The Egg and I

by Betty Macdonald

  From that day forward Bob had wonderful luck with Miss Wetter and came home loaded with books and pamphlets on Making the Small Farm Pay; Coccidiosis, Its Cause and Cure; How Many Chickens Can One Man Handle? and so forth for him, and the first thing either of them could lay their hands on for me. The mythical library which she was supposed to have purchased failed to materialize while I had traffic with Miss Wetter; or else, as I suspected at the time she told us of the deal, the new library was the twin sister of her own and the new Lives of Christ and Types of Manure and How To Know Them melted into her own stock and became indistinguishable. Included in one offering for me, selected by Miss Wetter and delivered by Bob, were Opera Made Easy for Tiny Tots and Tom Brown at Rugby. All I can say for Miss Wetter is that if her library was circulating I should hate to see one at a standstill.

  Late that second summer Miss Wetter sent me a series of articles which she had clipped from some paper (with malice aforethought) about a woman and her very aimless husband who by their own choice lived out of the reaches of civilization on the Pacific Coast. This woman was a very, very good sport about everything including eating seaweed and not having her husband work. She didn’t have lights, water, radio, toilet, bathtub, movies, neighbors or money and she just LOVED it. Miss Wetter sent it to me, I’m sure (and perhaps Bob had a finger in it too), for the purpose of bringing to light my own bad sportsmanship. But it was wasted effort.

  The articles affected me the same way as a book which Deargrandmother sent Mary and Cleve and me when we were children. It was a slender book with a dark red cover filled with good thoughts and illustrated with steel engravings. There were “Birds in their little nests agree,” “How doth the little busy bee,” “Many hands make light work,” “We live in deeds not years,” “Early to bed and early to rise” and others of that ilk. We didn’t care much for the book, for the pictures were ugly and the content was dull. Anyway we liked Slovenly Peter with its fascinating pictures of children with their eyes coming out and their legs broken off and all of the characters thoroughly bad. But there was one thought and picture in the little red book of good thoughts which absolutely infuriated us. The verse said, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, again!” and the picture was of a smug, near-together-eyed girl sitting on a little stool, her buttoned, picky-toed shoes crossed primly, sewing doll clothes. The doll dress on which she was sewing was of the round hole for the head stove-pipe sleeve variety, and scattered on the floor around the nasty little girl were dozens of the shapeless dresses which she had apparently spoiled.

  By the time I was halfway through the second article by Miss I-Love-Hardships, she had become the near-together-eyed little good-thoughts girl grown up. I don’t mind people making the best of inconveniences; in fact, I admired that quality in this woman and the articles would have been fine if she had let it go at that. But no, she had to become so hysterically happy that she made living out of doors in the winter up here sound like a vacation in Tahiti. She said that they didn’t even build a shelter—they just slept on the ground so they could be close to nature and had only the trees and the stars for walls and a roof. That was too much. I threw the articles across the room, for anyone in this region knows that from the first of September until the last of June we either have to have a roof and four walls or a coating of duck feathers. And if we lay on the ground and looked heavenward, as she said they did, for more than fifteen minutes at a stretch, we’d drown.

  I was so incensed by this misrepresentation that I told Mrs. Kettle about it. I said, “This woman said that they lay on the ground outside the year ’round.” Mrs. Kettle evidently missed the point, for she said, “Well, she’s gotta nerve writin’ about it. Mertie Williams laid up outside with Chet Andrews and her old man caught ’em and there was hell to pay. He woulda shot Chet, but he’d been havin’ trouble with Mertie anyways, and so he was glad to have the excuse to get her married.”

  Mrs. Kettle was working on a patchwork quilt. Seated in the black leather rocker around which the floor had been thickly carpeted with newspapers, she was sewing small octagonal pieces of gingham about an inch in diameter, on a clean bleached feed sack. The center of the design was an octagon sewn to a large octagon of plain color; from each point of the center were sewn pieces, and to each of their points more pieces. The edges were carefully turned under and the piece attached to the large octagon and to the feed sack by tiny stitches. From Mrs. Kettle’s ample lap cascaded a large finished section of the quilt. It was very attractive. I said as much and Mrs. Kettle said, “I’ve made one of these here quilts every year since I was married. Got ’em in the closet in the spare room—I figger it’ll be something real nice to leave the kids when I die. You’d oughta take up quiltin’ ‘stead of readin’ them damn fool books all the time. Piecin’ a quilt is real quietin’ work. Here, leave me show you how.”

