The Egg and I (14 page)

Paw moved up to lean in the outhouse doorway and said, "Now, Maw, it ain't the bull, itth the flieth. Perhapth, Bob, if you could give uth a hand with the manure, thay a day or tho, we could get rid of the flieth. . . ." Bob recognized defeat when he saw it and anyway you can't be either threatening or forceful with your back to the audience, so he came home and grimly added a strand of barbed wire to our rail fences and mended the rustic gate.

The cows continued to come and, as summer progressed and the flies got worse, the cows got so they could leap four rails and a strand of barbed wire with the grace and skill of antelopes. Bob became desperate and on advice of other experienced farmers, he loaded his shotgun with rock salt. I doubted at the time that this would do any good since the bull, a wizened sallow little bookkeeper type without a vestige of the lusty manliness which is ordinarily associated with the word bull, quite evidently tried to make up for his lack of physique by telling the cows, "Say girls, if you'll follow me I'll take you to a keen restaurant up on that mountain," and no peppering of rock salt was likely to make him give up his only lure. And I was right. Bob shot and the bull roared and retreated a short distance down the road only to return within the hour to be shot again and to roar and retreat again.

By the end of the first spring Bob hated the Kettles with a deadly loathing and I couldn't blame him—they practically doubled his work and certainly impeded his progress. By the time we had weathered the first winter his attitude had softened somewhat, and by the end of the second year he accepted them like one does a birthmark. I enjoyed the Kettles. They shocked, amused, irritated and comforted me. They were never dull and they were always there.

With misfortune constantly stalking them and poverty and confusion always at hand, I was amazed at the harmony that existed among the Kettles. There was no bickering or blaming each other for things that happened—there was no need to, for the fault didn't lie with them, they figured. Taking great draughts of coffee, Mrs. Kettle told me again and again where the fault lay. "It's them crooks in Washington," she said vehemently. "All the time being bribed and buyin' theirselves big cars with our money." To Mrs. Kettle there was but one Government and that was in Washington, D. C. She had no knowledge of any county, city or state governments. "The whole damn shebang" was in Washington, and Washington to her was a place where everyone was in full evening dress twenty-four hours a day attending balls and dinners which seethed with spies, crooks, liquor, loose women, Strauss waltzes and bribes. Politics were the Kettles' out. When the manure in the barn was piled so high Paw couldn't get in to milk the cows or Tits' Mervin had given her a black eye, or there was no chicken feed or money to buy any, Mrs. Kettle would say, "Look! Just look what them crooks in Washington has did. They put them new fancy laws on time payments so Paw can't get a manure spreader. They give Mervin his Indian money so he gits drunk and hits Tits. They're payin' the farmers not to raise chicken feed and the price is so high I can't git the money to buy it. If you want to know what I think," she would take another strengthening gulp of the coffee, then glaring at Paw, Elwin, Tits and me, would conclude, "I think them politicians can take their crooked laws and their crooked bribes and stuff 'em." They would all nod wisely. The blame had been put squarely where it belonged and nobody on the Kettle farm had to go sneaking around feeling guilty.

The Hicks, our other neighbors, lived five miles down the road in the opposite direction from the Kettles. They had a neat white house, a neat white barn, a neat white chicken house, pig pen and brooder house, all surrounded by a neat white picket fence. At the side of the house was an orchard with all of the tree trunks painted white but aside from these trees there was not a shrub or tree to interfere with the stern discipline the Hicks maintained over their farm. It made me feel that one pine needle carelessly tracked in by me would create a panic. Mrs. Hicks, stiffly starched and immaculate from the moment she arose until she went to bed, looked like she had been left in the washing machine too long, and wore dippy waves low on her forehead and plenty of "rooje" scrubbed into her cheeks.

Mr. Hicks, a large ruddy dullard, walked gingerly through life, being very careful not to get dirt on anything or in any way to irritate Mrs. Hicks, whom he regarded as a cross between Mary Magdalene and the County Agent.

When we first moved to the ranch we were invited to the Hicks to dinner and to an entertainment at the schoolhouse. For dinner we had a huge standing rib roast boiled, boiled potatoes, boiled string beans, boiled corn, boiled peas and carrots, boiled turnips and spinach. Mrs. Hicks also served at the same time as the meat and vegetables, cheese, pickles, preserves, jam, jelly, homemade bread, head cheese, fried clams, cake, gingerbread, pie and tea. This was supper. Dinner had been at eleven in the morning. Mrs. Hicks, a slender creature, ate more than any ten loggers but as she took her third helping she would remark sadly, "Nothing sets good with me. Nothing. Everything I've et tonight will talk back to me tomorrow."

