spirit of adventure which led my two brothers to roam. Some of the wanderers they met were trade union organizers, “Wobblies,” or International Workers of the World (I.W.W.)—all part of a movement that introduced industrial unionism into the mines, the lumber industry, and the maritime industry of the western states. My brothers brought home boys who, like themselves, were wandering far from home. One, Luther Keene, a boy from bluegrass country in Kentucky, had a different speech than I had ever heard before. My father urged him to go home, promising to help him to get his own mule if he went home.

  When my brothers turned up at home once in a while, my mother deloused them and gave them clean clothes before they came into the house. They seemed strangers to me, bearded and with a new vocabulary, new songs, restlessness, and dissatisfaction. In summer they drifted off again to find temporary jobs as fire lookouts on lonely mountaintops or as crop harvesters. They neither went away nor came home in a decisive way.

  Wendell was working in a bank in Seattle and Paul was wandering when Papa, Mama, and I moved to Seattle. My brothers’ wanderings and their jobs away from Montana probably decided my parents on this move; or the move may have been made because Papa received an inheritance and could invest in a business in Seattle, an importing firm dealing with the Orient. He dealt with Chinese merchants; one time he took me along to present one of them with a bunch of lilacs, which were blooming in profusion in our yard.

  Seattle had foreign ships in the harbor, and there were distinct foreign groups in the population: Chinese in Chinatown and a large Scandinavian district in Ballard, across the lake. For the first time I saw stores with foreign products, ten-cent stores with counters over which to pore, a Farmers’ Market. I heard Chinese, Swedish, and Russian spoken; the Swedes and Russians had come as lumber workers, and eventually their women came to join these men in Seattle. An occasional copra ship from Papeete tied up at the waterfront. To me all was wonderful, a glimpse of the world beyond all I had so far seen. In the middle of the school year, we moved to a large rambling house on Lake Washington; it was across town from my school, and Papa took me several times on the streetcar to teach me the route and to make sure I could cross streets safely by myself. I found the streetcar an adventure, and learned the whole Seattle system. I can’t remember that we owned a car in Seattle, we all used the streetcars.

  I was growing up; once, at his place of business, Papa said to me, “Choose all the dolls you want,” and I chose thirty-five dolls. But because I no longer played with dolls, when I looked at them they seemed to accuse me of abandoning my childhood.

  I walked Seattle’s hills, going downtown by myself on Saturday morning to take my piano lesson, walking in the Farmers’ Market where farmers sold their vegetables and fishermen their fish. I walked on the waterfront streets too, where I found a flea circus; Seattle was a city on the sea with ships and fish boats tied up at the waterfront. I loved to smell the coffee, spices and fish—to me exotic smells; one of these odors will still bring me memories of Seattle. I was in love with my first city.

  The lamplighter came along at sundown with his small ladder on one shoulder and the lighter in his hand. He stopped at a light pole, leaned his ladder against the pole, stepped up to open the little door in the lamp, turned on the gas and lit the lamp. The light had a greenish glow and the evening ritual, the lighting of the lamps, was lovely.

  Rich, older matrons went about the city in small electric cars with a stick control for steering; the lady sat back on her seat enclosed in glass, gliding quietly along on her errands. An occasional elegant carriage appeared, drawn by a pair of matched horses, and big department stores used a delivery service with electric trucks which glided to a stop at the curb and quietly started on again. The milkman delivered milk, his bottles making a characteristic klonk-klank noise as he ran with them to the door. Each milk company had its delivery wagon, and in the early morning the heavy hooves of the horses clopped by; the horse knew the house of a customer and stopped without command. Early morning also meant the sound of the morning newspaper landing with a thud on the front door as the delivery boy threw it expertly without leaving his bicycle.

  On a visit to one of my father’s friends near Seattle, his two boys and I roamed the wide beach by their house. I had never been on a seashore before with driftwood and small scurrying crabs, some of which I took home in my pocket. The boys and I smoked pith-filled reeds, and when we returned to the house on the beach at the base of the cliff we had dinner. Papa had to have bread with his meal in order to enjoy the meal, and I remember the discussion about such different customs—this was a German family with German ways. Perhaps I remember these small details because shortly after our visit a landslide covered their house, and they were killed.

