The Egg and I

by Betty Macdonald

  The outhouse at night where I had a horrible choice of either sitting in the dark and not knowing what was crawling on me or bringing a lantern and attracting moths, mosquitoes, night hawks and bats.

  No radio.

  No telephone.

  Bats hanging upside down in the cellar, flying in the open bedroom windows on summer nights, swooping low over the bed, almost touching my face and making my skin undulate in horror.

  Dropping boards and chicken lice.

  The inconsistency of a Mother Nature who made winter so wetly, coldly, soggily miserable that I wanted to get back under my stone, and spring so warm, so lush and fragrant that I wanted to roll on my back and whinny.

  Rhododendrons being wild. Rhododendrons are expensive shrubs usually grouped in bad color combinations in front of white houses—the ugly purple ones are often banked in front of mustard stucco houses. That is all I knew about the rhododendron until I moved to the mountains. Then I learned that the rhododendron is the native flower of the State of Washington and in the spring and early summer every roadside, every mountainside, every woodsy place on the coast is ablaze with them. They are all pink but range from deep cerise buds to pale pink full-blown blossoms. In the open fields around Docktown Bay, the bushes were about four feet high, rounded in the orthodox bush shape and solid with blooms—the flower heads as big as cabbages—the individual flowerets like single roses. The shiny, dark green foliage, like laurel, was beautiful in its own right. In the thickets and in the woods the long slender rhododendron branches reached as high as twenty feet in an effort to find light and sun and, as they bore their flowers on the uppermost tips of these branches, it was no surprise to walk through the woods, look up and see a lovely cerise bud peering down from the top branches of a small fir or with flushed cheek laid on the cool oily smoothness of a cedar frond. The rhododendrons were so gorgeous, so showy, it was hard for me to believe that they were wild flowers and, as I climbed into trees and scrambled over stumps to get a wonderful armful of buds, I guiltily looked for No TRESPASSING signs. There is a law that they cannot be picked within fifty feet of the highway, but no one should object to that as they are far prettier and deeper-colored back in the woods.

  Rhododendrons grew profusely all over the mountains near our ranch but there were none in the ranch yard, so I asked the man at the feed and seed store in Town how to transplant them. He said to transplant them while they were in bloom and be sure to put them in a shady place where the soil was damp and acid. What he did not tell me was that they have a tap root as big as my arm and about a mile long. Armed with my spading fork and a desire to fill up an ugly corner by the back porch where the soil was so sour it grew only moss, I went out one warm spring evening and found myself three stocky well-formed plants just coming into bloom. I confidently thrust the fork into the soil, making a circle around the base so that there would be a ball of earth on the roots. When everything was well-loosened I slipped the fork under the roots, grabbed the main stalk and nothing happened. The thing wasn’t even budgeable. I dug deeper and pried harder and finally located the tap root which went straight down into the bowels of the earth, then took a sharp turn and headed north for a mile or so. With night upon me and the realization that I was going to have to tunnel under the road staring me in the face, I went home and got the hatchet and chopped off the tap root about a foot from the main stem. The next two I chopped before even digging and stuffed them all into a pit I had previously dug by the porch. They not only lived—they throve.

  The astonishing fact that there was always on my pantry shelf a water bucket of double-yoked and checked eggs to do with as I would was a source of constant delight and lured me into trying many of the rich, eggy old-fashioned recipes in Mrs. Lincoln’s cookbook. In town where I would have had to buy my groceries and balance a food budget, I wouldn’t have put up with Mrs. Lincoln and her “beat the whites of sixteen large eggs with a fork on a platter,” and her “two wineglasses of old brandy and a cup of slivered, blanched almonds,” for two minutes. Mrs. Lincoln was the type who couldn’t cook oatmeal mush without adding a flagon of cherry flip and a soupçon of betel nuts. I would have loved to visit Mrs. Lincoln, but she was hell to cook for unless you lived on a chicken ranch, and then you and Mrs. Lincoln could see eye to eye about a lot of things. Particularly eggs. I had already made sunshine cake, angel food and pound cake and was wondering what would be good on a rainy wet winter day when I chanced on cream puffs. “Now there is something,” I said, for cream puffs were an old favorite of mine and they used lots of eggs. The recipe called for “eight eggs to be broken one by one and beaten into the mixture with the bare right hand.”