After Mrs. Hicks and I had washed the supper dishes we retired to the tiny living room to sit in a self-conscious circle on the golden oak chairs around the golden oak table and the Rochester lamp while Mr. Hicks fumbled fruitlessly with the radio and Mrs. Hicks firmly snipped off between her teeth any loose threads of conversation. Occasionally she would glance sharply at Mr. Hicks and I felt that one false move and she would take him by the collar and put him outside. After one silence so long that I could feel the tidies of the chair sticking to my neck and arms, Mrs. Hicks called Mr. Hicks into the kitchen and I don't know whether she twisted his ear or what but he announced that he was not going to the entertainment as one of the cows was expecting a calf. Bob elected to stay and help with the delivery and Mrs. Hicks and I set off for the Crossroads in her car. We also shared the car with Mrs. Hicks' liver and her bile, neither of which functioned properly and though she had been to countless doctors and had had several "wonderful goings over" she had to take pills all of the time. She drove, as did all the natives of that country, on the wrong side of the road, very fast and with both hands off the wheel most of the time. During the course of the drive she missed by a hair two other cars, a cow, a drove of horses, a wagon and a road scraper but not a feint in the blow by blow account of the fight between her liver and her bile. Her liver was so sluggish that it had constantly to be primed in order to make it pump her bile, according to Mrs. Hicks. Just before we went into the auditorium of the schoolhouse, she took two of the priming pills and I was very disappointed not to hear liver's motor start and a cheery chug-chug-splash as it pumped Mrs. Hicks' bile into her bilge or wherever bile goes.

During the drive home Mrs. Hicks entertained me with
her
many miscarriages,
her
sisters' many miscarriages,
her
cows' many miscarriages, and
her
chickens' blowouts. The internal structure of Mrs. Hicks and all of
her
connections were evidently so weak that I was relieved when we reached home without the crankcase dropping out of
her
car. When we got in the house, Bob and Mr. Hicks were celebrating the arrival of a heifer calf with a bottle of beer. Mrs. Hicks' disapproval stuck out all over like spines, but when I lit a cigarette she turned pale with horror. "It's not that I mind so much," she told me later, "I know you're from the city but I'd hate to have you smokin' when any of my friends come in because they might think I was the same kind of woman you was."

Mrs. Hicks was good and she worked at it like a profession. Not only by going to church and helping the poor and lonely but by maintaining a careful check on the activities of the entire community. She knew who drank, who smoked and who "laid up" with whom and when and where and she "reported" on people. She told husbands of erring wives and wives of erring husbands and parents of erring children. She collected and distributed her information on her way to and from town, and apparently kept a huge espionage system going full tilt twenty-four hours a day. Having Mrs. Hicks living in the community was akin to having Sherlock Holmes living in the outhouse, and kept everyone watching his step. I was surprised when I learned that Birdie Hicks had a mother—she was so pure I thought perhaps she had come to life out of the housedress section of the Sears, Roebuck catalogue. But one warm evening that spring I left Bob with the egg records and the baby and boldly struck out for Mrs. Hicks' to stitch some curtains on her sewing machine. When I arrived, Mrs. Hicks, her mother and Cousin June were sitting on the front porch slapping at mosquitoes and discussing their miscarriages. After the introductions had been made I sat down for a while before opening my brown paper parcel and exposing the real reason for my visit. This was considered good manners, for in the country where people only call to borrow or return or exchange, and everyone is hungry for companionship, it is considered very impolite to hastily transact your business and leave. You must exchange views of crops and politics if you are a man, gossip if you are a woman, then state your business, then eat no matter what time of day it is, then exchange some more politics or gossip and at last unwillingly tear yourself away. I had sat on Birdie Hicks' front porch for perhaps two minutes when I realized that hungry as I was for companionship this visit was going to be an ordeal, for Birdie's mother, a small sharp-cornered woman with a puff of short gray hair like a gone-to-seed dandelion, tried so hard to be young that conversation with her was out of the question and her ceaseless activity was as nervewracking as watching someone blow up an old balloon. When we were introduced she said, tossing her head about on its little stem, "Bet you thought I was Birdie's sister instead of her mother. Sixty-four years young next Tuesday and everybody guesses me under forty. He, he, he! Everybody does. It's 'cause I'm so active." Whereupon she shot out of her chair and leaped four feet off the ground after a mosquito. Coming down with the astounded mosquito in her little claw, she caught herself deftly on the balls of her feet, bent her knees so that she was almost squatting, then snapped into a standing position, turned and winked at me. I'm not able to wink and nothing else seemed adequate, so I just sat. Cousin June, a plump middle-aged woman, turned to Mrs. Hicks and said, "Honest to gosh, Birdie, she's like a little kid." Mrs. Hicks said rather testily, "For heaven's sake, Ma, set down. You make me nervous." Mother finally perched on the edge of the porch railing but kept her eyes darting, head bobbing and foot tapping and I felt that she had every pore coiled ready for the next spring.

