The business of lending our services was something else again, and after that first initial mistake, we seldom if ever granted any of Paw’s millions of request for help—help with the plowing, the sowing, the haying, the milking, the barn cleaning, the chicken house building, the gardening, the cess pool, the outhouse moving. He asked and was refused, but he kept right on asking, for that was Paw’s business—begging. He didn’t care what humiliations, what insults it entailed—it was better than working.
Actually the Kettle farm was the finest, or rather could have been the finest, in that country. They had two hundred acres of rich black soil, of which about twenty, including the acre or so rooted by pigs and scratched by chickens, were under cultivation. Their orchard, which was never pruned or sprayed, bore old-fashioned crunchy dark red apples, greengage plums, Italian prunes, russet and Bartlett pears, walnuts, filberts, chestnuts, pie cherries, Royal Anne’s and Bings. Their loganberry, currant, raspberry and blackberry bushes bore with only the spasmodic cultivation given them by rooting pigs and scratching chickens; their thirty-five Holstein cows were never milked on time, rarely fed and beset by flies and vermin but they gave milk, apparently from force of habit; their Chester White sows were similarly abused but they bore huge litters which Paw sold for $5.00 each piglet as soon as they were weaned. Occasionally the Kettle animals just up and died. Such deaths were immediately attributed to a vengeful providence and never for a second did any Kettle entertain the idea that dirt or malnutrition had anything to do with it.
Of course, we didn’t know all of those things that next morning when with charity in our hearts we set out to help with the plowing, which we honestly thought Paw Kettle intended to struggle with by himself unless Bob helped him. As we cautiously drove the car through the conglomeration of old cars, parts of old cars, Kettle boys under old cars and discarded furniture which studded the driveway, Paw hallooed down by the barn, so Bob let me off to walk to the house and he drove in the direction of Paw. When I got to the house I found Mrs. Kettle in the throes of cleaning the bathroom and jubilant over an apronful of tools, the top of a still and an unopened package from Sears, Roebuck which had been missing for a year or so. The bathroom was definitely an afterthought tacked on to one wall of, and accessible only through, the parlor. It was just a bathroom, containing a solitary tub and evidently used only through the warm weather. Knowing that they had a good stream, a ram and a water tower, I asked Mrs. Kettle why they didn’t install an inside toilet. She was incensed. “And have every sonofabitch that has to go, traipsin’ through my parlor? When we start spendin’ money like drunken sailors it won’t be for no lah-de-dah toilet.” I slunk into the parlor and after pulling up the green-fringed blinds I did a little self-conscious dusting under the cold surveillance of rows of “Stony Eyes,” Gammy’s name for chromo portraits, which lined the walls and were apparently the forebears of Maw and Paw photographed post-mortem. The parlor was clean and neat. The dark red brick fireplace morbidly sported a fern where the fire should have been and from the edge of the mantel were suspended, by tacks and strings, folding red paper Christmas bells, cardboard Easter eggs and greeting cards from birthdays, Valentine’s day, Christmas and Easter. At one end of the mantel stood a very bold-faced Kewpie doll clad only in an orange ostrich feather skirt and with no back; at the other end was a much-gilded figurine of the Madonna. The furniture was all slippery black leather; the floor slippery mustard and rust linoleum, and the golden oak library table in the center of the room wore a dung-colored tapestry cover on which were laid at angles a pocketbook of Shakespeare, a mother of pearl encrusted photograph album, a stereoscope and a box of photographs which said on the lid in gold, VIEWS OF YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK, From the lamp hook in the center of the ceiling hung three long curls of flypaper limp with age and heavy with petrified flies. The whole atmosphere was funereal and remote and there wasn’t a marred place or a scratch on anything. I was amazed considering the fifteen children and the appearance of the rest of the house. But, when I watched Maw, come out of the bathroom, firmly shut the door, go over and pull down the fringed shades clear to the bottom, test the bolt on the door that led to the front hallway and finally shut and lock the door after us as we went into the kitchen, I knew. The parlor was never used. It was the clean white handkerchief in the breastpocket of the house.
