The Egg and I (8 page)

Also the water was so hard it should have been chipped out of the spring and even when mixed 40-60 with soap produced nothing but a greasy scum and after a day spent scrubbing clothes in that liquid mineral I could peel the skin off my hands like gloves.

I entered all of the soap contests in the vain hope that I would win $5000 and never have to use theirs or any other washing powder again as long as I lived. I failed to understand why farm wives were always talking about the sense of accomplishment they derived from doing a large washing. I would have had a lot more feeling of accomplishment lying in bed while someone else did the washing.

Tuesday—Ironing!
Ironing with sad irons has nothing at all to do with preconceived ideas about ironing. It is a process whereby you grab a little portable handle and run over to the stove and plug it into an iron which is always covered with black. Then you run back to the ironing board and get black on your clean pillowcase. You take the iron over to the sink and wipe it off and it is of course too cool, by now, to do any good to the dirty pillowcase so you put it back on the stove and repeat the process until your husband comes in and wants to know where in HELL his lunch is.

Bob was irritatingly casual about my washing and ironing and was continually putting on clean clothes, when he could get them away from me. I got to be just like a dog with a bone over anything I had washed and ironed. It wasn't that I wanted him to act like the advertisements and come dancing into the kitchen in his underwear clutching a clean shirt and yelling "No tattle-tale gray this week, little Soft-hands!" It was just that I wanted him to be conscious of the fact that it took a terrific amount of back-breaking labor to keep us in clean clothes and occasionally to comment on it. "Heaven knows," I would say in exasperation, "you expect and get praise for your work—acting like you delivered every egg with high forceps." I was that way on winter Mondays and Tuesdays—it all seemed so futile.

Wednesday—Baking Day!
Each Wednesday plunged me headlong into another, great, losing battle with bread-baking. When I first saw that fanatically happy look light up Bob's face when he spoke of chickens and realized that this was his great love, I made up my mind that I would become in record time a model farm wife, a veritable one-man-production line, somewhere between a Grant Wood painting, an Old Dutch Cleanser advertisement and Mrs. Lincoln's cookbook. Bread was my first defeat and I lowered my standard a notch. By the end of the first winter, in view of my long record of notable failures, I would probably have had to retrieve this standard with a post-hole digger.

To begin with, the good sport, so the mountain legend has it, made her own yeast by grinding up potatoes, using ONE DRY yeast cake PER MARRIAGE; kept the yeast alive by adding potato water and never allowing the yeast bowl to get cool. I had been on the farm a matter of seconds before I saw that the only way I could keep anything consistently warm would be to stuff it down the front of my dress, so I gave up the homemade yeast idea and resorted to deceit and fresh "store-boughten" yeast.

My first batch of bread was pale yellow and tasted like something we had cleaned out of the cooler. I tried again. This batch had the damp elasticity of the English muffin that tasted like something we had intended to clean out of the cooler but was too heavy.

At Bob's gentle but firm insistence I took a loaf, still quivering from the womb, to a neighbor for diagnosis. Unfortunately, the neighbor, Mrs. Kettle, was just whipping out of the oven fourteen of the biggest, crustiest, lightest loaves of bread I had ever seen. I put my little undernourished lump down on the table and it looked so pitiful among all those great bouncing well-tanned beauties that I had to control a strong desire to jerk it up, nestle it against me protectively and run the four miles home.

Mrs. Kettle had fifteen children and baked fourteen loaves of bread, twelve pans of rolls, and two coffee cakes every other day. She was a very kind neighbor, a long-suffering wife and mother and a hard worker, but she was earthy and to the point. She picked my stillborn loaf from the table, ripped it open, smelled it, made a terrible face and tossed it out the back door to her pack of mangy, ever hungry mongrels. "God-damn stuff stinks," she said companionably, wiping her hands on her large dirty front.

