When introduced to the guests, Elwin closed his eyes tight and he didn’t open them until we were leaving. Paw alone retained his savior faire. He came clumping up onto the back porch exuding barnyard odors and good will, and after a few hearty stamps to loosen any loosely caked mud or manure he came charging into the parlor and shook hands heartily with everyone. “Glad to thee you, glad to thee you,” he beamed as he settled himself full length on the shiny leather couch. Mother said to Mrs. Kettle, “Do you mind if I smoke?” “Not at all, not at ALL,” boomed Paw. “Thmoke A WHOLE CARTOON if you have a mind to. Anyone want a THI-GAR?” and he laughed uproariously as he proffered a much-chewed cigar end.
By the time we had the house ready for guests, Gammy had gone to visit her sisters in Colorado, so we were deprived of her reaction to our ranch. However, after the cougar episode I doubt if we could have persuaded her to visit us, even if she had been violently enthusiastic previously, as she had not.
Bob’s dress-designing sister and her artist husband came for a week that second summer and they were delightful guests. I clung to them like the smell of frying in an effort to breathe in some of their aura of bright sophistication.
Geoduck Swensen, the angel, preceded their arrival by a few minutes with a gunny sack of Dungeness crabs, a water bucket of Little Neck clams and a bucket of butter clams.
I made the butter clams into fritters for breakfast, staying up until midnight cutting them out of their shells, removing the black part of the neck and the stomach, grinding them and wondering what to do with the shells which smelled so horrible after just a few hours in the sun. I used Mrs. Hicks’ recipe for the fritters, which was just an ordinary fritter recipe except that where the recipe asked for two eggs I used either six or twelve depending on the number of people I intended to feed. I also used twice as many ground clams as batter and threw in at the last a handful of fine chopped parsley. For anyone whose only experience with clam fritters has been the big doughy blobs with three specks of clam per blob, which most restaurants serve, I would suggest getting hold of some clams immediately and making yourself a batch. Served with dawn-picked strawberries, strong coffee and Mrs. Hicks’ thick yellow cream (which we learned we could buy as whipping cream), clam fritters were not easily forgotten. In fact, thanks to the natural resources of that country, all of the meals were notable. My guests even liked the moonshine which was Maxwell Ford Jefferson’s best, and that was good because Jeff was the best moonshiner in our country, having come from a long line of Kentucky moonshine people. Jeff never drank himself, testing his whiskey by the feel of it. He said that the gallon he gave Bob just before our guests arrived felt good and didn’t smell too bad.
With all the good food and smooth whiskey Bob’s brother-in-law heard the coyotes howl dismally all night; he felt the heavy forbidding nearness of the mountains; he saw the majesty in the unbroken miles and miles and miles of trees, but he saw also the loneliness of such a vista. He reveled in the crystalline beauty of the summer dawn, but he helped me light the fires; he thought the spring water sweet and satisfying, but he helped me carry it; he examined Bob’s egg records and was impressed by our hens’ performance, by Bob’s excellent management, but he said, “The thing that defeats me about a hen is its unresponsiveness. You can pour your heart’s blood into their upbringing and all you can hope for is a squawk. You can stroke cats, pet dogs and ride horses, but the only thing you can do with a hen is eat it.” Jerry said also, “I think this is an ideal spot to do penance in, but a hell of place to live.”
Bob’s sister said, “But, Jerry, this moonlight, the mountains, the quiet and the food! It’s like something you dream about.”
Jerry said, “Uh-huh, but we’d rather have a peanut butter sandwich in Grand Central Station, wouldn’t we, Betty?” He also insisted on seeing all of my sketches and said that my water colors had great strength and I must keep on with my painting. I tried to think of something just this side of human sacrifice to show my appreciation.
Bob had always treated my painting as a sort of recurring illness like malaria, and I glanced at him quickly to see what his reaction to Jerry’s opinion would be. Bob wasn’t even listening—he was reading about round worms in the Washington Poultryman.
