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 Little,” “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.