The Egg and I

by Betty Macdonald

  When we were finally settled and the berries, as large as thimbles, had begun to plink into the lard buckets, twilight was upon us and so were the mosquitoes, which spiralled out of the woods like smoke and made a direct line for the baby buggy. I slapped and fanned while Bob picked, but it was no use. The mosquitoes crawled into the crevices of the wicker buggy, up Bob’s trouser legs, down our necks and inside our sleeves. I took the baby, Sport and the puppy and started home.

  Going back through the dusky woods I found it difficult to guide the buggy and at the same time to search the underbrush fore and aft with nearsighted eyes, for cougars, coyotes and bears. It was also disquieting to know that my vision was so myopic that a wild beast would have had to lay its lip against mine and snarl before I could recognize it. In my haste to reach the farm I gave Sport and the puppy the impression that we were having a race and they went bounding out of sight leaving me alone in the gloom. Twigs broke with a loud snap to the left and right of me; overhead the deep quiet was broken by the loud sudden rush of wings. It was most irritating since I was intently trying to listen for a pursuing wild animal. Then just as I reached the point where I was going to scream “Shut up, so I can hear something, will you!” I saw our potato field and our lovely cozy farm buildings dead ahead.

  I was putting the baby to bed when Bob came in on the run. “Have the dogs been barking? Have you heard anything?” he breathlessly demanded, as he threw open the closet door and began shuffling through his guns. I showed him Sport and the puppy playing tug-o’-war in the front yard with a piece of rope and asked what sound he had in mind? He snorted impatiently and said, “I was kneeling, picking berries under the leaves [where they hide long and black] and I had that prickly feeling you get when something you can’t see is watching you. I looked up and the long grass between me and the woods was waving back together, closing the gap made by the passing of some animal. Some one of the cat family, I’ll bet, because there wasn’t even a rustle. Not a single sound. It gave me the creeps to think that something had passed so close to me I could have reached out and touched it and it hadn’t made a whisper of noise.” I thought of my recent trip through the woods with the baby, and the little blood I had left turned so cold my veins recoiled from it in horror.

  “Do you think it followed you home?” I quavered, as I began a tour of the house, bolting and locking all of the windows and doors.

  Bob disdained to answer such a ridiculous question and began whistling for Sport and pocketing shells. When Sport reluctantly slithered through the door, Bob took him by the collar and they left on an extensive inspection of the premises. I huddled by Stove, afraid to go to bed because I found that the only lock on the back door could have been wrenched off by an anaemic sparrow. I dragged the kitchen stool into the corner and, using it as a table, began a letter home:

  “Dear Mother: I am enclosing my sterling salad forks. Please turn them in on some stout bear traps and a good skinning knife. Don’t you think it is stretching this wifely duty business a bit too taut to ask me to spend the few minutes of the day when I’m not carrying water, baking, canning, gardening, scrubbing, and taking care of the chickens and pigs, in fending off wild beasts? It is beginning to look as if we are hemmed in by bears and cougars, yet we live in the day of the magnetic eye, automatic hot water heaters and television.”

  As I sealed the letter, Bob returned and reported small piles of feathers along the pullet runs, but no other tracks or signs. He said in his opinion the animal was a cougar, but it might be just a large wildcat. He also said, “Sport is without a doubt the dumbest animal alive and couldn’t follow the scent of a roast duck at twenty paces.” Sport hurriedly offered his paw, but Bob turned on his heel and slammed his gun into the rack. I wanted to lock the bedroom windows and have Sport, the puppy and the baby sleep with us, but Bob scoffed at such cowardice and insisted on night air and life as usual. The next morning Bob found prints as large as saucers in the dust of the road directly in front of the house. “It is a cougar and a whopper,” he joyfully announced. Then with Sport and his gun he left for the valley to assemble a hunting party. “Am I supposed to handle this cougar with kindness or a hatpin?” I called after him resentfully.

  “Would that I had it to do over again,” I reflected bitterly as I put a chair under the knob on the kitchen door, “and I would choose the indoor type. Preferably a gambler in a green eye-shade, who sat all day and night indoors under electric lights wearing his delicious pallor which proved that he hadn’t been out in the daylight or night air for years and years.”

