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

by Anne Wellman

  Sometimes Betty takes advantage of Bob’s absence:

  Some Saturday mornings, as soon as the mountains had bottled up the last cheerful sound of Bob and the truck, I, feeling like a cross between a boll weevil and a slut, took a large cup of hot coffee, a hot-water bottle, a cigarette and a magazine and WENT BACK TO BED. Then, from six-thirty until nine or so, I luxuriated in breaking the old mountain tradition that a decent woman is in bed only between the hours of seven pm and four am unless she is in labor or dead.

  Along with the picture Betty paints of growing loneliness and gloom comes this hugely funny disenchantment with farming as a way of life. One of the most enjoyable aspects of The Egg and I is Betty’s subversion of the rural idyll. Rugged pioneer women may have toiled heroically over their backbreaking tasks, eventually triumphing over adversity with a pristine farmhouse and abundant produce wrested from the land; Betty does not. For instance she is delighted, and doesn’t mind saying so, when the pressure cooker explodes and she no longer has to face canning the mountains of fruit, vegetables, meat and fish hauled into the kitchen by an unfeeling Bob.

  Day follows backbreaking day but at least Betty has her idiosyncratic neighbors to enjoy. First and foremost of these are the ‘Kettles’, a large and shiftless family subsisting on a ramshackle farm with much begging and borrowing off those nearby. Betty has a great deal of fun in Egg describing the mountainous, slatternly and foul-mouthed, if kindly, Maw (or Ma) Kettle, and the terminally lazy and feckless Paw who drives Bob insane with his countless requests for help with the plowing, the sowing, the haying, the milking, the barn cleaning, the chicken house building, the gardening, or the cess pool, while doing no work himself. The Kettles’ kitchen has baby chicks behind the stove and cats with fleas, and their outhouse, in which Ma Kettle sits comfortably chatting to visitors, has no door. The fact that their farm fails to thrive is entirely due to Washington machinations and not at all to Paw’s laziness or the dirt and animal malnutrition endemic on their homestead. Politicians are to blame for the fact that the manure is stacked so high in the barn that Paw can’t get in to milk the cows, and as far as Maw is concerned the crooks in Washington can take their fancy laws and bribes and stuff ‘em. Bob loathes the Kettles but Betty finds them comforting; their kitchen may be chaotic and somewhat heady, but it has a warm human feeling in comparison with Betty’s own clean but lonely one. In their struggle for existence the Kettles have developed strong ties with each other; it’s them against the world, and Betty appreciates being folded into their warmth.

  Betty’s actual neighbors, the Bishop family, certainly bore a striking resemblance to the fictional Kettles although slightly fewer in number. Suzanne, or Susanna, Bishop seems to have been the model for Ma Kettle, although the Bishop family always maintained that she never used swearwords like Betty’s character. Suzanne’s husband Albert Bishop was certainly known in the neighborhood as a bit impractical, if not as downright inept and lazy as Pa Kettle; like Pa he did once burn down a barn. The similarities were sufficient to cause Betty quite a bit of trouble later in life after The Egg and I had been published. She had described Pa Kettle as having eyebrows growing together, a large red nose and a black derby hat; a photograph of the Bishops from 1946 shows Albert Bishop as both dark-browed and large-nosed. The Kettles’ daughter ‘Tits’ in The Egg and I has young children just like the Bishops’ real daughter Madeline around the time that Betty was living there. Madeline was always called ‘Toots’ by her family (pronounced as in Tootsie Roll) and was married to a man who was half Native American and who later developed problems with alcoholism; in the book ‘Tits’ has problems with her Native American husband who gets drunk on checks he receives from the government. There was more than enough cause for the Bishops to claim they were the originals for the Kettles when The Egg and I was published over fifteen years later.

