BETTY: The Story of Betty MacDonald, Author of The Egg and I

by Anne Wellman

  But before that, when the family was still farming, Betty’s brother Cleve had one day bumped into his old acquaintance Bob Heskett in Seattle and invited him home for the weekend. The stage was set.

  Betty and the Chickens

  BETTY’S NEW HUSBAND, Robert Eugene Heskett, was an ex-Marine and former rancher. Born in 1895 in Cedar Falls, Iowa, he was the eldest of four children. In 1910 Bob’s father moved the family to Montana, where for the next seven years Bob worked outdoors on wheat and cattle ranches; according to Betty in The Egg and I, he also attended agricultural college and worked as a supervisor on a chicken ranch. In 1916 Bob registered for the draft, giving his occupation as farmer. He served in the US Marines but, presumably after seeing action abroad in the First World War, was medically discharged in 1919 with shell shock (now more commonly termed Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.) After his discharge Bob moved to Seattle to live with his parents and joined his father in selling insurance, which may not have been much to his obviously outdoor tastes. By the time he was romancing Betty he was probably already dreaming of returning to life on a ranch.

  Bob and Betty’s wedding took place on Sunday 10 July 1927 and was conducted by the Reverend Dr. Herbert Gowen, an Episcopalian priest and father of friends of the Bards – the Bards were nominally Episcopalian, although never very religious. The ceremony was held at the Gowens’ own house and Bob’s parents Otis and Florence were the witnesses. Betty was just twenty (although in her writing she described herself as younger, eighteen), and probably very inexperienced. She was also very bright, very fond of art and reading, and used to the noise and sociability of a large and bookish family. Now she was about to depart this lively and cultured atmosphere to start married life with a much older man, one she barely knew.

  After what seems to have been a very dull honeymoon with a morose Bob in Victoria, at least as described by Betty in The Egg and I, Bob went back to selling insurance for the Mutual Life Insurance Company. By now, though, his fervid intention was to try his hand at chicken farming. In Egg Bob tells Betty that he thinks wheat-farming is hard and thankless but speaks of his chicken-raising days with evident pleasure. The young Betty feels it is her duty, as taught to her by Sydney, to support her new husband in his ambitions. This had certainly worked out for Sydney, who had had a wonderful time following her mining engineer husband all over the US. Betty’s own wishes, if she has any, don’t appear to come into it, and she falls wholeheartedly in with Bob’s plans.

  In the book Betty writes about the first time they go to see the property for sale on the Olympic Peninsula that Bob has his eye on for their fledgling farm. She describes a ferry ride across the beautiful Puget Sound towards the snowy Olympic Mountains and the landing at ‘Docktown’, which from her detailed description is clearly the sawing and logging town of Port Ludlow, which at that time was connected by ferry to Seattle. In her account they then drive for several hours up into the mountains to inspect the tiny, lonely farm, surrounded by mighty fir trees and looking forlorn as it cowers under the vast Olympics.

  Her first impressions from afar are of a sad property that has been abandoned, the buildings weathered and the orchard overgrown, the fences falling down and the windows in the little farmhouse sagging open. She describes a sense of gloom as she gazes at the nearby mountains, so seemingly close that they give her the feeling of someone reading over her shoulder. But once in the farm clearing itself she can see the flowers and blossoming trees and the place seems less sinister, more ready to make friends. Perhaps with a lick of paint and some new windows the old place might actually work, thinks Betty. There are various outbuildings, and the house itself, an old log cabin, is well situated on a rise of ground under which a mature orchard slopes gently down to a large pond fed by a fresh spring. Inside the house there is an enormous square kitchen with a large pantry, a living room, a wood room, and a downstairs bedroom. Two more tiny slope-ceilinged bedrooms are at the top of a creepy flight of stairs. There is no bathroom, only an outhouse. A large, surly-looking rusty stove hulks against one side of the kitchen; old newspapers dating from the 1880s are tacked onto the walls. The place is otherwise empty.

