Farmers in the Dell
WHEN we moved to Forestville, we were too busy to think about putting in a garden, especially with the extra church work at first, then the adoptions of Timmy and Alex.
Finally our budget stared me in the face and I knew that a garden was something more than just a nice thing to have. The time had come when it was a plain, unvarnished necessity.
“We’ll simply have to raise part of our food,” I told Carl, after adding up our grocery bills in a stunned silence. He was earning $2800 a year now. His income had been rising steadily, but the postwar cost of living had risen more steadily.
“Good idea,” he murmured. He was working on a sermon.
“The salary doesn’t go very far, for nine people.”
He shook his head absently.
“The soil here must be rich, because the weeds come nearly to my shoulder. In fact they’re so high I couldn’t possibly spade them under, myself. So that’s where you come in.”
“Ummm,” Carl murmured, crossing something out and writing furious notes on the next page.
“Everyone in Forestville is putting in a spring garden, already. You ought to get out with a spade, first thing in the morning.”
“Sure,” Carl said. “Can you remember exactly how that quotation from St. Francis of Assisi goes, something about where there is hatred let us sow love . . . ?”
“I could look it up in a book,” I said. “Besides, it would be good exercise.”
Carl looked up, puzzled. “Since when is reading a book good exercise?”
“I was talking about you digging us a garden. Where there is hunger, let us sow vegetables.”
“Oh,” Carl said. “Oh, the garden. Well, don’t fret about it. I’ll get to it, when I’m not so busy.”
But Carl continued busy. Sunday services at two churches, pastoral calls in the homes, membership-training classes, evening discussion groups, choir practice, potluck dinners, church socials, committee meetings, official board meetings—was there no end? The weeds in the back yard continued to flourish, and so did our grocery bills.
“If you could just start the spading,” I said wistfully, “I could be planting seeds.”
“We’ll dig the ground for you, Mama,” Donny volunteered.
“Just give us a shubble,” Teddy said.
“You children may use the shovels in the garage,” I said. “But you couldn’t possibly turn the ground over, if Mama can’t.”
The next time I looked, the children had a hole five feet deep beside my clothesline post, where the weeds had been tromped down. The clothesline post gave a sigh and toppled in.
“But you children have to keep digging sideways, not straight down, if you want a garden,” I explained. “Anyway, I think this is too big a job for you.”
“Anyway, we’re tired of digging,” Donny said, and they all drifted off, leaving the shovels scattered in the weeds.
Like the little red hen, I decided to do it myself. After my first back-cracking day, I had but one row turned under, and planted to radishes. The next day I was inspired. Instead of bothering to spade under the weeds between my rows, I would skip along and just dig the actual rows needed for planting. I planted a strip of carrots that day. The next day, two feet down in the weeds, I spaded another row and put in corn. During the succeeding two weeks I planted more corn, three kinds of squash, bush beans, leaf lettuce, Swiss chard, beets, and turnips. When all my seeds were in, I dropped the spade, hoe, and garden gloves in the corner of the garage, took my last soaking bath, stuck Band-Aids on my blisters, and decided that if I ever looked at a garden again it would be too soon.
A month later, Carl stopped in the middle of a beeline to the church, and did a double take. At first glance, the back yard seemed to be nothing more than the same old weeds. Then he noticed, in the narrow ribbons of earth, in the bottoms of the sunless weed canyons, long wavering rows of pale sprouts.
“Mama’s garden,” Teddy explained.
“Purty, hmmm?” Timmy added.
“Pretty neglected,” Carl sighed. Not able to bear the sight of anything helpless, tiny, and in need, he returned to the house and changed into overalls. In a few days, the whole back yard was turned under and neatly weeded. We had a real garden at last.
Little brown Teddy was Carl’s right-hand man in the garden. He liked to water the seedlings with his sprinkling can. One day he told Timmy, “I’m playing God. I’m making rain for all the thirsty plants to drink.”
“How they drink?” Timmy asked. “I don’t see they got any mouth.”
“You don’t unnerstand because you only two years old,” Teddy said. “When you four years old like me, you unnerstand things.”
But even Teddy found some things hard to understand. When trucking the weeds off to the compost heap in his wagon, he asked Carl, “Why you pull them out, Daddy?”
“They crowd out our vegetables,” Carl told him. “They keep out the sun and hog all the water. They won’t let our garden grow.”
Teddy squatted back on his heels and shook his head. “I don’t think God ought to make weeds. I think God make a mistake.”
Donny was conspicuous by his absence when weeding was done.
“I’ll dig him his own patch,” Carl said. “Maybe planting his own garden will awake his interest.”
Offered a choice of seeds, Donny chose popcorn. He planted it in a rocket burst of high enthusiasm, telling us how we would all enjoy bushels of hot, buttered popcorn that winter.
