The Egg and I

by Betty Macdonald

  It all began with the baby chickens—they came first, while I was still very pregnant, and getting down on my hands and knees to peer under the brooder at the thermometer was a major undertaking. Bob and I scrubbed the brooder house, walls, floors, even the front porch with Lysol and boiling water. The brooder house had two rooms—the brooder room and the cool room. In the brooder room we had two coal-oil brooders which we lit and checked temperatures on, a week before the chicks arrived. The brooder room floor was covered with canvas and peat moss and had drinking fountains and little mash-hoppers scattered here and there. The cool room also had peat moss on the floor and buttermilk and water fountains and mash hoppers here and there. At last the chicks arrived and Bob drove down to Docktown and returned with ten cartons with air holes along the sides, in each of which yeeped one hundred chicks. We stacked the cartons in the cool room and then one by one we carried them carefully into the brooder room, took off the lids and gently lifted out the little chicks and tucked them under the brooder, where they immediately set to work to suffocate each other.

  From that day forward my life was one living hell. Up at four—start the kitchen fire—put the coffee on—go out to the baby chicks—come back and slice off some ham and sling it into the frying pan—out to the baby chicks with warm water—put toast into the oven—out to the baby chicks with mash—set the breakfast table—out to the baby chicks with chick food—open a can of fruit—out to the baby chicks and on and on through the day. I felt as if I were living in a nightmare, fleeing down the track in front of an onrushing locomotive. I raced through each day leaving behind me a trail of things undone. Of course, I chose that most inconvenient time to have the baby and her arrival quite typified the tempo of our life. I rode the fifty-odd miles to town sitting on her head, and the moment I reached the hospital she popped out, red-haired and weighing eight and a half pounds. When I came home from the hospital after two weeks of blissful rest, everything on the ranch had been busy producing and I was greeted by the squealing of baby pigs, the squeaking of baby goslings, the baaing of a heifer calf, the mewing of tiny kittens, the yelping of a puppy and the stronger louder yeeping of the chicks. All of the small eat-often screamers were assigned to my care and I found that feeding of them all and Bob and me was a perpetual task. I relegated my ironing to something I would try and finish before small Anne entered college—my washing I tried to ignore, although it assumed the proportions of a snowball rolled from the top of Mt. Olympus—and I closed my eyes to Spring who was imploring me from every side to do something, anything, about my garden.

  Bob’s life was as harried, and our marriage became a halloo from the brooder house porch to the manure pile; a call for help when pulling a stump or unrolling some wire; a few grunts at mealtime as we choked down our food and turned the leaves of seed catalogues and Government bulletins. One night after dinner as I sat at the kitchen table industriously making my baby chick “feed and death” entries for the day, Bob unexpectedly kissed the back of my neck. I was as confused as though an old boss had chosen that means of rewarding me for a nice typing job. “Another year or two and we probably won’t even use first names,” I told Bob.

  8

  People

  THE most important people in a community are usually the richest or the worthiest or the most useful, unless the community, like ours, happens to be scattered thinly over the most rugged mountains and the largest stand of Douglas fir on the North American Continent. Then the most important people are the closest. Your neighbors. Our neighbors were the Hickses and the Kettles.

  My first brush with the Kettles came about two weeks after we moved to our ranch and before we had bought our dozen Rhode Island Red hens, when I in my innocence thought I would walk to a neighbor’s and arrange to buy milk and eggs. Bob had gone to Docktown after lumber or I probably never would have made that fruitless voyage.

  I remember with what care I donned a clean starched housedress and pressed my Burberry coat. How carefully I brushed my hair and fixed my face and composed little speeches of introduction. “So, you’re Mrs. Kettle! Bob has told me so much about you!” or “I’m your new neighbor up on the mountain and I thought it about time to come down out of the clouds and make myself known!” (Ha, ha.)

  My first disappointment was a little matter of distance. It was possible to keep my spirit of good will and neighborliness whipped to a white heat for about a mile, then it began to cool slightly and by the fourth mile the whole thing had become a damned bore and I wondered why I ever had the idea in the first place. It had rained hard the night before and the road, normally pocked with holes and pits, was dotted with little lakes and pools, which reached clear across the road and oozed into the salal along the edges. In order to traverse these it was necessary to make detours into the soaking wet brush so that by the end of the first mile my neatly pressed coat slapped wetly against my legs and my hair and shoulders were full of twigs and stickers.