Cousin June laid down her tatting, rolled back her upper lip, exposing enormous red gums sparsely settled with nubbins of teeth, and began an interminable story of a supposingly funny incident that had taken place at the grange meeting. She laughed so much during the telling that it was difficult to understand what she said and either I missed the point or as I suspect there wasn't any because it sounded like "and . . . ha, ha, ha, ha, . . . ho, ho, ho . . . hehehehe . . . owoooooooooo! Well, anyway this fellah say to me . . . ho, ho, ho, ho, ho, hehehehe, hahahahaha, oooooooooooooowh . . . I thought I'd die . . . heheheheh heh . . . hahahahahahah. It's about time you got here . . . hahahahahahah . . . heheheh . . . hohohoho." Mother and Birdie were wiping their eyes and urging her to go on and I felt as left out as though they had all suddenly begun to speak Portuguese. In desperation I began unwrapping my package but this also proved embarrassing as they stopped dead in the middle of a neigh, thinking I had brought Birdie a present. Mumbling apologies I slunk in to sew my seams, but apparently their disappointment was short-lived for above the whirring of the machine I could hear "heheheheheheh, hahahahahahah, this fellah says . . ." "Go on, Junie, what did he say, hahahaha?" "Well, hahahahahahah, hohohohohohoh . . ." and the thuds of Mother leaping about after mosquitoes and being young.

When I had finished my curtains Mrs. Hicks served coffee and heavenly fresh doughnuts and, out of kindness and to explain my stolid dullness, said to Mother and Cousin June, "She reads." Mother in the act of hurling herself at the stove to get the coffeepot, stopped so quickly she almost went headfirst into the oven. "Well," she said, "so you're the one. Birdie's told me all about you and I'm saving my old newspapers for you." I started to say, "Oh, I can't read that well!" but Mr. Hicks came in then and Mother leaped to his shoulders pick-a-back fashion, which evidently delighted him, for his heavy face glowed and he said, "You look younger'n Birdie, Maw. Might be her daughter!" I glanced at Birdie and we felt together that it made no difference how young Mother looked, for our money, she had lived much too long.

I had meant to leave before it got dark and so didn't bring my flashlight, but the moon was high and the pale green moonlight proved adequate if I discounted stepping high over shadows and coming down with a spine jarring thump into chuckholes. At the top of the second hill a large black bear lumbered slowly across the road just in front of me. He seemed such a pleasant change from Mother and Cousin June that I forgot to be frightened.

The next morning Mrs. Kettle, clad for some mysterious reason in a woolen stocking cap and an old mackintosh, although the day was warm and bright, lumbered up to borrow some sugar. I asked if she knew Mother. She said "Godalmighty yes. Hops around like she was itchy, yellin' 'Don't I look young—took me for Birdie's sister, didn't you?'" Mrs. Kettle's two huge breasts and two huge stomachs plopped and quivered as she imitated the twittering mother. "Always talkin' about how delicate she is. 'Too little to have more'n one kid. Miscarried eight times,' she says. Considerin' the way she jumps around it's a wonder that ain't all she dropped. Acts like a goddamned flea and looks like a goddammed fool!" For that I quickly got the sugar and tossed in a package of raisins.

When it came time to plant the field crops, the potatoes, the mangels, the rutabagas and kale, that second spring, Bob and I decided that rather than work in these plantings between my regular chores we would hire someone and get this work done all at once, and incidentally right. We inquired of the Hicks first about available odd jobbers but they were rather superior about the whole thing and insinuated, and rightly so, that were I more competent Bob wouldn't have to hire help. That Mr. Hicks never had hired anyone in all the twenty years he had had the ranch; that they really wouldn't know whom to suggest. So we tried the Kettles. They, of course, had hired labor. They often took the cream check to pay a man to gather the eggs and haul in feed, which necessitated selling the eggs to buy feed for the cows so they would produce cream to sell, to pay the man, to gather the eggs. This left no money for chicken feed so they would borrow from us as much as they dared and when they didn't dare any more they would let the hired man go, lacking two weeks of his full pay, the chickens would go back to roosting on the front porch and laying in the orchard, the cows would be fed egg mash and the pigs would get the rest of the scratch. The Kettles recommended Peter Moses, a little, old, apple-cheeked man who "odd jobbed" and claimed to be the most patriotic man in the "Yewnited States of America." "Look at them goddamned mountains! Look at them goddamned trees! Look at them goddamned birds! Look at that goddamned water! Every sonofabitchin thing in this whole goddamned country is purty," he told me with tears in his eyes.