The family garden was watered by a large, central sprinkler, but Don’s plot was off to itself.
“You’ll have to bring the hose over there,” Carl told him. “Your garden will need lots of water during the hot summer.”
Donny watered his garden faithfully for three days, and then forgot it. Scorching heat, and no water, produced a sad row of very stunted cornstalks which bore no ears. Late that fall, in a cold November rain, Carl saw Donny in raincoat and boots, out in his garden sprinkling the yellowed stalks with the hose.
“What in the world are you doing?” Carl called from the window.
“I forgot to water my garden,” Donny shouted. “I’m trying to make my popcorn grow.”
Rita found our garden more intriguing than Donny did. When Carl was hoeing, she followed behind and collected the slugs that turned up. Carl thought she was helpfully dumping them into the incinerator, but actually she was collecting them in a tomato can for pets. While I was hanging up the wash in the side yard, Rita went upstairs to play. Half an hour later I heard her sobbing in the kitchen. I came in and took her in my arms.
“I guess something bite her,” Timmy commented.
“What?”
“Dunno,” Timmy said. “Something bited me and I squash him, and he got green guts.”
“No,” Rita sobbed, “that’s not it. All my baby-snails-withouten-any-shells, they all gone. I leaved them here onna kitchen table in my can, and now they all runned away.”
“Your slugs?” I stepped back, skidded on one, and my arms and legs flew up while the rest of me whammed down.
“Mama, quit,” Rita squealed. “You walk on one, and now you sitting on one.”
The slimy creatures had left silver trails winding all over the kitchen. We tracked them down, under the tabletop, shapelessly inching down the table legs, heading for stove, sink, and dining-room door. Rita grinned, forgot her tears, and gathered her pets back into the can. For two days I moved warily in the kitchen, never knowing what I might step on, or discover in my sugar bowl.
Our two floppy-eared cocker spaniels were almost as destructive to our garden as Rita’s snails. They solemnly watched me plant a row of potato pieces, then dug them up and ate them. Dogs are not popularly supposed to be fond of vegetables, but ours were. Patsy, the humble little freckled blonde, would not have had the sense to snitch if big red Rufus had not shown her how. Rufus figured that if people could eat out of a garden, he could. He had always considered himself to be a people, anyway.
“See that Woo-fus?” Timmy pointed out one day. “That bad doggy eat up all our dinner.”
There was Rufus, trotting delicately through the garden, stopping now to nimbly bite off a tender, green cucumber, next to detach the juiciest red tomato from the vine, and finishing with nibbles from the berry bushes. Patsy followed ten paces behind like a Chinese wife, following his example.
Since these uninvited guests in our garden were really part of the family, we didn’t resent them. Not the way we did the parasitic rats which lived off the sweat of our hoe. When the unwelcome vermin moved into our house, we resented them even more. They migrated to us from the barn next door, a quaint, tumble-down structure on the opposite side of us from the Lodge Hall. When the barn was torn down in the interests of sanitation, the rats came over and took up housekeeping in our walls. We didn’t realize we had new boarders sharing our roof at first. Walnuts began to disappear from a box on the back porch, but we didn’t guess.
“You children might get sick,” I said, “if you eat too many walnuts.”
“We’re not eating extra,” Donny said. “Just the handful you give us every day, that’s all.”
We harvested a bushel of small tomatoes, which I stored on the back porch until I could can them as juice. These, too, quickly disappeared.
“You children are liable to get tummy-aches,” I warned.
“Not eat many,” Timmy said, his round face solemn. He counted on his fingers. “Only one, four, two.”
This obvious understatement I attributed to an inability to count. But next a sack of wallpaper paste diminished, fast. The children looked blank. “Not us,” they said patiently.
The next morning I went to the back porch to wash the dirty clothes, which I soaked overnight in the laundry tubs. A suspicious gray lump floated in the water. Carl fished it out by the tail.
“We have rats,” he said. “I’ll go buy some poison.”
The next afternoon, Timmy burst from the bathroom, his pixie eyes almost round. “There’s a skirrel in there!”
“Couldn’t be a squirrel,” Donny said. “Squirrels live in trees.”
“Sure, really, honest,” Timmy said breathlessly. “A real live squirrel. He chew a hole inna wall and poke his head out the hole, and he wiggle his whiskers at me.”
Carl found a fresh hole in the wall beside the bathroom window. “That was no squirrel, Timmy,” he said. “That was a rat.” He went for a tin lid, to nail over the hole.
Donny was busy examining the hole, and Timmy tried to peek in, too. “What’s a rat, Donny, what’s a rat?”
“A rat?” Donny threw out his hands, searching for words. “Well, it’s sort of like a mouse, only more.”
