The Egg and I (31 page)

About eight o'clock Mrs. Hicks arrived with two chocolate cakes, two pounds of butter and two quarts of cream. The smoke had grown heavier with the lessening of the wind, but by closing all of the doors and windows I was able to keep most of it out of the house. A group of fighters arrived simultaneously with Mrs. Hicks and we had first to feed them before we could talk. Then we poured out cups of coffee and sank down to discuss the fire. I noticed with pleasure that in the excitement Mrs. Hicks had pulled the keg of whiskey over by the stove, had placed a pillow on it and was sitting there primly drinking her coffee.

Bob came excitedly in, grimy beyond recognition, and demanded help in soaking and loading in the truck the hundreds of feed sacks we had stored in the loft of the tool house. As we worked he told me that Jeff had the Kettles working at the point of his gun. He said that poor Maw Kettle was so humiliated about the whole thing that she had come to him in tears to ask if there wasn't something she could do. She had made coffee and fried bread and had fed many of the fire fighters.

After Bob had driven away with the wet sacks and ten milk cans of water, I went out to see how the heifer was reacting. She was in her stall, standing quietly but not eating. She had a nice new little barn beyond the pig houses, the farthest from the house of any of the buildings, so I led her back to the house and tied her to the cherry tree. Sport and the puppy trailed me everywhere, whining and begging me to explain the smoke and excitement. Sport's method of eliciting understanding and comfort from me was to shake hands. Every time I hesitated during the whole of that long, dreadful day, I would look down and there would be Sport, pale green eyes spilling over with love, offering me his large soft paw. By ten o'clock his paw and my hand were calloused and I was tired and scared so I yelled at him, "Oh, Sport, don't be such a bore!" Whereupon he gave me a look which said, "Here I am willing to die for you, trying to comfort you in your hour of need, and you speak to me like that." I gave him six chocolate creams and put him behind the stove where he remained for the rest of the night, shivering occasionally and whining steadily. Birdie Hicks left about ten-thirty with my promise that if anything happened I would stay with her indefinitely.

After she had gone I sat down by the stove with a magazine and I must have dozed for I was awakened by loud shouting down by the road. "This is it," I thought. "Let me see, should I wake the baby now, or wait until Bob comes." I was shivering and so I put some more wood on Stove thinking what a useless gesture that was when the whole house would soon be in flames. I put the diaper bag on the whiskey keg, laid my purse on the diaper bag, glanced out the window to see if the heifer was still tied to the cherry tree, and we were ready. I could hear voices coming up the lane and my heart beat wildly. "Where was Bob? Had the truck been burned?" The back door opened and Jeff came in looking like something from a minstrel show. He said, "It's all O.K. honey, the fire's in the burn and it's fixin' to rain in about ten minutes. Better start slicin' ham and fryin' eggs and boilin' coffee—there's an awful hungry mob on the way up."

I rushed and untied the heifer and led her back to her stall. The smoke was so thick it was like a heavy fog but there was a cool wet feeling in the air.

I fried eggs and ham and bacon and made toast and coffee until five the next morning. I also listened to the details of that and every other fire on the coast, since the days of the first settlers. Paw Kettle and the boys were very much in evidence, behaving like heroes instead of the guilty perpetrators of the disaster, and with the camaraderie produced by success and my keg of whiskey every one else adopted the same attitude, getting Paw to tell over and over when he first smelled smoke, what he did, if he lost any livestock, and so forth. I was very grateful when Paw at last brought the gathering to an abrupt close by pointing out that in the early days when a farmer needed a new barn all of his friends and neighbors got together and helped him build it. Being Paw, he couldn't let it go at that—he had to add, "And I heard tell that eath NEIGHBOR WOULD BRING thomething—thay, one would bring nailth—another the two by fourth, another THINGLE BOLTH . . ." Before he could finish this big lie, everyone but Bob and Jeff had eased out the door.

You Win

T
he next day it rained hard and all that remained of the fire were a hillside of glistening black stumps, occasional sharp cracks, wispy smoke and an acrid smell. Bob slept until noon, then arose groggily, gulped a cup of coffee and drove to Town to see about the lumber and millwork for an addition to the chicken house. He planned to brood twenty-five hundred baby chicks in the spring, which would give us, even with heavy culling of the old flock, two thousand laying hens the following fall. He also planned to buy a cow, scheduled to come fresh in March, one hundred baby turkeys and five young pigs. He was also going to see a farmer in the West Valley who had a light plant for sale.

