The Egg and I

by Betty Macdonald

  She moved the gallon-sized gray granite coffee pot to the front of the stove, went into the pantry for the cups and called out to me, “Ma Hinckley had trouble with her bread too when she lived on your place.” I brightened, thinking it might be the climate up there on the mountains, but Mrs. Kettle continued. “Ma Hinckley set her bread at night and the sponge was fine and I couldn’t put my finger on her trouble till one day I went up there and then I seed what it was. She’d knead up her bread, build a roaring fire and then go out and lay up with the hired man. When she got back to the kitchen the bread was too hot and the yeast was dead. Your yeast was dead too,” she added.

  Having quite obviously been given the glove, I hurriedly explained that we had no hired man and the barn was now a chicken house. Mrs. Kettle heaved a sigh for all good things past and poured our coffee. With the coffee she served hot cinnamon rolls, raspberry jam and detailed accounts of the moral lapses of the whole country. It was almost noon when I left for home, clutching a loaf of Mrs. Kettle’s bread, two pocketfuls of anecdotes for Bob and a few hazy instructions for myself.

  On the long walk home I attempted to strain my baking formula from the welter of folklore but, from that day forward, my wooden bread bowl was to me a sort of phallic symbol and as I kneaded and rolled the unwilling dough I mulled over the little unconventionalities of my neighbors and wondered through which window the hired man used to beckon to Ma Hinckley.

  Mrs. Kettle had told me that I didn’t work fast enough. That “store-boughten” yeast should never be set the night before and the bread had to be made quickly in one morning. I worked like a frenzied maniac and I baked three loaves of bread twice a week and it made the house smell peasanty and in my letters home I referred very often to my homemade bread, but Bob’s reaction—standard—was the true criterion of my success. He said only, “Will it cut?”

  Tuesday and Wednesday were also optional bath days. Saturday was a must bath day but because of fires all day for ironing and baking we also took baths on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. This cutting down from daily bathing to a maximum of two complete baths a week wasn’t at all hard for me nor for anyone else who has ever taken a bath in a washtub. Washtub baths are from the same painful era which housed abdominal operations without anaesthetics, sulphur and molasses in the spring, and high infant mortality. Both Bob and I are tall—he six feet two inches—and even with conditions right, Stove going, the water warm and scented, towels large and dry (always large and slightly damp in winter) the fact remains that the only adult capable of taking a bath in a washtub in comfort is a pygmy.

  A sponge bath in the sink was no sensual orgy either but it was quicker and got off some of the dirt.

  Thursday was SCRUB Day! Window washing, table leg washing, woodwork washing, cupboard cleaning in addition to the regular floor scrubbing. I indulged, somewhat unwillingly, in all of these because Bob, whom I accused of having been sired by a vacuum cleaner, was of that delightful old school of husbands who lift up the mattresses to see if the little woman has dusted the springs. I didn’t dare write this to Gammy; she would have demanded that I get an immediate divorce. I didn’t really object too strenuously to Bob’s standards of cleanliness as he set them for himself as well, and you could drop a piece of bread and butter on his premises, except the chicken houses, and I defy you to tell which side had been face down. There was just one little task which brought violent discord into our happy home. Floor scrubbing. By the end of that first winter I vowed that my next house would have dirt floors covered with sand. In the first place Bob had chosen and laid, with great precision and care, white pine floors. Another type of floor which might possibly get as dirty as white pine, or more quickly, would be one of white velvet. Bob was very thoughtful about wiping his feet but he might as well have hiked right through the manure pile and on into the kitchen. I scrubbed the floors daily with everything but my toothbrush, yet they always looked as if we had been butchering in the house for the past four years. Advice from neighbors had been to use lye, but as many of these lye prescribers were missing an eye or portion of cheek—which tiny scratch they laughingly said they got from falling in or over the lye bucket—I filed lye away as a last resort.

