Maude and John Bate

November 16, 1958         OUR LIFE IN DETAIL    Maude and John Bate           

by Maude Bate

 

   Sitting here just thinking of the past--when you get old it seems you live in the past.  My life was a very simple one.  I was a happy-go-lucky one up to a certain part of my life.  Up to 15 years I was kept home much of my life.  At 16, I met friends--boy friends--and had some experiences with a few.  One I came home with from singing practice.  His sister, Josie Murdock, was a bosom friend of mine.  Her parents were better off than mine.  She played the piano-not very good, but I wished I could do as good, as I was a lover of singing and music.  She bought the music and taught them to me, I sang them.  I sang with a quartet-Heber Wagstaff, Jimmie Richie, Mrs. Phoebe Daybell, and I.  Josie's brother would walk me home.

   We thought a lot of each other, but not too much.  He was a little younger than I.  I was very cautious with my boy friends.  The first saloon was opened up at that time.  He made his threat  that he was going to spend the night in there.  I told him if he did, he didn't need to come to see me again.  He did, and he never came back, but I didn't care-I had another one I thought a lot of.  He went on a mission.  Another fellow that I thought lots of didn't have a good background, so Father would not let me go with him.

   When the Bate family came to Charleston, I watched Johnnie very carefully for quite a long time.  One night we went to choir practice.  They left me to lock the door, and they all started off.  I said, "Wait, girls, I can`t find the keyhole."  A young man stepped up and lit a match for me.  For the first time our eyes met and he winked at me.  I was almost gone!  A few Sundays after that a boy that tried to go with me (I didn't like him because he was a sheepherder)tried to get me to ride with him in his buggy.  I wouldn't leave the other girls, so he tried to get Johnnie Bate to ride with him, saying he would show him a time.  I said, "Don't do it, Johnnie, walk with us."  He turned and said, "I never refuse a lady."  That was the first time I had spoken to him, but he walked home with me.  I was 17 years old that day, and I never quit going with him from then on.  He was a very interesting talker, and we talked hard that night.  By his language I got the impression he was a very well-bred boy.  He was a well-educated boy, using very good language.  I found it was an experienced education.  He worked in his father's store, drove to Salt Lake City for his father for supplies.  He was in the band, playing different instruments.  I learned he was an honest, upright boy, who had no bad habits, and I loved his father.  His father was just the ideal of a man.  They had a big piano, and the girls and boys were all talented.  I fell hard, for it was right up my line, loving all those things.

   The next two years were very happy ones.  I was so common and simple, I never had even gone to a soda fountain.  My first ice cream soda was with Johnnie.  He knew so much more than I and could talk so intelligently, sometimes I felt like a little kid with him.  Father said one day, "Maude, do you like that boy?" "Why shouldn't I?" "Are you being serious?" I said, "Yes, if he is serious."  Well, he goes right down to Bates house and hires Johnnie to work for him.  The very next morning after hiring him, he asked him to pray in family prayers.  I felt so sorry for him.  My folks were farmers and John's family were all merchants.  He was used to clerking in the store.  His father was a musician, and he played in his father's band.  He was used to dramatic work and such, wasn't used to hard work.  But father surely gave him a working out.  I knew Dad was doing it on purpose, but they didn't out do him.  I don't know how he did it, but he did-kept up with them, but I sure felt sorry for him.  Every night he was tuckered out, but he worked for us for about 3 years, then he worked hard getting a place(house and lot) for us, s I insisted on having a home of our own before we married.

   One night we went to a dance in Heber.  When we came home with his beautiful horse and buggy, he asked me when he could see me again. We had been going together a few months at that time, before he worked for us.  I smelled wine on his breath when he asked me.  I told him he wouldn't need to come anymore.  He said,"Why? I never got fired without knowing why."  Then I told him I had a rule-I never went with a boy who used tobacco, drank liquor, or used bad language.  They were my rules, and I would never break them.  He said, "I just took a mouth full to please the boys.  I don't drink." I said,"Well, think it over.  If you want to live my rules, you can come back Sunday.  If not,, we are through."  I kissed him more tenderly that night, for I did love him.  It was a week of suspense.  That was the longest week of my life.  I knew he was a boy of his word, but would he come back?  He came back on Sunday.  He told me later how he suffered between love and pride.  He talked with his mother, his sister, they thought it was pretty stiff, but he decided for me, and he has kept his word, he never touched another drop, or broke the others either.

I was very happy at that time.  I went with him for four years, found he was a man of his word.  If he said he would meet me at a certain time, he was there at that time.  All through life he was that way.  Sometimes it was a little hard on me, raising a family, but he was just as strong at what he believed as I was at mine.  In all his jobs he was the same.  He learned that from his father.  It was one of his father's laws before him.

After he quit working for Father,  I was teaching in Sunday School, but when I called for him on my way, he would be in bed.  So I thought I would stop that.  I told the Bishop I wanted a helper teacher.  He asked me who I thought I wanted.  I asked for John. He never knew I asked for him or he would not have taken the job.  But he did, and that settled the staying in bed Sunday mornings.  Later he was asked to be in the prayer circle.  Later, I remember Josie Murdock and I had a part in a Sunday School convention.  We ha to read a paper on what our religion was to us.  We made a rule that from that day forward, we would both get a testimony of the Gospel for ourselves.  From that time on, we both worked to that end.  We both got married and moved away.  I saw her only once after that when she and I both had children of our own.  I never heard how she got her testimony, but I did hear she made it.  That story is in another section.  She died early.

