Entertainment offered us chicken ranchers was: Saturday night dances—from twenty-seven to seventy-five miles away; moving pictures in near-by towns, seasonal entertainments at the schools—interesting only to the parents of the participants; monthly basket socials given by the churches—these socials were owned and operated by Birdie Hicks and her ilk and were for the sole purpose of gossiping and eating; occasional private parties such as the Indian picnic or the birthday party for Mrs. Kettle; and the county fairs.
Bob and I referred to anything social as either “the theatah” or “the dahnse” due to an unusual contact we had made during our first year on the ranch. It was a bright fall day and we had been out trolling for salmon. We had just returned Sharkey’s boat and were walking down the beach to the car when we noticed a woman and some children digging clams. The woman was clad in a few shreds of hip boots, men’s trousers, a gunny-sack apron, a purple knitted shawl, and had two long, dusty brown braids swinging from her head. With her were four children—a couple of them by necessity on all fours. They were all filthy and not bright. It was not an inspiring encounter and Bob and I quickened our pace, but to no avail, for the woman straightened up and hallooed to us. We stopped and she hurried up. “I am Mrs. Weatherby,” she said with a great air. “And this is Mary Elizabeth,” she indicated the biggest and blackest of the children, “Pamela Lorraine”—this one was a drooling crawler, “John Frederick”—his eyes only opened a tiny crack so he had to tip his head way back to see us, “and baby, Charles Lawrence.” Charles Lawrence was eating a raw clam. We started to introduce ourselves but she waived it, with “Oh, my goodness, I’ve heard all about you. I knew the day you moved out here. I even know,” she waved a dirty finger at me, “that you are expecting.” (My God, I thought, I hoped it won’t be marked.) “Now the children and I were just going up to the house for a bite and we want you to come along with us. We simply won’t take no!” she laughed, batting her eyes and exposing her bad teeth. I was fascinated by her and wanted to go; Bob seemed unable to cope with the situation and numbly followed. Mrs. Weatherby tripped along in front of us, occasionally pausing to scoop one of the children out of the brush and back onto the path which led up a bank from the beach and into the second growth. The path was littered with empty cans, bottles, discarded clothing, papers, empty boxes, broken furniture and other junk. The litter grew thicker as we approached the house until we were picking our way through a sizable dump. The path ended, we looked up and there was the house leering drunkenly at us from its unsteady stilt legs, more cans and bottles pouring from its open door like lava from a crater. “I hope you’ll excuse us,” called Mrs. Weatherby from the doorway, “I just couldn’t bear to be cooped up in the house on such a lovely day, so I left my housework and took the children to the beach.” They must have been gone for about five years, I thought, judging by the little household tasks which had accumulated in her absence. The tin sink was so covered by dirty dishes and pans and cans and bottles that it was possible to tell it was a sink only by the dripping faucet. The oven door was gone from the rusty range and the floor, drainboards, chairs, table, washbench and an old army cot were hidden entirely by newspapers and magazines. Mrs. Weatherby took a heap of newspapers from two rickety chairs, kicked the cans in front of them under the sink and bade us welcome. “It’s been so long since I’ve entertained anyone but the local folk,” she said gaily, “that we’re going to have a real treat.” She bent over and began fumbling under the sink and finally emerged with a bottle. “It’s only Chianti, but it is wine,” she laughed and I noticed that one of the heavy dusty braids had dipped in something under the sink for it was wet at the end and dripped. She got jelly glasses from a shelf and filled them, giving each of the slobbering children a little of the wine mixed with water. She said, “The little French children have wine so why shouldn’t Mary Elizabeth, Pamela Lorraine, John Frederick and baby Charles Lawrence, even though they aren’t French?” [or children, I added grimly to myself]. It was a grisly performance because the children were actually drooling idiots, but not so grisly as what was to come. While Bob and I held our wine, trying to gather up enough courage to drink it, Mrs. Weatherby got a stool out of a corner, knocked the carton full of magazines from it to the floor, climbed up on it and began rummaging around in a high cupboard. As she rustled around up there, I stole a look at Bob. He sat staring at the wine and looking like a man who has just been clipped by an iron pipe. “Oh, here it is,” squealed Mrs. Weatherby finally, and down she came clutching a big gray bundle in her dirty hands. She began slowly and carefully to unroll it, meanwhile telling us the secret. “I made it myself last year [she said yeah] but there was no occasion to warrant my using it, so I wrapped it up and tucked it away and how glad I am, for fruitcake is so improved with age.” She had finished the unrolling and at first I thought—“It can’t be!