Onions in the Stew

  In my early island days I cuddled a cozy little notion that our country repairmen might not be as dextrous or have as big tool kits as their city brothers but they were a lot more willing and much cheaper. The willing part is true enough. Nipper, when you can find him (which he has not made easy by marrying an Estonian girl who speaks only one word of English, “hello,” which she screams into the telephone before immediately hanging up), will attempt anything. Need your rowboat calked, your Pittisporum tobira transplanted, your Stradivarius tuned? Nipper will gladly take on the assignment, but first, and I mean before one broken fingernail or big rusty tool touches the job, he must send to Seattle for the most recent rate schedule for boat calkers, landscape gardeners or Stradivarius repairment. Your alternative is portal to portal pay from Seattle and maybe the lights are off and they are grinding the ramp of the dock down by hand.

  Island repairmen also expect immediate payment. “Be sure and send the check tomorrow morning, Betty—I’m real short of cash and Elva’s gittin’ her new china clippers,” New Motor Marvin told me after examining my steam iron the time it boiled and boiled but wouldn’t let out any steam and so I set it out in the patio to blow up and Mother said, “Why don’t you call Marvin? At least he can’t say that needs a new motor.” But he did, only he called it a “heat control unit and it will run you maybe twenty-twenty-five dollars.”

  Of course the pipes froze during the big snow and of course as soon as the weather warmed up we intended to put in new pipe. However, while the snow was still on the ground a delegation from the Spring Committee called on us. They were our neighbors on the beach, mostly summer people whom we had not met as yet, all male, the delegation, that is.

  “The spring,” they told us with great seriousness as they stamped the snow off their boots at the back door, “is on your property, but it is a community thing. We all have water rights. We all work together. We will all fix the frozen pipe. Do not do anything yourself!”

  “What darling people,” I said to Don after we had all had coffee and they had admired the way we had arranged the furniture and I had wished fervently I had washed the windows. “I just love community spirit. I adore people working together. I am so glad we live on an island.”

  Don said, “Did they say when we were all going to fix the pipe? I’m not exactly dedicated to carrying water?”

  “I don’t think they said when exactly,” I said, “but I imagine it will be this afternoon. After all, nobody else has any water either.”

  But it wasn’t that afternoon or the next or the next. Finally Don and Anne and Joan went back to the spring (I regret to say I protested this breach of community spirit and would take no part in the undertaking) wound rags and friction tape around the worst places in the pipe and that is the way it stayed until late spring when Don got hold of Zachary Millard Potts (colored) who wore tropical shorts and a sun helmet even on rainy days, sang calypso songs in French and signed his work, especially concrete variety: “Mended by Zachary M. Potts, 4/3/43.” Zachary had no tools but he was very strong and could rip the threads off any diameter of pipe. Don bought the necessary pipe and wrenches and Zachary, between cups of coffee (he had a very nervous stomach which could not stand being empty even a minute) and cigarettes which he borrowed from me, removed the broken pipe, as I say usually removing the threads from the good piece, and put in new. Zachary was very artistic and instead of burying the pipe in the humdrum fashion of the former plumber, he allowed it to swoop in big natural curves, propping the lowest places with small forked willow twigs which rooted and eventually grew into little willow trees.

  While he drank coffee with me, Zachary related incidents from his full life. The only one I can recall offhand, is the story of a lady friend of his who tripped over a broken place in the sidewalk in Chicago and fractured her ankle. “She sue the city,” Zachary told me, “but she don’t get a penny. She can’t understand why. ‘The big mistake you made,’ I tell her, ‘is havin’ your girl friend drive you to the hospital. What you should have did is lay on the sidewalk and wait for the avalanche.’”

  When Zachary had finished and signed the pipe work, Don put him to work on the county trail. We were able to follow Zachary’s remarkably slow progress on the trail by his singing which, though in a foreign tongue, had great volume and bounced off the hillside and rolled across the water with sonorous magnificence. When he had finished, Don and I walked the trail to check the results and found an ugly litter of paper bags, sandwich wrappers and Coke bottles, mingled with and following the course of the wilting nettles and slashed blackberry runners. Don told Zachary to clean up this mess but he was reluctant and without his usual zest.

