10
The Lure of the Tropics
I THINK seed catalogues are the most exciting things there are. And I think seed companies are the most generous, for they never question your motives when you write for their catalogues. By looking at the return address in the upper left-hand corner of the envelope they could have seen that I lived in the vicinity of the “most westerly tip of the United States,” and yet they never hedged about sending me gorgeously illustrated catalogues mostly devoted to tropical plants with thrilling pictures of orange trees in full fruit and bloom, lemon trees, magnolias, avocados, peppers and other brilliantly colored warm-sounding names like Canna, Iberian Fire Lily, Mexican Flame Flower, African Daisy. On gray soggy November days I pored over last year’s catalogues, and after an hour or two I could look out at the squishy landscape without shivering, for I could almost hear the hum of bees, feel the summer heat and see the yard wallowing in tropical glory.
When the new catalogues came in the spring I devoured them and with pencil and paper made lists, which usually totaled around $279 and had to be slashed and slashed. At last I ordered my seeds and spent days rigid with expectancy. I always bought against my better judgment some of the flame-fire-veldt type of plants from a little known semitropical seed company, which invariably substituted Nasturtiums for Belgian Congo Moon Glow Blooms (“often attaining a size of two feet in diameter”)—California Poppies for East Indian Pompoms and never put in more than three seeds to a package. They were not very honest, but I could warm my hands over the pictures in their catalogues.
Bob, who had already ordered and received all of his seeds weeks before from a well-known local firm, listened resignedly to my feverish accounts of the front yard exploding with giant Cannas, the house crawling with Flame Flowers, gourds and monstrous Congo Roses, the fences completely hidden by “Unusual Annuals”; then dug a trench the full length of the vegetable garden, filled it with chicken manure, rich brown earth and sweet peas. I saw defeat coming as relentlessly as old age.
The second spring Bob made me a coldframe all my own for my tropical galaxy of bloom. It was not exactly a spontaneous idea on Bob’s part, and he was pretty tightlipped as he grimly slammed the nails home, mumbling about the drop-of-water-on-stone technique; but it was a beauty, facing south, with three sections, sashes on hinges and little arms to brace the sashes when I wanted to lift them. When it was finished all I had to do was to wait for my seeds to come and for the earth to take a slight detour from its ordinary whirl on its axis, and success would be mine.
Meanwhile it was time to work on the vegetable garden. As we plowed and harrowed and dragged the feathery loam, I thought of New England people and of how they have to build their soil out of humus and sweat, and it made me feel guilty. Our soil was so wonderful that I could thrust my arm clear to the shoulder in it when it was ready to plant. It was a natural sandy loam and, with chicken manure and compost added, it was so fertile it was almost indecent. Bob made garden rows as straight as dies, spaced to the inch, and his seeds came up the correct distance one from another. When he planted a seed it immediately got busy and sprouted and appeared in exactly the allotted time. From thence forward the progress was about as fascinating and as trustworthy as a Postal Savings Bond. The seed reached full maturity, with interest, in exactly the promised number of days, and another good investment was harvested.
Bob’s garden was a thing of symmetry and beauty. It was bordered with great clumps of rhubarb that had bright-red speckled stalks as big as my arm and so crisp they snapped in two, drippy with juice. Between the rhubarb plants, and nourished by the continual waterings of manure water which we gave the rhubarb, were parsley, chives, basil, thyme, sage, marjoram, anise and dill. I put parsley in everything but ice cream, Bob said, but even he admitted that tomato sauce, stew, kidney sauté, spaghetti, or meat pie seemed tasteless without fresh basil once you had tasted them cooked with it. Mint grew in a thick hedge by the woodshed and my great fear was that it might get started somewhere else, it was so eager. In rows about fifty feet long, stretching from the sweet peas to the rhubarb and herbs, were peas, early and late, carrots, turnips, beets, salsify, celery, celery root, lettuce, endive, broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, Swiss chard, sweet corn, parsnips, beans, cucumbers, tomatoes, squash, radishes, onions (the sweet flat Bermudas which grew as large as apples and almost as mild), and Brussels sprouts. Over by the brooder house—at least that year’s location of the brooder house—Bob made an asparagus bed, which I estimated, when in full production, would take care of that portion of the United States extending from the Columbia River to the Pacific Ocean. Our growing season was short, or rather our maturing season was short, for we had late frosts and little hot weather; but the mild winters and long cool springs seemed to give a succulency to the vegetables which I have never seen surpassed. Nothing was ever pithy or tough or harsh flavored, and even carrots left in the ground all winter (by mistake) were crisp and tender the next spring. That was truly a gardener’s paradise except that we couldn’t grow lima beans or egg plant or melons or peppers and we had to mulch our English walnut trees and apricot trees very heavily, and even then the blossoms were often frostbitten.