  Other local inhabitants pose more of a problem for Betty. In her book she makes no bones about fearing and disliking the Native Americans she comes across. These are likely to have been members or descendants of the S’Klallam tribe (the ‘Strong People’) or the now extinct Chimakum tribe, also known as the Port Townsend Native Americans, who lived on the Olympic Peninsula and after whom the Hesketts’ local town of Chimacum was named. There may also have been members of the Quinault and Chinook tribes in the area. Native Americans had lived off the land of the Peninsula for thousands of years, making good use of the abundant natural resources – wild salmon from the rivers, and fish, seals and whales from the sea. They were known for their skill with canoes and superb knowledge of their surroundings but their way of life had inevitably changed with the advent of European settlers. Successive waves of measles and smallpox epidemics wiped out whole villages. In the 1870s, settlers in the Washington Territory wanted land, and urged the Bureau of Indian Affairs to relocate all Native Americans to reservations, although after passage of the 1884 Indian Homestead Act several S’Klallam families did become land holders themselves. By establishing homesteads, however, the S’Klallam were compelled to end relations with other tribal members who did not, and many chose to leave their home areas altogether rather than do this. Those times were difficult for many because they had no permanent homes and their shanty villages were frequently dislocated by settler pressure. The S’Klallam also faced hunger due to trouble with fishing access: a 1910 Washington State law was passed that required a license to fish, but the lack of US citizenship prevented tribal members from obtaining one. Even after 1924, when all Native Americans finally won citizenship, Washington State continued to limit its indigenous residents’ right to fish.

  Life was still difficult for the Native Americans when Betty was living on the Peninsula in 1927 but she is hardly sympathetic. As a very young child back in Butte, Betty had been attracted by the ‘Indians’. Braves on ponies sometimes rode down Main Street followed by squaws on foot with papooses on their backs. These were the Blackfeet tribe, wearing beautifully beaded dresses and terrific feather headdresses. The children’s grandmother Gammy had read them the stories of Hiawatha, Pocahontas and Sitting Bull and had told them plenty of hair-raising tales of massacres, scalpings and running the gauntlet. As a result Betty and her siblings romantically viewed ‘Indians’ as wonderfully strong and brave and would run for blocks to see them. Now she was meeting them in person.

  Her descriptions in Egg pull no punches. She dubs the Native Americans ignorant and dirty moonshine-drinkers, and worse. A number of the local ‘Indians’, called Geoduck (pronounced Gooeyduck), Clamface and Crowbar in The Egg and I, become buddies with Bob, but definitely not with Betty. She writes that they are excellent hunters and fishers and generous with what they catch, but that they knock their wives down for exercise and would never chop wood or carry water for them. They are unable to understand why manly Bob, a fine hunter and a crack shot, docilely fetches wood for Betty whenever asked instead of delivering a swift left to her chin and telling her to shut up. In the book Geoduck and a friend, both drunk, invade her kitchen when she is alone on the farm and very frightened; in her account she grabs a gun and manages to drive them off. (Bob just laughs when she tells him.) In another passage Betty attends a Native American beach picnic which she is horrified to find is an occasion for drinking to stupefaction. Babies crawl around neglected, women are shoved around and a young girl is molested by an older man. As a result of these experiences Betty is fearful and repulsed by the Native Americans she previously thought so wonderful, and is frank in saying so – seemingly failing to grasp, along with many others at that time, that the problems she describes stemmed from the damage done to their traditional way of life by white settlement.

  But in Betty’s account of the picnic she also describes speaking to a very old tribeswoman who could remember when her people were warriors, and who had heard stories of a great war among the tribes in 1855. The old lady is the last of her tribe and seems troubled by the degeneration she now sees around her, Betty writes. The inclusion in Egg of this dia
logue with the old woman is an indication that Betty nevertheless had an instinctive, if unconscious, sympathy with the Native American plight during her period on the Peninsula. In the end Betty does warm to some of the Native Americans, ‘Geoduck’ and the others among them, although she remains frank about her dislike in general and some of her comments make troubling reading. But there was no such thing as political correctness in 1945 when she wrote the book, and Betty told it as she saw it: she was frightened by Bob’s seemingly brutish friends, repelled by the drunkenness, and incensed by their attitude to women. Perhaps stark reality, with whatever cause, was too much of a contrast with her youthful imaginings about noble braves. However, Betty was no racist, and there would be plenty in her life and work to prove it.

