The Egg and I (9 page)

The rooster, now, is something else again. He doesn't give a damn if you take every egg in the place and play handball. He doesn't care if the chicken house is knee-deep in weasels and blood. He just flicks a speck from his lapel and continues to stroll around, stepping daintily over the lifeless but still warm body of a former mistress, his lustful eye appraising the leg and breast of another conquest.

Bob used to say that it was my approach to egg gathering which was wrong. I reached timidly under the hens and of course they pecked my wrists and as I jerked my hands away I broke the eggs or cracked them on the edges of the nests. Bob reached masterfully under the hens and they gave without a murmur. I tried to assume this I-am-the-master attitude, but I never for a moment fooled a hen and after three or four pecks I would be a bundle of chittering hysteria with the hens in complete command.

Bob usually got home from "Town" around five and nothing ever again in all of my life will give me ecstatic sensation as did the first sound of his returning truck. Every few seconds I dashed to the windows to note the progress of the lights and then finally in he came, smelling deliciously of tobacco, coldness and outdoors and with his arms laden with mail, newspapers, magazines, cigarettes, candy and groceries. How we reveled in those Saturday nights, smoking, eating, reading aloud and talking; unless, perhaps, as sometimes happened, I had forgot to order kerosene. Then I squeezed the can and poured all of the lamps together and turned way up the wick of the one lamp with the scant cup of kerosene in it. But the effect of the pale, scant-watted light, the sweating walls and Bob's set mouth and hurt eyes was more than a little as if we were trapped in an old mine shaft. Stove loved situations like that and added to the general discomfort by quickly turning black whenever I lifted his lids, then taking advantage of the murky gloom he would put out his oven door and gouge me in the shins. Bob was never one to scold, but he showed his disappointment in me by leaving the table still chewing his last bite and thrusting himself into bed, to dream, no doubt, of the good old days of wife beating.

Sunday!
In the country Sunday is the day on which you do exactly as much work as you do on other days but feel guilty all of the time you are doing it because Sunday is a day of rest.

Sunday mornings I cleaned Stove's suit, taking all of the spots off his vest and coat, and it evidently pleased him for he stewed chickens and roasted meat and even exuded a little warmth. Excited by his compatibility, I would mull over recipes for popovers, cup cakes and other hot oven delicacies but would eventually slink back to deep apple pie, as I could use automatic biscuit mix for the crust and our apples were delicious no matter what I did to them.

Also because of Stove's Sunday attitude I washed my hair on that day and guided by the pictures in Saturday's magazines would try the latest hair-dos. Unfortunately my hair is heavy and unmanageable and my attempts at a pompadour usually ended up looking like a Tam o'Shanter suspended over one eye. It made little difference, though, except as a diversion for me, because presently Bob would come in from the chicken house and look hurt and I would put my hair back the old way. I believe that Bob's mother must have been frightened by a candy box cover while she was carrying him, because he wanted me to wear long hair done in a knot, the color blue and leghorn hats, all of the time.

By one o'clock on winter Sundays the house was shining clean, my hair was washed, Bob had on clean clothes and dinner was ready. Usually, just as we sat down to the table, as if by prearranged signal, the sun came out. True it shone with about as much warmth and lust as a Victorian spinster and kept darting behind clouds as if it were looking for its knitting and sticking its head out again with an apologetic smile, but it was sun and not rain. The mountains, either in recognition of the sun or Sunday, would have their great white busts exposed and I expected momentarily to have them clear their throats and start singing
Rock of Ages
in throaty contraltos.

For the few minutes on Sunday when I was not within actual striking distance of Stove or the sink I was wiping up the mud I had tracked in from the woodshed. Bob would be occupied for two full shifts just chopping wood and carrying water. After dinner we would indulge ourselves by grading and packing eggs.

Winter day succeeded winter day and winter week succeeded winter week and the only thing that varied was the weather. No wonder the old timers looked so placid—they didn't have a damn thing to mull over. The days slipped down like junket, leaving no taste on the tongue.

Infiltration

Whatever my original attitude was, I became reconciled to certain things as unavoidable chuckholes in my road of living on a chicken ranch and grew to accept placidly certain other things, which at first had called for hyperboles of enthusiasm, as just everyday smooth places.