With Bob’s gardening so stable—so trustworthy—it didn’t seem fair to me that mine should always be the wildcat variety. A great many of my seeds not only did not sprout but disappeared entirely. The others came up the next morning like Jack’s Beanstalk or didn’t show up until I had given up hope and planted something else on top of them. And then they all appeared together and created confusion and ill will. My seeds, no matter in what order they were put into the ground, always came up in bunches. A big clump here, nothing at all here for quite a way, now a little wizened group, a single plant and another huge clump. Also my plants were usually not healthy, and I’m sure that I have introduced more varieties of plant disease than anyone in the Northern Hemisphere. I planted nasturtiums and bachelor’s-buttons and they came up covered with South African Jungle rot and Himalayan Spot Wart. I decided at last that instead of the green thumb I had the touch of death and that I was never destined to be a second Mowgli or Little Shepherd of the Hills because I hated little wild things and they hated me. Bob, on the other hand, had nature by the scruff of the neck and his sweet peas had blooms like gladiolus and stems about ten feet long.
The man from whom we bought our bulbs gave me all of his lovely single dahlia tubers and kept only the hydrocephaloid monsters in liverish lavender and virulent pink. He said, “You ought to get you another hobby, there is some folks who just don’t have the feeling. Yep, you should get you another hobby.”
11
The Mountain to Mohammed
THAT FIRST YEAR no one, or very few, knew that we were up there in the mountains on our ranch and so we were skipped by the door-to-door sellers. I didn’t learn about that delight of country living until one drear day late the first fall. Bob was out in the woods usefully and gainfully employed cutting shingle bolts and I was rattling around in the house longing for my lovely big noisy family and hating the mountains, when a little black truck sidled into the yard, a small man alighted and crept to the back door, where he scratched like a little mouse. I rushed to the door and he was so heartened by my greeting, not knowing that I was glad to see anybody, that he hurriedly scrambled back into the truck and came staggering back under four great black suitcases. He opened the first one and I realized that at last I was face to face with the creator of the knitting book outfits. The coat sweater made like a long tube with an immense shawl collar. The tatted evening dress. The lumpy crocheted bed-jacket tied with thousands of little ribbons. The great big tam. The slipover sweater with the waistline either crouching in the armpits or languishing just above the knees. Jack the Knitter had them all and mostly in maroon, a pink so bright it could have given a coat of tan, and orchid.
Jack the Knitter was so proud of his wares that I had a feeling he made them himself, and I pictured him stopping his truck halfway down t
he mountain and crawling into the back to tat up another evening dress or maybe knit another big purple tam.
He did have lovely suits knitted of yarn as soft and light as kitten’s fur and seemingly devoid of furbelows. I tried one on and was bitter to find the V-neck crowding the crotch for position and the skirt so tight that when I stood erect it made me look as if I were using my fanny for antennae and feeling around for a seat.
As I turned down offering after offering, Jack’s little watery eyes grew sadder and his little black suit shinier and shabbier, and we were both pretty desperate when he brought out the socks—the really superior wool socks. I immediately ordered twelve pairs for Bob and begged Jack to stay for dinner. He, however, seemed to have revived considerably under the stimulus of the order and briskly declined, packed his wares and left in the direction of Mrs. Kettle’s, where he undoubtedly had dinner after selling all of his sweaters including the expectant-sitter suits.