  Birth

  In late 1927 Betty realized she was expecting her first child. In Egg the mountain people call pregnancy being ‘that way’ and the news that young Betty Heskett is ‘that way’ soon gets around. One day when she and Bob are out in the car they are hailed by a complete stranger who climbs onto the car’s running board and, his face uncomfortably close to Betty’s, offers to fix her up for six dollars with a buttonhook. He has ‘taken care of’ someone else who was six months along and gotten rid of three for his own wife at three months. Betty, horrified, finds out at the doctor’s office in town that the man’s wife is in the hospital recovering from her latest abortion at her husband’s hands. The girl in the office telling her this laughs heartily but Betty doesn’t think it’s funny and asks why the man hasn’t been stopped or arrested. If it isn’t him it would be someone else, the girl tells her. Women would either find someone else to do it or produce an abortion themselves using buttonhooks or baling wire or hatpins. The hospital is always full of them. Abortion, of course, was still illegal at that point but from Betty’s account it appears that poverty-stricken mountain women could not always face the struggle of repeated pregnancy and child-rearing.

  In Egg Betty’s pregnancy isn’t made any easier by Bob’s insensitive discussion of worms, intestines and chicken lice at the breakfast table. She goes into labor just at the busiest time on the farm, according to her account in the book, and almost gives birth as Bob drives her at hair-raising speed into town. The baby pops out as soon as they reach the ‘Town’ hospital, after which she enjoys two weeks of heavenly rest. This was St. John’s Hospital in Port Townsend, at that point run by the Sisters of Providence who raised their own chickens and vegetables and fed them to their lucky patients. In the evenings the sisters sit sewing and talking and laughing in her room and Betty writes that with this kind of treatment, so very unlike her rough, hard-working existence on the farm, she is tempted to stay pregnant for the rest of her life.

  Betty may or may not have glossed over the actual process of birth. Responding once to a comment that birth was just like a little case of indigestion, she joked that maybe so, but only if you’d swallowed a cement-mixer. Prior to the 1920s the majority of births in America had taken place at home, with little or no pain relief, and one of the biggest changes to American childbirth in that decade was the move from home to hospital. This at least offered women the opportunity of a lying-in period to recover, and the support of nurses to help care for the baby in the first few weeks. However, the 1920s was also characterized by a dramatic increase in childbirth interventions such as forceps, episiotomy and cesarean section. Fortunately there was also a greater choice in pain relief drugs. Ether and chloroform were widely used and many women were also given a combination of morphine and the drug scopolamine, which induced a sort of blackout called ‘twilight sleep’. (Betty’s sister Mary was to experience this during her own labors.) Betty later told Mary she was so thankful for a chance to lie down she didn’t care what was happening. But whatever Betty’s actual experience in having her first child, baby Anne Elizabeth Heskett was born healthy – and red-haired, in the good old Bard tradition.

  Life is twice as hard on the farm with a new baby, and in Egg when she gets back Betty has to really run to keep up with the work, which now includes looking after hundreds of baby chicks as well as her own new-born. Betty’s life becomes a living nightmare – starting at four in the morning – of household tasks interspersed with running out to attend to the chicks. This goes on and on throughout the day. It felt like fleeing down the track just ahead of a rushing locomotive bearing down on her, she wrote. Her chicken manual warns that a single drink of cold water could be fatal for a chick and Betty looks longingly at their icy little lake. Other farm animals have also been busy producing and along with baby Anne and the chicks, all of the other small, screaming, voracious young are assigned to her care. Feeding them, herself, Bob and the baby becomes Betty’s perpetual task.

