Sherman was born in Norfolk, Virginia, but since his father was a naval officer who merely happened to be stationed there at the time of this most blessed event, Sherman can't really claim the honest status of a fine old Southern Gentleman. The one thing he ~o~ from Virginia, he says, was a discriminating taste for mint juleps. This seems a bit precocious, since he left there at the age of six months, but I never question his talents. As a Navy officer, his life was a roving one. He did spend his preparatory school and college years in New Jersey, but he never legally adopted any locality until he got old enough to have an effective mind of his own. Then he chose himself a state and became much more tiresome about it than a native. He selected Arizona.
In his enthusiasm for the place, he allowed a mild touch in the head, quite similar to the psychosis that frequently afflicts Californians and Texans with their typical spells of wild, frenzied exultation over their native soil. When I met Sherman, he was only in the East vacationing with his family. I was not for a minute allowed to forget that he was still young Lochinvar out of the West.
When he did his courting, he polished off two jobs simultaneously. He wooed me effectively and at the same time sold me Arizona. In fact, frequently his double-threat technique was a little confusing. If he spoke highly and with passionate warmth of the color "blue," for instance, there was no point in my fluttering my lashes. He was likely to be transported over the Arizona sky, not my eyes. And curves, well, they might be mine, but more probably he was describing some road high in the Chiricahua Mountains, 200 miles from me. It was a little disconcerting but now and again he'd toss good old Tray a nice bonus and I was content.
He snared me in both traps. I not only was anxious to marry him, I was dying to be a Pioneer Woman in Arizona. If I couldn't actually mold the course of empire, I at least could paint the walls and hang some gingham curtains in the adobe house that Sherman had out there, plunk in the middle of a terrific, overpowering piece of scenery.
He was very forthright with me, before he lured me away from my typewriter and into the wilderness.
"How do you feel about public utilities?" he asked.
"Well," I said, "if you are inquiring about my dowry, I own two common stocks in Pacific Gas and Electric. The income keeps me in chewing gum."
"No, that wasn't what I had in mind," he said. "I just wondered if you had any special attachment for running water, piped gas, electricity, and telephones."
"Water, I like. I don't abstain. I'll take a drink with the best of them." I said, "and I do like my meat seared on the outside."
"We'd have water, of course. There's a fine well and lots of heat but it comes from a fireplace and a coal cookstove."
"For goodness' sake," I assured him lightheadedly, "that takes care of everything."
"Except plumbing," he added ominously.
But I wasn't one to let hot and cold running water and a flush toilet interrupt the course of true love.
Sherman drove West in a new car and I went out s few weeks later on the train. He met me in New Mexico and we were married.
We lived in an adobe house, a former ranger station in the Dragoon Mountains, long abandoned by the Forest Service. We paid five dollars a month for it. We had eighty acres of land, two horses who came galloping up when we rang a dinner bell, and a cow named Pearl (the variety that should be cast before swine). She was always kicking the bucket, but by that I don't mean she died. She wasn't that obliging. I still don't like milk.
We also had twelve hens named for flowers. We couldn't distinguish Arbutus from Marigold, however. They all looked alike, except one that turned out to be a rooster. But he died violently early in life. The only problem connected with this anonymity was that when we stewed one of the girls we never knew which blossom we'd plucked.
We were forty-five miles from pavement, three miles from our postbox, twenty-six miles from the grocery store, and seven miles from a friendly neighbor. We did have a neighbor five miles away but he wasn't exactly cordial. He had the annoying habit of shooting at us.
Everything Sherman told me about Arizona was true. The place positively reeked of fresh air. It was hand in glove wit Nature, and everything Nature did around the place she did in a big way. There were tremendous mountains propped up all over the horizon. When the sun shone, it seared. When the rains came, they flooded. When the winds blew, they sounded like Niagara Falls torrenting down our canyon. When the furry friends in the forest made noises, they screeched because they were wildcats and mountain lions. It was all quite violent, and when I got over a slight nervous breakdown caused by finding a rattle- snake on my front doorstep one day and discovering a mountain lion on my roof one night, I quite liked it. I'd have made a fine wife for Daniel Boone.
The coal stove and I didn't hit it off like soulmates from the start. We didn't read life's meaning in each other's eyes. I had to get onto her dietary habits and finally learned just the proper mixture of tinder for her tastes and how much coal to shovel into the ravenous, gaping black mouth. She was allergic to wood and smoked like a dragon when it was forced upon her as a quick snack.
I finally became the master--or, at least, I thought I was the master. The stove, however, was a villain at stomach (she had no heart). She had a long-term design for demolishing me through my very devotion to her needs.