As soon as we finished the bathroom and parlor it was time to get dinner. For dinner we had boiled macaroni—not macaroni and cheese, just plain boiled macaroni without even salt—boiled potatoes, baked beans and pickles, washed down with large white cups of the inky black coffee which had been sulking on the back of the stove since breakfast.
The men gulped their food and hurried back to the plowing. Bob seemed a little grim. Maw and I lingered over the coffee, the lunch dishes and her complaints that her own sisters had been to see her just a few hours before Georgie, Bertha, Elwin, Joe, John or Charles were born and didn’t even know that she was “that way.” This did not surprise me a great deal as she looked as though she might be going to give birth to an elephant any moment.
About three o’clock Bob appeared and we left rather suddenly. Bob told me through clenched teeth that he had had to stop every five or ten minutes to mend the harness or to scoop Paw out of the shade of a tree, bush, fence post, even the horses, where he was resting. He was further irritated by young Elwin, a strapping hulk, who crawled out from under his car now and again to shout criticisms of the plowing.
Before this wound had time to heal the Kettle cows started crashing through our fences and eating our fruit trees and our gardens. Beset by flies and long-standing hunger they became a constant menace particularly as the Kettles were experimenting with a small scraggly garden and decided that the quick way to protect it was to mend their own barbed-wire border fences and keep their stock entirely off their property and free to plunder and pillage the entire countryside.
After the cows had broken in for about the tenth time, Bob took them home and stormed into the Kettle yard demanding some immediate action. The dignity and force of his entrance were somewhat impaired by the fact that as he came abreast of the back porch he found himself face to face with Mrs. Kettle who was comfortably seated in the doorless outhouse reading the Sears, Roebuck catalogue and instead of hurriedly retiring in confusion she remained where she was but took active part in the ensuing conversation.
Bob, very embarrassed, turned his back but continued to state his case. “I don’t want to quarrel with my neighbors and I know you old people have a hard time keeping up your fences, but by God if your cows don’t stay off our place I’ll take the car and chase them so damned far into the hills they’ll never come home.” Maw said, “Why don’t you save gas and shoot the bastards?” Paw appeared just then from the cellar where he had no doubt been resting in the shade of the canned fruit, and launched his “The boyth won’t HELP ME AND THE OLD LADY and I can’t do it all and we fixth the fentheth and THE BUGGERTH GET OUT ANYWAYS but if you’d come down and give uth a day or two on the fentheth maybe we could KEEP THEM IN . . .” plea, but Maw interrupted with “It’s the goddamned bull, Paw, he’s did this every summer. Bob, he’s et every garden in the valley and he’s broke out of every fence and he’s got to be shut up.”
Paw moved up to lean in the outhouse doorway and said, “Now, Maw, it ain’t the bull, itth the flieth. Perhapth, Bob, if you could give uth a hand with the manure, thay a day or tho, we could get rid of the flieth. . . .” Bob recognized defeat when he saw it and anyway you can’t be either threatening or forceful with your back to the audience, so he came home and grimly added a strand of barbed wire to our rail fences and mended the rustic gate.
The cows continued to come and, as summer progressed and the flies got worse, the cows got so they could leap four rails and a strand of barbed wire with the grace and skill of antelopes. Bob became desperate and on advice of other experienced farmers, he loaded his shotgun with rock salt. I doubted at the time that this would do any good since
the bull, a wizened sallow little bookkeeper type without a vestige of the lusty manliness which is ordinarily associated with the word bull, quite evidently tried to make up for his lack of physique by telling the cows, “Say girls, if you’ll follow me I’ll take you to a keen restaurant up on that mountain,” and no peppering of rock salt was likely to make him give up his only lure. And I was right. Bob shot and the bull roared and retreated a short distance down the road only to return within the hour to be shot again and to roar and retreat again.
By the end of the first spring Bob hated the Kettles with a deadly loathing and I couldn’t blame him—they practically doubled his work and certainly impeded his progress. By the time we had weathered the first winter his attitude had softened somewhat, and by the end of the second year he accepted them like one does a birthmark. I enjoyed the Kettles. They shocked, amused, irritated and comforted me. They were never dull and they were always there.
