The Egg and I (27 page)

One morning when the alarm went off Bob said thickly, "I candt ged up—I'b sick." And there it was—Bob was ill. With anyone else it would have been the common cold; with Bob it was a little-known, very serious illness for which he chose to direct treatment. His pillows were in wads just behind his neck so that his chin was on his chest and his cough sounded much worse than it was. He wouldn't read, preferring to snuffle and stare moodily out the window. He made me take his temperature, which soared to 99°, hourly, and howled with pain when I forced nosedrops up his quivering nostrils. His throat was very sore, he said, and it should have been bleeding from calling to me.

The second night he was in bed, Jeff brought him a gallon of whiskey, and Clamface, Geoduck and Crowbar a quart each. "Whiskey," they told me as they poured themselves large slugs, "will cure anything."

"If," I thought, "it will cure a strong leaning toward homicide, I will drink a pint, neat."

Bob was in bed a week, and Good Customer was so kind, so helpful, during that week, that by the second day, if he had elected to go around stark naked, I wouldn't have cared at all. He chopped me so much fine dry kindling and stacked it in the entryway so conveniently that I had Stove hot, really hot, from four-thirty until ten at night. He not only drove the truck to the valley and brought me up as much water as I could use, but he filled and emptied the wash tubs and carried the clothes basket out to the clothes line for me. He fed the ducks, the pigs, and the turkeys, which we had recently acquired and were fattening; and then he built a sandbox for the baby and drove clear to Docktown Bay for fine white sand to fill it.

When Good Customer first came, I used to sit at the table, my stomach rigid with disgust, as I watched him shovel in his food and knew that he would soon be sprawled in the rocking chair, unbuttoned and unlovely. During that week when Bob was ill, I used to sit at the lunch table soggy with sentiment and watch him shovel in his food and wonder why such a divine creature had never married. I asked him at last. He said, "Lady, I never married because I don't like women. Women drive me crazy. They've got no organization and they go puttering around and never get nothing done. Deliver me from havin' one around all the time." I was very hurt, and it didn't help to hear Bob's hoarse laughter come booming out from the bedroom where he had been listening.

At last the pipe was all buried, the engine was started and one bright fall morning I heard the musical splash and gulp of water being pumped into the tank. The tank was then scrubbed and drained and at last filled, and I stood underneath it and said a little prayer, then went into the kitchen to find that the faucet in the sink had been turned on and water was an inch deep all over the floor. I didn't care—it was in the house.

The next day I walked down to tell Mrs. Kettle about the water and to find out how she had been making out since the collapse of the water tower. What they were doing for water was evident long before I reached the house, for, sitting on an ordinary kitchen stepladder at the site of the old tower, was a fifty-gallon wooden barrel into which the ram was busily pumping about fifty thousand gallons of water. The barnyard was awash, and a white Pekin duck and her goslings were paddling in and out of the tool house. The old sow, which had disappeared into the oat field the day of the crash, had made a lovely wallow just outside the milkhouse door and little waves lapped against the old wagons and discarded furniture as she shifted her weight from side to side. Mrs. Kettle was futilely sweeping mud out of the milkhouse door, but every time the old sow or one of her children moved a fresh wave washed in. I called to her from the edge of the flood and she stopped sweeping long enough to call out, "There's some pitch in the woodbox. Put the coffee pot on and I'll be right up." When she finally came in, flushed and discouraged, she said, "You know that mess down there is only one of the thousands I've been in ever since I met Paw. He's good and all that, but he ain't got system." Which was where she was wrong, of course, for Paw had the perfect system for getting out of any and all work. I hadn't the heart to mention our running water.

It was late October. I awoke one night to the great whooshing of the wind through the forests which meant a storm was gathering. I felt the house give a convulsive shudder as the wind slammed its shutters and rattled the chimneys. The clock ticked loudly—tick, tick, tick, tick. I thought, "This is a winter storm that's coming. Soon it will be winter—a long dreary, gray, wet, lonely winter." The wind gave a derisive howl and dove headlong into the burn to worry the frail old snags. A few drops of rain fell. I felt a tremendous depression settle over me like a sodden comforter. Then from the kitchen I heard a small noise. It was a gentle little sound, but it had penetration and rhythm and soon I could hear it above the storm—above the clock—above the nervous rattling of the house. It was the friendly split, splat, split of a dripping faucet. Our kitchen faucet. That was it—I had water. I had almost forgotten. The winter prospects brightened. Soon I was asleep, lulled and quieted by that supposedly nervewracking sound, a dripping faucet.

