Picking Chickens

"Do you want to come out and set with me in the woodshed while I pick a couple o' chicken?" Grandfather asked one morning at the breakfast table.

"Ye—es," said his granddaughter.

"I don't mind picking a chicken, but I do like encouragement while I'm a-doing of it. All the pesky little pin feathers stick twice as tight when I'm alone with 'em."

"When do you begin?" Elizabeth faltered.

"Soon's I can get to it. First I catch my chickens. After you have heard them squawking for a while, you get your knitting and come out to the shed."

"When he cuts off their heads, I just about pass into Kingdom Come," said Judidy. "I hate to hear them squawking as much as I hate to hear a pig stuck."

"Oh, do you cut off their heads?" Elizabeth asked, faintly.

"Well, I wring their necks first."

"Don't take Jehoshaphat, will you, Captain Swift? I've fed him about every day this year, and he eats out o' my hand just as cute's the next one."

"Don't take Speckletop, will you, Grandfather?" Elizabeth moaned.

"She's a setting hen. I don't calculate to eat no chicken pie made out o' setting hens."

"It's dretful hard to eat your own hens," Grandmother said. "You raise 'em from chickens, and you get to know every one from every t'other one, and then some fine morning Father he puts their heads on the chopping block, and that's the last of them, but they do stick, going down, when I try to eat them."

"You don't have to worry, Mother. I know this is a pretty middling tender-hearted family, so I bought this pair o' roosters over to Battletown."

"Where's Battletown?" Elizabeth asked.

"That's the old-fashioned name for the region over yonder. This here was called Crocker Neck. You remind me and I'll tell you some poetry about it."

"I hate to eat anybody else's hens," Grandmother said, "you don't know how they been raised."

"They say old Uncle Jonathan Swift won't take his vittles hot nor cold," Grandfather chuckled. "Either way they hurt his teeth, he says."

"If you feel too squeamish about seeing those chickens picked, you just tell Grandfather, Elizabeth," her grandmother said after he had left the table. "I used to feel pretty delicate about such things myself, till I decided I'd got to get hardened."

"How did you get hardened?"

"Well, I took a spell to think about it. I can stand most anything if I can get my ideas fixed up about it."

"Oh, so can I," Elizabeth cried. "I guess I inherited it."

"I couldn't stand the sight o' blood, or hearing about killing a pig or a chicken, much less seeing the carcasses around. Well, I come to the conclusion that every time a chicken was killed somebody'd have to pick it, and I could pick a chicken if anybody else could. I figured out that if it wasn't me, it would have to be somebody else, probably just as squeamish. So I went ahead and caught a chicken and wrung its neck. I couldn't of chopped off its head if I suffered, but after Father helped me out that far, I cleaned it and picked it just like a storekeeper."

"I suppose that's the way you do get character, just by doing things that you can't do—all the time."

"Well, Providence sees that you have plenty of things to do that can't be done. I kinder hate to see young folks forcing themselves into it."

"I guess I'll go and see that chicken picked all the same, Grandmother," Elizabeth said.

She did not even put her fingers in her ears to shut out the sounds of attack and slaughter in the chicken yard when she went out to the woodshed and took her place determinedly on the step, companionably near the three-legged stool that her grandfather had drawn up to the door.

"What was the poetry you said you were going to say to me?" she began, "that poetry about Crocker Neck?"

"It's just what the girls used to say to the boys when they went a-courting:

"It doesn't rhyme very well, does it?" Elizabeth said.

"It used to kinder tickle the young folks. We used to have one that we said to the girls:

I don't know as that rhymes any better, but young folks get up things that don't have much rhyme or reason."

The air was full of the scent of wet feathers. Elizabeth looked up in time to see him lift a dripping fowl from the pail of hot water at his side, and then hastily looked away again.

"Grandfather, what did you do when you were a young man?" she said.

"I went to sea."

"How old were you when you first went?"

"'Long about nine or ten. I started in by going cook."

"Cook?" Elizabeth cried. "Cook? How—how did that happen?"

"All the boys went cook summers. We used to go to district school in the winter and then go to sea in the summer. I cooked for seventeen men my first trip, and I hadn't nothing to cook in but a baking kettle, neither."

"What kind of boat did you go in?"

Grandfather industriously plucked at the carcass in his hand.

"A fishing vessel. She was called the Good Intent. I used to make seven loaves of bread at a time, and we had to eat it every scrap up before we could touch the new. It didn't make much difference, though, because we carried four bushels of meal, part Indian and part rye, and it all soured before we was out long, but we et it just the same. We used to stay out two or three weeks at a time, and bring in seven or eight thousand fish."

"I can't believe that you used to be a cook. It doesn't seem possible."

"I didn't used to be a cook," said Grandfather, quietly, "I used to go cook on my grandfather's vessel. Have you heard from that friend of yours lately whose brother-in-law is a count?"