Our future prospects were very good but my enthusiasm was at a low ebb. I was overtired by the fire and insufficient sleep and even the magic words "electric lights" couldn't dispel the gloom in my outlook. My life on the ranch had reached some sort of climax and it was the aftermath which worried me. We were just about to go into another long, dreary winter and I felt harried and uncertain as though I were boarding a steamer with no passport and no luggage. I was leaning on the drainboard of the sink, staring moodily out of the window at the driving rain and drooling eave troughs when a figure in a long billowing white dress and without a coat or hat came loping into the yard. My reactions were delayed that day, for I pensively watched while this odd person galloped through the rustic gate, her long dress flapping wetly at her legs, dashed over to the cherry tree, picked up a wooden duck of Anne's, cuddled it to her bosom and began dancing around and around the cherry tree. Suddenly I came to. Something was not right. The woman had a shorn head and was obviously crazy. "This is all I need," I remember thinking frantically. "This finishes it." I knew that there was not a lock on the house which would keep this woman out if she made up her mind she wanted to come in. I was so frightened that I was probably right on a mental plane with my visitor. All the blood had drained from my body with a rush, leaving me perfectly flaccid. I thought, "I must lock the doors. That will give me time." I got to the kitchen door somehow and locked it. The kitchen door had one of those ridiculous locks which is a small black box with a tiny lever on the top; an angleworm could have forced it. My fumblings at the back door attracted the woman's attention and she came running across the yard crab fashion and peered in the kitchen window. Her eyes rolled in her head like marbles and she laughed wildly as she hurried from window to window playing peek-a-boo with me. I was leaning on the stove whimpering, "What
will
I do? What will I do?" when I remembered the open screenless window in the baby's room where she was taking a nap. I grabbed the stove lifter and started for the baby's room which was across the living room on the other side of the house. I couldn't hurry. I felt as if I were wading in water up to my waist. It took every ounce of strength I could muster to push one foot ahead of the other. When I finally reached the baby's room the woman was there already, her head and shoulders in the open window. I brandished the lifter, feebly croaking, "Get out of here. Go away!" She stopped rolling her eyes and laughing and looked at me. Her face crumpled; she looked as if she were going to cry. Then, slowly she retreated from the window, turned and went loping off down through the orchard toward the Kettles.

I watched until she had rounded the first bend in the road, then I sank weakly down on the bed and thought, "Now I'm going to have hysterics. I'm going to explode just like a sky rocket." But the baby awoke then and, in the adorable way of babies, was overjoyed at seeing me and jabbered and held out her arms and that was that.

Bob came home an hour or so later and he had new magazines and cigarettes and candy and a truckload of lumber. He was bubbling over with ideas and plans for the ranch and so I waited until after supper to tell him about the crazy woman. I didn't even try to convey my terror because I knew by then that Bob and I were poles apart as far as emotions were concerned. I knew before I had finished the story what he would say and he said it. "Why didn't you get out a gun? Always remember that with a loaded gun in your hands you have the upper hand of anything." That was true for Bob but not for me. With a loaded gun in my hands the gun had the upper hand and besides, if you are the kind of person who grabs a stove lifter instead of a gun when danger is at hand, you are that kind of person and you have to face it.

After supper Bob and Anne and I drove to the Kettles' to find out if they had seen the crazy woman. Mrs. Kettle was not at all perturbed. She said, "Oh, she was in here this afternoon. She's the loony sister of a woman down in the West Valley. Mostly she is shut up in a institute but whenever they can save the money, they have her over for a visit. She won't hurt nobody—she's just loony."

"Where is she now?" Bob asked.

"Why, she's down at the Larsens' farm," Mrs. Kettle said. "They phoned for the sheriff and he'll probably send her back to the institute."

"Oh, root-ta-ta-toot, a root-ta-toot—we are the girls of the institute!" Bob sang as we drove home. I thought, "That valley woman must be even more isolated than I, if she's that desperate for companionship."

