The Egg and I (15 page)

Just before he came to work for us Peter Moses had a job working on the county road. The men were blasting out some stumps so a curve could be eliminated, and it was Peter's job to stand with a red flag and stop the cars before the blast. The mail truck came along and Peter waved it through. "Go on! Goddammit, go on!" he yelled and the mailman drove on and just missed the blast which sent two rocks through his windshield and laid a slab of bark on top of his car. He got out of the truck and walked back. "Hey, Peter, did you tell me to go through?"

"Sure did," said Peter.

"Why, you damn fool," said the mailman. "A blast went off almost under the truck and the rocks broke my windshield. Why didn't you hold me back?"

"Can't do 'er," said Peter. "The Yew S. Mail must go through!"

Mrs. Kettle told us how Peter had appointed himself the official smoker-out of draft dodgers during World War I. Mrs. Kettle said naively, "There was some Germans lived on a ranch up here in the mountains and they had two boys that shoulda went to war but they was hidin' in the hayloft and Peter Moses heard about it and he went up there and seen where they was and reported them to the Government men who had come out to get my boys to enlist." Peter Moses swore that the Kettle boys were so anxious to enlist that they were down in the basement hiding behind the canned fruit, when the Government men came.

The Maddocks had one of the most prosperous farms in that country. Six hundred acres of peat, drained and under cultivation; a herd of eighty-six Guernsey cows; a prize bull; pigs, rabbits, chickens, bees, ducks, turkeys, lambs, fruit, berries, nuts, a brick house, new modern barns and outbuildings; their own water and light systems, and a wonderful garden had the Maddocks. They had also five sons who had graduated from the State Agricultural College and Mrs. Maddock herself was said to be a college graduate. We drove past their beautiful ranch on our way to and from Town and one day there was a sign on the mailbox "Honey for sale," I persuaded Bob to stop. We drove through the gateway and up a long gravelled drive which swept around the house and circled the barnyard. We stopped by the milkhouse and a large hearty man in clean blue-and-white-striped overalls came out, introduced himself as Mr. Maddock and invited us to go over the farm. The farm was everything we had heard. The epitome of self-sufficiency. The cows gave milk to the chickens, the chickens gave manure to the fruit trees, the fruit trees fed the bees, the bees pollenized the fruit trees, and on and on in a beautiful cycle of everything doing its share. The exact opposite of that awful cycle of the Kettles' where Peter robbed Paul to pay George who borrowed from Ed. The Maddock livestock was sleek and well cared for. The barns were like Carnation Milk advertisements—scrubbed and with the latest equipment for lighting, milking, cleaning and feeding; the bunkhouses were clean, comfortable and airy; the pigpens were cement and immaculate; the chicken houses were electric lighted, many windowed, white and clean; the duck pens, beehives, bull pens, calf houses, turkey runs, rabbit hutches, and the milkhouse were new, clean and modern. Then we went to the house. The house had a brick façade and that was all. The rooms were dark—the windows small and few. The kitchen was small and cramped and had a sink the size of a pullman wash basin. In one corner on a plain sawhorse was a wooden washtub. Mrs. Maddock was as dark and dreary as her house, and small wonder. She told me that she hadn't been off the ranch for twenty-seven years; that she had never even been to "Town" or Docktown Bay. When we said good-bye Mr. Maddock shook hands vigorously. "Well," he asked proudly, "what do you think of my ranch?" At last I understood Mrs. Kettle. There was but one suitable answer to give Mr. Maddock and I was too much of a lady.

Mary MacGregor had fiery red, dyed hair, a large dairy ranch and a taste for liquor. Drunker than an owl, she would climb on to her mowing machine, "Tie me on tight, Bill!" she would yell at her hired man. So Bill would tie her on with clothes lines, baling wire and straps, give her the reins and away she'd go, singing at the top of her voice, cutting her oats in semi-circles and happy as a clam. She plowed, disked, harrowed, planted, cultivated and mowed, tied to the seat of the machine and hilariously drunk. A smashing witticism of the farmers was, "You should take a run down the valley and watch Mary sowin' her wild oats."

