The Egg and I (26 page)

It was Cecil's idea that we drive to an inlet to see a log chute. He said casually one evening, "I think it would be fun to pack a picnic lunch and drive down tomorrow and watch them chute the logs into the water. Would you like to go, Betty?" Would I like to go? Hah! If he had suggested that we spend the day in the Crossroads cemetery or take a picnic lunch to the town funeral parlor, I would have given an enthusiastic yes. True, our social life had picked up somewhat by the end of that second summer, but I had as yet no need for a date book, for even I could remember that the day was Tuesday and that three weeks from the next Wednesday was Bob's grange meeting and that my next engagement was a Christmas party at the schoolhouse, approximately four months from Friday night.

I packed a lunch of fried chicken, stuffed eggs, tomatoes from the garden, and homemade bread. We stopped at a farm on the way and bought a gallon of ice-cold buttermilk for 10c and a market basket of sun-ripened peaches for 25c. It promised to be a good picnic no matter where we went. The inlet, a natural canal formed by the bed of an extinct glacier, was seventy miles long and about two miles wide. It extended south from Docktown through dense forests, along banks of huge gray stones with gnarled firs springing from their crevices at artistic intervals, past flat sandy flats with willow-fringed streams and lovely little bridges; beside oyster flats, summer camps, small towns and logging works. The road followed the inlet so closely that we were almost driving on the beach, and when we reached our destination, a place where the sand was fine and white and a small stream emptied into the inlet, we parked the car under a willow tree, stepped across the road and were on our picnic ground directly opposite the log chute. The shore on the other side, about a half a mile from us, was a steep bluff down the face of which extended the log chute. The first log came down while I was arranging the baby. I heard a tremendous dull boom, like a far away explosion, and turned around just in time to see a geyser of water shoot into the air for a hundred feet or more, burst like a rocket, fling crystal streams of water in all directions, and subside so slowly it was like watching a slow-motion picture. As the water cleared, the log bobbed up with a circle of ripples which spread and grew until they were washing the beach on our side with small slaps. It was such a tremendous spectacle that it seemed unbelievable we could sit comfortably on the beach eating our chicken and watch log after log come hurtling down. After lunch we went swimming in the lukewarm salt water of the inlet; then drove home in the late afternoon sunlight.

Coming back through the mountains, serene and cool in their dark green robes, I asked Cecil how long he thought our forests would last. He was very pessimistic. "Look," he said. "See those red flags?" I knew; they were planted every two or three miles. "Those flags mean 'Watch out for trucks' and trucks mean a skid road and every skid road means a logging outfit. The smaller the outfit the worse the waste. Improper logging is like a bum shot trying to shoot a certain man in a large crowd. He might get his man the first shot, but he's more likely to shoot two or three dozen innocent people trying to hit the man." I counted twenty-seven red flags on the way home. Some of them may have been old, some may have belonged to pole cutters, but even ten were too many.

Bob was so enthusiastic about logging, loggers, camp life and logging terms, that he asked Cecil if he would show him how to fell an enormous cedar on the back of our place. So one morning they set out, armed with Cecil's double bitted falling axe with narrow deadly sharp blades, and Cecil's falling saw which was so sharp and delicately set that they handled it like a soap bubble. For a while I heard the ring of axe blows, then pounding, then the even droning of the saw. Bob yelled for me to come out where they were. I didn't want to go at all. If both of us got clunked on the head by falling limbs, who would go for help? Who would care for the baby? Anyway, this job was extra dangerous because the tree had a bad lean. The shouting continued, however, so I girded up my loins and hiked out. I found them both standing on springboards which had been inserted in opposite sides of the trunk about five feet from the ground. These were necessary to avoid cutting through the swollen base of the tree. In the east side of the tree a deep cut had been made with the axe. The saw was almost through. The tree was swaying and groaning horribly. I thought it an excellent idea if they both got off those springboards and came back to the house and let the next storm take down the tree, but they laughed hearty man-laughs at me and continued to saw. Suddenly they took the saw out and began chopping vigorously. Then they both jumped down. Cecil shouted "TIMBAH!" and Bob echoed "
Timbaaaaaaaah!
" and with a sound like the indrawn breath of a giant the tree fell. It fell between two virgin firs and parallel to the road, so that it was easily accessible for sawing and hauling. In fact, it fell to the inch where Cecil had said it would. He was a wizard, but he had his broken skull to prove who was really boss.

