The Egg and I (22 page)

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 Jeffrey 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."

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.

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 desserts 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.