The Root Cellar

A
root cellar was originally a storage place for root vegetables such as carrots, potatoes, rutabagas, beets and turnips. It used actually to be an earthen pit where the vegetables were buried against the winter freeze. Root cellars in the mountains were more elaborate affairs—built to store fruit and vegetables in winter—milk and cream and butter in summer. Our first root cellar was a rather poorly constructed house next to the feed room. It had shelves and bins of sorts and a dirt floor. During the second spring and summer Bob built a new one, constructed like a mine shaft, tunneled into the bank near the driveway, timbered on top and on the sides, lined with double walls filled with sawdust, with a door that would have done credit to a bank vault, and a floor of white sand. Bob built shelves for all my canned fruit, screening shelves for the winter pears, bins for apples and potatoes, racks for squashes, cabbages, pumpkins and my wrapped green tomatoes, and bins of clean sand for celery and carrots. There were also spaces for crocks of pickles and cupboards for storing milk, butter, cheeses and lard. That storing, storing, storing against the winter should have given me a feeling of warmth and security. It didn't. I felt much more as if I were being prepared for the tomb. I spent so much of that first winter in gooseflesh that it took me the next spring and summer to get my skin to lie down flat again; preparing to go through the whole thing again, no matter how much we had to eat, left me cold. Cold and lonely.

The root cellar began where the pressure cooker left off. I canned my last quart of corn, emptied the pressure cooker, dried it, put it away in the pantry and it was time to put on jeans and help with the potato digging. I love to dig potatoes. To me it is a very exciting occupation, especially when the soil is ideal and each hill yields large, middle-sized and small ones. Our potato crop that second fall was so terrific that we kept track of the potatoes per hill and called excitedly to each other as we broke the record with new hills. The potatoes ran from six to twelve inches in length and two to six inches in breadth—they were free from scab and cooked to a dry white fluff. We had five tons, of which the most perfect were laid aside for seed—the largest put in a bin for baking and about three tons of mediums were sacked and sold.

A month after the potatoes, we dug the carrots, beets, rutabagas, mangels, celery root and parsnips. In between the potatoes and these root vegetables came the apples, pears, squashes, pumpkins and green tomatoes. We left the cabbage, Swiss chard, broccoli and kale in the garden along with the winter spinach, then several inches high, and a fall planting of early peas, but not the celery. We tried it one year and it was pithy and bitter, so along in October we lifted out the celery, being careful to take along lots of damp earth, and buried it in layers in a special dark, damp corner. It kept beautifully.

In September we bought a cider press and I gathered buckets and buckets of windfall apples and set them outside the feed room, where Bob squashed them into cider for vinegar and cider to drink. I made one five-gallon crock of cherry leaf sweet pickles and one five-gallon crock of garlic dill pickles. I found a wild plum tree down at the edge of the big burn loaded with hard green plums which Mrs. Hicks said made wonderful olives. I intended to experiment with perhaps a pint or two but Bob got wind of it and came staggering in with a washtub of plums. They were the size of jumbo green olives and the consistency of bullets. I made a five-gallon crock full and gave the rest to Mrs. Hicks. Five gallons of this, fifty quarts of that—two hundred jars of everything. "At this rate we will have to hire a full-time worker just to unscrew jar lids," I muttered to myself.

But then one clear warm day I walked down into the valley and picked a market basket of field mushrooms and experimented,
of my own volition
, with canning them. My canning book told me how to can mushrooms but said, "
Never can the wild or field mushrooms
. Only an
expert
can tell the difference between a deadly poisonous variety and the common field mushroom." They didn't scare me though. "What is a little mushroom poisoning compared to the dangers of botulism?" I said, "And if we are going to allow ourselves to be scared by a few mushrooms, who is going to eat those thousands and thousands of jars of potential death disguised as string beans, peas, asparagus, beets, carrots, spinach and meat." Ha! I scoffed as I compared a small button mushroom with the picture of the Destroying Angel toadstool which I had propped up beside the pressure cooker. Maybe it was and maybe it was not so I tossed it into the pot.