It was carrying the coal buckets that worked the havoc. Sherman always drayed the fuel for both the stove and the fireplace. However, he became quite ill in the dead of winter and was in bed for several weeks.So, of necessity, I took to shoveling the coal. I thought I was quite the Amazon when I lugged my big bucketfuls for the insatiable stove and chopped and carried wood to the equally ravenous fireplace. But I was being subtly undermined.
I had heard of crutch paralysis from time to time throughout my life. In fact, old Mrs. Ferris who first instructed me in the use of crutches had warned me about it when she taught me to protect the brachial nerves by leaning my weight on the palms of my hands, not my armpits. But, frankly, I rather regarded the whole grim idea as an old wives' tale. Even when I began to feel a numbness in my hands, usually noticed in the night or in the morning when I awoke, I assumed that I'd been lying on my arm and that the member had gone to sleep. The fact that shaking my hand quickly brought it to life added evidence to this theory.
When I began to experience a similar sensation during the day, I diagnosed myself as an arthritic and decided to see a doctor on our next trip to Tucson to find out what treatment was prescribed for arthritis. I didn't mention it to Sherman, since he was sick and might get fretful over it. I simply closed my mind to the possibility of crutch paralysis.
My husband wasn't quite as debonair about it when I finally got around to mentioning casually that I had arthritis.
"By the way," I announced one morning when he was up and convalescing waspishly, "I have arthritis now."
"Arthritis!" he yelled at me.
"Yes," I said huffily, "arthritis. Can't I have anything? You've been sick for four weeks." I described my symptoms. "Brachial paralysis!" He kept right on yelling. "Carrying the coal did it." He was sure. "That heavy weight pulling you down hard on the saddles of your crutches." He had me in the car and over ninety miles of rough road to Tucson in an hour and a half.
The doctor confirmed Sherman's diagnosis, not mine. I was, he told me, in the beginning stages of brachial paralysis and I'd have to quit carrying heavy things and leaning all my weight in my armpits while I did it. In fact, I'd have to get off my crutches completely while I did my housework unless I wanted permanently useless arms.
I was determinedly reluctant to accept his medical opinion. I regarded it as a conspiracy between Sherman and the doctor. "If I had come in without crutches," I insisted perversely, "mightn't you have said I had arthritis" The thought of going back to an artificial leg seemed a dire fate to me.
"Maybe." the doctor said, but you came in on crutches."
"How do you know you aren't just falling for the obvious?" Sherman dragged me away before I took the name of Hippocrates in vane.
Of course, intellectually, I knew that the doctor had told me the truth and I was merely trying to prove him wrong because I was scared to death. A leg I could get along without nicely, but I was awfully attached to my arms.
Sherman and I made plans to go to California as soon as possible and shop around for a prosthesis.
Curiously coincidental, three days later, an ancient weatherbeaten old prospector walked into our yard, leading a burro. It was not at all unusual for a prospector to appear at our house. I'd fed many of them who roamed through our lonely mountain area hunting for pay dirt. They usually could spin wonderful yarns, but none of them ever had a story to tell me comparable in practical worth with this prospector's tale.
He was a brother Elk. "Tim-bah!" Sherman called to me when he saw the old man appear at our gate. He wore a peg leg.
I felt sorry for the old man because I figured he couldn't afford a better prosthesis than a peg. However, he promptly put me right on that score. He felt sorry for me, because I didn't have sense enough to own a peg myself.
"Young lady," he told me solemnly, "you already got yourself a man. If you figger you can keep him without being fancied up all the time, you get yourself a peg. It's a mighty handy thing to have."
He told me about himself. He had been hurt in a mining cavein, caught under a shattered stull. He had used crutches, of course. You can't escape that phase of development, and he'd also used an artificial leg with all the best modern gadgetry. But by studied choice, he was a devotee of the peg. He traveled over the roughest terrain, climbed mountains, scrambled over rocks, dug shafts, and crawled into them. He rarely knew the luxury of smooth sidewalks.
"The peg is the only prop for a real workingman,"he told me.
In his own jargon, he pointed out that the peg is a device that gets down to fundamentals. Any other prosthesis is merely a complication of the basic principle exemplified in the peg-with the addition of articulation and aesthetic qualities. The onearmedman's hook is a similar case in point. It is his basic usable prosthesis,'with the artificial hand merely a cosmetic accessory to be worn for inactive dress occasions. The old prospector pointed out that the knee joint and the verisimilitude of shape in the artificial leg add to the appearance of normalcy in the handicapped. but they also add weight and deduct efficiency and security.
