Читать книгу The Bassett Women - Grace McClure - Страница 16

THE SURVIVORS

As Herb and his children faced the first difficult days of surviving without the driving force of Elizabeth, any fears that they would suffer materially were quickly allayed. Jim McKnight and Isom Dart were still in the bunkhouse and Matt Rash still lived down the road. Elizabeth’s coterie of friends automatically continued to handle the Bassett cattle and acted as unofficial guardians of her heritage until her own boys were old enough to stand alone. The children could readily accept this, for Isom and Matt had always been central to their lives. The ranch’s business went on as before.

The relationship between Herb and his children also continued unchanged. They loved him and respected him for his intrinsic goodness, but they still did not turn to him for practical advice in their own lives. Herb was sunk in a morass of grief, for he had loved Elizabeth as only a generous man can love. His grief was probably complicated by a feeling of helplessness when he looked at the children for whom he was responsible. Any advice he might give them, any authority he might attempt to exercise, were weakened by the fact that he had never been the master in his own house during Elizabeth’s lifetime and therefore could not become its master when Elizabeth was gone.

After Elizabeth’s funeral, young Sam and Ann went back to high school in Craig and Herb hired a housekeeper, “Auntie” Thompson, an Army nurse during the Civil War and now the wife of “Longhorn” Thompson, who had a homestead just east of Brown’s Park. Ann has given Auntie a certain immortality in the story she tells of Auntie’s confiscating the Police Gazettes the cowboys had stashed in the bunkhouse and using them to paper the bunkhouse walls-but hanging all the pages upside down to make them more difficult to read. This may have broken a few hearts in the bunkhouse, but it no doubt confirmed Herb’s belief that Auntie would make a good guardian for his younger boys.

When Herb spoke to Josie about returning to St. Mary’s she refused to go, saying she was needed at home. During that first sad time, Josie’s state of mind was perhaps the most pitiable of all the family. She could not indulge in simple, uncomplicated grief for her mother, but had to suffer the added grief of knowing that she was about to give a further wound to her father. Josie now knew for certain what she had not suspected when she had left for Salt Lake City in the fall—that she was pregnant by Jim McKnight, and that unless nature graciously intervened and she miscarried, her school days were over.

She procrastinated as long as she could, but the time came when there could be no more stalling. On March 21, 1893—two months after her nineteenth birthday, three months after Elizabeth’s death, and only four months before the baby was due—Josie and Jim were married in Green River City. The names of the witnesses on the marriage license, Charles H. Miller and Sarah C. Boorum, are not familiar in Brown’s Park annals. It is possible that Josie and Jim went alone to Green River City and waited until after the ceremony to confront Herb with the news. Their son Crawford was born on the twelfth day of July.

If Herb was sad, disappointed or shamed, the other folks in the Park were neither surprised nor too dismayed. Like wise people everywhere, they may have quoted the old saying that “a baby usually takes nine months to grow, but a first baby can come any time.”

Josie was universally liked by the Brown’s Park people. She was never “above herself,” as Ann later became. She talked easily to the women about women’s affairs and at the dances made the older men feel like gay young blades again. She was completely genuine and completely at home with her neighbors. Although she had a background and education that most of her neighbors lacked, she slipped easily into the colloquialisms of the country with no touch of condescension. She loved life in the Park and was part of it.

She could have had any man in the Park with a flick of her finger. Like all the Bassetts, she was handsome. She was small-waisted and full-breasted, and had a glorious mop of curly chestnut hair. Although she genuinely enjoyed the customary womanly tasks, she had also ridden the range with the cowboys, and she spoke their language. She was always more interested in men’s talk than in exchanging dress patterns with the women, and she had enough of the famous Bassett charm and enough confidence in her own desirability to be a flirt and a coquette. The combination made her irresistible.

There must have been gossip, of course, and much discussion, but even the most condemnatory of the gossips probably excused Josie by saying that it was the Bassetts’ own fault, keeping a grown girl in school when she should have been married and settled down, and that Herb Bassett had better not make the same mistake with Ann, or she would “get in trouble” even faster than her sister Josie.

As the gossips were to learn in the years ahead, not even marriage could permanently tame a Bassett woman. For Josie as for Ann, the intensity of her emotions and the strength of her will made it unthinkable that she could have denied herself sexual satisfaction when she was ready for it. No moral consideration, no fear of gossiping tongues, not even the larger fear of pregnancy could have prevented it. She was always to be this way. She would never count the cost.

Uncle Sam gave Josie a magnificent wedding gift. In earlier years he had filed a claim on Beaver Creek, eight or ten miles up the valley from Herb’s ranch, and had built a cabin to use as a base of operations between prospecting trips into the mountains. Now he promised to leave it to Josie, on the condition that she was to take care of him until his death. Sam’s prospecting days had ended, for he had suffered a stroke which left him with an unsteady gait and unclear speech.

