The Egg and I (6 page)
The first day we moved all of the furniture into the house and I thought that the next day we would start putting in windows, laying new floors, painting woodwork and sheathing the walls. That's what I thought. The next day we started building a brooder house because to get started with the baby chickens was the important thing. Bob cut the log stringers about twenty-five feet from the building site, hauled the rest of the lumber from the mill and I split the shakes with a dull chipped frow and many vigorous curses. We built the brooder house in the prettiest part of the orchard, facing the pond and the mountains, and its newness was so incompatible with the other silvery buildings that I suggested to Bob that we plant a few quick growing vines and perhaps a shrub or two to tone it down a little. He was as horrified as though I had suggested bringing potted plants into a surgery. "Brooder houses are built on skids so that they can be moved from place to place as baby chickens must have new UNTAINTED soil," he said. This still seems an unnecessary precaution to me, for the land up there was all of it so untainted, so virginal, that I expected the earth to yell "Ouch" when we stuck a spade into it and any germ that could have survived the rigors of that life would have been so big and strapping we could have seen it for blocks. However, the brooder house was built on runners and remained an eyesore, except for the shake roof, which weathered beautifully.
When the brooder house was finished and the seven hundred and fifty yeeping chicks and the brooder were installed therein, I thought we would then begin on the house. The nights were very cold and it rained at least three of the seven days a week and I thought we might pamper ourselves with a few windows and doors. That's what I thought. The most important thing was to build two small pullet houses and to whitewash the walls of and lay a new floor in one of the small chicken houses so that the cockerels would be comfortable while fattening. We built the cockerels a nice yard also and then we remodeled the other small chicken house for the baby pig because the pig must be comfortable and protected from the cold night air and the damp day air. By the time we finished those buildings it was May. A cold damp May with so much rain that mildew formed on our clothes in the closets and the bedclothes were so clammy it was like pulling seaweed over us.
"Now," I thought, "we have all the livestock warm and comfortable, surely it is at last time to fix the house." That's what I thought. It was time to plow and plant the garden. I had read that the rigors of a combination of farm and mountain life were supposed eventually to harden you to a state of fitness. By the end of those first two months, I still ached like a tooth and the only thing that had hardened on the ranch was Bob's heart.
Right after breakfast one May morning he drove into the yard astride a horse large enough to have been sired by an elephant. Carelessly looping the reins over a gatepost he informed me that I was to steer this monster while he ran along behind holding the plow. All went reasonably well until Birdie, the horse, stepped on my foot. "She's on my foot," I said mildly to Bob who was complaining because we had stopped. "Get her off and let's get going," shouted the man who had promised to cherish me. Meanwhile my erstwhile foot was being driven like a stake into the soft earth and Birdie stared moodily over the landscape. I beat on the back of her knee, I screamed at her, I screamed at Bob and at last Birdie absentmindedly took a step and lifted the foot. I hobbled to the house and soaked my foot and brooded about men and animals.
That evening Bob and I sat opposite each other for two hours sorting and cutting seed potatoes. The billing and cooing of the newly married love birds consisted of, "This is an eye. An eye is a sprout. A sprout makes a plant. Each piece must have three eyes." "Is this an eye?" "No!" "Why not?" "Oh, God!"
I thought, as I lay in bed that night listening to Bob snore and the coyotes howl, "The lives of Elizabeth Browning and Beth in
Little Women
weren't half bad. I wonder if Elizabeth would have been so gentle and sweet if in answer to one of her Bob's whims she had had her foot stepped on by a horse."
When the garden, about 50 feet by 350 feet, had been plowed, disked, harrowed and dragged until the deep brown loam was as smooth as velvet, it was planted to peas, beets, beans, corn, Swiss chard, lettuce, cabbage, onions, turnips, celery, cucumbers, tomatoes and squash. The preparing process was repeated on an acre or so in the back field which was planted to potatoes, kale, mangels and rutabagas.
