The Egg and I

by Betty Macdonald

My chick manual was detailed to the extent that it gave the number of minutes it should take so many chicks to clean up so much food—what to feed every single day until the chickens were six weeks old; even what to do about the floors, hovers, founts, hoppers, etc., four weeks before brooding. From my experience I would supplement this prior-to-brooding advice to read, “Four weeks before brooding, leave on an extended trip to the Baranof Islands.”

  I well remember how the Lucrezia Borgia in me boiled to the surface as I read in my chick manual, “A single drink of cold water may be fatal to a baby chick.” “You don’t say,” I thought, licking my fevered lips and glancing longingly at the little lake filled with icy water. But my poultricidal tendencies were replaced with pure hysteria as I read on, “Water may be warm when you put it in the founts, but will it stay warm?”

  “My God, isn’t it enough that my hands will soon be dragging on the ground from carrying buckets and buckets and buckets of water, and that Stove has acquired a permanent list on his reservoir side, without being further tortured with trick questions? Why don’t you get underneath the brooder and see if the water stays warm, you big bore? Me, I’ll fill the fountains with warm water and curses every three hours and take a chance.” That was my reaction to my chick manual.

  The next cozy paragraph was headed “Dopey Chicks.” “If many chicks are ‘dopey’ and you are sure they are not overheated or gassed, those chicks and the chicks that continually chirp should be sent to the nearest pathological laboratory (to see who’s dopey?). If the report says B.W.D., it is better to disinfect the premises and start new chicks.” I could find no explanation of B.W.D., but to me it was code for the best news in the world. It might have been better to start new chicks, but it might have been best to take the next train for Mexico.

  I wondered how other chicken ranchers’ wives reacted to baby chickens. Was there something in my background which kept me from becoming properly adjusted to the chicken, or was there just that too wide a gulf separating a woman and a chicken? I was delighted therefore, one spring morning, to have Mrs. Hicks halloo from the road and invite me to ride down to Mrs. Kettle’s with her while she returned some bread pans. Both Mrs. Kettle and Mrs. Hicks were raising baby chickens and I thought this would be a splendid opportunity to make comparisons and to slip out of harness for a little while.

  I had bathed and fed small Anne and put her to sleep in her carriage in the orchard, so I took a quick look at all of my other babies to be sure they were well fed and asleep, threw Bob a few hazy instructions, hung my apron on the gatepost, and we were off. Mrs. Hicks, full to the lip with some new and wonderful bile primer, was cheerful to the point of gaiety. Not so Mrs. Kettle, who clumped morosely out to greet us, kicking at her beloved mongrels as she went by.

  At first I thought it the heavy curtain of gloom which made the spacious kitchen seem so crowded—then I became conscious of a rising crescendo of twitterings from the vicinity of the stove. Mrs. Kettle was rearing her baby chickens in the kitchen. That area back of the large woodstove which ordinarily housed the woodbox, the house slippers and barn boots of Mr. Kettle and the boys, a couple of bicycles, bits of harness, the newspapers, the dogs and cats and the car parts, had been turned into a brooder house. Fenced off by rusty window screens leaning against chairs and heated by a varied assortment of jars, cans and bottles filled with hot water, two hundred baby chicks existed in apparent health and contentment. No B.W.D. there. No disinfectant, no thermometer—and no sickness either. “That manual writer should see this,” I thought bitterly.

  Mrs. Kettle was also harboring in her kitchen a little runt pig, the sole survivor of a litter eaten by its mother. “The old bitch ate ’em all but this little bastard,” chronicled Mrs. Kettle, whose nomenclature was always colorful but at times confused.

  The chicks she dismissed lightly with “Paw ordered ’em last fall but didn’t git around to buildin’ the brooder house before they come so I guess we’ll just have to raise ’em in here.” The chirping chickens and the little pig clicking around under foot on his little sharp hoofs, all completely innocent of any form of housebreaking, didn’t bother Mrs. Kettle a whit. What did trouble her was the fact that her elder sister, who twenty-odd years before had had the good fortune to marry a man both wealthy and prominent, had had the effrontery to send Mrs. Kettle by the morning mail, in lieu of a rich gift, an enormous tinted portrait of herself in evening dress. This Mrs. Kettle had set up on the table, easeled by the cracked white sugar bowl and a jar of jam.

