There is so much to tell about the Western country in that day that it is hard to know where to start. One thing sets off a hundred others. The problem is to decide which one to tell first.
You remember that
Samuel Hamilton said his children had gone to a dance at the Peach Tree School. The country schools were the centers of culture then. The Protestant churches in the
towns were fighting for their existence in a country where they were newcomers. The Catholic church, first on the scene and deeply dug in, sat in comfortable tradition while the missions were gradually abandoned and their roofs fell in and pigeons roosted on the stripped altars. The library (in Latin and Spanish) of the San Antonio Mission was thrown into a granary, where the rats ate
off the
sheepskin
bindings. In the country the repository of art and science was the school, and the schoolteacher shielded and carried the torch of learning
and of
beauty.
The
schoolhouse was the meeting place for music, for debate.
The polls were set in the schoolhouse for elections. Social life, whether it was the crowning of a May queen, the eulogy to a dead president, or an all-night dance, could be held nowhere else. And the teacher was not only an intellectual paragon and a social leader, but also the matrimonial catch of the countryside. A family could indeed walk proudly if a son married the schoolteacher.
Her children were presumed to
have intellectual
advantages both inherited and conditioned.
The daughters of Samuel Hamilton were not destined to become work-destroyed farm
wives. They were
handsome girls and they carried with them the glow of their descent from the kings of Ireland. They had a pride that
transcended their
poverty. No one ever thought of them as deserving pity.
Samuel raised a distinctly superior breed. They were
better read and better bred than
most of their
contemporaries. To all of them Samuel communicated his love of learning, and he set them apart from the prideful ignorance of their time. Olive Hamilton became a teacher. That meant that she left home at fifteen and went to live in Salinas, where she could go to secondary school. At seventeen she took county board examinations, which covered all the arts and sciences, and at eighteen she was teaching school at Peach Tree.
In her school there were
pupils older and bigger than she was. It required great tact to be a schoolteacher. To keep order among the big undisciplined boys without pistol and bull whip was a difficult
and dangerous
business. In one school in the mountains a teacher was raped by her pupils.
Olive Hamilton had not only to teach everything, but to all ages. Very few youths
went past the eighth grade in those days, and what with farm duties some of them took fourteen or fifteen years to do it. Olive also had to practice
rudimentary
medicine, for there were constant accidents. She sewed up knife cuts after a fight in the schoolyard. When a small barefooted boy was bitten by a rattlesnake, it was her duty to suck his toe to draw the poison out.
She taught reading to the first grade and algebra to the eighth. She led the singing, acted as a critic of literature, wrote the social notes that went weekly to the Salinas Journal. In addition, the whole social life of the area was in her hands, not only graduation
exercises, but
dances, meetings, debates, chorals, Christmas and May
Day festivals, patriotic
exudations on Decoration Day and the Fourth of July. She was on the election board and headed and held together all charities. It was far from an easy job, and it had duties and
obligations beyond
belief. The teacher had no private life. She was watched jealously for any weakness of character. She could not board with one family for more than one term, for that would
cause jealousy—a family
gained social
ascendancy by boarding the teacher. If a marriageable son belonged to the family where she boarded a proposal was automatic; if there was more than one claimant, vicious fights occurred over her hand. The Aguita boys, three of them, nearly clawed each other to death over Olive Hamilton. Teachers rarely lasted very long in the country schools. The work was so hard and the proposals so constant that they married within a very short time.
This was a course Olive Hamilton
determined
she
would not take. She did not share
the intellectual
enthusiasms of her father, but the time she had spent in Salinas determined her not to be a ranch wife. She wanted to live in a town, perhaps not so big as Salinas but at least not a crossroads. In Salinas,
Olive had
experienced
niceties of living, the choir and vestments, Altar Guild, and bean suppers of the Episcopal church. She had partaken of the arts—road companies of plays and even
operas, with their magic and promise of an aromatic world outside. She had gone to parties,
played charades,
competed in poetry readings, joined a chorus and orchestra. Salinas had tempted her.
There she could go to a party dressed for the party and come home in the same dress, instead of rolling her clothes in a saddlebag and riding ten miles, then unrolling and pressing them.