Then I was drafted into the stump-pulling department. The scene was the orchard and my part in the activity was to try and grab the chain as the horse walked by, fasten it around the trunk of a fir tree before the horse shifted her position and it wouldn't reach, shout "Go ahead" to Bob and forget to get out of the way of the heavy sprays of damp loam. Clearing land is very satisfying work because you have something definite to show for your efforts, even if it is only a large hole. In the orchard it was wonderful to watch a little fruit tree huddle fearfully as we worked to remove a large bullying fir; then when with a last grunt the protesting fir was dragged away and the earth patted back on the fruit trees' roots, to watch the little tree timidly straighten up, square its shoulders and stretch its scrawny limbs to the sun and sky.
When the last fir had been hauled away to the stump pile the other side of the east fence to be burned the next winter, Bob and I pruned away dead limbs on the fruit trees and made guesses as to varieties of fruit. We knew by the blossoms that there were early and late apples, cherries, pears, plums and prunes, but we had no way of knowing which trees would bear and what they would bear. Unfortunately the sturdiest trees turned out to be the poorest varieties and many of the trees bore nothing or merely two or three wizened nubbins. By fall, however, we were sure that we had two Gravenstein, one Wealthy, one Baldwin, one Winter Banana and two Yellow Transparent apple trees; two Italian prune trees and a greengage plum tree; three or four Bartlett and two Seckel pear trees, several Bing cherry trees which bore a cherry per tree, and the grandfather cherry tree in the backyard that was some obscure variety which no visiting nurseryman was ever able to identify. This tree was a prolific bearer, a late ripener (around the last of August) and the cherries were large, bright red and crunchy with juice and sugar. Because of its great vigor and evident health, it was the only tree on the ranch which escaped the ravages of Bob's pruning. While we were still in the process of clearing the orchard, Bob saw an advertisement in a farm magazine for a pruning guide and it seemed a sensible thing to have, so he sent for it. It came promptly and with it also came a large colored sheet of required tools and implements. Bob sent for them all. Curved saws, short shears, long shears, short clippers, long clippers, knives and machetes. All implements of destruction. That first year Bob practised on the vines and shrubs, reducing them to stumpage with a few sure strokes. The next spring he fixed the orchard. "This must come off," he would say squinting first at the pruning guide and then at the lone live limb on the tree. And off it came and the tree died.
"Suckers!" he sneered, grasping the only live shoots on a quivering plum tree, and snipping them off with his vicious clippers. The tree died. Bob was hurt. "That's what they said to do," and he pointed out the instructions. "Yes, but perhaps they refer to new, young trees," I suggested. "Our trees are probably forty or fifty years old and weak and starved."
"And better off dead," Bob concluded, but seemed relieved when I showed him that the climbing rose on the kitchen window was going to live after all.
When the gardens were finished and the orchard had been cleared and plowed, we started on the big chicken house. Up to this time we had been buying all of our building materials from the Docktown sawmill and our groceries from the company store, but now we had to have special items like glass cloth and heavy mesh wire so we took a trip to "town."
"Town" was the local Saturday Mecca. A barren old maid of a place, aged and weathered by all the prevailing winds and shunned by prosperity. Years ago the Town with her rich dot of timber and her beautiful harbor was voted Miss Pacific Northwest of 1892 and became betrothed to a large railroad. Her happy founders immediately got busy and whipped up a trousseau of three-and four-story brick buildings, a huge and elaborate red stone courthouse, and sites and plans for enough industries to start her on a brilliant career.
Meanwhile all her inhabitants were industriously tatting themselves up large, befurbelowed Victorian houses in honor of the approaching wedding. Unfortunately almost on the eve of the ceremony the Town in one of her frequent fits of temper lashed her harbor to a froth, tossed a passing freighter up onto her main thorofare and planted seeds of doubt in the mind of her fiancé. Further investigation revealed that, in addition to her treacherous temper, she was raked by winds day and night, year in and year out, and had little available water. In the ensuing panic of 1893, her railroad lover dropped her like a hot potato and within a year or so was paying serious court to several more promising coast towns.