  I heartily resented having to scrub my floors every day. I thought it a waste of valuable time and energy and accomplished nothing for posterity. I didn’t see why beginning with the rainy season we didn’t just let the floors go, or cover them with cheap linoleum. But no, mountain farm tradition and Bob’s vacuum cleaner heritage had it that I should scrub the floors every day—it was a badge of fine housekeeping, a labor of love and a woman’s duty to her husband. The more I was shown of that side of the life of a farmer’s good wife, the more I saw in the life of an old-fashioned mistress. “Just don’t let anyone tempt me on a linoleum floor.” I would growl balefully at Bob.

  Friday—Clean lamps and lamp chimneys! I have heard a number of inexperienced romantics say that they prefer candle and lamp light. That they purposely didn’t have electricity put into their summer houses. That (archly) candle and lamp light make women look beautiful. Personally I despised lamp and candle light. My idea of heaven would have been a ten million watt globe hung from a cord in the middle of my kitchen. I wouldn’t have cared if it made me look like something helped from her coffin. I could see then, and candles could go back to birthday cakes and jack-o’-lanterns and lamps to the attic.

  In the first place you need a set of precision instruments and a hair level to trim a lamp wick. Even then it burns straight across for only a moment, then flares up in one corner and blackens the chimney. It’s a draw whether you want to use half your light one way or the other—either with the wick turned up and one side of the chimney black or the wick turned below the light line. According to Sears, Roebuck the finest kerosene lamp made only gives off about 40 watts of light so you’re a dead cinch to go blind anyway, according to Mazda.

  Candle and lamp light are supposed to make your eyelashes look long and sweeping. What eyelashes? Most of the time my eyelids were as hairless as marbles from bending over the lamps to see why in hell those clouds of black smoke.

  Saturday—Market Day! In winter Bob left for “Town” while it was still dark, to sell the eggs, buy feed and groceries, get the mail, cigarettes and some new magazines. In spring and summer I joyfully accompanied him, but in the winter driving for miles and miles in a Ford truck in the rain was not a thing of pure joy and anyway, in view of the many ordinary delays such as flat tires, broken springs, plugged gas lines, ad infinitum, I had to stay home to put the lights in the chicken house at the first sign of dusk.

  Some Saturday mornings, as soon as the mountains had blotted 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 7 P.M. and 4 A.M. unless she is in labor or dead.

  Along about three-thirty or four o’clock on Saturday I had to light the gasoline lanterns—the most frightening task on earth and contrary to all of my early teachings that anyone who monkeys around gasoline with matches is just asking for trouble. I never understood why or how a gasoline lantern works and I always lit the match with the conviction that I should have first sent for the priest.

  Bob patiently explained the entire confusing process again and again, but to me it was on the same plane with the Hindu rope trick, and it was only when he was not home that I would tolerate the infernal machines in the same room with me. I used to take them out into the rain to pump them up, then crouching behind the woodshed door I reached way out and lit them. Immediately and for several terrible minutes they flared up and acted exactly as if they were going to explode, than as suddenly settled back on their haunches to hiss contentedly and give out candle power after candle power of bright, white light. With two lanterns in ea
ch hand I walked through the complete dejection of last summer’s garden, ignoring the pitiful clawings and scratchings of the derelicts of cornstalks and tomato vines shivering in the rain, and hung the lanterns in the great chicken house which instantly seemed as gay and friendly as a cocktail lounge. When the frightened squawks of a few hysterical younger hens had died down, I stood and let some of my loneliness drip off in the busy communal atmosphere.

  The floor was covered with about four inches of clean, dry straw; and the hens sang and scratched and made little dust baths and pecked each other and jumped on the hoppers and ate mash and sounded as if they were going to—and did—lay eggs. They were as happy and carefree in November, when the whole outside world was beaten into submission by the brooding mountains and the endless rain, as they were on a warm spring day.

