Life on a
Chicken Ranch
Betty MacDonald
Part II.
Along
about three-thirty or four o'clock on Saturday I had to light gasoline
lanterns --- the most frightening task on earth and contrary to all of
my early teachings that anyone who monkeys around with gasoline with
matches is just asking for trouble. I never understood why or how a
gasoline lantern works and I always lit the match with the conviction
that I should have first sent for the priest.
Bob patiently explained the entire confusing process again and again,
but to me it was on the same plane with the Hindu rope trick, and it was
only when he was not home that I would tolerate the infernal machines
in the same room with me. I used take them out into the rain to pump
them up, then crouching behind the woodshed door I reached way out and
lit them. Immediately and for several terrible minutes they flared up
and acted exactly as if they were going to explode, then as suddenly
they settled back on their haunches to hiss contentedly and give out
candle power after candle power of bright, white light.
With two
lanterns in each hand I walked through the complete dejection of last
summer's garden, ignoring the pitiful clawings and scratchings of the
derelicts of cornstalks and tomato vines shivering in the rain, and
hung the lanterns in the great chicken house which instantly seemed as
gay and friendly as a cocktail lounge. When the frightened squawks of a
few hysterical younger hens had died down, I stood and let some of my
loneliness drip off in the busy communal atmosphere.
The floor was
covered with about four inches of clean, dry straw, and the hens sang
and scratched and made little dust baths and pecked each other and
jumped on the hoppers and ate mash and sounded as if they were going to
and did --- lay eggs. They were as happy and carefree, in November, when
the whole outside world was beaten into submission by the brooding
mountains and the endless rain, as they were on a warm spring day.
Then I gathered the eggs. Gathering eggs would be like one continual
Easter morning if the hens would just be obliging and get off the nests.
Cooperation, however, is not a chickenly characteristic and so at
egg-gathering time every nest was overflowing, the hen got her feet
planted, and a shoot-if-you-must-this-old-grey-head
look in her eye. I made all manner of futile attempts to dislodge her
--- sharp sticks, flapping apron, loud scary noises, lure of mash and
grain --- but she would merely set her mouth, clutch her eggs under her
and dare me. In a way, I can't blame the hen --- after all,
soft-shelled or not, they're her kids.
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 legs 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 chattering 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. Ever 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 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 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.
--- From The Egg and I
©1945, J. P. Lippincott