  “Now, Mrs. Lincoln, let’s not be frugal!” I said and used sixteen eggs. This made gallons of dough and almost broke my arm but if Mrs. Lincoln could do it, at her age, so could I. “Put pieces of dough the size of walnuts in the pan, leaving plenty of room, as they will puff to the size of large apples.” I did but when I took them out of the oven they were still the size of walnuts but as hard as diamonds. Down but not out, I got out my deep fat kettle. When the fat was smoking hot I dropped in a piece of the dough. Pouffffff—the little thing swelled to the size of a cantaloupe. I was ecstatic. For hours I dropped little walnuts into the fat and pulled out great, golden puffs. Then sweating but happy I whipped a large bowl of canned milk. “We’ll each fix our own,” I said proudly to Bob as I put them on the dinner table and hurried back for the canned milk. I cut mine open to put in the filling but it was already filled—filled with cold grease. They all were, and not only that, but whipped canned milk, in case you didn’t know, tastes exactly as burning rubber smells.

  I never became acclimated to discussions of wire worms, intestines, chicken lice, ad nauseam at the breakfast table. I used to think that Bob’s finer feelings would make a good emery bag as I watched him closely examine a colored diagram of a chicken’s wormy insides, then with relish take a spoonful of soft boiled egg, back to the diagram, then to the egg. I would nervously sip my coffee and try to concentrate on last week’s paper.

  Even when I was clear and away from the kitchen and feeling in first-class shape, not pregnant, in order to take care of the various ills of or to perform a post-mortem on a chicken, I would have to say over and over, “This is just like being a doctor! This is just like being a doctor!” And sometimes I was sick and sometimes I was not. But it took me several days to get back to eggs again. Bob said that it was in the mind but I reminded him that cleaning fish made him sick and I had to take the dead rats out of the attic. There is no explaining those things. A large husky Swedish farmer down the valley was known to be the best butcher in the country. One day during the fall, Bob went down to see him about butchering our pigs. Mr. Larsen was in the barnyard and while Bob talked to him he knocked on the head, slit the throats and eviscerated two calves without twitching a muscle, but when his wife cut her hand on the separator, a few minutes later, Bob had to stop the flow of blood and bandage it while Mr. Larsen turned green. Mopping his moist forehead with a handkerchief held by a hand and arm, red to the elbow with the calves’ blood, Mr. Larsen said, “Blood always did make me sick.”

  I found it impossible to remember that almost everyone was part Indian. I commented on this to a tall blond woman named Selma Johnson whom we picked up on the road one day and drove to the Docktown store. She laughed heartily and said, “Don’t let it bother you. Now, I’m one third bow and arrow, myself. Dad’s a Swede and Mom’s an Indian and I look like a Swede and my older sis looks like Pocahontas. The only thing I inherited from Mom was good teeth. All us Indians got good teeth,” and she laughed again, exposing her milk-white perfect teeth.

  I learned that first year that I must not be embarrassed or incensed at the most personal questions. In a country where breeding, fertility and birth were of prime importance in livestock and were discussed casually all the time, it stood to reason that breeding, fertility and birth in humans, though not so important, would be discusse
d as casually. I turned crimson the first time a farmer, almost a total stranger to me, leaned across the supper table and said to his wife, “Vera, tell Betty about the time you miscarried when we had the preacher to supper.” I grew used to it though, as I grew used to all the food being boiled and the homes of the illegitimate sons of the illegitimate sons of the illegitimate sons dotted over the countryside like naturalized bulbs. The legitimate and otherwise gathered together for holidays and anniversaries and no one seemed ashamed of his relationship. There’s no use crying over spilt milk, we of the mountains said.