—it can’t be!” but it was. The fruitcake had been rolled in a rather soiled suit of someone’s long underwear. The cake was small and dark and I prayed that there would not be enough to go around, but Mrs. Weatherby served Bob and me before giving a thin slice to each of the droolers. Then, seating herself on the stool, one elbow on the dirty drainboard of the sink, one hand daintily holding the fruitcake, the fingers of the other carefully encasing the glass of wine, Mrs. Weatherby told us about the “quaint folk” of that country. She said, “When I first moved up here among these folk, I was dreadfully distressed by the ignorance, the complete absence of any form of culture. I said to Mr. Weatherby, ‘I don’t know how I’m going to go through a winter without the symphony, the theatah or the dahnse.’” She batted her eyes and nibbled at her fruitcake, waiting for my reaction. I said, “What did you do?” She said, “Why, my deah, I organized a study group. We were to meet every other Thursday—light refreshments, you know—and we would study and discuss. Music I thought would be the first subject—just simple little melodies at first—then a little stronger, and a little stronger, until we were at last able to digest a whole symphony. I had rather an ex-tensive course planned but it fizzled out. I learned to my sorrow,” she took a sip of wine, “that these folk are truly simple children of the soil and they wish to stay that way.” I could imagine where Mrs. Kettle had told Mrs. Weatherby to put her symphony and her study group. Mrs. Weatherby continued, “And there is no spirit of cooperation at all. Time and again I have offered to help them put on little things at the schoolhouse, but they are still angry over the hot lunch ruckus and won’t have anything to do with me.” She waited for her cue so I said, “What hot lunch ruckus?” She said, “Surely you have heard?” “No,” I answered. “Well,” said Mrs. Weatherby, “it was at one of the grange meetings and the women were talking about having a hot lunch served at school. I said, and I had every right, that I could not approve such a program until I had inspected the school kitchens to be sure they were sanitary. Honestly,” said Mrs. Weatherby, “from the uproar that ensued you would have thought I had questioned the ladies’ legitimacy.” I knew that if I caught Bob’s eye I would explode, so I stood and thanked Mrs. Weatherby for the refreshments and we left.
When we got in the car, Bob said, “That woman! Completely nuts!” But I had an awful foreboding that given time I could be like Mrs. Weatherby, without the idiots of course. Where had she come from? Who was Mr. Weatherby? What had happened to him? Mrs. Kettle, when questioned, said, “Nobody knows where she come from. Sharkey says she washed up on a high tide. She’s married to the most worthless, drunken Indian in the whole country and he beats her unconscious every Saturday night. She never tells nothing about herself. When she first come over here she put on lots of airs and tried to teach us about music—‘the theatah and the dahnse’ [Mrs. Kettle waved the stove lifter like a baton and half closed her eyes in great disdain]—but her neighbors wouldn’t have none of that stuff and now she just stays home in that dump or takes them kids down to play with the clams.” Poor, poor Mrs. Weatherby with nothing in her life but those names, Mary Elizabeth, Pamela Lorraine, John Fr
ederick and Charles Lawrence. How she rolled them around on her tongue, savoring them to the last drop. I tried rolling Anne Elizabeth around on my tongue but it was too plain and easy. I was safe for a little while yet.
My first contact with the “theatah” was the grade school Christmas entertainment which I attended with Mrs. Hicks. The entertainment was notable for a smell of manure which came in with and hovered over the audience like a swarm of insects and a snowflake waltz danced by ten little jet black Indians whose only claim to snowiness was the whites of their eyes.
Our next brush with the entertainment world was “the dahnse.” “The dahnse” was a country dance held every Saturday night, week in, week out, year in and year out. Sometimes the dance was twenty-seven miles away; sometimes seventy-five miles over tortuous mountain roads, but everyone attended. The farmers and their wives and families went because they were Grange members and often the different granges sponsored the dances. The farmers and their wives danced, helped with and provided the food, and behaved themselves. The loggers and millworkers went to the dances to get drunk. They wouldn’t for a moment have considered dancing and, after standing on the sidelines and shyly watching for a while, they’d go outside, get uproariously drunk, usually manage to get in a fight, and toward morning could be found either asleep in their cars or in an all night restaurant in the nearest town. The Indians danced, drank and fought at the dances. They were also the cause of the ruling that once inside you had to stay or pay again. “This,” explained Mrs. Hicks who escorted us to our first dance, “is to keep couples from dancing one dance and then going out to their cars to drink and you-know-what.” “No, what?” asked Bob wickedly.