AUTUMN

I saw old Autumn in the misty morn
Stand shadowless like silence, listening
To silence.

—
Hood
—

And Not a Drop to Drink

T
he well at the back of the place dried up during the spring; the spring at the foot of the orchard disappeared during the summer; and we carried August's and September's water from a spring in a valley eighteen hundred feet from the house if we cut across the burn, a mile and a half by road. I was really glad when the spring dried up, for it meant that Bob hauled the water in the truck in ten gallon cans and I didn't have to feel guilty if he caught me washing my face more than twice a day. Bob was so parsimonious with the water when he was carrying it, that one would have thought we had pitched camp in a dry coulee instead of being permanently settled in the wettest country in the world outside of the Canadian muskeg. "I have to have more water!" was my perpetual cry. "More water?" Bob would shout. "More water? I just carried up two buckets." "I know you did," I would explain patiently. "Two buckets equal twenty quarts. Twenty quarts equal five gallons and the stove reservoir holds five gallons. In addition to filling the reservoir I made coffee and boiled you two eggs, made cereal for the baby and wet my parched lips twice. The water is gone."

With set mouth Bob would go down through the orchard and dip out two more buckets. These would see me through the first tub of baby's washing. There were still the rinsings, the baby's bath, the luncheon tea, the luncheon dishes, the floor scrubbing, the canning, the dinner and the dinner dishes—not to mention occasional hair washings, baths and face washing. For these I carried the water from the spring myself—it was so much easier than explaining.

I estimated that I carried a minimum of sixteen buckets of water a day—sixteen ten-quart buckets or one hundred and sixty quarts a day for about three hundred and sixty days. Is it surprising that my hands were almost dragging on the ground and my shoulders sagged at the sight of anything wet? That I was tortured by mirages of gushing faucets and flushing toilets? I could not believe it when Bob announced casually one fall morning, "I'm going to start laying the pipe for the water system tomorrow." He had been plotting the course, tiling the spring and ordering equipment for a long time now, but none of it had been definite enough to bring running water out of the mirage department. But pipe laying was different. Each day I could actually watch the water being brought nearer and nearer the house—foot by foot.

Then the six hundred gallon water tank arrived, knocked down and looking disappointingly like a bundle of faggots. Bob spent a day out in the woods locating four poles, straight, clear and approximately eighteen inches at the butt end to support the platform for the tank. I scanned the bathroom fixture section of the catalogues, and Bob decided that the bathroom would have to go where my rhododendrons
sans
taproots were thriving. Did I care? Not a whit. I jerked them up and put them by the woodshed. We were all out for water.

Fall was a wonderful time in the mountains. The sun got up at six, but languorously, without any of her summer fire, and stayed shrouded with sleep until about nine. She shone warmly and brightly then, but I knew it wasn't summer because, though the earth was still warm and the squashes were still blossoming, when I looked heavenward I saw the tops of the trees swimming filmily in mists and the big burn smoked and smouldered with rising fog until noon.

Fall and school were still closely linked in my mind, and I could almost feel the pinch of new school shoes when I saw the first red leaf, heard the first hoarse shouts of fog horns. I remembered last fall when we had driven along a valley road one morning early and had seen the children scrubbed and clutching their lunch boxes, waiting at each gate for the school bus. I wondered if we would still be on the ranch when Anne started to school. I thought what a long day eight o'clock to four-thirty must be for six-year-old first graders. While I was absorbed in such reverie one morning, Bob shouted that the water tower was finished—except for the water. To the casual outside eye it was just a very sturdy, well-constructed platform on which rested a round wooden water tank. To me it was lovelier than the Taj Mahal.