Poor little Town never recovered from the blow. She pulled down her blinds, pulled up her welcome mat and gave herself over to sorrow. Her main street became a dreary thing of empty buildings, pocked by falling bricks and tenanted only by rats and the wind. Her downtown street ends, instead of flourishing waterfront industries, gave birth to exquisite little swamps which changed from chartreuse to crimson to hazy purple with the seasons. Her hills, shorn of their youthful timber in preparation for a thriving residential district, lost their bloom and grew a covering of short crunchy grass which was always dry and always yellow—lemon in spring, golden in summer and fall. She wore her massive courthouse like an enormous brooch on a delicate bosom and the faded and peeling wedding houses grew clumsy and heavy with shrubbery and disappointment.
Of late years a small but gay army post and a thriving branch of the Coast Guard settled within arm's length, but the Town shunned their advances, preferring just to keep body and soul together through her little ordinary businesses. These were succored by the surrounding country and the mountain dwellers who referred to her disparagingly as the world's only lighted cemetery. All except me, that is, and to me "Town" spelled L-I-F-E!
I loved the long sweeping hill that curved down to Town: I loved the purply-green marshes we crossed at the bottom of the hill; I loved the whitecaps in the harbor and the spray lacing the edges of the streets; I loved the buildings squatting along the water on the main thorofare, their faces dirty but earnest, their behinds spanked by icy waves; and I loved the Town's studied pace, her unruffled calm, her acceptance of defeat.
We drove around her quiet streets, over her lovely hills and looked at her wonderful views, then we went into her shops, and we knew instantly that her customers were farmers and Indians. The grocery store smelled like sweat, cheese, bakery cookies and manure. The drug store smelled like licorice, disinfectant, sweat and manure. The hardware store smelled like commercial fertilizer, sweat and manure. The only place which managed to rear its head above its customers was the small candy store catering mostly to townspeople. I breathed in great draughts of its rich fudgy smells and bought a bag of vanilla caramels (pronounced "kormuls" by the proprietress) which had evidently never hardened for they stuck to the brown paper bag and to each other so stubbornly that I had either to turn back the bag and lick the brown lumpy mass therein or to pry off little bits of candy and brown paper and eat both. Finally I threw it away en masse and watched the sea gulls scream and swoop for it and was disappointed that they didn't fly up again all stuck together by the beaks.
We had three strokes of luck in Town on that visit. One was that a check of our bank balance found that it tallied with our check stubs and was holding up surprisingly well. Another was a tip on where to buy a dozen laying pullets for ten dollars. And the last was a ranch-warming present of a gallon of moonshine from the best of the local moonshiners, of which there seemed to be hundreds. The moonshine in a gallon jug was a dark amber color and had a hot explosive smell. We had a drink before dinner that night and it went down with lights flashing like marbles in a pinball game.
The next morning we had breakfast in that filmy period just before daylight and were busily at work on the big chicken house before sunrise. The work was hard and the task large but Bob and I, or rather, Bob impeded by me, had first to remove all of the big barn's viscera; then put in nests, dropping boards, roosts and windows on three and one-half sides (the other half was the doorway); and to install Healtho-Glass in the windows. Healtho-Glass was a glass cloth which, so the advertisements said, sorted out the sunlight and let in
only
the health-giving
violet rays
. The first day we put it up I half expected to find the chicken house suffused in soft lavender light and the hens scratching around under a purple spot. Actually Healtho-Glass gave the same type and amount of light as frosted lavatory windows.
Down the middle of the old barn were log uprights. We naturally didn't jerk these out although I thought it a fine idea until Bob pointed out drily that they held up the roof. We built mash hoppers between the uprights, whitewashed the walls even unto the rafters, swept and scraped the hard dirt floor—the barn, like most things there in the mountains, had gone barefoot all of its life and the soles of its feet were as tough and smooth as leather—and it turned out to be a very useful, though unorthodox, chicken house where we kept as many as fifteen hundred hens.
The first day the chicken house was finished Bob drove to Town and bought the twelve Rhode Island Red pullets for ten dollars and we immediately turned them into the great new house, where they rattled around like beads in an empty bureau drawer and, being chickens, instead of laying in the row upon row of convenient new nests, they laid their eggs on the dropping boards at the entrance of rat holes or out in the yard.