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.
PART FIVE
Autumn
I saw old Autumn in the misty morn Stand shadowless like silence, listening To silence.
——HOOD
19
And Not a Drop to Drink
THE 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 eighteeen 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 t
he 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.
One morning when the alarm went off Bob said thickly, “I candt ged up—I’b sick.” And there it was—Bob was ill. With anyone else it would have been the common cold; with Bob it was a little-known, very serious illness for which he chose to direct treatment. His pillows were in wads just behind his neck so that his chin was on his chest and his cough sounded much worse than it was. He wouldn’t read, preferring to snuffle and stare moodily out the window. He made me take his temperature, which soared to 99°, hourly, and howled with pain when I forced nosedrops up his quivering nostrils. His throat was very sore, he said, and it should have been bleeding from calling to me.
The second night he was in bed, Jeff brought him a gallon of whiskey, and Clamface, Geoduck and Crowbar a quart each. “Whiskey,” they told me as they poured themselves large slugs, “will cure anything.”
“If,” I thought, “it will cure a strong leaning toward homicide, I will drink a pint, neat.”
Bob was in bed a week, and Good Customer was so kind, so helpful, during that week, that by the second day, if he had elected to go around stark naked, I wouldn’t have cared at all. He chopped me so much fine dry kindling and stacked it in the entryway so conveniently that I had Stove hot, really hot, from four-thirty until ten at night. He not only drove the truck to the valley and brought me up as much water as I could use, but he filled and emptied the wash tubs and carried the clothes basket out to the clothes line for me. He fed the ducks, the pigs, and the turkeys, which we had recently acquired and were fattening; and then he built a sandbox for the baby and drove clear to Docktown Bay for fine white sand to fill it.
When Good Customer first came, I used to sit at the table, my stomach rigid with disgust, as I watched him shovel in his food and knew that he would soon be sprawled in the rocking chair, unbuttoned and unlovely. During that week when Bob was ill, I used to sit at the lunch table soggy with sentiment and watch him shovel in his food and wonder why such a divine creature had never married. I asked him at last. He said, “Lady, I never married because I don’t like women. Women drive me crazy. They’ve got no organization and they go puttering around and never get nothing done. Deliver me from havin’ one around all the time.” I was very hurt, and it didn’t help to hear Bob’s hoarse laughter come booming out from the bedroom where he had been listening.
At last the pipe was all buried, the engine was started and one bright fall morning I heard the musical splash and gulp of water being pumped into the tank. The tank was then scrubbed and drained and at last filled, and I stood underneath it and said a little prayer, then went into the kitchen to find that the faucet in the sink had been turned on and water was an inch deep all over the floor. I didn’t care—it was in the house.
The next day I walked down to tell Mrs. Kettle about the water and to find out how she had been making out since the collapse of the water tower. What they were doing for water was evident long before I reached the house, for, sitting on an ordinary kitchen stepladder at the site of the old tower, was a fifty-gallon wooden barrel into which the ram was busily pumping about fifty thousand gallons of water. The barnyard was awash, and a white Pekin duck and her goslings were paddling in and out of the tool house. The old sow, which had disappeared into the oat field the day of the crash, had made a lovely wallow just outside the milkhouse door and little waves lapped against the old wagons and discarded furniture as she shifted her weight from side to side. Mrs. Kettle was futilely sweeping mud out of the milkhouse door, but every time the old sow or one of her children moved a fresh wave washed in. I called to her from the edge of the flood and she stopped sweeping long enough to call out, “There’s some pitch in the woodbox. Put the coffee pot on and I’ll be right up.” When she finally came in, flushed and discouraged, she said, “You know that mess down there is only one of the thousands I’ve been in ever since I met Paw. He’s good and all that, but he ain’t got system.” Which was where she was wrong, of course, for Paw had the perfect system for getting out of any and all work. I hadn’t the heart to mention our running water.
It was late October. I awoke one night to the great whooshing of the wind through the forests which meant a storm was gathering. I felt the house give a convulsive shudder as the wind slammed its shutters and rattled the chimneys. The clock ticked loudly—tick, tick, tick, tick. I thought, “This is a winter storm that’s coming. Soon it will be winter—a long dreary, gray, wet, lonely winter.” The wind gave a derisive howl and dove headlong into the burn to worry the frail old snags. A few drops of rain fell. I felt a tremendous depression settle over me like a sodden comforter. Then from the kitchen I heard a small noise. It was a gentle little sound, but it had penetration and rhythm and soon I could hear it above the storm—above the clock—above the nervous rattling of the house. It was the friendly split, splat, split of a dripping faucet. Our kitchen faucet. That was it—I had water. I had almost forgotten. The winter prospects brightened. Soon I was asleep, lulled and quieted by that supposedly nerve-wracking sound, a dripping faucet.
20
The Root Cellar
A ROOT CELLAR was originally a storage place for root vegetables such as carrots, potatoes, rutabagas, beets and turnips. It used actually to be an earthen pit where the vegetables were buried against the winter freeze. Root cellars in the mountains were more elaborate affairs—built to store fruit and vegetables in winter—milk and cream and butter in summer. Our first root cellar was a rather poorly constructed house next to the feed room. It had shelves and bins of sorts and a dirt floor. During the second spring and summer Bob built a new one, constructed like a mine shaft, tunneled into the bank near the driveway, timbered on top and on the sides, lined with double walls filled with sawdust, with a door that would have done credit to a bank vault, and a floor of white sand. Bob built shelves for all my canned fruit, screening shelves for the winter pears, bins for apples and potatoes, racks for squashes, cabbages, pumpkins and my wrapped green tomatoes, and bins for clean sand for celery and carrots. There were also spaces for crocks of
pickles and cupboards for storing milk, butter, cheeses and lard. That storing, storing, storing against the winter should have given me a feeling of warmth and security. It didn’t. I felt much more as if I were being prepared for the tomb. I spent so much of that first winter in gooseflesh that it took me the next spring and summer to get my skin to lie down flat again; preparing to go through the whole thing again, no matter how much we had to eat, left me cold. Cold and lonely.
The root cellar began where the pressure cooker left off. I canned my last quart of corn, emptied the pressure cooker, dried it, put it away in the pantry and it was time to put on jeans and help with the potato digging. I love to dig potatoes. To me it is a very exciting occupation, especially when the soil is ideal and each hill yields large, middle-sized and small ones. Our potato crop that second fall was so terrific that we kept track of the potatoes per hill and called excitedly to each other as we broke the record with new hills. The potatoes ran from six to twelve inches in length and two to six inches in breadth—they were free from scab and cooked to a dry white fluff. We had five tons, of which the most perfect were laid aside for seed—the largest put in a bin for baking and about three tons of mediums were sacked and sold.