Carl nailed on the lid, then put poison out under the house. It didn’t seem to diminish the rat population, though, as the walls grew noisier and noisier every night. One pair of rats had an apartment about two feet left of the place where our stovepipe entered the dining-room wall. Nightly scuffles, with angry low squeaks and high piping squeals, indicated that the relationship was not too happy. Periodically one threw the other downstairs, with a bumpetty, bumpetty, bump all the way down between the studding, ending in a dull thud behind the baseboard.
The last straw came the morning I went to get Alex up from his basket in the corner of the living room. There was not only a new hole in the living-room wall, but fresh tracks around the baby’s basket and across his blue blanket. I snatched up Alex and called for Carl.
“Put out some more poison,” I cried. “This is too much!”
“This time I’m getting professional help,” Carl said, reaching for the phone. “It was bad enough having them invade the garden. When they take over the house—!”
The exterminator arrived and did his job. That night, and every night afterward, it was quiet in the walls of the old parsonage. No more tails lashed on the thin wallboard. We heard no more squealing and patter of rodent feet, and we didn’t even miss the quarrelsome couple which had lived two feet left of the stovepipe.
When I tried to be a farmer, I fared much worse with the chickens than with the garden. My poultry fiasco began when somebody gave us a fat red hen which Carl didn’t have the heart to kill. We kept it for a pet and it laid an egg or two, then seemed to lose interest. The trap was sprung when I was passing through the Sears, Roebuck store in Santa Rosa, and was drawn into the farm department by the irresistible peeping of a new batch of baby chicks.
Wouldn’t the children be thrilled with these, I thought.
A salesman appeared at my elbow, beaming. “Can I sell you some of this fine, healthy stock?”
“How would I raise them?” I laughed. “I haven’t any incubator, or whatever it takes. And no extra money to buy one.
He pursed his lips. He was trying to be very helpful. “Perhaps you could borrow a good broody hen from a friend?”
“I already have a hen, but I don’t know if she’s broody,” I said. “She looks like she’s brooding about something.”
He demonstrated. “Does she sit on the nest a lot, and go around cluck-cluck-cluck-CLUU-UUCK, like this?”
I looked at him, surprised that he would know. “That’s exactly what she goes around saying.”
The salesman beamed. “A good broody hen could raise at least eighteen for you, and no trouble with temperatures or thermostats. You’ll have some fine pullets for egg-layers, and good eating from your fryers. Would you like eighteen?”
“All right,” I said dubiously, showing my lack of sales resistance. “But what if the hen doesn’t cooperate?”
“She’ll take them,” he assured me, counting eighteen yellow balls into a box with holes. “The trick is to put them under her at night, when she’s asleep. In the morning she thinks she hatched them.”
At home, I opened the box on the dining-room floor and my family clustered around, hollering for turns to hold a chirping ball of fluff. The children were enchanted, delighted, overjoyed.
The old hen was not.
In the chilly night, Donny carried the flashlight, I lugged the cheeping box, and we tiptoed out to her hangout in a corner of the tool shed. Slip the chicks under her while she was asleep? That was a joke. She was wide awake, waiting for us, her battle weapons sharpened, tall and straight on her nest, with her wattles whisking from side to side as she glared from one eye and then the other. Grabbing two chicks, I lifted her wing and shoved them under. One chick escaped, and both that chick and I got viciously pecked in a manner meant to draw blood.
“She’s mean,” Donny said. “I think we ought to cook her. With dumplings and gravy.”
We huddled in the dark, hoping she would go to sleep, but we grew sleepy before she did. Every time I tried to outmaneuver her with a fast shove of another chick under her wing, she outmaneuvered me.
“I’m freezing,” Donny complained. “Let’s go to bed.”
I gave up and left the one chick under the old battle-ax, hoping that he might bring out her mother-instinct by morning. We took the other seventeen rejected orphans back to the house, and I left their box overnight on the gas range. Would the pilot light be warm enough to keep them from dying?
In the morning we awoke to a chirping like a houseful of canaries. All seventeen in the box were popping with life, but the other chick was not so lucky. He had been brutally pecked, kicked out of the nest, and left to freeze.
“You’re right,” I told Donny. “She deserves to go into the pot for dinner, Sunday.”
I rounded up enough scraps of fencing and wire and boards to build a back-yard sunning pen for my orphans. It was chick-tight, but not child-tight. Timmy trotted in for a visit and forgot to shut the gate on the way out. The baby chicks, in all their trusting innocence, fluttered out to see the world. The children dashed to the rescue, helping me round them up. The two flap-eared cockers helped too, but only a few puffs of yellow down remained of the six they retrieved.
Every night the remaining eleven had to be rounded up and put into their box over the pilot light on the stove. Curiously enough, they thrived. The children were delighted to see the white feathers sprouting on wings and tails.
Then came the day it rained.
“Hey, Mama,” Timmy shouted. “All our chickies, they turning into baby ducks. They swimming!”
“Goodness gracious,” I exclaimed. “They’ll drown, they’ll die of pneumonia!”