  Scratching herself vigorously and gesticulating with her soup ladle, she sneered, “Look at that, would you—pretty fine ain’t we with our dinners all bare like a whore’s?” (The dress was cut in a very modest V.) “And covered with jools which your old man got from bribing the Government. Well, you can stuff your jools and your crooked husband and—” Mrs. Kettle’s face brightened. “You know where I’m going to hang your goddamned pitchur? In the outhouse!”

  Mrs. Hicks and I took our leave at this point, but as we drove over the hill we heard the sound of violent pounding as Mrs. Kettle hung sister’s gilt-framed picture.

  Mrs. Hicks invited me to go home with her for a cup of coffee and to see her baby chickens. I accepted instantly, of course, so we jounced right past our ranch and down the mountain on the other side.

  The coffee, strong and delicious, with thick yellow cream, was accompanied by that heavenly and completely indigestible delicacy, fried bread. Apparently all Mrs. Hicks did was to drop twisted pieces of bread dough into hot fat and in a minute or two take out big golden brown puffs which she dipped in powdered sugar and covered with strawberry jam. They weren’t small and had what I’ll call body, but I ate three and Mrs. Hicks five before we made a move toward the chicken houses. Then I tried a sprightly leap off the back porch, only to find that I had suddenly been outfitted with ballbearings. The fried bread rolled from side to side giving me the feeling of sea legs. I glanced at Mrs. Hicks but she sailed ahead of me like a piece of thistledown. Thistledown or no, I already had a different conception of her liver and vowed that in the future I would be a little more careful of what was left of mine.

  Mrs. Hicks’ brooder house smelled so strongly of disinfectant it made my eyes water and the chickens, looking as if they had sprouted under boards, drooped listlessly around the edges of their immaculate modern house. Gammy used to say, “Too much scrubbing takes the life right out of things,” but a perennial droop seemed to be Mrs. Hicks’ yardstick of cleanliness.

  On the ride home I clutched my fried bread on the rough places and shifted it left and right on the curves, while Mrs. Hicks, seemingly in perfect comfort, chatted gaily. I asked her about the percentage of deaths in her chicks and was amazed to learn that out of five hundred chicks she had lost only five. She said, “Those five died the day after we got the chicks and I don’t think they was right, but just in case it was anything catching I put a little disinfectant in the drinking water and the rest pulled through fine.” What I think really happened was that Mrs. Hicks called a meeting of her chicks right after they arrived and told them, “I’m the boss here and I’m not going to put up with any sickening or dying. The first chick I catch dying is going to get what for and I mean it.” And the chicks, disinfected inside and out, stayed alive—or else.

  Mrs. Hicks was really a remarkable woman. She was slender and frail-looking, but she did so much work that just to hear her tell about it made me tired. She took all of the care of the chickens, the calves, pigs, turkeys, ducks and eggs, in addition to keeping her house like an operating room, baking, cooking, cleaning, sewing, washing and ironing. In winter Mr. Hicks, as did most of the farmers, supplemented his income by longshoring at Docktown or working in the lumber camps. During these times Mrs. Hicks did all of her usual work and milked ten cows night and morning, separated the milk, fed and watered the horses and still had time to take the eggs to town and pick up her spy reports.

  Often after a particularly gruelling day, as I banged
my shins against the oven door and cursed the inadequacy of coal-oil lamps, I would think enviously of Mrs. Hicks, who at that moment was probably standing in her immaculate kitchen, in an immaculate apron and housedress, wondering, now that the dishes were done, if she shouldn’t just bake an angel food cake or set some rolls for the basket social. Just thinking of her in her tireless efficiency sometimes made me think I had better give up smoking and take up bile priming in its stead.

  Once Mr. Hicks got hurt in the woods and was sent to a hospital in town, Mrs. Hicks went in to stay with him and Bob and I took care of their ranch for them for a few days. I couldn’t begin to take over all of Mrs. Hicks’ duties, but between us we managed very well, except that I fixed the milk and cream which we bought from the Hickses and I evidently used the wrong faucet on the separator because the cream, instead of being the top-milk variety which we had been getting all spring and summer, oozed into the bottle, dark yellow and thick. I didn’t say anything to Bob, for he leaned terribly toward fair play and would probably have left no stone unturned until he had located the error, but I noticed that for those few days he used cream on everything but his meat. Every day I unlocked Mrs. Hicks’ back door and tiptoed into the house and dusted the golden oak furniture and resisted a strong impulse to rummage in her bureau drawers and pantry—a holdover from the days when I was a child-sitter and supplemented my 25c-for-the-afternoon pay by eating everything not nailed down in the houses of my customers.