  She reached down at her side and produced a clean folded feed sack and a large blue octagon. She threaded me a needle and started me attaching the large octagon to the feed sack. She reached behind her and pulled the coffee pot to the front of the stove, and then we settled down with our sewing. Mrs. Kettle said, “When I set and sew like this I think about things. When I was first married I was neat and clean and tried to keep my house and my kids clean, but Paw’s a awful lazy old bastard and it was fight, fight, fight all the time to get him to fix the fences, clean the barn, wipe his feet, change his clothes, and finally I give it up. I says to myself, ‘I can’t make Paw change and be neat, so I’ll have to change and be dirty, or it’ll be fight, fight, fight all our lives,’ and so I got easier and easier and found it don’t really matter one way or the other. Sure he tracks in manure and he don’t clean the barn and last week the cheese factory sent us a warnin’ about dirt in the cream, but he’s real good-natured and he’s never lifted a hand to one of the kids and anyways I don’t see that Birdie Hicks is so much better off with her Christly scrubbin’ from dawn to dark.” She heaved to her feet and said, “Git some of them rock cookies out of that jar in the corner of the pantry and I’ll pour the coffee.”

  Some time later I left for home laden with quilt pieces and full directions for the entire layout. I finished one square after dinner and, although I punctured both hands to pulpy masses and was almost blind, I darted about the house holding up the square to see the effect of piece-quilt walls, piece-quilt curtains, piece-quilt doilies. Bob refused to evidence any enthusiasm over this wonderful new accomplishment of mine and stolidly read aloud from the American Poultryman an unusually dull article on coccidiosis, stopping dead at the end of every line regardless of content. The clock on the shelf above the kitchen sink ticked loudly, the stove shifted the position of its wood occasionally. Sport whined plaintively in his sleep, an owl hooted, the coyotes began their nightly howling and the evening droned on. The next night I firmly placed my piece-quilt square in the bottom drawer with “Just call me Myrtle’s” cut-out dresses, sorted over Mrs. Hicks’ latest contribution of magazines, and settled down happily with a story about a murder in a night club.

  Mrs. Hicks kindly bestowed on me all of her old magazines. She brought them up to me well wrapped in her contempt for the printed word. Her excuse for having the nasty things in the house at all was a desire for “receipts and pattrons,” and she nearly always managed to not include the end of a serial. In those women’s magazines I read thousands of stories about girls named Ricky, Nicky or Sticky and boys named Brent, Kent and Trent. They all earned enormous salaries in advertising agencies, and the girls, as totally unjustified rewards for being both dull and usually disagreeable, had great big apartments full of heat, light and conveniences. The only thing that kept me going, as I read these stories day after day, was the thought that Ricky, Nicky and Sticky would probably get their just deserts whether the authors knew it or not, because Brent, Kent and Trent, in spite of their prodigious business acumen and witty repartee, were American men and average (the author implied) and therefore they would either bore Ricky, Nicky
and Sticky to death talking about a little chicken ranch or they would cash in on some of those hundred thousand dollar accounts and buy a little chicken ranch. “Then let’s see how gay, how smooth, how burnished-headed you are, girls.” I would sneer as I ripped the magazine in two and then carefully put it back together again with transparent tape, so I could read some more stories and get mad the next night.

  Verna Marie Jefferson, the moonshiner’s wife, sent me up hundreds of True Story, True Confession, True Love, Dream World, etc., which she bought for the pictures since she couldn’t read. I read them all and was fascinated and ashamed. Here I was complaining and I didn’t know what a problem was. Was Bob a thief? Was Bob a murderer? Did my Mother drink? Did my sisters smoke doped cigarettes? Then what was I complaining about?