She moved the gallon-sized gray granite coffee pot to the front of the stove, went into the pantry for the cups and called out to me, "Ma Hinckley had trouble with her bread too when she lived on your place." I brightened, thinking it might be the climate up there on the mountains, but Mrs. Kettle continued. "Ma Hinckley set her bread at night and the sponge was fine and I couldn't put my finger on her trouble till one day I went up there and then I seed what it was. She'd knead up her bread, build a roaring fire and then go out and lay up with the hired man. When she got back to the kitchen the bread was too hot and the yeast was dead. Your yeast was dead too," she added.

Having quite obviously been given the glove, I hurriedly explained that we had no hired man and the barn was now a chicken house. Mrs. Kettle heaved a sigh for all good things past and poured our coffee. With the coffee she served hot cinnamon rolls, raspberry jam and detailed accounts of the moral lapses of the whole country. It was almost noon when I left for home, clutching a loaf of Mrs. Kettle's bread, two pocketfuls of anecdotes for Bob and a few hazy instructions for myself.

On the long walk home I attempted to strain my baking formula from the welter of folklore but, from that day forward, my wooden bread bowl was to me a sort of phallic symbol and as I kneaded and rolled the unwilling dough I mulled over the little unconventionalities of my neighbors and wondered through which window the hired man used to beckon to Ma Hinckley.

Mrs. Kettle had told me that I didn't work fast enough. That "store-boughten" yeast should never be set the night before and the bread had to be made quickly in one morning. I worked like a frenzied maniac and I baked three loaves of bread twice a week and it made the house smell peasantry and in my letters home I referred very often to my homemade bread, but Bob's reaction—standard—was the true criterion of my success. He said only, "Will it cut?"

Tuesday and Wednesday were also optional bath days. Saturday was a must bath day but because of fires all day for ironing and baking we also took baths on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. This cutting down from daily bathing to a maximum of two complete baths a week wasn't at all hard for me nor for anyone else who has ever taken a bath in a washtub. Washtub baths are from the same painful era which housed abdominal operations without anæsthetics, sulphur and molasses in the spring, and high infant mortality. Both Bob and I are tall—he six feet two inches—and even with conditions right, Stove going, the water warm and scented, towels large and dry (always large and slightly damp in winter) the fact remains that the only adult capable of taking a bath in a washtub in comfort is a pygmy.

A sponge bath in the sink was no sensual orgy either but it was quicker and got off some of the dirt.

Thursday was SCRUB Day!
Window washing, table leg washing, woodwork washing, cupboard cleaning in addition to the regular floor scrubbing. I indulged, somewhat unwillingly, in all of these because Bob, whom I accused of having been sired by a vacuum cleaner, was of that delightful old school of husbands who lift up the mattresses to see if the little woman has dusted the springs. I didn't dare write this to Gammy; she would have demanded that I get an immediate divorce. I didn't really object too strenuously to Bob's standards of cleanliness as he set them for himself as well, and you could drop a piece of bread and butter on his premises, except the chicken houses, and I defy you to tell which side had been face down. There was just one little task which brought violent discord into our happy home. Floor scrubbing. By the end of that first winter I vowed that my next house would have dirt floors covered with sand. In the first place Bob had chosen and laid, with great precision and care, white pine floors. Another type of floor which might possibly get as dirty as white pine, or more quickly, would be one of white velvet. Bob was very thoughtful about wiping his feet but he might as well have hiked right through the manure pile and on into the kitchen. I scrubbed the floors daily with everything but my toothbrush, yet they always looked as if we had been butchering in the house for the past four years. Advice from neighbors had been to use lye, but as many of these lye prescribers were missing an eye or portion of cheek—which tiny scratch they laughingly said they got from falling in or over the lye bucket—I filed lye away as a last resort.

I heartily resented having to scrub my floors every day. I thought it a waste of valuable time and energy and accomplished nothing for posterity. I didn't see why beginning with the rainy season we didn't just let the floors go, or cover them with cheap linoleum. But no, mountain farm tradition and Bob's vacuum cleaner heritage had it that I should scrub the floors every day—it was a badge of fine housekeeping, a labor of love and a woman's duty to her husband. The more I was shown of that side of the life of a farmer's good wife, the more I saw in the life of an old-fashioned mistress. "Just don't let anyone tempt me on a linoleum floor." I would growl balefully at Bob.