The young couple moved up to Beaver Creek and built a cabin for themselves near Sam’s. They put in a garden and erected some outbuildings, but it was obvious that they would have to do something about the water supply if they wanted a hayfield or crops. While it was true that Beaver Creek ran through their property, its banks were so high that the water level was below the level of their land.

Josie came up with the solution and Jim put it into effect. Using a horse and plow, or digging by hand where necessary, Jim cut an irrigation ditch extending four or five miles across the brush to a point where the creek came out of the hills, grading the ditch in a gentle slope to his home fields. The neighbors were unbelieving, said the bizarre idea would never work, and called it “McKnight’s Folly.” Josie herself was serenely confident throughout the digging, and her confidence was justified when the irrigation floodgate was opened and the water came flowing smoothly down the ditch. “It stands to reason,” she is quoted as saying, “that water would have to flow downhill.” The ditch was used to irrigate that ground until the paving of Highway 319 in modern times.

Matt Rash was the real manager at the Bassett ranch after Elizabeth’s death, and although Isom Dart had maintained a friendly relationship with him through the years, Isom had been Elizabeth’s man. He turned now to Elizabeth’s daughter Josie. If Josie herself were not enough reason for this, there was the baby Crawford, and Isom loved children. By the time Josie’s second child Herbert—always to be called Chick—arrived in early 1896, Isom was working full time with Jim McKnight. Isom, who had his own herd and land, developed the same working relationship with Jim as they had both once had with Elizabeth. Again, Isom became almost a family member. When Josie had her hands full at home or wanted to ride down to the Bassett ranch to visit her father, Isom would do some of the cooking and would babysit for the boys and for helpless old Uncle Sam.

Herb’s greatest difficulty in those days was trying to decide what on earth to do with Ann; as time passed, it became a question of what to do with Ann next. At the time of Elizabeth’s death, Ann was a tomboy and a hoyden, still trying to keep up with her brothers, still spending time out in the bunkhouse with the cowboys, and still refusing to be ladylike.

Herb believed in ruling children by love alone, and Ann was the only one of the children to whom he had ever administered corporal punishment. One day when he was making puncheons out of cottonwood logs he found Ann trying to make her own puncheons with his sharp ax. When he admonished the child, she screamed at him, “You son of a bitch, I’ll do what I want to do!”

“Now that’s enough, girlie—you’ve stirred up enough for a time,” he said, and gave her a sound thrashing.

Herb’s reliance on love as a discipline might have been effective had he been a stronger and more impressive figure. As it was, the family seems to have been rudderless after Elizabeth’s death, with little effective control over a recalcitrant child.

As soon as Ann reached the proper age, Herb sent her to St. Mary’s of the Wasatch, where Josie had been so happy. In later years Ann was to write a tender and poetic account of what the convent school had meant to a young girl from the back country, but this must have been her opinion only in retrospect. At the end of the year the nuns asked Herb not to send Ann back; they considered her incorrigible.

Ann was also an indifferent student, one who seemed to learn by osmosis rather than through mental effort. After St. Mary’s closed its doors to her, Herb was still determined that his daughter was to be educated. She was sent east to school, probably to Cleveland where Herb had a half-brother; possibly other schools were involved. In 1899 the Craig newspaper reported that “Miss Anna Bassett of Omaha and Miss Blanche Tilton have arrived in town from Brown’s Park. . . . “ What Ann was doing in Omaha is lost in the mists of time.

In her memoirs, Ann claims to have attended Miss Porter’s School for Girls in an exclusive Boston suburb, but Josie told her family that this was just another of Ann’s exaggerations. The exaggeration did serve to enhance Ann’s reputation, and in later years the people in Colorado and Utah considered her a highly educated woman; one old-timer in Vernal now insists that she was a Vassar graduate. Ann told a story of a happening at Miss Porter’s that smacks of truth and surely must have occurred at some school or other. This is what she wrote in The Colorado Magazine:

. . . A wild barbarian who knew nothing about “correct style” must be taught horsemanship by a competent instructor. The school employed a riding “mawstah” to teach the girls correct positions in the saddle and how to post. One morning about a dozen of us were lined up for inspection before taking off for a decorous canter over chosen bridle paths. Everything appeared ship-shape. But there was rebellion in my soul, revolt that demanded action.

The “Mawstah” walked back a few yards for some words with one of the stable boys. That was my Heaven-given chance to air “ronickie” dun out a little. I was perched like a monkey on a stick, atop of a locoed old sabine gelding with one glass eye. I threw my right leg up over the side saddle and raked his flanks. Then uttering a wild yell that must have scared him half to death, I put him through several range stunts while the girls screamed with glee.

The outraged “Mawstah” came on the run, giving off a stream of sarcasm meant for me. He grabbed for my bridle reins at the same time ordering me sharply to “Dismount.”

He got nowhere reaching for my bridle. I was completely “r’iled up” by that time. I swung the horse about, with a prancing and rearing he had probably never before even attempted. Leaning from my saddle, I exclaimed vehemently, “Go to hell, you repulsive, little, monkeyfaced skunk!”