With misfortune constantly stalking them and poverty and confusion always at hand, I was amazed at the harmony that existed among the Kettles. There was no bickering or blaming each other for things that happened—there was no need to, for the fault didn’t lie with them, they figured. Taking great draughts of coffee, Mrs. Kettle told me again and again where the fault lay. “It’s them crooks in Washington,” she said vehemently. “All the time being bribed and buyin’ theirselves big cars with our money.” To Mrs. Kettle there was but one Government and that was in Washington, D. C. She had no knowledge of any county, city or state governments. “The whole damn shebang” was in Washington, and Washington to her was a place where everyone was in full evening dress twenty-four hours a day attending balls and dinners which seethed with spies, crooks, liquor, loose women, Strauss waltzes and bribes. Politics were the Kettles’ out. When the manure in the barn was piled so high Paw couldn’t get in to milk the cows or Tits’ Mervin had given her a black eye, or there was no chicken feed or money to buy any, Mrs. Kettle would say, “Look! Just look what them crooks in Washington has did. They put them new fancy laws on time payments so Paw can’t get a manure spreader. They give Mervin his Indian money so he gits drunk and hits Tits. They’re payin’ the farmers not to raise chicken feed and the price is so high I can’t git the money to buy it. If you want to know what I think,” she would take another strengthening gulp of the coffee, then glaring at Paw, Elwin, Tits and me, would conclude, “I think them politicians can take their crooked laws and their crooked bribes and stuff ’em.” They would all nod wisely. The blame had been put squarely where it belonged and nobody on the Kettle farm had to go sneaking around feeling guilty.
The Hickses, our other neighbors, lived five miles down the road in the opposite direction from the Kettles. They had a neat white house, a neat white barn, a neat white chicken house, pig pen and brooder house, all surrounded by a neat white picket fence. At the side of the house was an orchard with all of the tree trunks painted white but aside from these trees there was not a shrub or tree to interfere with the stern discipline the Hicks maintained over their farm. It made me feel that one pine needle carelessly tracked in by me would create a panic. Mrs. Hicks, stiffly starched and immaculate from the moment she arose until she went to bed, looked like she had been left in the washing machine too long, and wore dippy waves low on her forehead and plenty of “rooje” scrubbed into her cheeks.
Mr. Hicks, a large ruddy dullard, walked gingerly through life, being very careful not to get dirt on anything or in any way to irritate Mrs. Hicks, whom he regarded as a cross between Mary Magdalene and the County Agent.
When we first moved to the ranch we were invited to the Hickses to dinner and to an entertainment at the schoolhouse. For dinner we had a huge standing rib roast boiled, boiled potatoes, boiled string beans, boiled corn, boiled peas and carrots, boiled turnips and spinach. Mrs. Hicks also served at the same time as the meat and vegetables, cheese, pickles, preserves, jam, jelly, homemade bread, head cheese, fried clams, cake, gingerbread, pie and tea. This was supper. Dinner had been at eleven in the morning. Mrs. Hicks, a slender creature, ate more than any ten loggers but as she took her third helping she would remark sadly, “Nothing sets good with me. Nothing. Everything I’ve et tonight will talk back to me tomorrow.”
After Mrs. Hicks and I had washed the supper dishes we retired to the tiny living room to sit in a self-conscious circle on the golden oak chairs around the golden oak table and the Rochester lamp while Mr. Hicks fumbled fruitlessly with the radio and Mrs. Hicks firmly snipped off between her teeth any loose threads of conversation. Occasionally she would glance sharply at Mr. Hicks and I felt that one false move and she would take him by the collar and put him outside. After one silence so long that I could feel the tidies of the chair sticking to my neck and arms, Mrs. Hicks called Mr. Hicks into the kitchen and I don’t know whether she twisted his ear or what but he announced that he was not going to the entertainment as one of the cows was expecting a calf. Bob elected to stay and help with the delivery and Mrs. Hicks and I set off for the Crossroads in her car. We also shared the car with Mrs. Hicks’ liver and her bile, neither of which functioned properly and though she had been to countless doctors and had had several “wonderful goings over” she had to take pills all of the time. She drove, as did all the natives of that country, on the wrong side of the road, very fast and with both hands off the wheel most of the time. During the course of the drive she missed by a hair two other cars, a cow, a drove of horses, a wagon and a road scraper but not a feint in the blow by blow account of the fight between her liver and her bile. Her liver was so sluggish that it had constantly to be primed in order to make it pump her bile, according to Mrs. Hicks. Just before we went into the auditorium of the schoolhouse, she took two of the priming pills and I was very disappointed not to hear liver’s motor start and a cheery chug-chug-splash as it pumped Mrs. Hicks’ bile into her bilge or wherever bile goes.