"No. Yes, that is. She writes me quite regularly." Elizabeth blushed crimson. "She's an awfully nice girl, with no nonsense about her at all."

"'Taint so much her that I'm interested in as her brother-in-law," Grandfather said, solemnly, "he must have been a pretty smart man, to earn that title of count by his own efforts."

"I—I don't think he did," Elizabeth said, before she caught the twinkle in her grandfather's eye.

"Your grandmother's father he was a sailmaker, you know," he continued, soberly. "He used to have a sail loft where he sat and sewed on sails. He used to pay your grandmother by the dozen for threading for him."

"I didn't know," said Elizabeth. She looked up from her knitting for an instant, and saw the strange, prickly surface of the denuded fowl. "I didn't realize that the reason they called it goose flesh when they got chilled was because your flesh looked like a goose's flesh—I mean a—a geese's," she added, hastily.

"Yes, and sometimes the reason they call a young girl a little goose is that all of a sudden she begins to act like one. Pesky things, these little pin feathers!"

"I—I can help you do that," Elizabeth said.

"Well, put that towel over your lap and don't get any blood on you. Sure it won't make you sick?"

"I'm just about sure that it will," said Elizabeth, "but—but what do I care? Did it make you sick when you first went to sea, Grandfather?"

"Sick as a dog," said her grandfather, heartily, "and the smell of that souring meal, and mouldy corn beef, and dead fish—well, I——"

"Oh, you poor, poor granddaddy," Elizabeth cried, "you poor little boy, why did they make you go?"

"That was my father's idea of bringing me up. I ain't so sure it wasn't a pretty good one."

"Did you get paid for it?"

"Six dollars a month and found. I had the promise of a new hat in the fall, but I never saw it. Times has changed considerable since I was a boy."

"I should think they had," said Elizabeth, fervently.

"You see, Grandfather he owned a fleet of fishing vessels, he owned a dozen himself, and he was part owner with your grandmother's father in as many more."

"But I thought you said Grandmother's father was a—was just a sailmaker?"

"So he was, but he was a shipowner, too. He had to have an interest in a good many vessels in order to get the business of making sails for them."

"Did he make them all by himself?"

Grandfather smiled.

"Well, not exactly. His will was good, but he couldn't manage to fit out more than a few hundred boats single-handed."

"You laugh at me every word you say, Grandfather."

"About every other word, I should call it. He went to sea a good part of his life, but he had learned his trade at sailmaking. Boys learned a trade those days, if they was real enterprising. My father he learned the cooper's trade when he was a boy."

"How big were these boats?"

"They carried from ten to twenty-five men. Grandfather he built a sailing vessel down here at the mouth of Herring River that went all around the world nearabout. 'Twas his boast that he built it from timber cut on his own land. I was on board of her just off New Bedford when the steamer Morning Star struck her amidships. She sunk in less'n fifteen minutes."

"But you—were saved?"

"I woke up when she struck, and I come up from below just as I was, in my underclothes. I saw a dark shape coming alongside, and that was all I knew. I jumped for her. They said I was the first one over the side. 'Twas the old coastwise steamer that saved us, nosing along in the dark. She was good enough for me to land on."

"All these things don't seem possible, Grandfather. I can't believe them. You must have been a brave little boy."

"I don't know. I don't think boys is born brave, but they get the fear o' God put into them one way or another, the same as little girls."

"But all these things are like—story books."

"Like enough. Story books is imitated from real life, as near as I can make out."

"I didn't think any things like these could happen to anybody I knew. I mean, things so exciting."

"You never thought to sink so low as to be picking pin feathers out of the same fowl with a feller that had been cook on a fishing schooner."

This time Elizabeth met his twinkling gaze. She rose from her task long enough to deposit an emphatic kiss on the top of a shiny, bald pate.

"Who called me a goose?" she said.

"In the circles you're accustomed to, I suppose they don't call such names?"

"This is the circle in which I move," Elizabeth said, "this circle of you and Grandmother and Judidy. Now I know where I inherited my cooking ability from—you, sir."

"Well, there was times when the crew could get their teeth into my pie crust," grandfather admitted.

Elizabeth slipped up to her room that afternoon, after her noonday dinner, and wrote to Jean:

Jeanie Dear:

I have learned so much since I came to Cape Cod, that I don't see how there is going to be much more in the world to learn. I suppose there will be, but I don't think it can possibly be so important. I was an untried child when I came here, and now look at me. You can't, but I wish you could. I have grown a little taller and, I think, a lot sadder looking. Also, I am healthier. I feel a lot like Alice in Wonderland, mentally, however—I have to keep running and running, to stay in the same place, and then I don't.