Bob returned from the woods and pointed out that I had ordered the twelve pairs of socks two sizes too small. I tried to make up my mind whether to walk in the dark and rain down to Mrs. Kettle’s and tell Jack the right size or to let the wrong ones come and go through the long exchanging process. I decided to let the wrong ones come and went shuffling off to bed with my will power dragging around my feet like let-down suspenders.
Then came Christmas and the mail order. I bought all my Christmas presents from the catalogues, which was wonderful for I had the thrill of first choosing what I would buy if I could have anything, and then what I would actually buy.
My greatest hurdle in ordering was whether or not to take a chance on “multi-colored.” Practically everything except farm machinery came in pink, blue, green, maize (never yellow) and multi-colored. It sounded as if they had stirred all of the left-over colors together as we used to do with Easter egg dyes. I was strong and limited myself to plain colors, but I felt I had erred. What if I died and Bob sent for and buried me in a multi-colored shroud and I had never seen one. I was also fascinated by that wonderfully ambiguous term “floral background.” Since a flower could be anything from a forget-me-not to a Yucca, that was certainly buying a pig in a poke; and so I bought many “floral backgrounds” for my family.
Then came spring and the Stove Man. Along in January, Stove developed virulent digestive trouble. In fact, where his grate had been there was a gaping hole and I had to build my fire like a blazing fringe around the edge. Stove was “taken” in January, but it was March before anything was done about it. We of the mountains didn’t dash into town for a new grate. We wore our already taut nerves to within a hair of the snapping point trying to cook on the circle of fire or that faint warm draught that wafted from the ash pit down around Stove’s feet, where the pieces of grate and all of the wood had fallen, and waited for a mythical character known as the Stove Man who was supposed to make rounds in the spring.
One morning I had reached the stage where I was craftily planning to chop up a chair or two and build a fire in the sink in an effort to drive Bob to some immediate action, when the Stove Man arrived. With him also were a truckload of stove parts and tools, his wife and three-year-old daughter. Stove Man quickly disembowled Stove, something which I had been longing to do to that big black stinker all winter, spread the entrails all over the kitchen floor and went out to the chicken house to point out to Bob the many opportunities for failure in the chicken business.
This black-future attitude was not from any manic depressive tendencies on the part of Stove Man, but was the reflected attitude of the farmer. The farmers wanted to be sad and they wanted everyone who called on them to be sad. If your neighbor’s chickens were each laying a double-yolked egg every single day, all of his cows had just had heifer calves, his mortgage was all paid, his wheat was producing a bushel per stalk and he had just discovered an oil gusher on the north forty, you did not mention any of these gladsome happenings. Instead, when you looked at the chickens, you said, “A heavy lay makes hens weak and liable to disease.” The neighbor, kicking sulkily at the feed trough, would reply, “Brings the price of eggs down too.”
When you went into the barn you looked over the heifer calves and said, “Lots of t.b. in the valley this year. Some herds as high as 50 per cent.” The neighbor said, “Contagious abortion is around too.” Leaning morbidly on the fence around the groaning wheat fields, you said, “A cloudburst could do a lot of damage here.” The neighbor said, “A heavy rain in harvest time would ruin me.” I learned that our farmers were like those women who get some sort of inverted enjoyment out of deprecating their own accomplishments—women who say “This cake turned out just terribly!” and then hand you a piece of angel food so light you have to hold it down to take a bite.
Our farmers were big saddos and our farmers’ wives were delicate. Farmers’ wives who had the strength, endurance and energy of locomotives and the appetites of dinosaurs were, according to them, so delicate that if you accidentally brushed against them they would turn brown like gardenias. They always felt poorly, took gallons of patent medicines and without exception they, and all of their progeny, were so tiny at birth that they slept in a cigar box and wore a wedding ring for a bracelet.