  Working within the sacred bounds of Mrs. Hicks’ cleanliness proved such a strong impetus for a while that I found myself going after corners in my own house with pins and washing the face of the kitchen clock. I waited for her return with the smug feeling of someone who has done something well and knows he is going to be praised. Mrs. Hicks was very grateful to Bob and me and she and Mr. Hicks told us over and over what kind neighbors we were, but the next day Bob and I stopped on our way to town to see if we could get them anything, and Mrs. Hicks had her washtub filled with boiling water and disinfectant and soapsuds and was scrubbing the walls and floors of the chicken houses, calf houses, pig houses, turkey houses, duck houses and brooder house which Bob and I thought we had kept so clean. I gave up.

  Bob turned out to be the best chicken farmer in our community. He was scientific, he was thorough, and he wasn’t hampered by a lot of traditions or old wives’ tales. Bob didn’t believe in mixing breeding and egg raising—he said that they were separate industries and should be treated as such. His theory was that an egg-raising flock should be kept to a 90-96 per cent lay as much of the year as possible, but that if you were also using the flock for breeding and hatching eggs, such a strenuous laying program weakened the stock and made for poor chicks. He evidently knew what he was doing for his chickens laid eggs and didn’t get sick and we always made money. Bob said that he could make money if eggs dropped to 15c a dozen. They never did—I think that 19c was the lowest we ever got and that was in the spring when eggs were plentiful—but Bob was not one to make promises he couldn’t keep. Bob said that the secret of success in the chicken business for one man was to keep the operation to a size that could be handled by one man. He estimated that one man could handle 1500 chickens (provided his wife was part Percheron) by himself and make a comfortable living—but most people’s trouble was that they were so comfortable on 1500 chickens that they figured they might as well be luxurious and have 2500. Then the trouble started: they had to hire help; they had to have much more extensive buildings and equipment; and to warrant the extra expense they would have to have five or ten thousand chickens instead of 2500. It sounded reasonable, and if Bob said it, it probably was.

  An average white Leghorn hen laid from 150 to 220 eggs a year. She cost from $2.25 to $2.50 to raise—this included cost of equipment and bird. Eggs averaged over the year 31c a dozen. Using this as a basis we figured that a hen the first year might, if she tried, lay 204 eggs or 17 dozen, which at 31c would be $5.27. Less her original cost of $2.35, less feed costs of around $2.40, this would leave a profit of about 50c per hen the first year. The second year the eggs were all profit except the feed, unless you wanted to split the cost of the new pullets and bring down the original cost per hen. There was a prize flock of 455 pullets in that vicinity which laid 243.5 eggs per hen per year, 111 ,027 eggs per year per flock—and made a profit of $3.46 per fowl above feed costs. Our records showed that we were not too far behind this prize flock the second year and we had 1000 chickens.

  I kept all of the egg records. I wrote on a large calendar in the kitchen the number of eggs we gathered at each gathering. At the end of the day these figures were entered in a daybook and later entered in a weekly column, along with the feed, which was delivered once a week. It was a very simple system, but when it came time to draw weekly and monthly percentages I was apt to find the hens in the throes of a 150 per cent lay, and then I would have to go laboriously back and try to find out how far back and in which branch of my arithmetic, adding, multiplication or subtraction, the trouble lay.

  The percentage of cockerels was a vital factor in determining the cost of each pullet, and I watched the baby chicks with beating heart for the first signs of the little combs which would tell me how we stood. As soon as we could tell them apart, we separated the cockerels and put them in fattening pens where they ate and fought and crowed until it was time to dress them for market. Anything else that I had cared for from birth would have become so embedded in my feelings I would have had to gouge it out, but I got so I actually enjoyed watching Bob stick his killing knife deep into the palates of fifty cockerels and hang them up to bleed. My only feeling was pride to see how firm and fat they were as we dressed them for market.