  Things got worse. Bob returned from the valley and requested that I feed and water the chickens and gather the eggs while he drove up to some logging camp to get Crowbar and Geoduck Swensen, who were the best hunters in the country and the only ones he wished to trust with his precious cougar. I refused to do the chores on the grounds that I was not going to put my foot outside the house while the cougar was loose. It got very warm in the house with all of the doors and windows locked, but better to drown in a pool of my own sweat, I thought, than be torn limb from limb by a wild beast. Bob slammed through the chores and drove off again. He returned about four-thirty with Crowbar, Geoduck and Crowbar’s large bear dog. While Bob finished his evening chores, Crowbar and Geoduck lay in the shade of the truck and gulped down a pint of moonshine each. Then Bob joined them in a third pint and, shouldering their guns, they disappeared into the woods directly back of the pullet runs. Almost immediately the dog began to bark and, guided by his excited yips, I was able to follow the progress of the hunt around the ranch. In spite of my furious threats of the morning, I had to open the windows—the screened ones, of course—both for the breeze and to follow the hunt. A beautiful June bug with gold legs, bronze belly and iridescent peacock-blue back crawled along the screen looking like an animated lapel pin. The kitten caught a baby mole and tortured it on the path to the feed room.

  The sun was beginning to yawn and edge toward his bed behind the far mountains, the livestock were making soft contented end-of-the-day sounds, the ducks were taking a last dip in the pond at the foot of the orchard and pre-evening coolness was in the air, when the barkings became wild and concentrated in the woods out by the old spring down past the potato patch. Then there were two shots. Then shouting, barking and at last the hunters appeared bearing the cougar in a stretcher made from their hunting coats and guns. The cougar measured eleven feet from head to tail tip and was the largest ever bagged in our community (according to Crowbar and Geoduck). He was an old-timer, quite grizzled about the head, but with the coldest yellow eyes and the largest sharpest teeth I had ever seen.

  Bob was delirious with pride and gave me numerous moonshiny hugs and kisses and an inch by inch description of the circling of our forty acres, the almost treeing and the actual treeing of the cougar in a small alder, the times the gun was aimed, the time he almost took a shot but decided not to, and at last the closing in and the final shot. I refused several hundred drinks of moonshine from Crowbar and Geoduck, who seemed to be padded with pints and who took long gurgling swigs after each sentence, politely wiped off the lip of the bottle on a filthy sleeve and passed it to me. Bob matched them drink for drink, and the cougar increased in size and ferocity. When they at last reach the point where they didn’t care who won and the cougar had been a “shwell shport,” they left with the kill, the hunting dog and the guns in the back of the truck. I went to bed with a nice juicy story about love in an apartment house and the bedroom windows opened wide to the velvety night air.

  Shortly after the cougar episode, Bob left with the truck one morning to help an East Valley farmer with his haying, and while I was still standing in the drive watching the truck over the brow of the last hill, a skunk strolled in the open back door and settled himself by Stove. I hurriedly shut Sport and the puppy, who were fortunately out by the chicken house, in Sport’s yard. Then I tried luring the skunk. I put out a little trail of milk, meat, water and cereal. The skunk blinked and snu
ggled closer to Stove.

  He was actually a civet cat, which is just as evil smelling but smaller than a skunk, but he was very determined. He allowed me to go in and out of the pantry which was across the kitchen from Stove, but one step closer than that brought him to his feet looking menacing.

  When Bob finally came home tired and very hungry, I was crouching in the driveway trying to warm the baby’s bottle over a smouldering pile of faggots and the skunk was resting in the kitchen. Bob walked loudly and masterfully in the front and skunk swaggered out the back, sneering at me over his shoulder as he disappeared into the woods. He evidently came back that night, for we heard Sport barking loudly in the cellar just under our bedroom, and then the room was filled with that most penetrating, most sickening of odors-skunk. We slept with clothespins on our noses, not only that night but for a week. I bathed Sport with strong soap and Clorox but he remained unpleasant-smelling for weeks.

  It just goes to show. In every case the wild animal bothered us first and it was merely luck for our side that Bob was nerveless in emergencies and a crack shot.

