The Egg and I (17 page)

Chickens are so dumb. Any other living thing which you fed 365 days in the year would get to know and perhaps to love you. Not the chicken. Every time I opened the chicken house door, SQUAWK, SQUAWK-SQUAAAAAAAAWK! And the dumbbells would fly up in the air and run around and bang into each other. Bob was a little more successful—but only a little more so and only because chickens didn't bother him or he didn't yell and jump when they did.

That second spring Bob built a large new yard for the big chickens—the old one was to be plowed and planted to clover, which disinfected the ground and provided greens for the hens. We eventually had four such yards so that by rotation our hens were always in a clean green playground. Other chicken ranchers shook their heads over this foolish waste of time and ground. They also scoffed at feeding the chickens buttermilk and greens the year round. They had been brought up to believe that women had tumors, babies had fits and chickens had croup; green food and fresh air were things to be avoided and a small dirty yard was all a chicken deserved.

Bob paid no attention to the other farmers, and when the new yard was finished we lifted the small runway doors and watched the hens come crowding out, scolding, quarreling, singing, squawking, choosing their favorite places and hurrying like mad to enjoy their playtime. They were gleaming white with health and spring, and didn't seem nearly so repulsive as usual.

When the pullets began laying, Bob and I culled the old hens. We did this at night. We'd lift an old hen off the roost, look at her head, the color of her comb, her shape, her legs, and if we were in doubt we'd measure the distance between her pelvic bones—two fingers was a good layer. Chickens could be culled in the yard except for the trouble encountered in catching them. The good layers looked motherly, their combs were full and bright red, their eyes large, beaks broad and short, and their bodies were well rounded, broad-hipped and built close to the ground. They were also the diligent scratchers and eaters and their voices seemed a little lower with overtones of lullaby. The non-producers, the childless parasites, were just as typical. Their combs were small and pale, eyes small, beaks sharp and pointed, legs long, hips narrow, and they spent all of their time gossiping, starting fights, and going into screaming hysterics over nothing. The non-producers also seemed subject to many forms of female trouble—enlarged liver, wire worms, and blowouts (prolapse of the oviduct). What a bitter thing for them that, unlike their human counterparts, their only operation was one performed with an axe on the neck.

I really tried to like chickens. But I couldn't get close to the hen either physically or spiritually, and by the end of the second spring I hated everything about the chicken but the egg. I especially hated cleaning the chicken house, which Bob always chose to do on ideal washing days or in perfect gardening weather. In fact, on a chicken ranch there never dawns a beautiful day that isn't immediately spoiled by some great big backbreaking task.

Our chicken house was very large and was complicated with rafters and ells and wings. Cleaning it meant first scrubbing off the dropping boards (which were scraped and limed daily) with boiling water and lye; then raking out all the straw and scraping at least a good half inch from the hard dirt floors; then with a small brush—a very small brush—I brushed whitewash into all the cracks on the walls, while Bob sprayed the ceiling. Then Bob sprayed the walls and criticized my work on the crevices (the only thing he failed to make me do was to catch the lice individually); then we put clean straw all over the floor; filled the mash hoppers; washed and filled the water jugs and at last turned in the hens, who came surging in filled with lice, droppings and, we hoped, eggs.

The Lure of the Tropics

I
think seed catalogues are the most exciting things there are. And I think seed companies are the most generous, for they never question your motives when you write for their catalogues. By looking at the return address in the upper left-hand corner of the envelope they could have seen that I lived in the vicinity of the "most westerly tip of the United States," and yet they never hedged about sending me gorgeously illustrated catalogues mostly devoted to tropical plants with thrilling pictures of orange trees in full fruit and bloom, lemon trees, magnolias, avocados, peppers and other brilliantly colored warm-sounding names like Canna, Iberian Fire Lily, Mexican Flame Flower, African Daisy. On gray soggy November days I pored over last year's catalogues, and after an hour or two I could look out at the squishy landscape without shivering, for I could almost hear the hum of bees, feel the summer heat and see the yard wallowing in tropical glory.

