Essay by Penelope Reedy
Rural life – September 2002 – Colorado Central Magazine
Eccentrics. Every community has them, but out West they seem to take on a unique aura.
Take the Babbington twins, two nearly identical men who lived on a farm on the west end of Camas Prairie, Camas County, Idaho, in the early to mid-part of the 20th century. They did everything together, including dying together in a house fire.
People who knew them say it was a blessing they died at the same time, insisting that a surviving brother wouldn’t have known what to do without the other.
People still talk about how when they shopped at the Market Basket in Fairfield, the only town in the sparsely populated county, they purchased each can of beans or peas separately and independently, even though they bought identical products. A rural mail carrier reported they subscribed to the same magazines independently as well.
Old-time prairie commentators tend to disregard the power of isolation on these men’s lives, preferring to think of their quirkiness as the result of being twins. After all, living “away from it all” is a highly valued priority in the American West.
Another case in point: Mary Botcher, her sister Clara and the elderly gentleman Mary married late in life, lived on a farm on Camas Prairie, all growing elderly and infirm sometime in the 1980s. Mary, a large, muscular woman, resembled Marjorie Main’s famous film character, Tugboat Annie. I’d like to say she wore the pants in the family, but her old-country German upbringing wouldn’t allow it. She did all her farm work in dresses, from feeding cows to working the fields.
When the girls’ parents died sometime before World War II, they drove their wagon the two or three miles into town to ask for help. The girls, who were young women by then, had never been to town before.
Later in life, Mary traveled to north Idaho to visit distant family and surprised the prairie by returning with a man named John, who lived out his days in a small shack on the sisters’ property.
John, a very quiet man, was seen often riding with Mary in her old green, Chevy pickup, up and down all the village streets one by one, their windows rolled down. People could hear Mary cussing him “up and down.” On the rare occasions when John was asked about the situation, he was said to merely shake his head, chuckle and say, “Oh, those girls!”
Clara, when she was well into her old age, giggled shyly like a young girl. Her ventures off the farm were few, and she became attached to her animals, so much so that she cared for steers that were very old.
When Clara was on her death bed, hospice workers report that Mary would torment her sister, mischief in her eye, by yelling up close so she was sure to hear, “I’m taking your cows to the sale ring!” And when Clara sputtered, wild-eyed with rage, Mary clucked with satisfaction.
Mary died sitting up in a sagging recliner. She hadn’t slept in a bed for more than 20 years, and the lights were kept on in her house all night.
In cities, when eccentrics die, they’re sometimes discovered by neighbors when the odor of rotting flesh seeps out from under their double-locked apartment doors. If a devoted pair doesn’t die together, sometimes the survivor keeps the body around and talks to it, or worse. City neighbors report eccentrics to investigators as anonymous characters, shadows seen out of the corners of their eyes, rummaging through garbage cans — solitary people who usually smell bad and mumble through tenement hallways to their nests.
Out on the Western prairies, eccentrics are equally ignored, except that everybody usually knows their names and family histories. Their routines are unconsciously noted, so when the pattern is broken, neighbors check in.
That’s what happened when Charlie Ford died one winter in the 1950s. Neighbors noticed the absence of smoke coming from his chimney up Corral Creek, hooked up their horses to sleighs and brought his body out. Somehow the Botcher sisters ended up with a box of Charlie Ford’s things, rediscovered when I helped them clean out a shed so I could purchase their unused egg incubator. The box contained Charlie Ford’s Bible and his last roll of toilet paper.
The code of the West insists that people who live off by themselves be left alone, and when a lonely death, suicide or other tragedy overtakes these eccentrics, communities find ways to rationalize.
“They liked to keep to themselves,” we say. “We didn’t feel it was our right to interfere.” Sometimes we’re right about that.
Penelope Reedy is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News in Paonia, Colorado (www.hcn.org). She writes in Pocatello, Idaho.