It was also my idea to gather a water bucket of hazel nuts and a bushel of Oregon grapes. The hazel nuts were wild filberts which grew plentifully along the edge of the roads —the Oregon grapes made a wonderful jelly to serve with game.

Then it was time for the butchering. Earlier in the fall I had begged Bob to take over the feeding of the pigs because I was becoming too fond of Gertrude and Elmer and did not wish to go through the winter bursting into tears every time I fried the breakfast ham or bacon. Bob thought this was pretty silly of me at first, then he took to telling me of little incidents where the pigs showed great intelligence or affection and the next I knew, I was again feeding the pigs. The day of the butchering I took the baby and walked down to Mrs. Kettle's. That they too had been butchering I could tell from a heap of entrails in the driveway opposite the kitchen door. The entrails hadn't really begun to smell too bad—just very entrailly—but the flies were like a black undulating cloth thrown over the gray shiny pile, and the back porch was heaped with cut meat which even my cursory glance revealed to be dotted with little clumps of fly eggs. It was not appetizing but didn't bother the Kettles as I could tell from the smell of roast pork coming from the kitchen. Mrs. Kettle had just made a fresh pot of coffee and baked a coffee cake and in spite of the entrails, the butchering and the fly eggs I was soon sitting at the kitchen table, eating and drinking with good appetite. The entrails were in my direct line of vision as I sat at the table but still I had another piece of the crusty coffee cake and another cup of coffee while Mrs. Kettle discussed the relentless piling up of the manure around the barn and the ever-present money shortage. "A year ago my stomach would have rebelled actively at first sight of the entrails," I reflected dreamily. I had come a long way in a year—but was I climbing upward toward some sort of well balanced maturity or sliding downhill into a slothful indifference? I asked Bob about it at dinner but he merely looked at me quizzically and went to bed without answering.

The next day we received a long and heartening letter from Bob's sister and husband urging us to buy a place nearer Seattle—what about one of the islands in the Sound, they asked. Bob read the letter and with no comment tossed it back to me. This was Bob's ranch and his work and he was happy in it and he resented any outside interference. I said nothing to Bob but after dinner I wrote a long account of the Indian picnic, moonshiners and the Kettles to both my family and Bob's. Just the actual setting down of the happenings made them lose their portent to me but I hoped they would arouse a little consternation on the other side.

By noon the next day the hams and bacons were soaking in brine; Bob was cutting applewood for the smokehouse; I was trying out lard and grinding up meat for sausage and thinking, "It's all in the mind, anyway, and by adopting the right attitude even I can be cold-blooded and think 'This is just pork—it bears no resemblance to my pigs.'" Then Bob came in bearing Gertrude's and Elmer's heads and asked me to cook them and make head cheese. It was just as if he had brought in Sport's and the puppy's heads and asked me to cook them. I gave an agonized howl and pushed him out of the kitchen and he disgustedly boiled the heads himself in a kettle outside.

I sent a pork roast to Mrs. Kettle and one to Birdie Hicks but there was still more pork than I had ever seen, leering at me from the pantry. Mrs. Hicks volunteered to help me make salt pork for beans and said that everything else which we were not able to eat immediately should be put in the sausage. I thought we should have butchered the pigs one at a time but Bob wanted to get the smoking done all at once.

Under Birdie's supervision, I made the well-seasoned sausage into little cakes and packed them in a great stone crock—first a layer of lard, then a layer of cakes, then a layer of lard. She said that they would keep indefinitely that way; I didn't understand why—still don't—but she was right.

The mountains were getting ready for winter, too. They were very sly about it and tried to look summery and casual but I could tell by their contours that they had slipped on an extra layer of snow—that the misty scarf blowing about that one's head would soon be lying whitely around her neck. With the bright fall weather, the moonlight and the activity on the ranch, I had not yet cringed before their overbearing hauteur but it was there—I could feel it but I didn't care yet.