  To supplement my reading I wrote letters. I wrote long letters to everyone I knew and wondered, while I was doing it, why I, who had nothing to say, was able to fill four and five pages while William Lyon Phelps never wrote more than a few meaty lines. Among the letters I received were monthly ones from Deargrandmother addressed Dear Child Bride, which I found intensely annoying, because it brought to mind pictures of a ten-year-old girl in pigtails and bare feet being dragged to the altar by a great hairy brute. I wrote to Mother and demanded that she make Deargrandmother stop addressing me in this depressing way, but Mother characteristically replied, “Why stop her? She enjoys it and it doesn’t hurt you.” In fact, even mentioning the child bride business to my family was a mistake, for from that time on all of their letters were addressed—and sometimes on the outside of the envelope—Child Bride.

  One time Bob went away on business and left me on the ranch alone over night—at least he thought he had. It was summer and sultry. I did the chores while great black clouds surged angrily around the mountaintops and the sky became dark and swollen. Coming back from my last trip to the chicken house and with only the ducks and the pig left to feed, I was surprised to find Elwin Kettle in the yard in one of his old cars with a top. He said, “Maw says there is going to be a storm and she wants you to stay all night at our house. It’s O.K. about the chickens. I’ll drive you up first thing in the morning. She said to bring the baby’s bottle and come on.”

  I was very touched by her thoughtfulness, but a little apprehensive about sleeping arrangements. I need not have been. Mrs. Kettle took me upstairs to the “spare” room which was immaculate, had a large brass bed with one of the beautiful finished quilts on it for a counterpane; a very pretty braided oval rug on the floor; clean ruffled curtains at the windows; and a large bureau with an embroidered bureau scarf, an oblong pincushion with an embroidered cover on it, a mother-of-pearl dresser set complete with a hair receiver and picture frame (a very deluxe catalogue item) and a vase of large red crepe paper roses. It was very cozy there with the dark clouds outside the window bumping into each other and grumbling menacingly and the wind whining in the tree tops. Mrs. Kettle showed me the closet full of quilts, and the baby shoes and hair of each of the children, the bureau drawers packed with Christmas presents all in their original boxes and never used and consisting mostly of nightgowns with heavy tatted yokes, towel and washrag sets, guest towels and crocheted doilies. By the time we had finished examining everything the storm had broken and the thunder roared and the lightning flashed and the rain hammered relentlessly on the roof over our heads. Mrs. Kettle had to leave me to get out the leak pans since the roof had begun to leak some ten years before. Paw hadn’t gotten around to fixing it and each year the winds tore off more shingles and the leaks increased until it had reached a state where she kept a great stack of cans and pans in the upper hall. At the first drop of rain she distributed them over the upstairs. Anne and I were assigned two empty coffee cans—one at the foot of the bed and one in the closet. As I undressed the baby and got her ready for bed, the pink! pink! of the leaks dripping into the cans played a little tune.

  After I had given Anne her bottle and settled her for the night, I joined the Kettles in the kitchen. The chores were done and they were all gathered around the kitchen table, reading the local papers and talking about the dance to which the older boys were going and which was seventy miles away. The only car that was running had no lights, and Elwin intended to drive it over the mountain roads by sense of smell, evidently. Maw protested mildly. She said, “Elwin you’ve turned over three cars on that road and two of ’em are at the bottom of the gulch. You was just lucky you turned over where you did—you go runnin’ off the road up by the old logging works and you won’t come limpin’ home with only a busted arm.” Elwin said, “Ah, I know that road like a book.” Maw said, “Well, what page was you on when you run off the road the last three times?” Elwin said, “Well, once I had a blowout, and once the axle broke and the other time I skidded.”

  Paw said, “Jutht remember, thon, you pay for your own funral.”

  Elwin said sulkily, “Well, what am I supposed to do, climb out of my coffin and go to work until I git enough for the funral?”

  Everyone laughed and Paw said, “It ain’t no laughin’ matter. How about thome thupper, Maw?”

  So Maw and I brought to the table great bowls of plain boiled navy beans, boiled macaroni and fried potatoes. Already on the table were pickles, bread, canned peaches and rock cookies. We all had cups of coffee, which was strong, but not venomous, since a fresh pot had been made just after I arrived.