  My father dealt with a fireworks manufacturer named Mr. Hitt; I thought him a sort of wizard, like the Wizard of Oz, so Papa promised we would go to see the display of fireworks d
esigned by Mr. Hitt for Seattle’s Fourth of July celebration. We arrived early and sat on a hillside with a clear view. First rockets and fireballs, then larger, more complicated rockets exploded higher and higher, and revolving Catherine wheels sent out streamers of fire of different colors. I lay back on the grass to watch every star, every spark—they seemed to have always one more. Gasps and sighs passed through the throng of night-watchers and hung in the air with the showers of stars until it seemed we could bear no more. We waited, dazzled, and then trailed along behind the homeward-bound crowd.

  My friend Russel and I went black-berrying on late summer days. Seattle had more vacant lots than it had houses in its outskirts, and we explored woods, canyons, brooks, and cliffs. The city was lovely with snow-covered mountains off in the distance. We came home at sundown scratched and sunburned, but with our pails full of berries.

  On my way to school one day my dog was run over and killed; a passerby called the Humane Society to come for him, and I went to school sobbing. I would not tell the teacher what had happened, I would not say that he was dead—I could not yet accept his death.

  On Saturdays my mother and I met Papa downtown, where we went to vaudeville shows which had a variety of entertainment: magicians, tumblers, adagio dancers, singers. I liked the dancers best and thought of becoming a dancer, but Papa said, “It is no kind of life for you.” In Kalispell I had seen only Chautauqua-circuit performers and an occasional opera or an acting company, so vaudeville in Seattle was the first I had seen of a real stage, with lights and a full orchestra in the pit to accompany the performers. I practiced dancing by myself, and once when Wendell and I were at home alone on a summer evening I asked him to watch me dance. I danced in the garden; it was my only performance.

  Papa was not pleased with his partners in the import business in Seattle, so he sold his share and traveled down the coast to find a place to start a new business. He chose Grants Pass, Oregon, because a new dam was being built on the Rogue river, and the dam indicated that agriculture would develop from the abundant water for irrigation. He also had in mind that his three sons were wandering and that my uncle and aunt and their four children were his responsibility—wherever we went, they soon came too. My brothers were relieved to be called back by my father to help in the new store; they came home, never to go far from my mother or that region. Eventually they took to the forests for their livelihood and to hunting and fishing for their recreation.

  For my brothers, coming home was a return to a life they understood. The Marines, the Army, and the city had been confining and stultifying experiences; freedom meant roaming the woods with a gun or a fishpole. Wendell vowed, “After working in a bank, never again will I work at anything that requires that I look through a window at the world.” Not one of my brothers ever entered a factory to work. They feel still, at their advanced ages, that the city is the enemy—when they travel they drive a car or a truck, and they detour around cities. But when my family moved to Grants Pass I was twelve years old, and almost at once I began to save money to escape; my own direction was set by the family move from Montana to Seattle, my first city, which I loved. My mother was an example of this first movement away from the farm life which had been the only way for a large proportion of the population. Her yearnings for town and city life had behind them the consciousness that she was a farm girl, and a feeling of inferiority to townspeople lay under her seeming confidence. She was never sure that her dress, her style, her manner were the ones which gave her equal status in the town or city. While she felt comfortable in the greater anonymity of Seattle, she didn’t have the easy emergence into the community that had been hers by right in Kalispell, where she was a native daughter. In the back of her mind, I think, was a vision of riding into town on a wagon with thirteen siblings, well-fed but certainly not looking like town children. In Seattle she had found it more fashionable to be thin, and she became thin. She was quick to observe, to learn, to adapt.

  In Grants Pass, a few blocks down “A” Street, I found a building not much larger than a big schoolroom—the library of the town. There were so few books that I started at one end of a shelf and read everything I could of any possible interest, from Maeterlinck to Sax Rohmer; I re-read my Bible and our other books that I already knew well. My father bought me a puppy to keep me company, and I built a doghouse for him, even finding shingles for the roof. He was my first companion in this town which even for dogs was different from other towns; if dogs ate of the dead salmon that came floating down the river after spawning, they died. Soon the little house in the back yard stood empty.