Busy though she was with her teaching, Olive
longed for the metropolitan life, and when the young man who had built the flour mill in King City sued properly for
her hand, she accepted him subject to a long and secret engagement. The secrecy was required because if it were known there would be trouble among the young men in the neighborhood.
Olive had not her
father’s brilliance, but she did have a sense of fun, together with her mother’s strong and undeviating will. What light and beauty could be forced down the throats of her reluctant pupils, she forced.
There was a wall against learning. A man wanted his children to read, to figure, and that was enough. More
might make them dissatisfied and flighty. And there were plenty of examples to prove that learning made a boy leave the farm to live in the city—to
consider himself
better than his father. Enough arithmetic to measure land and lumber and to keep accounts, enough writing to order goods and write to relatives, enough reading for newspapers, almanacs, and farm journals, enough music for religious and patriotic display—that was enough to help a boy and not to lead him astray. Learning was for doctors,
lawyers,
and
teachers, a class set off and not considered related to other people. There were some sports, of course, like Samuel Hamilton, and he was tolerated and liked, but if he had not been able to dig a well, shoe a horse, or run a threshing
machine,
God
knows what would have been thought of the family.
Olive did marry her young man and did move,
first to Paso Robles, then to King City, and finally to Salinas. She was as intuitive as a cat. Her acts were based on
feelings
rather than thoughts.
She had her
mother’s firm chin and button nose and her father’s fine eyes. She was the most definite
of any of the
Hamiltons except her mother. Her theology was a curious mixture of Irish fairies and an Old
Testament Jehovah
whom in her later life she confused with her father.
Heaven was to her a nice home ranch inhabited by her dead
relatives.
External
realities of a frustrating nature
she obliterated by refusing to-believe in them, and when one resisted her disbelief she
raged at it. It was told of her that she cried bitterly because she could not go to two dances on one Saturday night. One was in Greenfield and the other in San Lucas— twenty miles apart. To have gone to both and then home
would have entailed a sixty-mile horseback ride. This was a fact she could not blast with
her disbelief, and so she cried with vexation and went to neither dance.
As she grew older she
developed a scattergun
method for dealing with unpleasant facts. When I, her only son, was sixteen I contracted
pleural
pneumonia, in that day a killing disease. I went down and down, until the wing tips of the angels brushed my eyes.
Olive used her
scattergun method of treating pleural pneumonia, and it worked. The Episcopalian minister prayed with and for me, the Mother Superior and nuns of the convent next to
our house held me up to Heaven for relief twice a day, a distant relative who was a Christian Science reader held the thought for me. Every incantation, magic, and herbal formula known was brought out, and she got two good nurses and the town’s best doctors. Her method was practical. I got well. She was loving and firm with her family, three girls and me, trained us in housework, dish washing, clothes washing, and manners. When angered she had a terrible eye which could blanch the skin off a bad child as easily as if he were a boiled almond.
When I recovered from
my pneumonia it came time
for me to learn to walk again. I had been nine weeks in bed, and the muscles had gone lax and the laziness of recovery had set in. When I was helped up, every nerve cried, and the wound in my side, which had been opened to drain the pus from the pleural cavity, pained horribly. I fell back in bed, crying, “I can’t do it! I can’t get up!”
Olive fixed me with her terrible eye. “Get up!” she said. “Your father has worked all day and sat up all night.
He has gone into debt for you. Now get up!”
And I got up.
Debt was an ugly word
and an ugly concept to Olive. A bill unpaid past the
fifteenth of the month was a debt.
The word had
connotations of dirt and slovenliness and dishonor. Olive, who truly believed that her family was the best in the world,
quite snobbishly
would not permit it to be touched by debt. She planted that terror of debt so deeply in her children that even now, in
a changed economic
pattern where indebtedness is a part of living, I become
restless when a bill is two days overdue. Olive never accepted the time-payment plan when it became popular. A thing bought on time was a thing you did not own and for which you were in debt. She saved for things she wanted, and this meant that the neighbors had new gadgets as much as two years before we did.