During the drive home Mrs. Hicks entertained me with her many miscarriages, her sisters’ many miscarriages, her cows’ many miscarriages, and her chickens’ blowouts. The internal structures of Mrs. Hicks and all of her connections were evidently so weak that I was relieved when we reached home without the crankcase dropping out of her car. When we got in the house, Bob and Mr. Hicks were celebrating the arrival of a heifer calf with a bottle of beer. Mrs. Hicks’ disapproval stuck out all over like spines, but when I lit a cigarette she turned pale with horror. “It’s not that I mind so much,” she told me later, “I know you’re from the city but I’d hate to have you smokin’ when any of my friends come in because they might think I was the same kind of woman you was.”
Mrs. Hicks was good and she worked at it like a profession. Not only by going to church and helping the poor and lonely but by maintaining a careful check on the activities of the entire community. She knew who drank, who smoked and who “laid up” with whom and when and where and she “reported” on people. She told husbands of erring wives and wives of erring husbands and parents of erring children. She collected and distributed her information on her way to and from town, and apparently kept a huge espionage system going full tilt twenty-four hours a day. Having Mrs. Hicks living in the community was akin to having Sherlock Holmes living in the outhouse, and kept everyone watching his step. I was surprised when I learned that Birdie Hicks had a mother—she was so pure I thought perhaps she had come to life out of the housedress section of the Sears, Roebuck catalogue. But one warm evening that spring I left Bob with the egg records and the baby and boldly struck out for Mrs. Hicks’ to stitch some curtains on her sewing machine. When I arrived, Mrs. Hicks, her mother and Cousin June were sitting on the front porch slapping at mosquitoes and discussing their miscarriages. After the introductions had been made I sat down for a while before opening my brown paper parcel and exposing the real reason for my visit. This was considered good manners, for in the country where people only call to borrow or return or exchange, and everyone is hungry for companionship, it is considered very impolite to hastil
y transact your business and leave. You must exchange views of crops and politics if you are a man, gossip if you are a woman, then state your business, then eat no matter what time of day it is, then exchange some more politics or gossip and at last unwillingly tear yourself away. I had sat on Birdie Hicks’ front porch for perhaps two minutes when I realized that hungry as I was for companionship this visit was going to be an ordeal, for Birdie’s mother, a small sharp-cornered woman with a puff of short gray hair like a gone-to-seed dandelion, tried so hard to be young that conversation with her was out of the question and her ceaseless activity was as nervewracking as watching someone blow up an old balloon. When we were introduced she said, tossing her head about on its little stem, “Bet you thought I was Birdie’s sister instead of her mother. Sixty-four years young next Tuesday and everybody guesses me under forty. He, he, he! Everybody does. It’s ’cause I’m so active.” Whereupon she shot out of her chair and leaped four feet off the ground after a mosquito. Coming down with the astounded mosquito in her little claw, she caught herself deftly on the balls of her feet, bent her knees so that she was almost squatting, then snapped into a standing position, turned and winked at me. I’m not able to wink and nothing else seemed adequate, so I just sat. Cousin June, a plump middle-aged woman, turned to Mrs. Hicks and said, “Honest to gosh, Birdie, she’s like a little kid.” Mrs. Hicks said rather testily, “For heaven’s sake, Ma, set down. You make me nervous.” Mother finally perched on the edge of the porch railing but kept her eyes darting, head bobbing and foot tapping and I felt that she had every pore coiled ready for the next spring.