  The day was clear and blowy with clouds like blobs of thick white lather sailing along on the wind, which was so strong and so playful that incredibly tall, spindly, snags leaned threateningly toward me, particularly when I was trying to edge around an especially large puddle and couldn’t have got out of the way if the snag had shouted “Timbah!” before it fell. This fear of falling snags wasn’t just idle terror on my part either, because every once in a while there would be a big blundering crash to the right or left of me. As the snag was usually just about to hit the ground by the time I had it located, I finally gave up and decided that if God willed it, God willed it, and there was nothing I could do about it.

  On either side of the road were dense thickets of second growth, clear green and bursting with health and vigor. Back of these thickets rose the giant virgin forests, black and remote against the sky. Occasionally a small brown rabbit flipped into the bush just ahead of me and little birds made shy rustling noises everywhere. The mountains looked down scornfully at my skip, hop and jump descent and when I saw their unfriendly faces reflected in the puddles I felt the resisting power of that wild country so strongly that I was almost afraid to look back for fear the road would have closed up behind me and there would be nothing but trees, sky and mountain and no evidence that I had ever been there.

  Lost in these gloomy thoughts I trudged on until I turned a bend and suddenly came on the Kettle farm. First there was a hillside orchard, alive with chickens as wild as hawks, large dirty white nuzzling pigs and an assortment of calves, cows, horses and steers. Wild roses laced the fences and dandelions glowed along the roadside and over and above the livestock arose the airy fragrance of apple blossoms.

  Below the orchard were a large square house which had apparently once been apple green; a barn barely able to peep over the manure heaped against its walls; and a varied assortment of outbuildings, evidently tossed together out of anything at hand. The pig house roof sported an arterial highway sign and the milkhouse had a roof of linoleum and a wooden Two Pants Suit sign. All of the buildings had a stickery appearance, as any boards too long had been left instead of sawed off. The farm was fenced with old wagons, parts of cars, broken farm machinery, bits and scraps of rope and wire, pieces of outbuildings, a parked automobile, old bed springs. The barnyard teemed with jalopies in various stages of disintegration.

  I turned into a driveway that led along the side of the house but there arose such a terrific barking and snarling and yapping from a pack of mongrels by the back porch, that I was about to leap over the fence into the orchard when the back door flew open and someone yelled to the dogs to “stop that goddamn noise!” Mrs. Kettle, a mountainously fat woman in a very dirty housedress, waddled to the corner of the porch and called cordially, “Come in, come in, glad to see you!” but as I drew timidly abreast of the porch my nostrils were dealt such a stinging blow by the outhouse lurking doorless and unlovely directly across from it that I almost staggered. Apparently used to the outhouse, Mrs. Kettle kicked me a little path through the dog bones and chicken
manure on the back porch and said, “We was wonderin’ how long afore you’d git lonesome and come down to see us,” then ushered me into the kitchen, which was enormous, cluttered and smelled deliciously of fresh bread and hot coffee. “I’ll have a pan of rolls baked by the time the coffee’s poured, so set down and make yourself comfortable.” She indicated a large black leather rocker by the stove and so I sat down gratefully and immediately a long thin cat leaped into my lap, settled himself carefully and began purring like a buzz saw. As he purred I stroked him until I noticed a dark knot of fleas between his eyes from which single fleas were disentangling themselves and crawling down on to his nose and into the corners of his eyes and then unhurriedly going back into the knot again. I gently lifted him off my lap and put him down by the stove but he jumped back again and I pushed him off and he jumped back and so finally I gave up and let him stay but stopped stroking him and tried to keep track of the fleas to be sure they went back after each sortie.