I have some things in my mind that I can hardly bear, and some that I can hardly wait for, and some that I can hardly believe. You know what they are all about. The first is Buddy's girl and her approaching wedding. I am to stand up with them. I couldn't refuse; how could I, Jean? It's just a terrible, terrible thing. Buddy doesn't know it, because he is coming out of the hospital and down here just as soon as he can, and I am afraid it would retard his recovery if I wrote him. So I am not telling him till he gets here. Do you wonder, Jean, that I feel like a so much older girl than I did when I first came down here? Sometimes I think that my hair ought to be quite gray, with all my responsibility. I lit a light once, in the middle of the night, and got up to see if I hadn't really got gray hair, I felt so gray. I keep having to decide what to tell Buddy and what not. I can't ask Mother, because Buddy would never forgive me if I did, and what he would do to me would turn me gray for a fact, I guess. I've hinted it all out to you to keep from bursting, but Jeanie, it isn't the same thing as talking to you. It's only like saying my prayers or writing a diary. Besides, I haven't told you details. Only the general facts.

The things I can hardly wait for are my parents and Buddy coming—my own brother, that has come out of the jaws of death in two senses, since I have seen him. Once from the Trenches and once from the U. S. Base Hospital. Having a brother is the strangest, sweetest thing. I'd rather have one than a sister, though I do think Ruth Farraday is beautiful, and Peggy's lot is, next to mine, the most fortunate in that respect. I ought not to crow like this to an only child, though.

The things I can hardly believe are the things I've been hearing about my ancestors. In a way, you know, I think it is more interesting to be an American than even to be a count. I've lived along all my life with the idea that I was a New Yorker, or rather a New Jerseyite with one foot on Broadway or Fifth Avenue, and I thought the cook was the cook and the butcher the butcher, and that was all there was to it. I had a grandfather and grandmother that I had idealized in my imagination, all dressed up in city clothes and manners. I didn't stop to think what I came from, except that Mother was an Endicott, and that all her relations lived abroad most of the time.

You know the rude shock I got when I came down here. The corner grocer is my distant uncle. The hired girl is a kind of cousin. The butcher that goes out selling things in a cart, meat all raw and pig pork that he has killed himself, is the family's friend. It seemed just plain awful to me at first. I didn't know what any of it meant. But now I'm getting to. I talked with grandfather, who quite rightly understands my horrid scruples and teases me to pieces about them, and I talked with Peggy, whose father tells her a lot of things. (Those girls get their niceness from their father.)

He says this early settlers' blood is a wonderful thing. It was mostly the younger sons of aristocrat families that settled here, and a great many of them married their cooks or serving maids. (Perhaps that's why cooking is such a general talent.) They had to hew a living out of a very sterile soil, and to learn all the virtues of thrift and prudence from actual practise. They didn't have any houses or money or matches or anything. They just had to make them, and learn not to be aristocrats, instead of learning to be. They had to make New England. Well, my grandparents and my great-great-great-greats did an awful lot about this. There wouldn't be any Cape Cod, if it hadn't been for these Industries that they were engaged in, and it's the most romantic thing, the way even young children lived this seagoing, hardy life in the school of hard knocks. My grandfather was a cook at a very early age, and was lost at sea, only he jumped into a coastwise steamer instead of being drowned.

It's all wonderful, about grandmother's being courted at a Harvest Ball, and her grandmother running to get fire in a swing-pail, and funny little old songs they sing. Do you know what I feel as if I had done? I feel my roots pushing right down into the ground, and I love the ground, and it loves my roots.

Also, I love you, my own Jeanie, and more so all the time as I grow better. Some time I am going to show you all this Cape. Well, now I must take up my cross and my scare again. I almost forgot it when I was writing.

Your Elizabeth.

When she had finished and stamped this letter, Elizabeth took it in her hand and went slowly down the stairs. It was nearly time for the auto-bus from the morning train, the rumble of which could be heard distinctly on the street beyond that on which the old house stood. Elizabeth always waited for this before she went to the post office. She had heard the whistle of the train some time since.

Her grandmother stood at the door.

"The barge has turned in on our street, and it's stopping here," she said, "I guess we're going to have company. I'm dretful glad Father killed those roosters this morning. There's plenty cooked."

"Who do you suppose it is?" Elizabeth said.

"Some o' Father's folks. They're always turning up when least expected."

Elizabeth watched the high-set, curtained vehicle, a hybrid motor truck and picnic carryall that had been converted to its present use by the exigencies of "depot" traffic. A boy in overalls had descended from the driver's seat, and was lifting out a small motor trunk by its handle, and a big, pig-skin suitcase.

"Why, that's like Mother's trunk," Elizabeth said, "and that suitcase is like her suitcase."

A tall, blonde woman in a blue tailored suit and a blue veil jumped lightly out of the unwieldy conveyance, her hand touching that of the boy in overalls.

"Shall I lift these here baggages into the house for you?" he said.

"Yes, thank you. Thirty-five cents, isn't it? Oh, don't bother to make change. That's all right."

"For the Land o' Liberty!" Grandmother exclaimed. "For the land sakes!"

"Why, it is Mother!" cried Elizabeth.