  Bob’s life is just as hard as hers, clearing land, pulling tree stumps or unrolling wire. Their conversation becomes limited to grunts at mealtimes as they hurry their food and flick through seed catalogs. There is little time for romance and when Bob one night unexpectedly kisses the back of her neck, Betty is as confused as if a boss had rewarded her in this way for her typing.

  Nevertheless, by the end of 1928 with Anne still under a year old there was another baby on the way, although she doesn’t mention this pregnancy or birth in The Egg and I. She visited Mary in Seattle while in the city, probably for a doctor’s appointment. When she and Mary were standing in a very crowded streetcar and her protruding stomach was hitting the backs of the seats, Mary, in her inimitable fashion, loudly demanded of the whole car if there wasn’t anyone who would give a pregnant woman a seat. The entire streetcar rose in a body to offer her a place, Betty claimed, telling the story to Blanche. She returned to Bob and the farm, probably with some reluctance after the pleasures of the city, and in July 1929 Betty’s second daughter Joan Dorothy Heskett was born in the nearby little town of Chimacum.

  Life continued. In Egg Betty cooks, washes, looks after the babies, raises vegetables, helps Bob and, as ever, cares for the chickens and cleans out the chicken houses. On and on goes the monotonous work of feeding and watering, conducting post-mortems on dead chickens, keeping detailed egg records, dressing cockerels for market, helping Bob with the culling, and gathering pullets from the tops of trees at night to put them to roost in the chicken houses out of the way of predators. But it isn’t all chickens and loneliness. In Egg there is the occasional Saturday night dance, often many miles away; movies in nearby or not so nearby towns, where Betty loses all interest in the plot if the heroine has modern conveniences and takes long steamy baths; county fairs, which Betty enjoys, although she is saddened by the loneliness implicit in the many fancywork exhibits on display; and occasional private events such as the ‘Indian’ beach picnic or the famous occasion of Mrs Kettle’s birthday, when the men drink on the back porch and talk non-stop about sex while the women cook in the kitchen and talk non-stop about sex. There is the excitement, and horror, of the occasional cougar or bear lurking around the farm. Things get easier when Bob installs water pipes and at last there is running water in the kitchen. But through it all runs the slowly unraveling thread, faint but discernible, of the disintegration of Bob and Betty’s marriage.

  By 1931, after nearly four years on the farm, Betty had had enough. Not just of the chickens, which in Egg she now hates with a vengeance, especially the chicks. She writes that the dear fluffy little babies are stupid, smell, peck each other’s eyes out, require constant feeding and watering and are hell-bent on killing themselves by drowning in the water fountains or coming down with diseases. She also can’t take the isolation and the rain in the winter months. The hard work of the farm was easier and more enjoyable in the spring and summer (despite the canning) but she had been broken by the other seasons: waking up in the mornings to the persistent battering of rain on the roof and then going to bed to the same sound, knowing that there was nothing ahead but more rain and wind and loneliness.

  But most importantly, her relationship with Bob has disintegrated. The Egg and I ends with Betty and Bob t
hinking about buying a new chicken ranch with a nice modern farmhouse. The reality was that Betty was suddenly impelled to take flight, taking the children with her. In Anybody Can Do Anything she describes her flight as due to this combination of too many chickens, the depressing winters and the increasing alienation from Bob, from whom she is now poles apart emotionally. She reflects in Egg that Bob is more interested in how much weight her shoulder can carry than with the shoulder itself. She muses that she has obediently followed her mother’s well-meant advice in falling in with her husband’s plans in order to keep him happy, and trying to learn to like chicken farming on a lonely ranch. Now she wonders if there is something wrong with her, as only Bob turned out to be happy. Instead of enjoying living in the wilderness she feels she is pitting herself against mountains and millions of trees and failing dismally. Perhaps Sydney had the pioneer spirit for it, she says to herself; she has not.