Bob shouted down from the high platform, "I feel like running up an American flag."

I was so excited that I decided to go down and tell Mrs. Kettle about it. In the baby buggy I put Anne, a bucket of extra eggs and a half a chocolate cake and, with Sport and the puppy racing fore and aft, we started down. It was a delightful walk and our cheeks were rosy and our spirits high as we trundled up the last lap to the Kettles' porch. I was startled out of my intent maneuvering of the buggy wheels around axles, stray fenders, car parts and tools, by a terrified roar from Paw Kettle in the barnyard. I turned just in time to see him streak out of the milkhouse into the barn and to see the water tower, which was on a platform about thirty feet high and supported by four straddled spindly legs, give a great groan and collapse with a splintering crash on the milkhouse roof.

A geyser of water flooded the barnyard and frightened an old Chester White sow and her pigs so that they went right through the discarded bed spring which was part of the barnyard fence and disappeared into the oat field.

After a time things quieted down and Paw came sidling cautiously out of the barn and Elwin called from under his car, "Hey, Paw, you dropped something! Haw, haw, haw!" Maw shuffled down from the back porch and for a while they stood and looked. Then Paw whispered, "The bugger almotht got me! It almotht got me!" Maw said, "For Krissake, what happened?" Mr. Kettle looked belligerently at the hole in the milkhouse roof and at the shattered tank. "All I wanted wath a little piethe of two by four. How would I know the bugger'd collapthe." Mrs. Kettle said, "Paw, what
was
you doing?" Mr. Kettle said, "I needed a little piethe of two by four for the apple bin and I thought the other leg could hold her all right. I only took a piethe about a foot long from that leg by the milkhouthe." Maw said, "Well, I'll be goddamned. It was only a little piece you took out of the water tank support? What in hell did you think would hold it up—air?" She started back toward the house. I went with her. We left Paw still muttering, "It wath only about a foot long. Only a little piethe." Elwin was crowing delightedly, "I knowed what would happen when I seen the old fool sawin'. Haw, haw, haw!"

The next morning before seven Mr. Kettle was at the back door. "I heard you wath inthtalling a water thystem," he said as he scrambled off his wagon and adroitly intercepted Bob's intended escape through the orchard. "And I wondered if perhapth you had a few hundred feet of old pipe you wathn't going to uthe, thome extra fittingth OR THOME LUMBER, [preferably four thirty-foot four-by-fours to support a new water tower] AND THEN I WONDERED if you could thpare me a few dayth with the haying. We're awful late thith year, but the BOYTH WON'T HELP AND MAW AND I CAN'T do it all alone." Bob said rather sharply, "Of course I don't have any extra pipe. It was difficult enough to scrape together the money for the eighteen hundred feet we have to have, and how can I help you with the haying when I have almost a quarter of a mile of pipe to bury?"

Paw, not at all nonplussed, thought this over for a moment, then said, "Well, I tell you, Bob, the cream check wath pretty thmall thith month and I jutht thought that perhapth you had thome old pipe or perhapth you ordered too much and I wouldn't want to thee it wathted when I got good uthe for it."

Bob walked away in disgust, but Mr. Kettle didn't seem to mind and waved cheerfully to me as he drove out of the yard. I knew that he would be up the next day for something else.

The pipe burying progressed so slowly that Bob finally had to hire help. Jeff, the moonshiner, sent up a good customer of his who was temporarily out of work. Good Customer was a fine worker and an appreciative eater, but he was very fat and each day after lunch he settled himself in the kitchen rocker, spread a newspaper over his lap, unbuttoned his trousers and fell into a heavy sleep. Of course he was entitled to his lunch hour. He had a right to be comfortable and he tried to be modest; but I felt that that open fly was a slap at my dignity. I spoke to Bob, but he thought it very amusing and said that we were lucky to get Good Customer, buttoned or unbuttoned. I felt the same way before long, for Bob became ill. It was our first bout with illness of any kind outside of bear clawings, smashed toes and other ordinary mishaps. And it was sudden.