  The Kettles’ kitchen was easily forty feet long and thirty feet wide. Along one wall were a sink and drainboards, drawers and cupboards. Along another wall was a giant range and a huge woodbox. Back of the range and woodbox were pegs to hang wet coats to dry but from which hung parts of harness, sweaters, tools, parts of cars, a freshly painted fender, hats, a hot water bottle and some dirty rags. On the floor behind the stove were shoes, boots, more car parts, tools, dogs, bicycles and a stack of newspapers. In the center of the kitchen was a table about nine feet square, covered with a blue and white oilcloth tablecloth, a Rochester lamp, a basket of sewing, the Sears, Roebuck and Montgomery Ward catalogues, a large thick white sugar bowl and cream pitcher, a butter dish with a cover on it, a jam dish with a cover on it, a spoonholder, a fruit jar filled with pencil stubs, an ink bottle and a dip pen. Spaced along other walls were bureaus, bookcases, kitchen queen, worktables and a black leather sofa. Opening from the kitchen were doors to a hall, the parlor, the pantry (an enormous room lined with shelves), and the back porch. The floor was fir and evidently freshly scrubbed, which seemed the height of useless endeavor to me in view of the chicken manure and refuse on the back porch and the muddy dooryard.

  While I was getting my bearings and keeping track of the fleas, Mrs. Kettle waddled between the pantry and the table setting out thick white cups and saucers and plates. Mrs. Kettle had pretty light brown hair, only faintly streaked with gray and skinned back into a tight knot, clear blue eyes, a creamy skin which flushed exquisitely with the heat, a straight delicate nose, fine even white teeth, and a small rounded chin. From this dainty pretty head cascaded a series of busts and stomachs which made her look like a cooky jar shaped like a woman. Her whole front was dirty and spotted and she wiped her hands continually on one or the other of her stomachs. She had also a disconcerting habit of reaching up under her dress and adjusting something in the vicinity of her navel and of reaching down the front of her dress and adjusting her large breasts. These adjustments were not, I learned later, confined to either the privacy of the house or a female gathering—they were made anywhere—any time. “I itch—so I scratch—so what!” was Mrs. Kettle’s motto.

  But never in my life have I tasted anything to compare with the cinnamon rolls which she took out of the oven and served freshly frosted with powdered sugar. They were so tender and delicate I had to bring myself up with a jerk to keep from eating a dozen. The coffee was so strong it snarled as it lurched out of the pot and I girded up my loins for the first swallow and was amazed to find that when mixed with plenty of thick cream it was palatable. True it bore only the faintest resemblance to coffee as I made it but still it had a flavor that was good when I got my throat muscles loosened up again.

  As we ate our rolls and drank our coffee Mrs. Kettle told me that she and Paw had fifteen children, the youngest of whom was then ten. Seven of these children lived at home. The other eight were married and scattered in and around the mountains. Mrs. Kettle began most of her sentences with Jeeeeesus Key-rist and had a stock disposal for everything of which she did not approve, or any nicety of life which she did not possess. “Ah she’s so high and mighty with her ’lectricity,” Mrs. Kettle sneered. “She don’t bother me none—I just told her to take her old vacuum cleaner and stuff it.” Only Mrs. Kettle described in exact detail how this feat was to be accomplished. As Mrs. Kettle talked, telling me of her family and children, she referred frequently to someone called “Tits.” Tits’ baby, Tits’ husband, Tits’ farm, Tits’ fancywork. They were important to Mrs. Kettle and I was glad therefore when a car drove up and Tits herself appeared. She was a full-breasted young woman and, even though Mrs. Kettle had already explained that the name Tits was short for sister, I found it impossible to hear the name without flinching. Tits was a Kettle daughter and she had a six-month-old son whose name I never learned as she referred to him always as “You little bugger.” Tits fed this baby pickles, beer, sowbelly and cabbage and the baby ungratefully retaliated with “fits.” “He had six fits yesterday,” Tits told her mother as she fed the baby hot cinnamon roll dipped in coffee.

  Then there were Elwin Kettle, a lank-haired mechanical genius, who never seemed to go to school, although he was only fifteen, but spent all of his time taking apart and putting together terrible old cars; and Paw Kettle whom Bob aptly described as “a lazy, lisping, sonofabith.” The other Kettles were shiftless, ignorant and non-progressive but not important.