The next morning the storm had increased in tempo and there were pools on the floor beneath the open windows and the rain had oozed under the doors during the night. The baby's washing festooned the kitchen once more and Stove had his back up and refused to digest the fuel and became constipated with ashes. Swathed in oilskins Bob began work on the new chicken house. After I had finished the lunch dishes and put the baby down for her nap, I donned my rain clothes and went out to help him. I peeled stringers and measured two by fours. I ran and got the hammer, the saw, the level, the rule. I was more skilled than last year but I had lost all of my drive. Bob said, "Would you like to start splitting the shakes for the roof?" I loved to split shakes and ordinarily I would have been enthusiastic but all I could manage then, was a weary, "All right."

At dinner Bob shattered all precedent by suggesting that we drive to Town to a movie. He said he had asked Max Jefferson to stay with the baby, so we hurried with the dinner dishes and the chores, dressed, stoked the fire and then sat down to wait. When fifteen minutes had elapsed, we realized that we would have to see the second feature anyway, so took off our coats and Bob lit us each a cigarette. We sat and smoked and were self-conscious with each other. Bob studied the burnt end of the match he had used for our cigarettes, turning it around slowly in his lean brown fingers. I watched him and the clock ticked off the minutes. "Do you think he's coming?" I asked at last. "Oh, he'll be along," Bob said, not looking at me. I thought, "Heavens, we act like neighbors who suddenly find themselves in a hotel bedroom together." The clock ticked on. Bob said, "Did you order those hinges?" I said, "Oh, I forgot," and jumped up guiltily and started for the cupboard where we kept the catalogues. Bob said, "Don't bother now," and got up and put his cigarette in the stove. I came back and sat down. Bob was poking aimlessly at the fire, his back still toward me. I lit another cigarette and reflected, "Husband and wife teamwork is just fine except when it reaches a point where the husband is more conscious of the weight his wife's shoulder carries than of the shoulder itself." I said, "I don't think that Jeff is coming."

Bob said, "I guess not," and sat down and lit another cigarette.

The clock ticked on and after a while we went to bed.

October eased out and November slid into its place. We got up in the morning to the persistent steady thumping of rain on the roof and we lay in bed at night and listened to the persistent steady thumping of rain on the roof.

One Saturday I went to town but when I came home I knew it would be the last time that winter—driving so many many miles in the cold and rain in a truck was too hard on the baby.

Winter had come again but there was no excitement in the knowledge. No visions of exhilarating battles with piling snows; no shutting out of roaring blizzard; no sudden dramatic changes in the weather. It was the regular, gradual closing in of the mountains with rain, rain, rain, moaning winds and loneliness.

Just before Christmas Bob made an unexplained trip to Seattle. He was gone three days. The second day I ran out of kerosene and we had the worst storm the mountains could manage on such short notice. The wind screamed around the house like a banshee, the trees beat their breasts and moaned, and the night threw her musty cape over us at a little after four in the afternoon. I lit candles which sputtered feebly, poked up the stove, put the baby on the floor beside Sport and went out to do the chores. The animals all seemed apprehensive and hinted broadly that they would prefer to spend the night in the house with me, but I was firm and fed and watered them, then bolted their various houses and barns against the wicked wind. When I returned to the house, bedraggled and dripping, I found that the back door had blown open, the candles had blown out and the baby was howling. With trembling hands I relit the candles, poked up Stove and fixed the dinner. At five-thirty sharp we were all in bed. In the same bed. Anne and I under the covers at the top. Sport, the puppy, and the kittens at the bottom.

I left the candles lit although it was hard to choose between being burned alive and being scared to death.

The next morning dawned at last gray and wild. Bob came home at three, looking and smelling deliciously urban. He was so cheery that I hesitated about telling him that I had again forgotten to order kerosene and in the ensuing excitement I forgot all about it, and we spent another evening by meager candlelight. Bob had news. Wonderful news which he told me as he changed his clothes. He had gone to Seattle on the advice of the Town banker, to look at a chicken ranch which was for sale. He hadn't said anything to me because he didn't want to disappoint me if the ranch had proved a poor buy. But it hadn't. The buildings were sound and well built although in need of repairs and paint, the price was stiff but not unreasonable and the house was modern. In addition to all that, the Town banker had a buyer for our place. One with cash.