Stove Man’s wife—”Just call me Myrtle”—and Darleen, the small white thready-limbed child, stayed in the house while Stove Man and Bob made their gloomy journey around the ranch. As lunchtime approached with Stove still in surgery, Myrtle and I, accompanied by the drop, drop, drop of her leaky heart, made sandwiches and brewed tea over some canned heat. I offered to warm some soup or vegetables for Darleen, but Myrtle demured with “That kid eats anything—strong as a horse.”
The horse ate for her lunch one white soda cracker and a sweet pickle; then hung on the back of her mother’s chair and whined. Not bothering to turn around and not missing a mouthful, Myrtle comforted her with threats of “I’ll warm your bottom”; “I’ll turn you over to your Dad”; “I’ll lock you in the truck”; “I’ll send for the bogey man”—all of which Darleen ignored and kept on swinging and whining. In desperation, I suggested a nap, but Myrtle said, “That kid has never took a nap since she was weaned—just don’t need sleep—strong as a horse.” Even though Darleen looked like something they had whipped up out of pipe cleaners, she certainly had endurance. She whined and swung until after five, when they left.
Much to my surprise Mr. Myrtle became very businesslike after lunch and put Stove back together with new grates and a new, more thorough ash shaker. Unfortunately Myrtle also became businesslike and insisted on cutting out dresses for small Anne from the eight lengths of dimity and nainsook I had brought from town the day before. I had patterns but she scoffed at these as totally unnecessary for children’s clothes.
When I came in from one of my various trips to the chicken house, baby buggy, feed room or coldframe, I found Myrtle slashing out the last dress. She stacked the cut-out garments, took Darleen to the outhouse and, with “See you next year if my heart holds out”—“Quit that, Darleen, or I’ll smack you!”—“Hope the stove holds together,” they were gone.
After dinner that night I examined the ready-to-sew dresses. Something seemed to be wrong. There were eight large round pieces of material—one from each length—and eight rims from which the circles were cut. I was unable to determine which were the dresses and which the scraps. I laid small obliging Anne on the bed and tried to fit her into these strange pieces, but all we were able to work out were the foundations for eight old-fashioned sweeping caps and matching ruffles for Anne’s fat posterior.
Either Myrtle had a splendid idea which I was too stupid to grasp or Anne was the wrong shape. “Oh, well, see you next year, Myrtle,” I said, dusting off the bedside table with one of the circles and putting the rest away in my bottom drawer, where they remained as long as we lived on the ranch.
For several weeks after the visit of the Stove Man the weather was clear and bright and we worked like maniacs to get caught up with Spring, which raced ahead of us e
ach day, unfolding new tasks for us to do and cautioning us about leaving the old ones too long. Each night Bob drove the truck down into a small valley below the house and filled ten, ten-gallon milk cans with water, and the next morning as soon as I was dressed I filled Stove’s reservoir and my wash boiler, and between chores I washed all day long. The clothes billowed and flapped whitely against the delphinium blue sky and the black green hills, and at night I brought in armloads of clean clothes smelling of blossoms and breezes and dry.
For three weeks I washed all day and ironed every night and felt just like the miller’s daughter in Rumpelstiltskin, for there was always more. After all, I had been heaping dirty clothes in the extra bedroom ever since September and only washing what we had to have and what I could dry over Stove. After the baby came, I had to wash for her every day, so I threw everything into the extra bedroom. Finally one morning I found the room empty. I tottered back to the kitchen and emptied the wash boiler into the sink and collapsed by Stove. Immediately the sun was obscured by a heavy dark cloud, a wind came swooshing out of the burn; there was a light patter of rain and I fell asleep.
Like coming to the surface after a deep, deep dive, I came at last to the top of my sleep and heard hammering at the back door. I drifted through a heavy mist to the entryway and opened the door. It was the Rawleigh Man, who burst in and snapped me to attention by looking deep into my eyes, and saying, “I heard you got a new baby, organs all back in place O.K.?”
The Egg and I Page 14