Birdie Hicks pulled down her mouth and swelled her thin nostrils when she mentioned Mary's name. "She's a bad woman," said Mrs. Hicks, "and we never invite her to our basket socials." I asked Mrs. Kettle about her. She said, "She's kinda hard but she's real good-hearted. There ain't a man in this country but what has borrowed money from Mary and most of 'em has never paid it back. The women don't like her though and all because one time her old man was layin' up with the hired girl and she caught 'em and run a pitchfork into her old man's behind so deep they had to have the doctor come out and cut it out. She said that would teach him and it did because he got lockjaw and died from where the pitchfork stuck him. Mary felt real bad but she said she'd do it again if conditions was the same."

Mary sold cream to the cheese factory. One morning she found a skunk drowned in a ten-gallon can of cream. She lifted the skunk out by the tail and with her other hand she carefully squeezed the cream from his fur. "Just between us skunks, cream is cream," she said as she threw the carcass into the barnyard. She sold the cream and vowed she'd never tell a soul but Bill the hired man told everyone, especially people he saw coming out of the cheese factory with a five-pound round of cheese.

Our first spring on the ranch we didn't have any callers because no one knew we were up there and anyway at that time we didn't have anything to borrow or rather lend nor were we experienced enough to be sought out for advice. Those are the reasons for calling—the time for calling is between four in the morning and seven in the evening and the season is springtime. Summer is too hot, too busy, fall is for harvesting, winter is too wet and rainy. Spring is the time for building, planting, plowing, reproducing and the logical time for calling and borrowing. No one told me this; I learned by bitter experience.

I remember well how the night before I had been awakened by that taut stillness which presages mountain rain. I lay there in the thick dark, at once alert and unreasonably teetering on the edge of terror. No sound, no movement anywhere. Curtains poised in the middle of a sway, half in and half out the window. Shades gone limp. A trailer of my climbing rose clutching the window sill to keep from twitching. Breezes on tiptoe. Trees reaching. Trees bent listening. Everything in the mountains playing statue. Then the signal. Tap, tap. Tap, tap, tap. Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. A great, soft sigh spread through the orchard, across the burn, over the mountains, everywhere. A frog croaked, the curtains bellied, a shade rattled, an owl hooted apologetically and the rain settled down to a steady hum.

I got up the next morning to a dreary world of bone-chilling air, wet kindling, sulky stove and a huddled miserable landscape. It was Spring's way of warning us not to take her for granted.

It took me from four o'clock until seven-thirty to care for my chicks, get Stove awake and breakfast cooking. Each time I went outdoors I was soaked to the skin by the rain, which was soft, feathery and scented but as penetrating as a fire hose. After using up three sets of outside garments, in chilly desperation I put on my flannel pajamas, woolly slippers and bathrobe until after breakfast. What luxury to be shuffling around in my nightclothes getting breakfast after all those months of being in full swing by 4:15
A.M.
with breakfast a very much to the point interval at five or five-thirty. When Bob came in he acted a little as if he had surprised me buttering the toast stark naked. I patiently explained the reason for my attire and was defiantly pouring the coffee when a car drove into the yard. "Dear God, not callers at 7:30 and on this of all mornings!" I prayed. But it was.

A West-side dairy rancher and his sharp-eyed wife. Mr. and Mrs. Wiggins. Mr. Wiggins wanted some advice on fattening fryers and she wanted to look me over. It was very natural on her part as she had probably heard from Birdie Hicks that I smoked and read books and was a terrible manager, but she didn't have to sit on a straight chair in the draughtiest corner of the kitchen with her skirts pulled around her as though she were waiting for her husband in the reception room of a bad house.