We took a wonderful trip while Bob’s sister and brother-in-law were there. We drove down to Discovery Bay, then up to Port Angeles, then on to Lakes Crescent and Sutherland. It was a trip to prove that occasionally fulfillment exceeds anticipation. We left the baby with Mrs. Hicks, and arranged with Mr. Hicks to gather the eggs and feed the chickens, pig, calf, etc., and were on our way by nine o’clock. It turned out to be a day to treasure, to bring out once in a while to fondle and remember. To begin with, the Discovery Bay road, instead of leaping and twisting around the mountains trying to scare its customers to death as most mountain roads do, took us firmly by the hands, led us between banks of rhododendrons and rows of great cedars and firs, up a gradual slope and around well-banked curves until we reached the top of a mountain and a stoutly fenced lookout point called the Crow’s Nest but large enough for trucks to back and turn.
Here all obstructions had been sheared away, and we got out and stood on the brink with nothing but the yellow highway fence between us and the Bay hundreds and hundreds of feet straight down.
We were up so high and the day was so clear that we could see the Straits of Juan de Fuca and Victoria, B. C. I had a strong feeling that if I had brought my glasses I could have spotted London Bridge and the Arc de Triomphe. This bay was named by Captain Vancouver who sailed into its calm waters in 1792 to repair his ship the Discovery and, as a reward, named the bay Port Discovery and the small island, which sits sturdily at the entrance, fending off storms and high seas, Protection Island.
The bay is horseshoe-shaped, peacock-blue and beautifully trimmed with white shores and black forests. At the head we watched a tiny lumber train dump its load of matches and go snuffing up the hill again. Sharp and clear came the whistle punk’s signals for a skidder somewhere in the mountains back of us. Directly below we could make out infinitesimal beach houses, and a more perilous location I cannot imagine because one pebble carelessly kicked off the top edge could work up enough fury on the way down to smash in a roof. Occasionally on the face of the bluff a brave tree, with toes dug in, leaned against the wind, her hair blowing out straight toward the sea.
After leaving the lookout point the road thoughtfully put up its trees again to shield us from the scarier aspects and before we knew it, we were coasting across tide flats on a bridge. The road didn’t leave the water until we had passed Dungeness, the famous crab catchery, and reached the flats of Sequim, a very rich dairy country. We bowled along between well-kept fences, herds of sleek Guernseys, and spacious barns until we reached the top of a long hill and the outskirts of a town. The first thing we knew there was a large PENNY’S sign and we were in Port Angeles. Port Angeles, quite evidently supported by pulp mills and their bad smells, is located on the Straits of Juan de Fuca facing Vancouver Island. It is a beautiful town with all the streets ending at the water’s edge, a long spit extending into the Sound like a reaching arm, homes and gardens perched on hills that sweep up steeply from the business district, then obligingly flatten out into plateaus commanding a view embracing Victoria, B. C., the Olympic Mountains and the passing freighters in the deep blue Sound. We had lunch at the best restaurant, which was a regulation chop house with starched white tablecloths and a high-class clientele. Bob, dressed in slacks and sport jacket, looked so devastatingly unfamiliar in the booth beside me that I could hardly eat.
It was almost dusk when we got back to Discovery Bay, but Bob insisted that we stop at the “mansion,” a decaying and deserted old estate sprawled along a bluff overlooking Discovery Bay and facing the Crow’s Nest. It seems that years and years ago a lumber king for some strange masculine reason thought this spot would be a fine place to bring his young South American bride; but she (and I don’t blame her) stayed two months, said t
o hell with the good neighbor policy and ran home as fast as her little South American legs would carry her. The lumber king, hurt and bewildered closed up the estate and never came back.
The main house, a Victorian grande dame, was prickly with cupolas, little balconies and chimneys. The sagging porches and paneless windows gave it a wrinkled toothless look. Crouching at the back was a huddled mass of servants’ quarters with caretakers’ cottages, barns and farm buildings across the driveway on the other side. Buildings, orchards and gardens were strung along the edge of the bluff, but so obliterated by second growth, firs, blackberry vines and salal that only by stumbling on broken bits of fence were we able to guess what had been where.