  Pregnancy was referred to as being “that way.” My being “that way” went the rounds of the mountains and valleys along with the news about the contagious abortion in the Helwig herd of Jerseys and the impotency of the Green bull. One day when Bob and I were driving to Town a man hailed us. We stopped and he climbed on the running board and leaned into the car confidentially. “Say,” he said, “heard you was that way.” “Yes,” I said, “I am.” The man leaned in farther so that his face was uncomfortably close to mine. “Just say the word and I’ll fix you up. Drop up some evening with six dollars and I’ll fix you good as new. Not a thing to it,” he said winking at Bob. “Took care of Mrs. Smith when she was six months along and got rid of three for my own wife at three months. Just a plain old-fashioned buttonhook. Nothing to it.”

  “Oh, him!” said the girl in the doctor’s office in town. “His wife’s in the hospital right now recovering from her last abortion. We get his work in here all the time,” and she laughed heartily. I didn’t think it was funny. “Why don’t they stop him? Why don’t they arrest him?”

  The girl sighed and looked out the window. “If it wasn’t him it would be someone else. If they can’t find someone else to do it they abort themselves. The hospital’s full of ’em all the time. Buttonhooks, baling wire, hatpins. God, they’re dumb.” Not dumb—pitifully ignorant.

  I put up my Christmas tree during the last week of November, just to get the feel and smell of November out of the house. Bob warned me that it would dry out and the needles would fall off before Christmas but I laughed. Not only did I think the drying out improbable but it seemed more likely that it would flourish and give birth to little Christmas trees in the moist atmosphere of the house.

  I never tired of admiring and loving our little Christmas trees. When we cleared the back fields, Bob let me keep about ten of the prettiest trees for future Christmas trees. The loveliest of all we sent home to the family but the one I chose for our first Christmas was a dear, fat little lady with her full green skirts hiding her feet and all of her branches tipped with cones. During the summer and fall I used to go out and stroke and smell my little tree and it made me feel guilty to look around at her little brothers and sisters crowding the fence and peering wistfully into the yard. Clearing land there in the mountains was like holding back a mob at a fire. As long as the fences held and we were ever watchful, we were safe enough but one break and the trees surged in. We were constantly pushing them back from the garden, the road, the driveway, the chicken yard; and the mountains were carelessly letting them slide down on us. I expected to look up some day and see a mountain bare shouldered and grabbing frantically for her trees.

  The family implored us to spend Christmas with them but we couldn’t leave the chickens and so they sent lavish boxes and we retaliated with Sears, Roebuck “multicoloreds” and “floral backgrounds.” It rained on Christmas and it differed from other winter days only in that Stove balked and refused to have anything to do with the twenty-two pound turkey Bob had bought, and so we had dinner at ten-thirty at night instead of five. Christmas is best with a large family, I found.

  After Christmas it rained and rained and rained and dusk settled like a shroud at a little after three o’clock. From the forlorn grayness of the burn would come the sharp crack of a falling snag. Even when there wasn’t a breath of wind the poor old things would release their grip on the earth and fall with a splintering crash. The burn, known always as the Big Burn, extended from our road to an arm of the sea about fifty miles away. It was about five miles wide but gradually grew narrower as the mountains did their best to draw the trees together over this unsightly rip which showed their bare skin through the green.

  Years ago fire had swept up this great ravine and was evidently finally checked by the stream whose dry bed was our road. Like a pestilence-struck village, the burn was covered with the gaunt dying bodies of the sick, the fallen rotting bodies of the dead and over everything crawled the marauding blackberry vines, nettles and fireweed. A few low-class squatters, like alder, salal, wild raspberry and blackcaps had made some half-hearted attempts at reclamation but only in the earliest spring were these even noticeable. For some strange reason it was fine hunting ground for birds, rabbits and deer. I hated the burn. In summer it was parched and dry and ugly, and in winter it was gray and soggy and ugly. Mists haunted it day and night and winds came roaring up its entire length and crashed headlong into the house or came crawling from under the vines and logs on their bellies up through the orchard to snivel and whine at the doors and windows. The skyline of the burn was so bleak and hopeless it made me want to run home, light all the lamps and huddle by Stove. In summer the orchard and the alders and maples across the road hid it from the house, but on gray winter days its snaggle-toothed horizon could be seen plainly. Some winter days great winds came bounding down out of the north; blew rain at us in spitty gusts; sent the mountains’ misty veils flying, exposing their pale haughty faces; crashed around on the burn, snapping giant snags and tossing terrible handfuls of limbs just anywhere; grabbed our house by the scruff of its neck and shook it until the windows rattled and the shakes flew off; sniffed around the eaves of the chicken house hoping for a loose board; then dashed back to annoy the mountains again, prostrating the small trees in its path. It was boisterous and noisy and terrifying. The only redeeming feature of this terrible wind was that it reached down the chimney, yanked the smoke out and made Stove roar and crackle in spite of himself.