  On that first visit Mrs. Kettle told me that she had been born in Estonia and had lived there on a farm until she was fourteen; then she had accompanied her mother and father and sixteen brothers and sisters to the United States and, somewhere en route to the Pacific Coast, had been unfortunate enough to encounter and marry Paw. Immediately thereafter she began having the fifteen children who were all born from ten to fourteen months apart and all delivered by Paw. Mrs. Kettle was plunging into a detailed recital of the conception and birth of each, when I hurriedly interrupted and asked about the milk and eggs. She was shocked. Sell milk? They had never even considered it. They separated all of their milk and sold the cream to the cheese factory. Nope, selling milk was out of the question. “What about eggs?” I asked. “Well,” said Mrs. Kettle, “Paw just hasn’t gotten around to fixing any nests in the hen house and so the chickens lay around in the orchard and when we find the eggs some are good and some ain’t.” I hurriedly said that that was all right, I could get the eggs in town, took my leave and went home, and there learned that Bob the efficient, Bob the intelligent, had already arranged with the Hickses for milk and eggs.

  Evidently my call was the opening wedge, for the next morning, just after I had finished the breakfast dishes and Bob and I were at work on the pig house, we suffered our first encounter with Mr. Kettle. He came careening into the yard precariously balanced on the top of a flight of steps which formed the seat of his wagon and driving a team composed of a swaybacked stallion about eighteen hands high and a slight black mare little larger than a Shetland pony. Mr. Kettle drew them to a flourishing halt just as I pictured them charging through the side of the house, and wished us a cheery good morning. Then leaping from the leaning tower of steps to the ground with the air of a Roman charioteer who had just won a race, he stopped and examined his steeds’ flanks, did little things to the harness, a masterpiece of ingenuity consisting of baling wire, bits of rope, heavy twine and odd lengths of strap, then straightened up and lit a small piece of cigar. Bob stood transfixed staring at the wagon and team. The small horse staggered under a pair of great brass hames while the stallion wore none; the front wheels of the wagon were easily four feet in diameter and iron, those in back delicate rubber-tired sulky wheels; the wagon itself was the body of a hayrack without the sides and garnished with a flight of steps sloping toward the rear and leading heavenward. I was more fascinated by Mr. Kettle. He had a thick thatch of stiff gray hair quite obviously cut at home with a bowl, perched on top of which he wore a black derby hat. His eyebrows grew together over his large red nose and spurted out
threateningly over his deepset bright blue eyes. He had a tremendous flowing mustache generously dotted with crumbs, a neckline featuring several layers of dirty underwear and sweaters, and bib overalls tucked into the black rubber hip boots. Drawing deeply on the cigar butt Mr. Kettle said, “Nithe little plathe you got here. Putty far up in the woodth though. Latht feller to live here went crazy and they put him away.” He scrutinized Bob from under his eyebrows. Bob laughed and said, “Well, how do I look?”

  Mr. Kettle said, “All right tho far.” He turned to me, “The old lady tellth me you wath down yethtiddy. Gueth I mutht have went to town jutht afore you come. Too bad. Too bad.” He continued to smoke and we all looked at each other expectantly. Mr. Kettle broke the silence. “Thingth ith putty tough thith year. [We learned the hard way that this was his stock approach to borrowing.] Yeth thir. Tough! The boys WON’T HELP MAW AND ME [his voice seemed to break bounds and rose and fell like the crescendos of a siren] and we can’t do it all alone and I GOT TWO THICK COWTH AND WE wondered if you folkth would give uth a hand becauth the boyth are working in the campth in the woodth logging and I CAN’T PLOW ALONE AND THE OLD lady wondered if when you come down YOU WOULD BRING a little kerothene and a little pullet masth, ten cupth of FLOUR AND A FEW RAITHINS if you got ’em.” Innocently we agreed to everything and Paw leaped to the flight of steps, clucked to the horses and catapulted out of the yard. From that day forward the flour, chicken feed, eggs, bacon, coffee, butter, cheese, sugar, salt, hay, and kerosene which the Kettles borrowed from us, placed end to end, would have reached to Kansas City—the flour, chicken feed, eggs, bacon, coffee, butter, cheese, sugar, salt, hay, and kerosene which they had already borrowed from the rest of the farmers in the mountains would have reached from Kansas City to New York and back to the coast. There was nothing anyone could do about this borrowing, though. With the nearest store seventeen miles away, you could not refuse to lend someone coffee, flour, eggs, bacon, butter, cheese, sugar, salt, hay or kerosene, because you yourself knew what it was like to run out of any or all of them. Paw Kettle banked on this knowledge and the rest of us charged it off to overhead.