  “Waste of time,” he told me when he knocked at the door for his seventeenth Coke. “Just trash along that trail anyways, what harm a few ole Coke bottles goin’ to do? Mr. MacDonald’s just wastin’ money.”

  The next morning, Sunday, at five Don had a call from Zachary, who was in jail and needed bail. Don provided it that time and several others. Zachary explained that it was his weak stomach that always got him in trouble. “Two double sherrys and I’m a wild man,” he explained sadly. When hot weather came and Don put Zachary to work on our new road, he quit. “My weak stomach won’t stand that shovelin’,” he told me. “I’ll have to git me some sort of over-seein’ job. My last boss tell me I should be in charge of people. I’m a natural executor he tell me.”

  After Zachary came a pale artist named Egular Earhart who was studying oil painting by mail but for a dollar and twenty-five cents an hour offered to “put the place in shape.” I had visions of weedless beds deep in peat moss, trimmed hedges, beautifully espaliered trees, slugless rockeries, wild morning-gloryless hillsides and everything very artistic. I told Don about Egular with a great deal of enthusiasm and he said evenly, “Is he very strong?”

  I thought of Egular’s shoulders like a bent coathanger under his threadbare tweed jacket, of his waxy face, his spindly arms, but I said, “He’s not exactly husky but he’s certainly willing.”

  “Well, try him out,” Don said. “I guess he’s better than nothing.”

  But he wasn’t.

  He came every morning at eight o’clock, checking in and collecting his tools courteously at the back door. Then he disappeared. I was writing, my typewriter on the small blue table by the kitchen window and I suppose I didn’t pay as much attention as I should either to what Egular was doing or where.

  I do remember going to the beach for bark occasionally (there was a strong feeling in our house at that time that writers didn’t have to be warm) and wondering irritably as I fought my way through the syringa and blackberries on the path what exactly was Egular’s idea of “putting the place in shape.” Then one beautiful April Sunday, when the sky behind the black firs was the color of a milk of magnesia bottle, the peach tree was covered with pink tissue-paper rosettes, the wind had veered to the north which meant clear weather and the Sound was wrinkled green silk sprinkled with white ostrich plumes, Anne and Joan and Don and I decided to cook supper on the beach.

  We were hunting for good marshmallow sticks when we found Egular’s project—the project on which he had already spent eleven full twelve-dollar-days and on which I am sure he had intended to spend the entire summer. It was a lovely little design about three by four feet, made of beer bottles pounded into the hillside in the shade of an enormous wild blackberry vine. In between the beer bottle bottoms, Egular had transplanted some of my choicest alpines, some azaleas and two baby nettles. I do not know whether he intended eventually to pave the entire hillside with beer bottles or whether he intended to scatter these gems here and there in the garden, but Don said he didn’t want to find out. Egular had to go.

  Monday morning when he knocked at the back door I was ready with an evasive lie about Don’s father, a landscape gardener from Scotland, coming to live with us and so, although we were just crazy about Egular and his work, we wouldn’t need him any more, but perhaps I could get him some
other jobs on the beach. . . .

  Egular said, “Oh, that’s all right, Mrs. MacDonald. I was going to quit anyway because I’m making pottery full time now.”

  Time is a great healer but I still remember the summer morning when Gimpy Hodgkins, hired to clean out the spring tank, told me he wouldn’t be able to come until Saturday because he had “back door trouble.”