  On stormy days I lit the lamps early and stayed close to the house and Stove.

  Bob seemed oblivious of the weather. Apparently lulled by the screaming wind, the falling trees, the lashing rain, he whistled gaily as he pumped up his lanterns and began his evening chores. Bundled in oilskins, lanterns swinging like beacons, feed buckets clanking cheerfully, he walked briskly through the rain. He never even noticed the terrible nearness of the mountains.

  PART THREE

  Spring

  Hear ye not the hum of mighty workings!

  —KEATS

  7

  The Whistle Blows

  UNTIL I moved to the ranch, the coming of spring had been a gradual and painless thing, like developing a bust. In Butte the snow melted and made torrents in the gutters, the streets didn’t freeze at night, we found our first bluebell and it was spring and we could take off our “Chimaloons.” In Seattle the seasons ran together like the stained-glass-window paintings we did at school where we wet the drawing paper first, all over, then dropped on blobs of different colors which ran into each other so that it was impossible to tell where one began and the other left off. Seattle spring was a delicate flowering of the pale gray winter—a pastel prelude to the pale yellow summer which flowed gently into the lavender autumn and on into the pale gray winter. It was all very subtle and, as we wore the same clothes the year around and often had beach fires in January but found it too cold for them in June, we were never season conscious.

  Things were certainly different up on the ranch. Spring stopped there with a screech of brakes. Somewhere someone blew a whistle and all hell broke loose. We awoke one morning to a new Sears, Roebuck catalogue; baby chickens, thousands of them; a new little red-haired baby girl; little yellow goslings; two baby pigs; a puppy; two kittens; a little heifer calf; fruit trees snapping into bloom all over the place; a newly plowed plot for the biggest garden in the world; streams and lakes brimming; trilliums, wild vi
olets both purple and yellow, camas and starflowers carpeting the woods; fences to mend; seeds to plant; seed catalogues to dream through; Government bulletins to choke down and digest; and no rest ever any more.

  The spring sun, a bold-faced, full-blooded little wench, obviously no kin to the sallow creature who simpered in and out occasionally during the winter, bestowed her warm caresses impartially on the handsome virile timber, the tender plowed land and the ugly impotent burn. Every place she touched throbbed hopefully and there was a rapid spreading epidemic of pale green mustaches and beards. The mountains’ noses began to run and though they tied veils over their heads they seemed less formidable.

  Bob announced that the Big Burn was going to have a bumper crop of wild strawberries, which was like telling me that Dracula was really somebody’s mother.

  I was so ebullient from the sun and warmth that even the fact that I had to dogtrot through the long days, in order barely to scratch the surface of my thousands of new duties, failed to dampen my ardor.

  Bob’s spirits, never depressed by the dreary winter rains as mine had been, soared too, and in spite of the fact that for months I had been lifting him out of the abyss of my bad management with the bright hope that I would become marvellously efficient when working under pressure, and unfortunately we both found that like the Government when given more bureaus to handle, I merely became much more inefficient on a much larger scale.

  I had read of beauty-starved farm wives standing for an hour on their back stoops absorbing the glory of a sun-drenched branch of forsythia; walking in the orchards and burying their noses in the fragrant boughs; standing motionless in the warm spring sun and thanking God for the miracle of fertility. What I wanted to know was, where they got the time for such ethereal pursuits. I saw the forsythia, I saw the apple blossoms, I saw the sun glancing over the emerald-tipped firs and pointing up the chartreuse maples and alders on its way. I saw those things but I had about as much chance to linger and appreciate as I would have had riding a motorcycle through an art gallery.