2
Olive had great courage. Perhaps it takes courage to raise children. And I must tell you what she did about the First
World War. Her thinking
was not
international.
Her first
boundary was the geography of her family, second her town, Salinas, and finally there was a dotted line, not clearly defined, which was the county line. Thus she did not quite believe in the war, not even when Troop C, our militia cavalry, was called out, loaded its horses on a train, and set out for the open world.
Martin Hopps lived
around the corner from us. He was wide, short, red-haired.
His mouth was wide, and he had red eyes. He was almost the shyest boy in Salinas. To say good morning to him was
to make him itch with self-consciousness. He belonged to Troop C because the
armory had a basketball court.
If the Germans had
known Olive and had been sensible they would have gone out of their way not to anger her. But they didn’t know or they were stupid.
When they killed Martin Hopps they lost the war because that made my mother mad and she took out after them. She had liked Martin Hopps. He had never hurt anyone. When they killed him Olive declared war on the
German empire.
She cast about for a
weapon. Knitting helmets and socks was not deadly enough for her. For a time she put on a Red Cross uniform and met other ladies similarly dressed in
the armory, where
bandages were rolled and reputations unrolled. This was all right, but it was not driving at the heart of the Kaiser. Olive wanted blood for the life of Martin Hopps. She found her weapon in Liberty bonds. She had never sold anything in her life beyond an occasional angel cake for the Altar Guild in the
basement of the Episcopal church, but she began to sell bonds by the bale. She brought ferocity to her work. I think she made people afraid not to buy them. And when they did buy from Olive she gave them a sense of actual combat, of putting a bayonet in the stomach of Germany.
As her sales skyrocketed and stayed up, the Treasury Department began to notice this new Amazon. First there came mimeographed letters of commendation, then real
letters signed by the Secretary of the Treasury, and not with a rubber stamp either. We were proud but not so proud as when prizes began to
arrive, a German helmet (too small for any of us to wear), a bayonet, a jagged piece of shrapnel set on an ebony base. Since we were not eligible for armed conflict beyond
marching with
wooden guns, our mother’s war seemed to justify us. And then she outdid herself, and outdid everyone in our part of the country. She quadrupled her already fabulous record and she was awarded the fairest prize of all—a ride in an army airplane.
Oh, we were proud kids! Even vicariously this was an eminence we could hardly stand. But my poor mother—I
must tell you that there are certain things in the existence of which my mother did not believe, against any possible evidence to the contrary. One was a bad Hamilton and another was the airplane. The fact that she had seen them didn’t make her believe in them one bit more.
In the light of what she did I have tried to imagine
how she felt. Her soul must have crawled with horror, for how can you fly in something that does not exist? As a punishment the ride would have been cruel and unusual, but it was a prize, a gift, an honor, and an eminence. She must have looked into our eyes and seen the shining
idolatry there and understood that she was trapped. Not to have gone would have let her family
down. She was
surrounded, and there was no honorable way out save death. Once she had decided to go up in the nonexistent thing she seemed to have had no idea whatever that she would survive it.
Olive made her will—
took lots of time with it and had it checked to be sure it was legal. Then she opened her rosewood box wherein were the letters her husband had written to her in courtship and since. We had not known
he wrote poetry to her, but he had. She built a fire in the grate and burned every letter. They were hers, and she wanted no other human to see them. She bought all new underwear. She had a horror of being found dead with mended or, worse, unmended underclothes. I think perhaps she saw the wide twisted mouth and embarrassed eyes of Martin Hopps on her and felt that in some way she was reimbursing him for his stolen life. She was very gentle with us and did not notice a badly washed dinner plate that left a greasy stain on the dish towel.
This glory
was
scheduled to take place at the Salinas Race Track and Rodeo Grounds. We were driven to the track in an army automobile,
feeling more
solemn and golden than at a good funeral. Our father was working at the Spreckles Sugar Factory, five miles from town and could not get off, or perhaps didn’t want to, for fear he could not stand the strain. But Olive had made arrangements, on pain of not going up, for the plane to try to fly as far as the sugar factory before it crashed.
