EDEN VALLEY
In Camp, August 28.
Dear Mrs. Coney,—
We are almost across the desert, and I am really becoming interested. The difficulties some folks work under are enough to make many of us ashamed. In the very center of the desert is a little settlement called Eden Valley. Imagination must have had a heap to do with its name, but one thing is certain: the serpent will find the crawling rather bad if he attempts to enter this Eden, for the sand is hot; the alkali and the cactus are there, so it must be a serpentless Eden. The settlers have made a long canal and bring their water many miles. They say the soil is splendid, and they don’t have much stone; but it is such a flat place! I wonder how they get the water to run when they irrigate.
We saw many deserted homes. Hope’s skeletons they are, with their yawning doors and windows like eyeless sockets. Some of the houses, which looked as if they were deserted, held families. We camped near one such. Mrs. O’Shaughnessy and I went up to the house to buy some eggs. A hopeless-looking woman came to the door. The hot winds and the alkali dust had tanned her skin and bleached her hair; both were a gray-brown. Her eyes were blue, but were so tired-looking that I could hardly see for the tears.
“No,” she said, “we ain’t got no eggs. We ain’t got no chickens. You see this ground is sandy, and last year the wind blowed awful hard and all the grain blowed out, so we didn’t have no chance to raise chickens. We had no feed and no money to buy feed, so we had to kill our chickens to save their lives. We et ’em. They would have starved anyway.”
Then we tried for some vegetables. “Well,” she said, “they ain’t much to look at; maybe you’ll not want ’em. Our garden ain’t much this year. Pa has had to work out all the time. The kids and me put in some seed—all we had—with a hoe. We ain’t got no horse; our team died last winter. We didn’t have much feed and it was shore a hard winter. We hated to see old Nick and Fanny die. They were just like ones of the family. We drove ’em clean from Missouri, too. But they died, and what hurt me most was, pa ’lowed it would be a turrible waste not to skin ’em. I begged him not to. Land knows the pore old things was entitled to their hides, they got so little else; but pa said it didn’t make no difference to them whether they had any hide or not, and that the skins would sell for enough to get the kids some shoes. And they did. A Jew junk man came through and give pa three dollars for the two hides, and that paid for a pair each for Johnny and Eller.
“Pa hated as bad as we did to lose our faithful old friends, and all the winter long we grieved, the kids and me. Every time the coyotes yelped we knew they were gathering to gnaw poor old Nick and Fan’s bones. And pa, to keep from crying himself when the kids and me would be sobbin’, would scold us. ‘My goodness,’ he would say, ‘the horses are dead and they don’t know nothin’ about cold and hunger. They don’t know nothin’ about sore shoulders and hard pulls now, so why don’t you shut up and let them and me rest in peace?’ But that was only pa’s way of hidin’ the tears.
“When spring came the kids and me gathered all the bones and hair we could find of our good old team, and buried ’em where you see that green spot. That’s grass. We scooped all the trash out of the mangers, and spread it over the grave, and the timothy and the redtop seed in the trash came up and growed. I’d liked to have put some flowers there, but we had no seed.”