When the new catalogues came in the spring I devoured them and with pencil and paper made lists, which usually totaled around $279 and had to be slashed and slashed. At last I ordered my seeds and spent days rigid with expectancy. I always bought against my better judgment some of the flame-fire-veldt type of plants from a little known semitropical seed company, which invariably substituted Nasturtiums for Belgian Congo Moon Glow Blooms ("often attaining a size of two feet in diameter")—California Poppies for East Indian Pompoms and never put in more than three seeds to a package. They were not very honest, but I could warm my hands over the pictures in their catalogues.

Bob, who had already ordered and received all of his seeds weeks before from a well-known local firm, listened resignedly to my feverish accounts of the front yard exploding with giant Cannas, the house crawling with Flame Flowers, gourds and monstrous Congo Roses, the fences completely hidden by "Unusual Annuals"; then dug a trench the full length of the vegetable garden, filled it with chicken manure, rich brown earth and sweet peas. I saw defeat coming as relentlessly as old age.

The second spring Bob made me a coldframe all my own for my tropical galaxy of bloom. It was not exactly a spontaneous idea on Bob's part, and he was pretty tightlipped as he grimly slammed the nails home, mumbling about the drop-of-water-on-stone technique; but it was a beauty, facing south, with three sections, sashes on hinges and little arms to brace the sashes when I wanted to lift them. When it was finished all I had to do was to wait for my seeds to come and for the earth to take a slight detour from its ordinary whirl on its axis, and success would be mine.

Meanwhile it was time to work on the vegetable garden. As we plowed and harrowed and dragged the feathery loam, I thought of New England people and of how they have to build their soil out of humus and sweat, and it made me feel guilty. Our soil was so wonderful that I could thrust my arm clear to the shoulder in it when it was ready to plant. It was a natural sandy loam and, with chicken manure and compost added, it was so fertile it was almost indecent. Bob made garden rows as straight as dies, spaced to the inch, and his seeds came up the correct distance one from another. When he planted a seed it immediately got busy and sprouted and appeared in exactly the allotted time. From thence forward the progress was about as fascinating and as trustworthy as a Postal Savings Bond. The seed reached full maturity, with interest, in exactly the promised number of days, and another good investment was harvested.

Bob's garden was a thing of symmetry and beauty. It was bordered with great clumps of rhubarb that had bright-red speckled stalks as big as my arm and so crisp they snapped in two, drippy with juice. Between the rhubarb plants, and nourished by the continual waterings of manure water which we gave the rhubarb, were parsley, chives, basil, thyme, sage, marjoram, anise and dill. I put parsley in everything but ice cream, Bob said, but even he admitted that tomato sauce, stew, kidney sauté, spaghetti, or meat pie seemed tasteless without fresh basil once you had tasted them cooked with it. Mint grew in a thick hedge by the woodshed and my great fear was that it might get started somewhere else, it was so eager. In rows about fifty feet long, stretching from the sweet peas to the rhubarb and herbs, were peas, early and late, carrots, turnips, beets, salsify, celery, celery root, lettuce, endive, broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, Swiss chard, sweet corn, parsnips, beans, cucumbers, tomatoes, squash, radishes, onions (the sweet flat Bermudas which grew as large as apples and almost as mild), and Brussels sprouts. Over by the brooder house—at least that year's location of the brooder house—Bob made an asparagus bed, which I estimated, when in full production, would take care of that portion of the United States extending from the Columbia River to the Pacific Ocean. Our growing season was short, or rather our maturing season was short, for we had late frosts and little hot weather; but the mild winters and long cool springs seemed to give a succulency to the vegetables which I have never seen surpassed. Nothing was ever pithy or tough or harsh flavored, and even carrots left in the ground all winter (by mistake) were crisp and tender the next spring. That was truly a gardener's paradise except that we couldn't grow lima beans or egg plant or melons or peppers and we had to mulch our English walnut trees and apricot trees very heavily, and even then the blossoms were often frost bitten.