Friday—Clean lamps and lamp chimneys!
I have heard a number of inexperienced romantics say that they prefer candle and lamp light. That they purposely didn't have electricity put into their summer houses. That (archly) candle and lamp light make women look beautiful. Personally I despised lamp and candle light. My idea of heaven would have been a ten million watt globe hung from a cord in the middle of my kitchen. I wouldn't have cared if it made me look like something helped from her coffin. I could see then, and candles could go back to birthday cakes and jack-o'-lanterns and lamps to the attic.

In the first place you need a set of precision instruments and a hair level to trim a lamp wick. Even then it burns straight across for only a moment, then flares up in one corner and blackens the chimney. It's a draw whether you want to use half your light one way or the other—either with the wick turned up and one side of the chimney black or the wick turned below the light line. According to Sears, Roebuck the finest kerosene lamp made only gives off about 40 watts of light so you're a dead cinch to go blind anyway, according to Mazda.

Candle and lamp light are supposed to make your eyelashes look long and sweeping. What eyelashes? Most of the time my eyelids were as hairless as marbles from bending over the lamps to see why in hell those clouds of black smoke.

Saturday—Market Day!
In winter Bob left for "Town" while it was still dark, to sell the eggs, buy feed and groceries, get the mail, cigarettes and some new magazines. In spring and summer I joyfully accompanied him, but in the winter driving for miles and miles in a Ford truck in the rain was not a thing of pure joy and anyway, in view of the many ordinary delays such as flat tires, broken springs, plugged gas lines, ad infinitum, I had to stay home to put the lights in the chicken house at the first sign of dusk.

Some Saturday mornings, as soon as the mountains had blotted up the last cheerful sound of Bob and the truck, I, feeling like a cross between a boll weevil and a slut, took a large cup of hot coffee, a hot water bottle, a cigarette and a magazine and
went back to bed
. Then, from six-thirty until nine or so, I luxuriated in breaking the old mountain tradition that a decent woman is in bed only between the hours of 7
P.M.
and 4
A.M.
unless she is in labor or dead.

Along about three-thirty or four o'clock on Saturday I had to light the gasoline lanterns—the most frightening task on earth and contrary to all of my early teachings that anyone who monkeys around gasoline with matches is just asking for trouble. I never understood why or how a gasoline lantern works and I always lit the match with the conviction that I should have first sent for the priest.

Bob patiently explained the entire confusing process again and again, but to me it was on the same plane with the Hindu rope trick, and it was only when he was not home that I would tolerate the infernal machines in the same room with me. I used to take them out into the rain to pump them up, then crouching behind the woodshed door I reached way out and lit them. Immediately and for several terrible minutes they flared up and acted exactly as if they were going to explode, then as suddenly settled back on their haunches to hiss contentedly and give out candle power after candle power of bright, white light. With two lanterns in each hand I walked through the complete dejection of last summer's garden, ignoring the pitiful clawings and scratchings of the derelicts of cornstalks and tomato vines shivering in the rain, and hung the lanterns in the great chicken house which instantly seemed as gay and friendly as a cocktail lounge. When the frightened squawks of a few hysterical younger hens had died down, I stood and let some of my loneliness drip off in the busy communal atmosphere.

The floor was covered with about four inches of clean, dry straw, and the hens sang and scratched and made little dust baths and pecked each other and jumped on the hoppers and ate mash and sounded as if they were going to—and did—lay eggs. They were as happy and carefree in November, when the whole outside world was beaten into submission by the brooding mountains and the endless rain, as they were on a warm spring day.

Then I gathered the eggs. Gathering eggs would be like one continual Easter morning if the hens would just be obliging and get off the nests. Cooperation, however, is not a chickenly characteristic and so at egg-gathering time every nest was overflowing with hen, feet planted, and a shoot-if-you-must-this-old-gray-head look in her eye. I made all manner of futile attempts to dislodge her—sharp sticks, flapping apron, loud scary noises, lure of mash and grain—but she would merely set her mouth, clutch her eggs under her and dare me. In a way, I can't blame the hen—after all, soft-shelled or not, they're her kids.