One of the worst chuckholes was getting up at four o'clock in the morning. I got used to it but I felt so strongly about it that many mornings I wondered aloud if I would have married Bob if I had known that this went along with him. He used to laugh at me and swear that he told me but I think it as unlikely as to have courted me with, "And another wonderful thing, dearest, an old prostitute friend of mine is going to live with us." I found that an alarm clock going off at my head at 4
A.M.
did nothing toward awakening me—it merely produced shock and when I recovered I was sleepier than ever. I learned that the only solution was to leap from bed at the first jangle, throw on my clothes—and then there is one thing to be said for an outhouse, a brisk walk the first thing in the morning does wake you up.

Bob didn't mind getting up. In fact, he seemed to enjoy it and was odiously cheerful. When the dark winter mornings came around and the rain seemed to be pushing the roof down on us, Bob generously offered to get up and build the fires while I lolled in bed. Of course I accepted and the first morning he tumbled out, managing to untuck the covers on my side and to admit great draughts of chill air between the sheets. "Get some more sleep," he said loudly as he stamped and grunted into his clothes. "I'll soon have a fire." And so I burrowed down into drowsiness and warmth and thought "I have married, without a doubt, the most wonderful man in the world." But I had reckoned without Stove. Suddenly I was ripped from unconsciousness by the crashing of stove lids and my teeth rattling to the rhythm of the ash shaker. This was quickly followed by billows of black smoke and a stream of curses predominated by roars of "Big Black Bastard." When I hurried to the rescue, Bob was amazed and said innocently, "No need for you to get up. Should have slept until I got the fire going." I refrained from stating that it would have been stretching a point to ask a person to stay dead in that racket. From then on I continued to arise and cope with Stove myself.

Definitely a smooth place was the food. I accepted as ordinary fare pheasant, quail, duck, cracked crab, venison, butter clams, oysters, brook trout, salmon, fried chicken and mushrooms. At first Bob and I gorged ourselves and I wrote letters home that sounded like pages ripped from a gourmand's diary, but there was so much of everything and it was so inexpensive and so easy to get that it was inevitable that we should expect to eat like kings. Chinese pheasant was so plentiful that Bob would take his gun, saunter down the road toward a neighbor's grain field and shoot two, which were ample for us, and come sauntering home again. At first under Bob's careful guidance I stuffed and roasted them, but finally I got so I ripped off the breast, throwing the rest away, and sautéed it in butter with fresh field mushrooms. It made a tasty breakfast. The blue grouse were also very plentiful, but the salal berries which they gorged on gave them an odd bitter taste which neither Bob nor I cared for. Quail were everywhere but they are such tiny things that we finally passed them up for the ruffed grouse and the pheasant. There were literally millions of wild pigeons in the valleys. They descended in white clouds when the farmers planted grain and in actual self-defense they shot them even though they were protected by Federal law. Our neighbors gave them to us by the dozens and they were simply delicious, all dark meat and plump and succulent from eating the farmer's wheat, barley, oats and rye. I regret to state that their illegality didn't taint the meat one iota for me. Bob is a fine hunter and a good sport and he, at first, lectured the farmers and their sons on the seriousness of their offense in shooting the pigeons, but the first time he was present at grain planting time and saw what they did to the crops, he told me he thought there should be a bounty on them. He never shot one, however, nor admitted that he enjoyed eating them.

Venison we had twelve months a year, both canned and fresh. To the Indians, who comprised a great part of the population of that country, and to the farmers, who were part Indians, deer meat was meat and game laws were for the city hunters who came in hordes every fall to slaughter all of the bucks. Our local any-season-hunters said they killed only the barren does, which were easily distinguished by their color and which were a nuisance. True or false, the Indian hunters went through the woods without as much disturbance as a falling leaf and the only game warden able to catch them would have been another Indian, and so we had an Indian game warden and the other Indians and the farmers continued to hunt when ever they needed meat and we, in the heart of the deer county, had venison the year round.