It was late September of the second year before we felt the need or the urge to go to a dance, and even then it was not Bob’s idea, but “A dance every two years or so won’t spoil you for the simple life,” he laughed and told the Hickses we would go with them. Having never been to a country dance in all of my life I didn’t know what to wear but when I asked Bob he got his voile and leghorn look, so I wore a suit and my hurty alligator pumps and realized as soon as we arrived that I could have worn anything from a housedress to a crumpled taffeta party dress. Mrs. Hicks had on a blue flowered print, a touch of orange lipstick, stiff dippy waves low on her forehead and lots of bright pink “rooje” scrubbed into her cheeks. Her stockings were deep orange service weight and she had her feet encased in long black patent leather slippers with high heels which made her walk with her behind stuck out. Mr. Hicks wore his town suit, the tightest collar in the world and a remarkable hair-do wherein the hair was parted in the middle, wet down thoroughly, while from each side a small group of front hairs were laid back as though they were to be fastened with barrettes. It gave him a look of careful elegance which was unfortunately marred by a strong smell of Lysol. Mrs. Hicks probably made him put it in his bathwater. Mrs. Hicks was wearing Rawleigh #5 and Lysol. Bob was well-groomed, divinely handsome and a little drunk.
We arrived at the dance hall, a large square building, at 8:30 exactly. There seemed to be hundreds of cars from which people were disembarking while shouting to people in other cars, calling anxiously to children who were climbing on radiators, over fenders and into other cars. There was apparently no system to the parking—you just drove into the yard wherever you could, and turned off the motor. Mrs. Hicks, however, directed Mr. Hicks to a spot at the back of the hall near a side road so that we could leave whenever we wanted to. We walked around to the front past several parked cars where couples were already in the back seat drinking, and up on the porch where the tickets were sold. As soon as Bob had the tickets he gave them to a doorman who stamped PAID in purple ink on the backs of our hands and we went inside. The dance hall was very large and brillantly lighted; festooned with dusty green and pink crepe paper streamers; heated to approximately 90° and packed with dancers. The orchestra on a raised platform in the center of the hall consisted of a piano, accordion, violin, trumpet and saxophone manned by hard-working sweaty musicians. The music was very loud. Along each of the four walls ran a bench piled high with coats and as I discovered later, sleeping children of various ages. During intermissions I watched mothers shuffle through the coats until they found their child, hurriedly change its diapers and as often as not, whip out a large breast and nurse the baby through the next dance.
We found a vacant place on a bench, took off our coats and folded them, Birdie Hicks scrubbed a great deal more of the “rooje” into her cheeks and we were ready. Bob and I danced the first dance which was one of those double quick hops that are the delight of country dancers. We stood it for a few minutes, then retired to the sidelines. While we watched the twirling and hopping Bob warned me that I was to dance with anyone who asked me as even a faint display of choosiness would brand me as a snob and immediately and irrevocably ruin my social career. As that dance ended Bob wandered over to speak to some of his logger friends and I stood ready to obey his wishes and dance with the first person who asked me. Of course the first person who asked me was a tiny Filipino, Manuel Lizardo, who rolled his r’s so that I could barely understand him and was so short I could hardly hear him. He had his trousers pulled up to his armpits and we must have made a striking couple as we danced around the floor, me crouching like a broody hen over Manuel who, with head thrown back and teeth all exposed was entertaining me with witticisms such as “The mussssssss-eeeeek isssssss ssssso loud it sssssounds like barrrrrrrrrrnyarrrrrrd ahn—ee—mahls. Haa-ha-ha-ha-ha! Ho-ho-ho-ho!” After he had stood on his tiptoes and screamed this at me for the fourth time I understood and laughed dutifully. Bob oozed by like an oil slick with a very beautiful, bad-looking Indian girl, plastered so tightly to him that I expected to see the print of her dress rubbed off on his jacket when they disentangled. I tried to catch his eye but he was intent on his work and didn’t look up.