  After supper Maw and I “redd” up the dishes, but we couldn’t wash them right away for the older boys had to wash (very lightly) and comb their hair at the sink in preparation for the dance. When they had finally left with admonitions to be home before milking time and to drive slowly (wasted breath), Maw and I washed the dishes while Paw and the three little boys took a bicycle apart in one corner of the kitchen. The area back of the stove and around the woodbox showed no evidences of the brooding it had done earlier in the year, but there was a very heady odor in that vicinity because of the wet barn clothes of Paw, the work clothes of the boys steaming behind the stove and the many pairs of work shoes drying on the oven door. Heady odor or not, the Kettles’ kitchen had a warm human feeling in comparison with my own clean lonely kitchen further up the mountain. The Kettles, owing no doubt to their struggle for existence, had developed strong family ties; and they had generously, for this stormy evening, allowed me to become one of them. It was “Us Kettles against the world.”

  Maw and I sewed on her quilt and occasionally put wood in the stove and sneered at everyone who had more worldly goods than the Kettles. “Seventy-two poles Charlie Johnson had to buy to bring ’lectricity in to their ranch and he had to help set ’em too. But did that satisfy Nettie? No. She had to have a ’lectric stove, a worshing machine, a ‘lectric iron, a vacuum cleaner. Jeeeeeeesus Keeeeeeerist, I says to her, you’d think you was a invalid. I’ve worshed for fifteen kids and done it all on a board and with a hand wringer and I ain’t in a hospital yet, I says to her.”

  “I wath up there yethtiddy,” Paw said, as he stirred some vile-smelling tire-mending concoction on the stove, “and Charlie wath butchering and I athk him for the thpare ribth becauthe they kilt two pigth and I knowed that the two of them couldn’t eat all them thpare ribth, but that thtingy thkunk thaid, ‘The reathon I’M BUTCHERING, MR. KETTLE, is becauthe I need the meat,’ and I wath tho mad I forgot the egg math I had borried.”

  Maw said, “Well, I would have told him to take them spare ribs and stuff ’em.”

  I said, “What else could they do with all of those spare ribs?”

  Maw said, “Oh, I suppose they give them to some of Nettie’s relations. She’s related to every sonofabitch in the country.”

  I said, “Well, anyway when we butcher Gertrude and Elmer, our pigs, I’ll give you all of the spare ribs you can eat.”

  Maw said, “You and Bob are real good neighbors, Betty, but honest to Gawd some of these bastards don’t seem to know what the word neighbor means. Pull that coffee pot to the front of the stove, Paw.”

&
nbsp; About nine-thirty we all retired. I had on my outing flannel pajamas and was just about to blow out my candle when Maw called to me to come to their bedroom across the hall. I took my candle and tiptoed out into the hall, which ran the full length of the house and from which opened eight doors, not counting my room or Mrs. Kettle’s. I was a little hesitant about going in, but Maw was standing by the window in a voluminous outing flannel gown, beckoning to me. “Put your candle on the dresser and come here,” she said in a vibrant whisper. She had the window opened wide and the wet night air carried the sweet smells of wet earth and evening scented stock, which grew in a great clump below Mrs. Kettle’s window. She said, “Look there, down by the south gate, the lightning struck the old maple.”

  I looked and made out the outline of half of the maple lying across the road. The other half hung torn and bleeding against the pale summer evening sky. The rain had stopped while we were at supper and all that remained of the storm were the dying tree and the splat, splat, splat of the dripping eaves. Maw stared morbidly at the fallen tree for a few minutes more; then, carefully closing and locking the window, took her candle from the dresser and put it on a chair beside the bed. From the bed came the rhythmic beat of heavy breathing and occasional gulp, gulp, snort of a broken snore. Paw had evidently fallen asleep as soon as he touched the pillow and he must have been very tired for I noted that he wore a felt hat pulled down well over his ears, and the usual layers of dirty underwear and dirty sweaters. Maw sat heavily down on her side of the bed, causing Paw to spring up and slant alarmingly but not to waken. She said, “Paw always wears a hat in bed. He says his head gets cold.” I realized suddenly that I had been staring in rude fascination at Paw whose mustache twittered on the ends with each gulp and snort, while his eyebrows drew together menacingly with each indrawn breath. I hastily picked up my candle and left.