  I got so I could dress chickens like an expert, but have wondered since how this ability to defeather a chicken in about two minutes without once tearing the skin, my only accomplishment, could ever be mentioned socially along with swimming and diving, or gracefully demonstrated as with violin and piano playing. Wouldn’t you know that I would excel in chicken picking?

  About the time the cockerels were ready for market, the pullets were ready to be taught to roost in their own little houses instead of in the trees, where they were easy prey for owls and wildcats. This meant that at dusk each night Bob and I had to go through the orchard plucking squawking, flapping birds out of the tops of the trees, holding them by the ankles with heads down. When we had as large a bouquet as we could hold, we took them to the pullet houses and planted them firmly on the roosts. At first I felt like a falconer and found the work rather exhilarating, but after about two weeks, when there was still a large group of boneheads who preferred to sleep out of doors and get killed, I found myself inclining toward the you’ve-made-your-bed-now-lie-in-it attitude.

  Chickens are so dumb. Any other living thing which you fed 365 days in the year would get to know and perhaps to love you. Not the chicken. Every time I opened the chicken house door, SQUAWK, SQUAWK-SQUAAAAAAAAWK! And the dumbbells would fly up in the air and run around and bang into each other. Bob was a little more successful—but only a little more so and only because chickens didn’t bother him or he didn’t yell and jump when they did.

  That second spring Bob built a large new yard for the big chickens—the old one was to be plowed and planted to clover, which disinfected the ground and provided greens for the hens. We eventually had four such yards so that by rotation our hens were always in a clean green playground. Other chicken ranchers shook their heads over this foolish waste of time and ground. They also scoffed at feeding the chickens buttermilk and greens the year round. They had been brought up to believe that women had tumors, babies had fits and chickens had croup; green food and fresh air were things to be avoided and a small dirty yard was all a chicken deserved.

  Bob paid no attention to the other farmers, and when the new yard was finished we lifted the small runway doors and watched the hens come crowding out, scolding, quarreling, singing, squawking, choosing their favorite places and hurryi
ng like mad to enjoy their playtime. They were gleaming white with health and spring, and didn’t seem nearly so repulsive as usual.

  When the pullets began laying, Bob and I culled the old hens. We did this at night. We’d lift an old hen off the roost, look at her head, the color of her comb, her shape, her legs, and if we were in doubt we’d measure the distance between her pelvic bones—two fingers was a good layer. Chickens could be culled in the yard except for the trouble encountered in catching them. The good layers looked motherly, their combs were full and bright red, their eyes large, beaks broad and short, and their bodies were well rounded, broad-hipped and built close to the ground. They were also the diligent scratchers and eaters and their voices seemed a little lower with overtones of lullaby. The non-producers, the childless parasites, were just as typical. Their combs were small and pale, eyes small, beaks sharp and pointed, legs long, hips narrow, and they spent all of their time gossiping, starting fights, and going into screaming hysterics over nothing. The non-producers also seemed subject to many forms of female trouble—enlarged liver, wire worms, and blowouts (prolapse of the oviduct). What a bitter thing for them that, unlike their human counterparts, their only operation was one performed with an axe on the neck.

  I really tried to like chickens. But I couldn’t get close to the hen either physically or spiritually, and by the end of the second spring I hated everything about the chicken but the egg. I especially hated cleaning the chicken house, which Bob always chose to do on ideal washing days or in perfect gardening weather. In fact, on a chicken ranch there never dawns a beautiful day that isn’t immediately spoiled by some great big backbreaking task.

  Our chicken house was very large and was complicated with rafters and ells and wings. Cleaning it meant first scrubbing off the dropping boards (which were scraped and limed daily) with boiling water and lye; then raking out all the straw and scraping at least a good half inch from the hard dirt floors; then with a small brush—a very small brush—I brushed whitewash into all the cracks on the walls, while Bob sprayed the ceiling. Then Bob sprayed the walls and criticized my work on the crevices (the only thing he failed to make me do was to catch the lice individually); then we put clean straw all over the floor; filled the mash hoppers; washed and filled the water jugs and at last turned in the hens, who came surging in filled with lice, droppings and, we hoped, eggs.