He told me that he once went out on a prospecting trip on a fine new artificial leg. He had learned to walk very well--on even floors and paved streets. He was tired, however, before he'd traversed a mile over the rough mountain trails that were an integral part of his normal life. And before he returned (on the burro, with a damaged and useless leg slung on behind the saddlebags), he was fatigued to the point of illness.
"You can't do that to a burro," he explained simply. "Prospecting is all the life I know. I had to do something. so I got me a peg. This one here I got in Tucson. Took the man three days to make it and it cost a quarter of the price of my regular wooden leg from up to Phoenix."
That night Sherman and I decided to go to Tucson in the morning and order a peg to tide me over until such time as we could get someone to take care of our place while we went through the more prolonged custom leg building in California.
The orthopedic fitter who measured me thought I was out of my mind. He kept telling me that he'd never before met a lady who wanted a peg, and his implication that I was certainly no lady was obvious. The whole deal made him frightfully nervous. I think he felt temporarily like a medical quack. He was very .anxious to make me an orthodox limb.
"Not just now," I told him. "I'm planning to get a regular artificial leg later, on the Coast."
"You may," he assured me, "put your leg into my hands with confidence."
I had forgotten the solemnity with which most of these craftsmen regard their trade. "There are few gentlemen into whose hands I put my leg with confidence," I said, but I should have held up a sign labeled "Joke: laugh please," because my friend the legmaker wasn't in the mood to cope with a comic.
He merely gave me a disturbed grimace and told me with a shudder tat I was making a horrible misstep and wasting my fifty dollars.
Actually, I never took a firmer step than that one nor invested half a hundred more profitably. However, I didn't know it myself at the time. I was inclined to share the orthopedic artisan's dim view.
I felt like a perfect fool when I put the peg on and started using it around the house; There is something basically comical about a Peg Leg Pete--at least American humor has made it so. However, there was nothing comical in the fact that my paralytic symptoms disappeared almost immediately and I could carry all the coal I wanted to.
In a couple of weeks we went to California and I shopped around and finally ordered myself a $250 leg--a splendid, shapely, glamorous number that I brought back and almost immediately hung in the closet. I put on the peg again.
The old man was quite right. As a workingman's device it couldn't be outsmarted. It was light, and could be put on in the mornings almost as quickly as I could pick up a crutch. It didn't have to be dressed in a stocking and shoe. It played me no temperamental tricks. It was unbending, but as dependable as most virtuous, unbending characters are It required no repairs and adjustments beyond an occasional new shoulder strap. And, well covered with the leg of my Levis, it scarcely showed. It just gave the rather unusual impression that I was half horse and had a foot on one side and hoof on the other.
There is, I believe, a reason why practically all French veterans of World War I who lost their legs wore pegs. The preferred them, and in France there were no mild snickers over the device. The wearers were honored for the symbol of their sacrifice. Even Maurice Bunau-Varilla, the owner of Le Matin and one of France's wealthiest citizens, always wore a peg leg, and not because he couldn't afford the best and most scientific prosthesis on the market anywhere in the world. He used the peg, one of his acquaintances told me, because it was light, efficient, and completely dependable.
I am still self-conscious about Margaret (Peggy to her intimates). I never venture out of the house on it, except to garden in my own yard. I am just too vain. I put on my artificial leg or, more generally, my crutches, when I face people. Many of my close friends don't even know I possess a peg, since I don't often admit to ownership of this naive little device. However, if some cold, blizzardly night I were faced with the necessity of chopping up either my artificial leg or my peg for firewood, it would be my fancy, curved confection that would get the ax.
I don't lug coal any more. I now live quite a civilized life, with all the elegant utilities on tap. But I always do my housework on the peg. It is preferable to my highly respected crutches since it leaves my arms free to reach for cobwebs and it allows pliability that the crutches prohibit--bending and stretching. I trust the peg, even if it isn't as cosmetic as a leg, as thoroughly as I would a good precalamity flesh and blood appendage. Moreover, at the end of spring house-cleaning, I may be tired, but it's not from lugging around about twenty pounds of beautifully carved tree.
I don't make a brief for the use of a peg leg by a person who possesses his own knee. These aristocratic unipeds aren't in my class at all. Nor is there any advantage to a man who never leaves the pavement and works at a desk all day. But for anyone with a thigh amputation who has a more active role in life than sitting on a satin sofa and contemplating his own calves, there's nothing like it.
Also, if you're invited to a masquerade and own a peg, you can always dress up like Long John Silver and win first prize. I did, anyway.