With Bob's gardening so stable—so trustworthy—it didn't seem fair to me that mine should always be the wildcat variety. A great many of my seeds not only did not sprout but disappeared entirely. The others came up the next morning like Jack's Beanstalk or didn't show up until I had given up hope and planted something else on top of them. And then they all appeared together and created confusion and ill will. My seeds, no matter in what order they were put into the ground, always came up in bunches. A big clump here, nothing at all here for quite a way, now a little wizened group, a single plant and another huge clump. Also my plants were usually not healthy, and I'm sure that I have introduced more varieties of plant disease than anyone in the Northern Hemisphere. I planted nasturtiums and bachelor's-buttons and they came up covered with South African Jungle rot and Himalayan Spot Wart. I decided at last that instead of the green thumb I had the touch of death and that I was never destined to be a second Mowgli or Little Shepherd of the Hills because I hated little wild things and they hated me. Bob, on the other hand, had nature by the scruff of the neck and his sweet peas had blooms like gladiolus and stems about ten feet long.

The man from whom we bought our bulbs gave me all of his lovely single dahlia tubers and kept only the hydrocephaloid monsters in liverish lavender and virulent pink. He said, "You ought to get you another hobby, there is some folks who just don't have the feeling. Yep, you should get you another hobby."

The Mountain to Mohammed

T
hat first year no one, or very few, knew that we were up there in the mountains on our ranch and so we were skipped by the door-to-door sellers. I didn't learn about that delight of country living until one drear day late the first fall. Bob was out in the woods usefully and gainfully employed cutting shingle bolts and I was rattling around in the house longing for my lovely big noisy family and hating the mountains, when a little black truck sidled into the yard, a small man alighted and crept to the back door, where he scratched like a little mouse. I rushed to the door and he was so heartened by my greeting, not knowing that I was glad to see anybody, that he hurriedly scrambled back into the truck and came staggering back under four great black suitcases. He opened the first one and I realized that at last I was face to face with the creator of the knitting book outfits. The coat sweater made like a long tube with an immense shawl collar. The tatted evening dress. The lumpy crocheted bed-jacket tied with thousands of little ribbons. The great big tam. The slipover sweater with the waistline either crouching in the armpits or languishing just above the knees. Jack the Knitter had them all and mostly in maroon, a pink so bright it could have given a coat of tan, and orchid.

Jack the Knitter was so proud of his wares that I had a feeling he made them himself, and I pictured him stopping his truck halfway down the mountain and crawling into the back to tat up another evening dress or maybe knit another big purple tam.

He did have lovely suits knitted of yarn as soft and light as kitten's fur and seemingly devoid of furbelows. I tried one on and was bitter to find the V-neck crowding the crotch for position and the skirt so tight that when I stood erect it made me look as if I were using my fanny for antennae and feeling around for a seat.

As I turned down offering after offering, Jack's little watery eyes grew sadder and his little black suit shinier and shabbier, and we were both pretty desperate when he brought out the socks—the really superior wool socks. I immediately ordered twelve pairs for Bob and begged Jack to stay for dinner. He, however, seemed to have revived considerably under the stimulus of the order and briskly declined, packed his wares and left in the direction of Mrs. Kettle's, where he undoubtedly had dinner after selling all of his sweaters including the expectant-sitter suits.

Bob returned from the woods and pointed out that I had ordered the twelve pairs of socks two sizes too small. I tried to make up my mind whether to walk in the dark and rain down to Mrs. Kettle's and tell Jack the right size or to let the wrong ones come and go through the long exchanging process. I decided to let the wrong ones come and went shuffling off to bed with my will power dragging around my feet like let-down suspenders.

Then came Christmas and the mail order. I bought all my Christmas presents from the catalogues, which was wonderful for I had the thrill of first choosing what I would buy if I could have anything, and then what I would actually buy.

My greatest hurdle in ordering was whether or not to take a chance on "multi-colored." Practically everything except farm machinery came in pink, blue, green, maize (never yellow) and multi-colored. It sounded as if they had stirred all of the left-over colors together as we used to do with Easter egg dyes. I was strong and limited myself to plain colors, but I felt I had erred. What if I died and Bob sent for and buried me in a multi-colored shroud and I had never seen one. I was also fascinated by that wonderfully ambiguous term "floral background." Since a flower could be anything from a forget-me-not to a Yucca, that was certainly buying a pig in a poke; and so I bought many "floral backgrounds" for my family.