  13

  That Infernal Machine, the Pressure Cooker

  TOWARD the end of June when the cougar episode had cooled somewhat, Bob and I made several early morning pilgrimages to the abandoned farm and picked five gallons of wild blackberries—and the canning season was on. How I dreaded it! Jelly, jam, preserves, canned raspberries, blackcaps, peas, spinach, beans, beets, carrots, blackberries, loganberries, wild blackberries, wild raspberries, applesauce, tomatoes, peaches, pears, plums, chickens, venison, beef, clams, salmon, rhubarb, cherries, corn, pickles and prunes. By fall the pantry shelves would groan and creak under nature’s bounty and the bitter thing was that we wouldn’t be able to eat one tenth of it. Canning is a mental quirk just like any form of hoarding. First you plant too much of everything in the garden; then you waste hours and hours in the boiling sun cultivating; then you buy a pressure cooker and can too much of everything so that it won’t be wasted.

  Frankly I don’t like home-canned anything, and I spent all of my spare time reading up on botulism. Bob, on the other hand, was in the thing heart and soul. He stepped into the pantry, which was larger than most kitchens, and exhibited pure joy at the row on row of shining jars. And I couldn’t even crack his complacency when I told him that, although the Hickses were at the time using year before last’s canned beef, they were busily preparing to can another one hundred and fifty quarts. Women in that country were judged not by their bulging sweaters, but by their bulging pantries. Husbands unashamedly threw open their pantry doors and dared you to have more of anything.

  I reminded Bob, as I began hauling out jars, lids, sugar and the pressure cooker, that the blackberries of the summer before tasted like little nodules of worsted and we still had twenty-five quarts. But he was adamant and so “Heigh-ho and away we go”—the summer canning was on.

  I crouched beneath the weight of an insupportable burden every time I went out to the garden. Never have I come face to face with such productivity. Pea vines pregnant with bulging pods; bean poles staggering under big beans, middle-sized beans, little beans and more blossoms; carrots with bare shoulders thrust above the ground to show me they were ready; succulent summer squash and zucchini where it seemed only a matter of an hour ago there were blossoms; and I picked a water bucket full of cherries from one lower branch of the old-fashioned late cherry tree that shaded the kitchen.

  There was more of everything than we could ever use or preserve and no way to absorb the excess. I tried sending vegetables to our families, but the freight rates and ferry fares and time involved (plus the fact that Seattle has superb waterfront vegetable markets) made this seem rather senseless. I sent great baskets of produce to the Kettles, but with Paw on the road every day imploring the farmers to give him anything they couldn’t use, even they had too much. I picked peas and took a shopping bag full to Mrs. Kettle, and was embarrassed and annoyed to find two bushel baskets of them sitting on the back porch, covered with swarms of little flies and obviously rotting. There was no market for this excess since the market gardeners supplied the neighboring towns. I became so conscience stricken by the waste that of my own volition I canned seventy-five quarts of string beans and too late noticed that the new farm journal carried a hair-raising account of the deaths from botulism from eating home-canned string beans.

  Birdie Hicks took all the blue ribbons at the county fair for canning. She evidently stayed up all night during the summer and early fall to can, for she would come to call on me at seven-fifteen, crisp and combed and tell me—as her sharp eyes noted that I still had the breakfast dishes and the housework to do, the baby to bathe and feed and my floor to scrub before I could get at my canning—that she had just finished canning thirty-six quarts of corn on the cob, twenty-five quarts of tomatoes, eighty-two quarts of string beans and a five-gallon crock of dill pickles. She canned her peaches in perfect halves, stacked in the jars like the pictures in the canning book. They were perfectly beautiful, but tasted like glue. She canned her tomatoes whole and they came out of the jars firm and pretty, but tasted like nothing. Mother had taught me to put a couple of pits and a little brown sugar with my peaches; plenty of clove, onion and finely chopped celery with tomatoes—and anyway, I like the flavor of open-kettle canned fruit and tomatoes.