  Then I gathered the eggs. Gathering eggs would be like one continual Easter morning if the hens would just be obliging and get off the nests. Cooperation, however, is not a chickenly characteristic and so at egg-gathering time every nest was overflowing with hen, feet planted, and a shoot-if-you-must-this-old-gray-head look in her eye. I made all manner of futile attempts to dislodge her—sharp sticks, flapping apron, loud scary noises, lure of mash and grain—but she would merely set her mouth, clutch her eggs under her and dare me. In a way, I can’t blame the hen—after all, soft-shelled or not, they’re her kids.

  The rooster, now, is something else again. He doesn’t give a damn if you take every egg in the place and play handball. He doesn’t care if the chicken house is knee-deep in weasels and blood. He just flicks a speck from his lapel and continues to stroll around, stepping daintily over the lifeless but still warm body of a former mistress, his lustful eye appraising the leg and breast of another conquest.

  Bob used to say that it was my approach to egg gathering which was wrong. I reached timidly under the hens and of course they pecked my wrists and as I jerked my hands away I broke the eggs or cracked them on the edges of the nests. Bob reached masterfully under the hens and they gave without a murmur. I tried to assume this I-am-the-master attitude, but I never for a moment fooled a hen and after three or four pecks I would be a bundle of chittering hysteria with the hens in complete command.

  Bob usually got home from “Town” around five and nothing ever again in all of my life will give me ecstatic sensation as did the first sound of his returning truck. Every few seconds I dashed to the windows to note the progress of the lights and then finally in he came, smelling deliciously of tobacco, coldness and outdoors and with his arms laden with mail, newspapers, magazines, cigarettes, candy and groceries. How we reveled in those Saturday nights, smoking, eating, reading aloud and talking; unless, perhaps, as sometimes happened, I had forgot to order kerosene. Then I squeezed the can and poured all of the lamps together and turned way up the wick of the one lamp with the scant cup of kerosene in it. But the effect of the pale, scant-watted light, the sweating walls and Bob’s set mouth and hurt eyes was more than a little as if we were trapped in an old mine shaft. Stove loved situations like that and added to the general discomfort by quickly turning black whenever I lifted his lids, then taking advantage of the murky gloom he would put out his oven door and gouge me in the shins. Bob was never one to scold, but he showed his disappointment in me by leaving the table still chewing his last bite and thrusting himself into bed, to dream, no doubt, of the good old days of wife beating.

  Sunday! In the country Sunday is the day on which you do exactly as much work as you do on other days but feel guilty all of the time you are doing it because Sunday is a day of rest.

  Sunday mornings I cleaned Stove’s suit, taking all of the spots off his vest and coat, and it evidently pleased him for he stewed chickens and roasted meat and even exuded a little warmth. Excited by his compatibility, I would mull over recipes for popovers, cup cakes and other hot oven delicacies but would eventually slink back to deep apple pie, as I could use automatic biscuit mix for the crust and our apples were delicious no matter what I did to them.

  Also because of Stove’s Sunday attitude I washed my hair on that day and guided by the pictures in Saturday’s magazines would try the latest hair-dos. Unfortunately my hair is heavy and unmanageable and my attempts at a pompadour usually ended up looking like a tam-o’-shanter suspended over one eye. It made little difference, though, except as a diversion for me, because presently Bob would come in from the chicken house and look hurt and I would put my hair back the old way. I believe that Bob’s mother must have been frightened by a candy box cover while she was carrying him, because he wanted me to wear long hair done in a knot, the color blue and leghorn hats, all of the time.

  By one o’clock on winter Sundays the house was shining clean, my hair was washed, Bob had on clean clothes and dinner was ready. Usually, just as we sat down to the table, as if by prearranged signal, the sun came out. True it shone with about as much warmth and lust as a Victorian spinster and kept darting behind clouds as if it were looking for its knitting and sticking its head out again with an apologetic smile, but it was sun and not rain. The mountains, either in recognition of the sun or Sunday, would have their great white busts exposed and I expected momentarily to have them clear their throats and start singing Rock of Ages in throaty contraltos.

  For the few minutes on Sunday when I was not within actual striking distance of Stove or the sink I was wiping up the mud I had tracked in from the woodshed. Bob would be occupied for two full shifts just chopping wood and carrying water. After dinner we would indulge ourselves by grading and packing eggs.