  The house faces south across the orchard to the pond and towards the ever-present mountains. Whichever way she turns Betty describes being brought up short against something dense and imposing, and wham! there’s another mountain icily ignoring her, as she puts it. But the more they explore the old place the more Betty has the feeling that they should move in and help the little farm in its struggle with the wilderness. Bob is delighted and they decide to snap the place up. They can just about afford to pay cash for the farm and to put enough in the bank for the chickens and feed. Fuel and water, from the trees that surround the farm and the spring by the pond, will be free, and they decide that with a large vegetable garden, pigs to eat leftovers and a few chickens to provide eggs just for themselves they will be able to manage.

  In The Egg and I the first spring and summer are occupied with just getting the previously derelict farm into some kind of shape. Slowly they make progress, and by the time fall is in the air Bob and Betty have built the chicken houses; plowed, harrowed and planted the garden and a back field (with a horse, not machinery); cleared the orchard of stumps; and bought and installed several hundred yeeping baby chicks. Only now does Bob allow them to start on the lesser matter of the house, which lacks both doors and windows and other such little necessities. There has been frequent rain, and mildew has been forming on the clothes in the closets. The bedclothes are so clammy when they get into bed at night that it’s like being covered in seaweed, Betty writes. Now, finally, they lay floors, put in windows, fix broken sills and sagging doors and put in a sink (without water but with a drain). It begins to feel like home. The kitchen still has the malignant stove, anthropomorphized in Betty’s beady eye as ‘Stove’, which had been there when they moved in. This room becomes the hub of all of their activities – keeping egg records, writing checks, making out mail orders, reading letters, eating, washing, taking baths and entertaining. They begin the day in it at four in the morning and end it at about eight-thirty by shutting the damper in the stove and blowing out the kerosene lamp.

  They trade their car for a Ford pick-up truck and, in place of various useless wedding presents that would have needed non-existent electricity, they acquire a dragsaw, gasoline lanterns, kerosene lamps and sad irons, which worked by being heated up on the fire. They buy tin washtubs and a pressure cooker. They hew a road into the virgin timber at the back of the ranch and drive the truck out there to saw up fallen cedars and firs with their new dragsaw. Tackling these rough tasks, Betty writes that she quickly learned new ways:

  I learned the inadequacy of ‘Oh, dear!’ and ‘My goodness!’ and the full self-satisfying savor of sonofabitch and bastard rolled around the tongue.

  All of this backbreaking activity is relayed by Betty in Egg with her trademark acidic observation and self-deprecation. She paints a picture of herself at this time as very green in the ways of farming but at least blessed with abundant energy and very willing to do hard labor as Bob’s inept new underling. On moving to the ranch with Bob she immediately loses her status as blushing and fragile bride and becomes merely her husband’s sidekick and all-round handyman. Bob is described as snapping and roaring and laughing callously as he belts out commands to a trembling Betty, who begins to realize that she is now just a wife to be ordered around. Much of this is for humorous effect, of course, but Bob is clearly in the driving seat. Romance appears to have fled. Betty does her best to get used to it and to acquire the skills she now needs, and Bob can also be kind and encouraging; he has the right kind of disposition and experience for this kind of work, Betty writes, whereas all she has to offer is her willingness and youthful muscle. That first spring and summer at the ranch she feels both joy and despair as slowly they get the farm up and running.

  Even after the house is more fixed up Betty’s life remains one of constant drudgery. There is no
sharing of household chores with Bob, and no running water. She carries up ninety-nine per cent of the water for washing clothes into the cabin herself. The water is hard and won’t soap properly and after a day scrubbing clothes in the greasy scum Betty writes that she can peel the skin off her hands like gloves. She fails to understand why the other mountain women gain such a sense of accomplishment from a big wash; as far as Betty is concerned she would feel more of a sense of accomplishment if someone else did it while she stayed in bed. The effort to wash and iron in such primitive conditions seems to her entirely futile. Washing herself is just as difficult; she and Bob can take baths only twice a week, in a washtub, when the stove is hot enough to heat the water. They are both tall and find washing in such a tiny receptacle difficult. Betty is still wearing her hair long and hair-washing is another problem.

  Ironing is done with the sad irons, which were intentionally heavy and flat in order to get the creases out (‘sad’ being an old word for heavy). She uses two of them, alternating a detachable handle between each; one heats on the stovetop while the second is in use on the clothes. When the first cools down, the handle is transferred to the now hotter iron on the stove. According to Betty the irons are always covered in black from the stove and merely succeed in dirtying the clean laundry.