It was quite dark by the time we started through the main house, and the creaking boards, bits of falling plaster and sudden bats kept us hushed and goosefleshy, until Bob, who had stayed behind to examine an old plow, came stamping in, slamming doors and commenting on things in a loud hearty voice. We stepped into a ballroom dappled with shadows and oozing atmosphere and romance, and Bob began pounding on the walls to locate the studs. “With just a little fixing up you could probably house three or four hundred chickens in here,” remarked his sister coldly. Bob laughed good-naturedly. “There are some wonderful timbers in this old house,” he said. “If I could get it cheap enough it would pay me to tear it down and haul the timbers up to the ranch for a new chicken house.” This created such a furor of protest that he stopped being volubly commercial, but while I gazed at the little raised stage at one end of the ballroom and pictured South American musicians playing hot-blooded South American music for the homesick bride, Bob was, I could tell by his face, mentally putting in roosts and nests below the windows.
Upstairs there were endless hallways and about twenty bedrooms, but only one very slender bathroom, with high-stepping gray marble fixtures. The master bedroom across the front of the house had a balcony leaning yearningly toward the water far below. By the time we had reached the second floor the moonlight was pointing up broken steps, spidery corners and cavernous closets and Sister and I were anxious for hot coffee; but Bob, still bold and hearty, made us step out onto the rickety balcony and peer down at the phosphorescent hull of an old sailing vessel lying at the bottom of the bay.
Clutching the fragile railing and crawling with cobwebs and gooseflesh, I expected any moment to feel a hairy hand on my shoulder and to turn around and find Boris Karloff.
Home seemed very cozy with cold fried chicken, hot coffee and all of the buildings one-storied and melting down into the ground.
As our back door closed on each departing guest it closed also on dinner-table conversation and the incentive to arrange flowers and wear nail polish. When the Sister and Brother-in-law left, I laid my sketches beside my first corsage and, grimly shouldering my new pressure cooker, I dropped back into the old groove.
15
Fancywork Versus the Printed Word
WITH my usual bad management, when I moved to the ranch I took with me a box of old school and children’s books instead of my own books. At first in loneliness and desperation I read The Five Little Peppers, Alden’s Encyclopedia and The Way of All Flesh, separately, together, and alternately over and over. I also read magazines, the newspapers and any and all catalogues. I couldn’t borrow books because my neighbors never read. Reading was a sign of laziness, boastfulness and general degradation.
Mountain farm women did fancywork. They embroidered their dishtowels and then bleached them so that they always looked mended. They embroidered their pillowcases with hard, scratchy knots and flowers. They embroidered every stitch their babies wore, and they embroidered, tatted, crocheted and otherwise disfigured their own underclothing, handkerchiefs, doilies, bureau scarves, bedspreads, sheets and napkins. They called it “embroidrying” and said, “I’m going to embroidry me some pillow slips.” They were at it from infancy to the grave, but as I don’t like embroidery in any form, I resolved that they could cross-stitch me to the cross and I would not learn. I’m the type of female the pioneers were tickled pink to give to the Indians as a hostage.
I wrote long pleading letters to my family to sort out and send on my books, but we were so far from any main roads and the sending of anything over mailing size involved so many people and so many arrangements with bus companies, ferries, individual bus drivers, farmers on the route, that we finally decided against sending the books. Mother promised they would bring them on the first visit. On the first visit they came so loaded with candy, cigarettes, fruit, magazines and presents for the house that I was ashamed to mention the books which they had obviously forgotten. Subsequent visits proved like the first. We corresponded feverishly about the books between visits, sending lists back and forth and fighting via mail over who owned what books, but they were always forgotten. “Left on the front porch!” “Left in the garage!” “Stacked in the front hall!” they lamented, but I knew better. In the first place, most of them were loaned to people—no one ever remembered to whom (like the first edition of Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary which we were never able to track down); and in the second place, packing books is not a chore that anyone undertakes just for the sheer joy of it, so it was always put off until the actual time of departure, then forgotten.