  Winter day succeeded winter day and winter week succeeded winter week and the only thing that varied was the weather. No wonder the old timers looked so placid—they didn’t have a damn thing to mull over. The days slipped down like junket, leaving no taste on the tongue.

  5

  Infiltration

  WHATEVER my original attitude was, I became reconciled to certain things as unavoidable chuckholes in my road of living on a chicken ranch and grew to accept placidly certain other things, which at first had called for hyperboles of enthusiasm, as just everyday smooth places.

  One of the worst chuckholes was getting up at four o’clock in the morning. I got used to it but I felt so strongly about it that many mornings I wondered aloud if I would have married Bob if I had known that this went along with him. He used to laugh at me and swear that he told me but I think it as unlikely as to have courted me with, “And another wonderful thing, dearest, an old prostitute friend of mine is going to live with us.” I found that an alarm clock going off at my head at 4 A.M. did nothing toward awakening me—it merely produced shock and when I recovered I was sleepier than ever. I learned that the only solution was to leap from bed at the first jangle, throw on my clothes—and then there is one thing to be said for an outhouse, a brisk walk the first thing in the morning does wake you up.

  Bob didn’t mind getting up. In fact, he seemed to enjoy it and was odiously cheerful. When the dark winter mornings came around and the rain seemed to be pushing the roof down on us, Bob generously offered to get up and build the fires while I lolled in bed. Of course I accepted and the first morning he tumbled out, managing to untuck the covers on my side and to admit great draughts of chill air between the sheets. “Get some more sleep,” he said loudly as he stamped and grunted into his clothes. “I’ll soon have a fire.” And so I burrowed down into drowsiness and warmth and thought “I have married, without a doubt, the most wonderful man in the world.” But I had reckoned without Stove. Suddenly I was ripped from unconsciousness by the crashing of stove lids and my teeth rattling to the rhythm of the ash shaker. This was quickly followed by billows of black smoke and a stream of curses predominated by roars of “Big Black Bastard.” When I hurried to the rescue, Bob was amazed and said innocently, “No need for you to get up. Should have slept until I got the fire going.” I refrained from stating that it would have been stretching a point to ask a person to stay dead in that racket. From then on I co
ntinued to arise and cope with Stove myself.

  Definitely a smooth place was the food. I accepted as ordinary fare pheasant, quail, duck, cracked crab, venison, butter clams, oysters, brook trout, salmon, fried chicken and mushrooms. At first Bob and I gorged ourselves and I wrote letters home that sounded like pages ripped from a gourmand’s diary, but there was so much of everything and it was so inexpensive and so easy to get that it was inevitable that we should expect to eat like kings. Chinese pheasant was so plentiful that Bob would take his gun, saunter down the road toward a neighbor’s grain field and shoot two, which were ample for us, and come sauntering home again. At first under Bob’s careful guidance I stuffed and roasted them, but finally I got so I ripped off the breast, throwing the rest away, and sautéed it in butter with fresh field mushrooms. It made a tasty breakfast. The blue grouse were also very plentiful, but the salal berries which they gorged on gave them an odd bitter taste which neither Bob nor I cared for. Quail were everywhere but they were such tiny things that we finally passed them up for the ruffled grouse and the pheasant. There were literally millions of wild pigeons in the valleys. They descended in white clouds when the farmers planted grain and in actual self-defense they shot them even though they were protected by Federal law. Our neighbors gave them to us by the dozens and they were simply delicious, all dark meat and plump and succulent from eating the farmer’s wheat, barley, oats and rye. I regret to state that their illegality didn’t taint the meat one iota for me. Bob is a fine hunter and a good sport and he, at first, lectured the farmers and their sons on the seriousness of their offense in shooting the pigeons, but the first time he was present at grain planting time and saw what they did to the crops, he told me he thought there should be a bounty on them. He never shot one, however, nor admitted that he enjoyed eating them.