  Betty also has to trim the kerosene lamps by hand and scrub the wooden floors, which are made of white pine planks carefully laid by Bob, and impossible to keep clean. The floors need constant work once the rainy season sets in and as far as Betty is concerned the whole thing is a waste of time and effort which she greatly resents. She would gladly cover them over with cheap linoleum, but Bob likes the floors and so Betty carries out a daily scrub, which has to be thorough. Bob’s insistence on keeping the floors as they are is a cause of marital strife, and she writes that despite her efforts with every kind of cleaning implement the floors always look as if she and Bob spend all their time butchering animals.

  In the spring and summer the hard work on the ranch is enlivened with the occasional visit to town, which for the increasingly lonely Betty is a very welcome return to something approaching life. She misses her family and is thrilled to go into the stores and meet other farmers and local townspeople and ‘Indians’, even if, as she remarks, all the stores smell like sweat and manure. In winter Bob goes into town for supplies on his own, because Betty, desperate as she is for the liveliness of the little town, needs to stay home to look after the chickens and get the gasoline lanterns lit in the chicken houses at the first sign of dusk. Sometimes she even stands a while among the busy chickens in their well-lit abode, which to her feels like a friendly cocktail lounge, just to relieve some of the loneliness. It’s ecstasy to hear Bob’s returning truck after a long rainy day all on her own, and utter joy in the evening to eat, smoke, and read letters and magazines aloud to each other.

  §

  Every reader of Egg is thoroughly beguiled by Betty’s funny, endearing story of a hapless young city woman battling loneliness and hardship as she learns to become the wife of a chicken farmer.

  But in reality Betty was not as isolated as she said she was.

  The distance from Port Ludlow (‘Docktown’) to Chimacum, the little town close to Bob and Betty’s place, was only about ten miles rather than the several hours’ drive described in the book, and the area is a broad agricultural valley with the surrounding mountains quite some way off. In Egg the farm is also described as five miles from any neighbor whereas in fact the Bishop family, the prototypes for the book’s famous Kettle characters, lived less than a mile away. In addition, although Betty describes feeling lonely and isolated and pining for her family back in civilized Seattle, the rest of the Bards were actually still living on the family farm only a few miles away. Both farms were on the Swansonville Road, not far from Chimacum, with Bob and Betty at number 711. The Bards moved back to the city only in 1931 so in real life Betty must have had her family pretty much next door for the majority of her time on the ranch.

  Depicting a more severe isolation of course makes for a better story. Betty’s books are usually described as autobiographical or semi-autobiographical, and readers have always tended to take the detail at face value; but, along with the exaggeration of both her isolation and the nearness of the mountains – always a massive, gloomy presence in Egg – there are other departures in the book from the real facts of Betty’s life. She was not, as she presented herself, a city girl from Seattle, a sophomore in college unused to country ways; when she married Bob she had been working on the family farm for over a year and by then must have been pretty well versed in farm life. Bob was not the cheerful, hard-working husband she painted him – more of this later.

  To be fair, Betty herself never claimed Egg was the gospel truth, or any of her other works for that matter. In fact she later argued that Egg was about ‘an imaginary place in an imaginary country’. None of the disconnects with real life need alter our enjoyment of the book. It can never truly be determined how much is fact and how much is fiction, and Betty was of course writing for publication and quite rightly wanted to engage her readers. There may well have been editorial pressure; she originally wrote the book in journal form, for instance, but was asked to change it. What we do know for sure, because Betty used to tell stories about the farm to friends for years before she wrote the book, is that, just as in Egg, the farm had no electricity or indoor plumbing; the recalcitrant wood stove made heating the house and cooking meals a major undertaking; and when there was money for improvements Bob always insisted that the chickens got priority. Many of the elements in The Egg and I – the bats that fly in through the bedroom windows, the joys of going to the outhouse at night, the ice in the chicken houses, Betty’s eccentric rural neighbors whom she actually enjoys because they are so different – were very much based in reality.