  Papa met Ruth, a girl near my own age who worked in the lodge-hall next door to his store, and invited her to meet me. Ruth took me with her to the river to teach me to swim. The Rogue is wide and deep, and near the bridge at the city park a swim-float was moored out in the river. I could swim, but not against such a current; I practiced, and when Ruth thought I swam well enough we walked upstream to a gradual bank from which we could reach the swim-float if we struck out strongly for the opposite side of the river. It was not a safe swimming place, but we used it during the summers, when heat is intense in Oregon. It was out on the swim-float that a boy pinched me on the nipple and then dove into the water—I had not been aware that I had breasts.

  When school began, Ruth and I entered the old red-brick school building up a flight of steep steps to a first-story hall which ran through to a flight of steps on the other side of the building. No light entered the central hall except that from the two entrance doors at either end. The floor was black splintery wood, oiled each day by the janitor with an oil that reeked through the hallway. Stairways at either end of the hall led to the second story. Windows of classrooms were above our heads when we were seated. One room on the second floor was larger than the others, and it was used for gymnastic exercises or for pronouncements by Miss Crane, the principal and English teacher. The desks were scarred with generations of carvings of students’ initials and those of their first loves. Miss Crane is the only teacher I remember from that year—Miss Crane, hated yet loved by all the kids for her ugliness, her temper, her red wig. Her distinction lay in being the worst possible teacher I could imagine. She shouted, she threw ink-pots, she hit with a ruler; she could have been the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland.

  A boy named Jack McArthur gave me a valentine in eighth grade; probably I received other valentines, but this was a declaration of serious love that I was not able to accept. Yet he persisted in assuming that I was his girlfriend, and since the other boys assumed it too, I did not find boyfriends later in high school. Jack had the first crystal radio in the town, and he invited me to his home to listen to it. His home may have been the first I had been in with a worker father; Jack’s father was an engineer on the railroad, and he had a comfortable home with a secure way of life in this town where there was poverty, but the ways of the house were not ways to which I was accustomed. They seemed to be living in a stasis, to be going nowhere—although the radio and the railroad were symbols to me of the outside world and of travel.

  One day Jack came running through the town to find me. He had been to my house, and he came to the library as the next most likely place for me to be. Breathless, he had run from the improvised airport at the edge of town, where he had a job as watchman of the airplane for a barnstormer who was offering rides for five dollars to daring townspeople. Jack’s payment was to be a ride in the airplane, and he gave me the ride. No one was at home to ask permission, so we ran all the way back to the airfield, I climbed into the seat, and the owner took me up. The plane was small and open, the air rushed by, the motor worked hard and lifted us. Labor ceased and the plane seemed held by air. I leaned over the side to see the whole valley as I had never seen it before: the pass through the mountains from the north, the river winding through the valley from mountains on one side to mountains on the other, and endless mountains reaching in all directions away from the valley. I saw my house
in miniature; the whole town lay like a map of itself. My aunt and uncle (with whom my brothers and I were taking our meals while our parents were out of town) evinced considerable consternation when I came to dinner bursting with the story of my airplane ride. But my brothers took the news calmly, and my aunt’s family gradually calmed.

  As I was packing for a hiking trip with some girls that year, I asked my mother to cut my long hair, thinking that she would object to cutting it. She picked up the scissors, cut my hair and turned back to whatever she had been doing. My parents were preoccupied with my father’s health, and I think they were not very much aware of me that summer. Margaret, the girl to whom I felt closest, and I went for long walks and talks in the hills, sometimes riding her horse Babe. Margaret was not the favorite child of her mother, and as we talked we tried to understand our mothers and ourselves. Margaret had a fine contralto voice that filled the church on Sundays when she sang solos in the choir. Like many others, she felt she must keep a connection with her established family back east, too, but I had no one back east; my grandmother Colby had moved to California, and I had not been old enough when we left Montana to keep friends there as my brothers had done.