We put on raincoats and rescued our crop of future egg-layers from the puddle in their outdoor pen. In the house we took towels and dried their tiny feet and draggled feathers. I put them in their night box and stowed it up on the shelf over our old-fashioned, uninsulated hot-water heater, which was going and would keep them warm. An hour later I noticed that the door to the heater closet had been shut, in spite of my solemn warnings to everyone to see that it stayed open. I threw open the door, pulled down the box, and yanked off the lid. Steam rose from the overheated inside; half the chicks lay on the straw, horribly still, and the rest drooped on their legs, panting.
“Give them water,” Donny said anxiously. “They look thirsty.”
We dipped their beaks into a cup of cool water, then had to tip their heads back so the water would run down their throats. We fluffed their feathers and blew cool air in their faces, kept dribbling their beaks through more water and holding them up when they were too weak to stand. Eight of the eleven pulled through. The next day Rufus dug under their pen and brought the number down to four.
“You won’t get any eggs from this batch,” Carl said. ‘Tour four survivors are all roosters.”
“I’ve got a rooster egg,” Timmy said. He pulled a large, smooth stone from his pocket.
“Roosters don’t lay eggs, son,” Carl said.
“If a Easter bunny can lay eggs,” Timmy challenged, “a rooster could lay eggs, if he wanted to, I betcha.”
“That nuisance of a Rufus,” I muttered, glaring down at the red cocker, who had the impudence to stand in front of us wagging his stubby tail for approval. “If he only could have left those chicks alone, I might have had some laying hens out of all my work and worry.”
“Rufus does have his faults,” Carl admitted, “but he loves the kids. You know, he’s a pretty good dog, down underneath.”
Our son bent over on his sturdy legs and inspected the underside of Rufus. “I think he looks better on the top,” Timmy said.
Our little illusion that we were farmers in the dell might have been maintained, if it weren’t for the Lodge Hall being in our dell, too. This brought city sophistication, noise, glamor, and secondhand parties into our otherwise quiet existence.
At night, the children could watch the festivities going on in the lighted Lodge Hall across the narrow side yard. Unfortunately, these fascinating doings began after the children’s bedtime. Whenever things quieted down so I could coax them to leave their windows and go back to bed, the music would flare out again in a turn, te-tum, te-tum, te-tum that crashed down the scales with the irresistible appeal of a Pied Piper’s flute. The children would leap out of bed and dance like elves and fairies in a moonlit ring, scattering only when my feet were heard on the stairs.
“That’s what they’re doing, marching all around,” Donny explained. “Only they don’t have fun, like us. They don’t laugh.”
The secondhand entertainment would have been bearable, if it had not been for the secondhand refreshments that went with it. Soon after we moved to the parsonage, I heard the children playing tea party outside on the morning after one of the Lodge Hall doings.
“I got a piece of bun,” came Laura’s voice, distinctly.
“There’s a wienie inside my bun,” Teddy boasted.
“Who wants mustard?” Donny asked. “I got half a bottle.”
“Look at all the beans on my plate,” Susie piped up.
“I’ll trade you a bite of this brown cake for a bite of your pink cake,” Rita was wheedling.
The aura of reality was too great for mere make-believe. I hurried outside. Behind the Lodge Hall, on the edge by the parsonage yard, I found an oil drum overflowing with boxes and paper plates from last night’s refreshments. The children were sitting in a circle under a tree nearby, delicately cleaning the remains from the party plates. I had a long, quiet talk with them about germs, sanitation, and nice manners; then we collected and burned the rubbish.
When parties were especially noisy, I usually remembered to grab a match and beat the children outside in the morning. The quieter parties became my downfall. The next morning I would hear through the kitchen window the high, childish voices.
“Good jello, hmmmm?”
“Mine’s soupy, but I got a cherry floating.”
“I like this cake with the little white worms on top.”
“That’s coconut. I’ll swap for some of this.”
Clutching my head, I would dash out with a match. They couldn’t really be hungry, as this usually happened after a breakfast that would fell a lumberjack. The challenge of a picnic, plus the irresistible lure of a grab-bag, drew like a magnet. It was the kind of fun they never forgot. Even last week, several years after we moved from Forestville, I overheard them reminiscing.
“Remember at our Forestville house?” Teddy asked. “Where they had that big barrel, and every once in a while it was full of perfeckly good food people just threw away?”
“We took our plates around behind the church and hid in the bushes,” Rita said, “so Mama wouldn’t burn them up.”
“Once Daddy looked out the church window and saw us,” Timmy giggled, “and spanked all our bottoms.”
“Yeah,” Laura drooled. “Once I had cherry pie with mustard.”
“Mama kept saying there was germs in that food,” Susie said. “But I never saw any.”
“Yeah,” Donny said dreamily. “Those were the days.”