Bob usually cooked the game. We underwent this little ordeal because he was of the opinion that only he, and perhaps the chef at the Waldorf, knew how to cook game. With venison he used lots of garlic, pinches of sage, marjoram, bayleaf, pepper, salt, hundreds of pots and pans, Worcestershire, celery salt, onion salt, mushroom salt and everything else he could grab with his large floury hands. When the meat was finally in the oven he hovered around the stove getting in my way and complaining about the quality of the wood (that same wood which he had praised so highly to me and with each armful of which he had guaranteed white heat). When at long last with reverent hands he served me a portion of the venison steak, chops or roast, I found that it tasted just like venison and palled after the second week. Canned with small carrots and onions the venison was delicious. The gamey flavor lost some of its identity in the preserving process and, when the jars were opened months later, the deer meat emerged as a savory stew.

Mushrooms grew profusely around the barns of all the neighboring farms and in our fields. Those around the barns reached a diameter of six inches and the buttons were the size of a baby's fist. Those in the fields were smaller but just as sweet and nutty. One of my early lessons in self-reliance from Daddy had been "How to tell a toadstool from a field mushroom." He bought a large, expensive and profusely illustrated set of nature books including one on mushrooms and toadstools, and for several years we gathered specimens and looked them up and were defeated by the mushroom book's vacillating attitude. "Some are poisonous and some are not," it stated vaguely underneath all of the pictures except those of the field mushroom and the Destroying Angel. Under the picture of the common field mushroom it stated, "This mushroom is often mistaken for the Destroying Angel." Under the picture of the Destroying Angel it said, "This toadstool is often mistaken for the common field mushroom." So Daddy had us gather large quantities of the Destroying Angel (which is so poisonous that even breathing the spores is dangerous) and large quantities of the common field mushroom in all sizes, from the tiniest button to the full grown kinds, and learn to tell them apart at a glance. We must have learned, because we are all alive and all ardent mushroom gatherers.

The seafood in the Pacific Northwest is superb. The Dungeness hardshelled crabs are the largest, sweetest most delicately flavored crabs obtainable. In Seattle and Portland markets they were usually from 30c to 75c each depending on size. (Today they are sold by the pound and even the medium-sized crabs cost 85c each.) We bought them from the Indians for one dollar a gunnysack full. We'd go on regular crab sprees—eat cracked crab with homemade mayonnaise well-flavored with garlic and Worcestershire, until it ran out of our ears. Have deviled crab, crab Louis and crab claws sautéed in butter and served with Tartar sauce. We never tired of crab and in summer we went often to Docktown Bay, an exquisite little cove below Docktown which was emptied and filled by the tide, and leaned over the sides of a flat-bottomed boat and with long handled nets scooped the scuttling crabs from under seaweed. They didn't compare with the Dungeness crabs, which are gathered from deep icy water, but they were wonderful when boiled on the beach and eaten warm.

This small bay also supplied us with clams—either the large delicately flavored butter clams, which we dipped in flour after removing the neck and stomach, and fried in butter, or the tiny but stronger flavored Little Necks, which we steamed and ate by the bushel. Docktown Bay was a small, warm, horse-shoe-shaped cove with a tiny island, about two hundred and fifty feet long by fifty feet wide, in the center of the bay like a dark green dot. When the tide went out it emptied the bay and you could walk to the island and scramble up its steep sides, climb to the top of one of its many trees and feel like Marco Polo. It was a child's island—just the right size and with the slowly returning tide supplying excitement without actual danger. Nearly always, after a picnic, one or two children would be trapped on the island by the tide and then Sharkey, an old Indian with a tremendous head, who lived in a shack on the beach across from the island, would untie his boat, clamber in and row slowly across, shouting in a booming voice, "I'm comin'—I'm comin'."

Sharkey gave me my first geoduck. I had been hearing about geoducks ever since first coming to Seattle. People spoke of them with the mystic reverence usually associated with an eclipse of the sun or the aurora borealis. I had heard that geoducks are giant clams and, like dinosaurs, now extinct. I had heard that geoducks have to be dug by flashlight at night. I had heard that they moved like greased lightning, opening and closing their great shells like a clamshell dredge and getting down to the bowels of the earth in a matter of seconds. I had heard that geoducks have to be dug by a crew of strong men all armed with shovels and all working like demons. I had heard that the only way to catch a geoduck was to take a hatpin and pinion his neck and then excavate under him. I had heard that geoducks were worth driving hundreds of miles and digging all night to get, for they were the most subtly flavored, most succulent of all seafood.