As each dance ended the dancers joined hands and marched around and around the floor until the music began again or there was an exchange of partners. By the end of the third straight dance Manuel had lost his smile and given up the wit and I was wondering what every other woman at the dance had which I seemed to lack, when Mr. Hicks came to our rescue. He grabbed me firmly around the waist, leaned forward and strode purposefully around the hall. The result was that I was bending way over backward, doing little running steps on my toes between Mr. Hicks’ legs and expecting momentarily to do a back flip over his iron arm. The music stopped at last and I begged to sit out the next dance. Mr. Hicks gallantly offered to sit out with me but was immediately claimed by Birdie’s mother who came skipping up in a pink taffeta dress and little dirty white canvas strap slippers. “Can’t bear to sit out a single dance—too full of pep!” she tittered, as Mr. Hicks set his vise and strode away. As they passed by the first time I saw that Mother had relaxed like a scarf over the arm, her little fluffy head bobbed spasmodically and the little dirty white canvas slippers made jerky futile attempts to reach the floor.
Cousin June floated by with Manuel and, judging by the teeth and ho, ho, ha, ha, ha’s, Greek had met Greek. All around the edge of the floor children danced and rassled and fought and banged into the dancers. Women danced together and sometimes three people would dance together screaming with laughter at their originality. Everyone was having a wonderful time.
Suddenly the music stopped, and the entire crowd and the orchestra surged to one end of the hall where the bad Indian girl and some farmer’s wife were pulling each other’s hair and smearing each other with richly appropriate epithets such as “Cross-eyed daughter of an egg-raising whore” and “Dirty clam-eating black bitch.” The Indian girl was the drunkest so she was put out, the music began again and we danced until supper. Supper, served at midnight in the basement on long tables, consisted of hamburgers, potato salad, cake, ice cream and big mugs of coffee.
After supper I danced twice with Bob and once with a very drunk sailor who called me “a very poor shport” because I refused to let him lower me by the ankl
es from a window where a pal of his waited with a drink some twenty feet below. “I’m dishappointed in you,” he said, blinking and swaying. “I’m sorry,” I said, “but my husband is very strict with me.” Then I saw Birdie’s mother across the room, coiled and waiting for her next partner. I grabbed the sailor and gave him a little shove in her direction. “That little lady over there in the pink dress is just the person you’re looking for,” I told him. “I know that she’d love to get a drink from your pal.”
Whether Mother was lowered out the window to Pal I never knew, for we left while they were still dancing, but I can picture her flipping out the window and up and down between Bluejacket and Pal like a yo-yo on a string. So much pep!
As we started the long drive home Mrs. Hicks began tossing us back bits of gossip picked up at the dance. The last I remember was “and Mrs. Cartwright’s son’s wife, Helen, lost her mother and then a tube and both ovaries. . . .” I wondered drowsily if she had lost them at the dance and then fell asleep with my nose buried in Bob’s shoulder which smelled of cheap Indian perfume.
The most outstanding of all (five) of the social events to which we were invited during our stay in the mountains, was Mrs. Kettle’s birthday dinner. We were the only outsiders asked, which was a singular honor; it was a Kettle gathering on Kettle soil and our first introduction to them en masse.
One very hot July morning Mr. Kettle and Elwin drove up to the house, to borrow some egg mash. I invited them in for a cup of coffee but Paw refused. He said, “Thure would like to but you thee itth Mawth birthday tomorrow and Elwin and I are trying to get a little help with the haying tho we will be free to thelebrate. Do you thuppose that Bob could thpare uth a little time?” I said, “Bob is working on the water system and I know he won’t be able to help. What about the other boys? Can’t they help?” Elwin said, “Haw, haw, haw! Help with the haying? They gotta work in the woods.” Paw said, “That’s the WAY IT GOETH. THE BOYTH WON’T help and the old lady can’t do it all alone.” I said, “I thought you and Elwin were going to do the haying.” Elwin said defensively, “I gotta get my car fixed before Saturday.” Paw said, “Mr. Olson cut our hay last year and Maw raked and stacked it—I wath havin’ turrible trouble with my back—but theein ath how tomorra is Mawth birthday we thought we would give a little thupper party for her and we want you folkth to come but she’ll be tho buthy she won’t have a chance to help with the hayin’.”
The Egg and I Page 23