I realize now that the several hundred people who
had gathered simply came to see the airplane, but at that time we thought they were there to do my mother honor. Olive was not a tall woman and at that age she had begun to put on weight. We had to help her out of the car. She was probably stiff with fright but her little chin was set.
The plane stood in the field around which the race track was laid out. It was
appallingly little and flimsy— an open cockpit biplane with wooden struts, tied with piano wire. The wings were covered with
canvas. Olive was
stunned. She went to the side
as an ox to the knife. Over the clothes she was convinced were her burial clothes, two sergeants slipped on a coat, a padded coat, and a flight coat, and she grew rounder and rounder with each layer. Then a leather helmet and goggles, and with her little button of a nose and her pink cheeks you really had something. She looked like a goggled ball.
The two sergeants hoisted her bodily into the cockpit and wedged her in. She filled the opening completely. As they strapped her in she suddenly came to life and began waving
frantically for
attention. One of the soldiers
climbed up, listened to her, came over to my sister Mary, and led her to the side of the plane. Olive was tugging at the thick padded flight glove on her left hand. She got her hands free, took off her engagement ring with its tiny diamond, and handed it down to Mary. She set her gold wedding ring firmly, pulled the gloves back on, and faced the front. The pilot climbed into the front cockpit, and one of the sergeants threw his weight
on the
wooden
propeller. The little ship taxied away and turned, and down the field it roared and
staggered into the air, and Olive was looking straight ahead and probably her eyes were closed.
We followed it with our
eyes as it swept up and away, leaving a lonesome silence behind
it. The bond
committee, the friends and relatives,
the simple
unhonored spectators didn’t think of leaving the field. The plane became a speck in the sky toward Spreckles and disappeared. It was fifteen minutes before we saw it again, flying serenely and
very high. Then to our horror it seemed to stagger and fall. It fell endlessly, caught itself, climbed, and made a loop.
One of the sergeants laughed. For a moment the plane steadied and then it seemed to go crazy. It barrel-rolled, made
Immelmann turns,
inside and outside loops, and turned over and flew over the field upside down. We could see the black bullet which was our mother’s helmet. One of the soldiers said quietly, “I think he’s gone nuts. She’s not a young woman.”
The airplane landed
steadily enough and ran up to the group. The motor died.
The pilot climbed out, shaking his head
in perplexity. “Goddamest
woman I ever saw,” he said. He reached up and shook Olive’s nerveless hand and walked hurriedly away.
It took four men and
quite a long time to get Olive out of the cockpit. She was so rigid they could not bend her. We took her home and put her to bed, and she didn’t get
up for two days.
What had happened
came out slowly. The pilot talked some and Olive talked some, and both stories had to be put together before they made sense. They had flown out and circled the Spreckles Sugar Factory as ordered— circled it three times so that our father would be sure to see, and then the pilot thought of a joke. He meant no harm. He shouted something, and his face looked contorted.
Olive could not hear over the noise of the engine. The pilot throttled down and shouted, “Stunt?” It was a kind of joke. Olive saw his goggled
face and the slip stream caught his word and distorted it. What Olive heard was the word “stuck.”
Well, she thought, here
it is just as I knew it would be. Here was her death. Her mind flashed to see if she had forgotten
anything—will
made, letters burned, new underwear, plenty of food in the house for dinner. She wondered whether she had turned out the light in the back room. It was all in a second. Then she thought there might be an outside chance of survival. The young soldier was obviously frightened and fear might be the worst thing that could
happen to him in handling the situation. If she gave way to the panic that lay on her heart it might frighten him more.
She decided to encourage him. She smiled brightly and nodded to give him courage, and then the bottom fell out of the world. When he leveled out of his loop the pilot looked back again and shouted, “More?”
Olive was way beyond hearing anything, but her chin was
set and she was
determined to help the pilot so that he would not be too afraid before they hit the
earth. She smiled and nodded again. At the end of each stunt he looked back, and each time she encouraged him. Afterward he said over and
over, “She’s the
goddamest woman I ever saw. I tore up the rule book and she wanted more. Good Christ, what a pilot she would have made!”