  What also seem real are Betty’s feelings and emotions, which make the book so much more than just a comic account of an inept farm wife. For her first year on the farm Betty writes that she feels constantly lonely, so much so that whenever she hears the sound of a car passing the end of the road she flings herself at the nearest window to see who it is. It’s difficult to know what to make of Betty’s repeated emphasis on her feelings of isolation, knowing that her mother and brother and sisters were all on a farm just a short distance down the road and that her other neighbors were much closer than the five miles she describes in Egg. But the frequent references to loneliness ring very true. Perhaps Bob discouraged visits to her family, or perhaps Betty was simply unable to get away from their busy life and did indeed feel alone much of the time. There was no radio or telephone and she is likely to have been on her own for long periods, frequently in terrible weather which would have kept her indoors. There is certainly so much mention of her loneliness in Egg that Betty’s apparent feelings on this score carry real weight.

  She was certainly alone in her marriage. Betty describes Bob as entirely impervious to the lowering gloom of the mountains and the solitary nature of their lives, and also pretty much indifferent to his wife’s sensitivity. They appear to have nothing whatsoever in common. Betty reads voraciously and can’t get enough books; Bob reads American Poultryman. Betty paints the local scenery in water-colors; Bob views artistic endeavor as some kind of intermittent medical aberration. She wrote that when the door closed on any departing guests, it closed also on any more dinner-time conversation between the two of them. And even this was not the whole story.

  §

  Books could have been an escape from loneliness but Betty can’t get hold of any. Mary in later life maintained that, apart from abounding health and vitality, the Bards had three outstanding characteristics: an irresistible desire to help, a mania for talk, and an appetite for literature encompassing anything in print. Betty now has no-one to talk to and nothing to read. She loved reading with a passion but in Egg she has brought too few books. She reads and re-reads what she has, plus any old newspapers, magazines and catalogs she can get
her hands on. She can’t borrow books off her mountain neighbors because they don’t read; the mountain women pass the time ‘embroidrying’ all their clothes and bedlinen and handkerchiefs with hard scratchy knots, and consider reading to be boastful and lazy and an indication of general moral turpitude. She herself hates any form of embroidery and would rather be cross-stitched to death than take it up. She longs for more books but it’s too difficult to get them sent from the city to such a lonely location. A ramshackle book shop in town only stocks titles like Types of Manure and How to Know Them, although the owner does send Betty some articles about a woman and her unemployed husband who by their own choice live in isolation on the Pacific Coast. The woman in question just loves all the privations, which like Betty’s include no electricity, running water, or toilet. Betty suspects that Bob and the bookshop owner have colluded in sending the articles in order to point up her own defects, and she is so incensed by the woman’s insane happiness with hardship that she throws the clippings across the room.

  While the first spring and summer are bearable in the sunshine, fall and winter come as a crushing defeat to Betty’s morale. It rains, and rains, and rains, and rains. The mountains, previously a glowering but passive presence, suddenly take to actively deluging the ranch with constant downpours. None of this can have come as a surprise, as Betty must already have experienced a Peninsula winter during her year on the family farm, but in Egg the winter deluges are painted as a new and depressing discovery. She is stuck in the little house all day and the smoky wood-burning stove is an increasingly sinister entity which refuses either to heat the house or cook the food unless coaxed with kerosene. In the summer and spring Betty hadn’t cared how slow the stove was or how little heat it gave out. She and Bob were outdoors from dawn to dark, they allowed plenty of time for cooking things and all of the wood was dry. With the first rainy day she realizes that ‘Stove’ is her mortal enemy and would have to be handled with extreme caution. It appears to burn through all the fuel it’s given while releasing no heat. They are cold all that first winter and surrounded by wet flapping washing which cannot be dried outside. Socks and underwear flap damply against Betty as she tries to cook, but she cannot take them down because they are essential items and need to be dried. After the strenuous spring and summer, she was looking forward to the winter as a time when she could curl up by a roaring fire and make rugs and quilts just like the farm people in all the books she had read. Obviously this is not to be as it takes her sixteen hours a day just to keep ‘Stove’ going and get the meals cooked, including dinner as their evening meal. Most of the mountain people eat their dinner at eleven in the morning and have their supper at five, but Betty clings to dinner at night as the last remnant of civilized life as taught by her elegant mother. There is no time for the winter neighborliness she had imagined, either, as all the usual chores take ten times as long in the cold and the dark and the wet. By January dusk is setting in at about three in the afternoon, ‘like a shroud’. On stormy days Betty lights the lamps early and stays close to the house and ‘Stove’.