  By the end of the summer the pullets were laying and Bob was culling the flocks. With no encouragement from me, he decided that, as chicken prices were way down, I should can the culled hens. It appeared to my warped mind that Bob went miles and miles out of his way to figure out things for me to put in jars; that he actively resented a single moment of my time which was not spent eye to pressure gauge, ear to steam cock; that he was forever coming staggering into the kitchen under a bushel basket of something for me to can. My first reaction was homicide, then suicide, and at last tearful resignation.

  When he brought in the first three culled hens, I acidly remarked that it wasn’t only the cooker which operated under pressure. No answer.

  Later, because of my remark, he said that I did it on purpose. I didn’t, I swear, but I did feel that God had at last taken pity on me—for the pressure cooker blew up. It was the happiest day of my life, though I might have been killed. A bolt was blown clear through the kitchen door, the walls were dotted with bits of wing and giblet, the floor was swimming in gravy, and the thick cast aluminum lid broke in two and hit the ceiling with such force it left two half moon marks above Stove. I was lyrical with joy. I didn’t know how it happened and I cared less. I was free! Free! F-R-E-E! After supper as I went humming about the house picking pieces of chicken off the picture frames and from the mirror in the bedroom, Bob eyed me speculatively. Then he picked up the Sears, Roebuck catalogue and began looking for a bigger, quicker and sturdier variety of pressure cooker.

  14

  This Beautiful Country

  AUNTY VIDA took another swallow of coffee, rinsed it around in her mouth as if it were antiseptic, and said, “You have solved the problem of living! You have the answer to happiness! There are thousands of people in this bitter old world who only hope some day to achieve by dint of hard work and sacrifice what you and Bob have now!” It was nine o’clock in the morning, and Bob and I had been up since four and had not gone to bed the night before until after twelve. Aunty Vida was just having breakfast. It was that part about others hoping some day to achieve by dint of hard work and sacrifice what Bob and I already had, that got me. And just what were Bob and I supposed to be doing for sixteen or eighteen hours a day? Weaving flowers in our hair and dancing around a maypole? I was overtired or I wouldn’t have paid any attention to Aunty Vida, who was a terrific bore but had a saving grace in that she was very appreciative of “this beautiful country.” She was so appreciative of it in fact that when she visited us I used to send Bob out to scoop her up occasionally and bring her in the house to recuperate, since I was afraid that in the white heat of her appreciation she might melt and ru
n into the ground. She took another deep swallow of coffee and garbled on about our pure minds, serene faces, God looking down on us and peace at last, and it was fortunate that Bob called to me just then to come and get the fryers he had killed.

  Of course, Aunty Vida was an idiot anyway, but our other guests weren’t. They were Bob’s immediate family and my immediate family and other charming intelligent people, but they all had the same idea. “Beautiful scenery, magnificent mountains, heavenly food, you fortunate people!” they said as they waddled away from the table. They neglected to note that while they lay in slothful slumber breathing in great draughts of invigorating, smokeless, fumeless, clean, appetite-producing mountain air, Bob and I were cleaning and picking chickens, cleaning clams, burying clam and crab shells, washing dishes, packing eggs, shelling peas and finally dragging to bed at twelve or half past.

  “Oh, I just love to wash at an old-fashioned sink,” they said. I don’t mind washing at an old-fashioned sink, either, when someone else has got up and made an old-fashioned fire and carried and heated some old-fashioned water, and I know that in a day or so I will go back to town and wash off the country grime in an old-fashioned bathtub.

  When my family came out to visit for the first time, they were more interested in meeting the Kettles than in exploring our ranch. I took them to call, but poor Mrs. Kettle was overcome with shyness and made us all sit in the parlor and tried so hard to be “reefined” that she only began two sentences with Key-rist. When one of my sisters admired the decorations hanging from the mantel, she said, “Aw I didn’t want all that goddamned cr-er-trash hanging there, but the girls insisted.” Then she subsided in an agony of embarrassment. I asked her where she had bought the linoleum because I was anxious to get some for my kitchen. She said, “A feller come by about ten years ago and he had samples as pretty as you please and I picked out the pattrun I wanted but when the Jeezly stuff come it weren’t the right color and when that feller come back the next year I told him where he—where he . . . where he-e-e-e—” and Mrs. Kettle turned crimson and left the sentence dangling like the flypaper that hung from the lamp hook.