Each time we went to town I looked in vain for a lending library and intended to locate the public library, and each time we returned to the farm with the chicken feed and groceries but without any books. If Bob hadn’t parked the car where he did one wet blowy Saturday that first November, we probably never would have found the Booke Stalle crouching on the main street between the cheese factory and the barber shop. “Look,” I shouted to Bob excitedly. “A new industry!” and I pointed to the slightly crooked sign timidly spelling out the name. After we had been in the Booke Stalle we realized that though it was a new enterprise—something of a miracle in Town—its opening was very much like putting another bunch of faded flowers on a grave.
The Booke Stalle’s door opened the wrong way, so that I was jammed against the wall, fighting for my breath and knocking things off the shelves, before I was decently inside. Miss Wetter, the owner-manageress, exuded Sloan’s Liniment and seemed to be trying to gather herself together. She was very thin, some age over thirty-five and had a broken tear duct in her right eye. She continually lifted up her glasses and wiped the eye, pulled up her skirt at the waist, and pulled down her cardigan. She was very deaf and had adenoids. Her stock, her prices and her spirits were very low.
I looked over the stock, which, judging from the titles, had been left her by a deceased relative. There were several lives of Christ, Brewster’s Millions, The Broad Highway by Jeffery Farnol, Zoroaster by Francis Marion Crawford, The Sheik, a few of Elinor Glyn, Zane Grey, Kathleen Norris. There were some little books of poetry with covers of brilliantly colored flowers: My Book of Poems with pansies on the covers, Poems I Love with forget-me-nots, and Hand in Hand with daisies. There were also some children’s books, some very old histories and a dictionary or two. The only thing I could say for the Booke Stalle’s stock was that in comparison the telephone directory seemed like very good reading.
I asked for a detective story. My exact words were, “Do you have any detective stories?” Miss Wetter said, “It’s bighty dice work—I beet lots of dice people.”
I said louder, “Do you have any mystery stories?” She said, “Ad I’b od by owd.” So apparently was I. I yelled “CRIME STORIES! MYSTERIES! DETECTIVES!” She shuffled through the drawer in the front of her desk and at last, locating a little notebook, she smiled brightly and said, “A dollar a bonth for two books at a tibe.”
So I fished an old envelope out of my purse and wrote out a list of books I wanted, paid my dollar and bought some new magazines. As I left Miss Wetter took off her glasses for the eighth time, dabbed at the watery eye, and remarked enigmatically, “I’b odly od page sevedty-two!”
I felt like replying, “Kid, you’re farther behind than you’ll ever know.”<
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Two weeks later I went to town again and sought out Miss Wetter. She had installed a smelly coal-oil heater, but other than that it was Act II—same scene, same costume, same books, didn’t hear a word I said, and was studying my list as though I had given it to her a half an hour ago instead of fifteen days before. Again I wrote everything down, but I was not absolutely certain that she wasn’t also blind.
We continued this way until well into February. Then I begged Bob to go in to the Booke Stalle with me to see what he could do with Miss Wetter. He balked at first, saying that he didn’t see of what use he could be unless I wanted him to turn her upside down and shake the books out of her. But I gave him my pleading setter look and in we went. Bob turned on a full one hundred and fifty watts of charm, did not raise his naturally husky voice a quarter tone, and darned if she didn’t understand every word he said. With a minimum of eye dabbing and cardigan jerking, she produced two mystery stories, only one of which I had read.
She also told him, ignoring me, that she had recently bought out a very prosperous circulating library and was expecting the books in a day or so. Bob was courtly to the point of almost kissing her hand, I was so elated over the coming books that I was graciously able to ignore her ignoring me, and Miss Wetter glowed until I thought her veins would burst their seams.
The Egg and I Page 17