We married April 1, 1930.  I was 2l in August the same year.  I didn't believe in long engagements, but I demanded a house to live in.  I got it all finished when we were married and we papered a painted it.  We never rented a home after that.  But my pride of that home was short-lived.  My first little girl was born in that little home about a year later, but when Lillie was a few months old the next fall, Father Bate moved to Idaho and talked John into going with him.  It almost broke my heart, but there wasn't much of a job in Charleston, and they homesteaded a place and we had to live on it two years, I think.  Mother was ill, and it relied on me to tend her.  She wouldn't let me go without her, so we took her up with us.  We had to live with John's mother that winter.  I was very unhappy over this, but I respected the Priesthood and did it.  It was a trying experience.  Mother stayed with us five weeks, and died on the way home at Aunt Rose Meedhour's home in Logan, Utah.  My sister, Rose, and I went to our mother's funeral.  Our babies were five months old.  They caught a terrible cold, nd Lillie had bronchitis, was a very sick little girl.  That was the start of my testimony of faith and prayer.  Brother Bate, John's father, had the beautiful gift of healing.  He told me in confidence to believe him as he says it--the Lord puts the words in the mouth how it can be.  Well, he gave her a wonderful blessing, promised her health that she would grow up and have children of her own.  I had every hope and she got well real quick, but they kept me in one little room just large enough for a bed and tiny stove.  They never let me come out only while she was asleep.  I ought to have been very thankful but I was so unhappy things weren't going as I wanted them to go.

We had nothing to live on-had to depend on other people.  Of course, John played in the band two and three times a week, got $2.50 a night, but it all went to the second wife, as she had little children.  We had two cows, but that went to them too.  Sister Bate had one cow, would sell it for bacon to cook potatoes, and we had a few chickens, so we had a few eggs.  Lillie didn't do very well.  We had no baby food like they do now.  We made pop, we called it.  It was bread scalded in hot water with a little milk and sugarbeet.  Lillie wouldn't eat it.  When she was two years old she only weighed twenty pounds.  We built a log cabin with a dirt roof and before Almon was born, we moved in our own house.  I took heart with that.  The first thing I did was to get all Lillie's pretty clothes out that I had put away, washed them all up, ironed them with care, drove nails all around the logs and hung them up to air.  But a big rain came up and leaked through the loose dirt of the roof, and soaked them through with--not water, but mud.  Well, I just gave up and spent most of my time crying and growling.  That was the time I received my greatest testimony of the gospel.  All this time I was praying for it and trying to live good enough to deserve it.  I didn't deserve it, but I got it.  The story of it is told in another section.

Those were trying days, and if the evil one tests you, it is at those times.  They had a plague of flies.  They were so thick, the place was full inside and out.  We would get our meals ready to put on the table and go outside and break leaves off of the trees and with dish towels would all brush.  When we got them to the door, one would run out the screen door, and we would brush them out.  Even then one would keep brushing the table to keep them off the food.  But everyone had them as bad, so that was all the comfort we had.  Out house was built with green logs and when they got rather dry, the bugs would crawl out and we had to fight bedbugs.  The winters were so cold and loose windows and doors; we burned sagebrush.  It kept us stuffing sagebrush in the stove all the time.  We carried water from the ditch by the barrels to wash and use.  The snow was so deep it would pile up each side of the door to the walk.  We couldn't see over it.  We would not see the sun for months at a time and Idaho was noted for its wind.  I've seen the time that my baby girl never had her coat off in the daytime nor out of her high chair which was close by the oven for four or five weeks.  I would wash the clothes and hang them up around the room.  They wouldn't dry from one week to the other.  Every piece we needed we would hang by the open oven in the wintertime.  In summer it wasn't like that.

     We got our two cows back, but one of them was so old without getting fresh, that her milk went bad, so we just had one.  We had a few chickens and plenty of grain to make bread, so that was what we lived on.  We had rabbits to live on for meat.  John raised pigs and we had pig meat, but he raised pigs one year.  After boiling grain and potatoes on the stove every day to fatten them for sale, they all got the colary (cholera) and all died but one.  And the hair all came off her.  There was about 40 of them. 

     John was a man very fond of horses.  He had a beautiful pair of work horses.  I guess he fed them too much, they got stoppage of the bowels and both died.  We had a beautiful bay mare we were fond of--she got too old to work, so he bred her and she had three lovely colts.  One of them got drowned in the creek.  When our span of work horses died, John had his land about ready, and the neighbor came and put his crops in.  That made us very humble and made us feel very close to them.  He sold the span of buggy horses, and bought a couple of horses to work with.

     One time of our life in Idaho, I got very jealous of him.  He played in the band very often with his father's band, made a little money, but it went to the second family; of course we were helped by him but I was home with a sick baby most of the time.  It was bad enough, but the other Maude Bate made it her mission to tell me some yarns about the men making merry with their playing.  I was weak enough to listen to her and believed it.  John made light of it, and it didn't help any.  I got so jealous.  We quarreled, and he was going to leave.  As he was ready, he picked Lillie up and hugged and kissed her, but she clung to him and screamed, "I want my daddy!"  He promised her everything, said he would send her a beautiful doll, but she wouldn't let go.  Her little hands were clenched so tight he couldn't get her loose.  We were all three crying, but we looked at each other, and I went in his arms.  We made up and he told me later he never believed I could believe it.  But he never said even he was sorry, but I felt it was just the evil one tempting us and at that time I was sick with Almon, my first boy who was born.  We both worked the next few months.  Almon was born weak and puny.  I had a hard time raising him that winter.  The next spring and summer I took sick--so sick I could hardly get around.  I didn't stop to think that John was working as hard as I was.  I grew cross and full of self pity,  He was aggravated with me, and one day told me I didn't know what sickness was.  He said if I had been as unhealthy as he, I would put up with a little sickness.  That hurt me very much, and I wouldn't forgive him.  Ten days after that I took down with typhoid fever.  Almon was nine months old then, and this story is in another section.  John's father died when Almon was about 6 months old.