I implored Bob, with every known signal, not to leave me alone with this one man board of investigation, but Bob went native the minute he saw another rancher and became a big, spitting bossy
man
and I was jerked from my pleasant position of wife and equal and tossed down into that dull group known as
womenfolk
. So, of course, Mrs. Wiggins and I were left alone. I tried to sidle into the bedroom and slip on a housedress and whisk everything to rights before the baby awoke, but the puppy chose that moment to be sick and instead of throwing up in one place he became hysterical and ran around and around the kitchen belching forth at intervals and mostly in the vicinity of sharp-eyed Mrs. Wiggins. She pulled her feet up to the top rung of her chair and said, "I've never liked dogs." I could see her point all right but it didn't improve the situation any, especially as Sport, our large Chesapeake retriever, managed to squeeze past me when I opened the back door to put the mop bucket out, and bounded in to lay first one and then the other large muddy paw on Mrs. Wiggins' starched lap. She screamed as though he had amputated her leg at the hip, which of course waked the baby. I retrieved Sport and wedged him firmly in behind the stove, we exchanged reproachful looks, I wiped up his many mdirty tracks, sponged off Mrs. Wiggins and picked up small Anne. As I bathed the baby, Mrs. Wiggins handed me flat knife-edged statements, as though she were dealing cards, on how by seven o'clock that morning she had fed and cared for her chickens, milked five cows, strained and separated the milk, cleaned out the milkhouse, cooked the breakfast, set the bread, folded down the ironing and baked a cake. It took all of the self-control I had to keep from screaming, "SO WHAT!"

Mrs. Wiggins, no doubt, had quite a juicy morsel for the next basket social, but I had learned my lesson and from that day forward I was ready for Eleanor Roosevelt at four-seven in the morning.

I Learn to Hate Even Baby Chickens

P
rior to life with Bob my sole contact with baby chickens had been at the age of eleven. Lying on my stomach in our hammock which was swung between two Gravenstein apple trees in the orchard by the house in Laurelhurst, I pulled out grass stems, ate the tender white part and watched Layette, Gammy's favorite Barred Rock hen, herd her fourteen home-hatched fluffy yellow chicks through the drifting apple blossoms and under the low flowering quince trees. This sentimental fragment of my childhood was a far cry from the hundreds and hundreds of yellowish white, yeeping, smelly little nuisances which made my life a nightmare in the spring.

I confess I could hardly wait for our chicks to come and spent many happy anticipatory hours checking the thermometer and reveling in the warmth and cleanliness of the new brooder house. But I learned to my sorrow that baby chickens are stupid; they smell; they have to be fed, watered and looked at, at least every three hours. Their sole idea in life is to jam themselves under the brooder and get killed; stuff their little boneheads so far into their drinking fountains they drown; drink cold water and die; get B.W.D.; coccidiosis or some other disease which means sudden death. The horrid little things pick out each other's eyes and peck each other's feet until they are bloody stumps.

My chick manual, speaking from the fence said, "Some chicks have a strong tendency to pick and some don't." (I was reminded of the mushroom book's, "Some are poisonous and some are not.") The chick manual went on to say, "The causes of picking are overcrowding, lack of ventilation or cannibalism." Our chicks, according to the standards set by the manual, had plenty of air and space so I added plain meanness to their list of loathsome traits. From the time of their contemplation, our baby chickens were given the utmost in care and consideration and their idea of appreciation was to see how many of them could turn out to be cockerels and how high they could get the percentage of deaths. I knew that Layette's babies never acted like that, which was a flaw-proof argument for environment over heredity and against any form of regimentation.

I really did my badly organized best to follow my chicken manual to the letter, even though it required that I spend one out of every three hours in the brooder house—measuring feed, washing water fountains, removing the bloody and the dying to the first-aid corner—and all of my leisure time nailing a dead chicken to a shingle, splitting the carcass from stem to stern and by peering alternately inside the chicken and at a very complicated chart, trying to figure out what in the world it died of. I always drew a blank. In my little Death and Food Record book, I, in my prankish way, wrote opposite the date and number of deaths, "Chickenpox-Eggzema and Suicide." When he checked the records, Bob noted this fun-in-our-work, and unsmilingly erased it and neatly wrote, "Not determined." Men are quite humorless about their own businesses.

My chick manual was detailed to the extent that it gave the number of minutes it should take so many chicks to clean up so much food—what to feed every single day until the chickens were six weeks old; even what to do about the floors, hovers, founts, hoppers, etc., four weeks before brooding. From my experience I would supplement this prior-to-brooding advice to read, "Four weeks before brooding, leave on an extended trip to the Baranof Islands."

I well remember how the Lucrezia Borgia in me boiled to the surface as I read in my chick manual, "A single drink of cold water may be fatal to a baby chick." "You don't say," I thought, licking my fevered lips and glancing longingly at the little lake filled with icy water. But my poultricidal tendencies were replaced with pure hysteria as I read on, "Water may be warm when you put it in the founts, but will it stay warm?"