  The spring had a cement tank into which it flowed and from which the houses on the beach got their water supply. This tank was supposed to be cleaned once a year. “Don’t you touch it,” the Spring Committee had warned us. “Community project. We all get together and clean it.” The tank was not mentioned again until one Sunday afternoon two summers later after a grueling weekend of fourteen adolescents, seven boys and seven girls, since Friday. It was about five-thirty in the afternoon and the houseparty had been up and eating (four more stacks of hotcakes and some more sausages, please Mrs. MacDonald) since dawn (more hamburgers—one without lettuce and lots of relish on mine but Mary Jean says she doesn’t like onions) but were at long last on their way to the ferry and Don and I were wearily sitting down to a pitcher of martinis and some fried chicken, served on a cardtable on the front porch.

  Don said, “I don’t understand kids these days. When I was fourteen or fifteen if I had had a chance to spend a weekend at the beach I wouldn’t have spent the whole time lolling around in the house giggling and listening to records. I would have been out in the boat fishing or hiking through the woods or digging clams.”

  I said weakly, “Oh, it’s just that Anne and Joan seem to have so many good records. Have another martini. I’m on my third.”

  Then Tudor began to bark, which is a mild way of saying that he rushed between our legs, hurled himself off the porch and ran shrieking down the path to the beach. After an interval a neighbor appeared.

  “Say, Don,” he said ignoring the chicken cooling on our plates and our haggard faces, “we don’t have any water. Haven’t had any all day. Let’s go up and take a look at the tank. Must be something wrong.”

  With an accusing look at me, Don got to his feet and followed Neighbor up the path to the spring. Tudor and Neighbor’s dog came up from the beach and followed them. I gazed across the horizon and thought longingly of the Deep South where girls marry at fourteen. Don and Neighbor returned.

  Neighbor said, “Tank needs cleaning. I’ll get a bunch together and we’ll all pitch in. Now, don’t you touch it, Don. The spring’s a community project. We all take care of it.”

  Don said, “Have a martini.”

  Just then Tudor and Neighbor’s dog started a fight under the cardtable. I will say that the fight was undoubtedly started by Tudor who even now at fifteen still attacks great Danes and small females. I jumped up and Don and I both yelled at Tudor to “stop—stop it—stop it you naughty dog-stop it you little bastard!” As always Tudor ignored us and continued to hurl himself at Neighbor’s dog’s throat until the cardtable tipped over and our martinis and chicken were tossed over the railing and down the bank.

  As I scrambled down after the silverware and pieces of plates, I heard Neighbor calling from the path, “Remember, Don, community project. We’ll all get together.”

  So through another neighbor on the other side, not using the spring and not hampered by community spirit, we heard about Gimpy, and after his “back door trouble” had cleared up he came to work or rather came to the house and told me his dreams, read me some short stories he had written, looked up my dreams in his dream book, told me the exact number of germs in a cup of spring water and finally, I guess, cleaned out the tank. He also showed me how to sharpen old victrola needles, how to make papier-mâché out of newspapers, and the correct way to fry an egg. “Add a teaspoon of water to the bacon grease—no more no less—just one teaspoon. Keeps the white soft and smooth instead of all bubbly and starched like.”

  I loved Gimpy but like so many of the local artisans he was continually involved in some sort of factional dispute with the competition. “I seen him put sand in my motor but I couldn’t prove nothin’ especially with his dad bein’ on the Chamber of Commerce.” He finally left Vashon and went to Alaska.

  For a while after we moved to the island the Puget Sound Power and Light Company had an electrician who knew what he was doing and did it. When the roaster lid got caught in a little spring in the oven element and filled the kitchen with lightning, when the pump was clogged with silt, when we had no water pressure and somebody was hammering inside the hot water tank, when I tried to unplug the vacuum cleaner and one prong came off and stuck in the wall socket—any of those little womanly emergencies—I called the Puget Sound Power and Light and they sent this nice man who located the trouble and also knew lots of interesting stories of buddies who grabbed live wires without their gloves.

  Then for some reason the power company stopped this fine unselfish service and we were left with Orville Kronenburg who hated everybody in the whole world and whose wife wore her bedroom slippers downtown. Orville knew about electricity I guess, but he didn’t consider looks important and, unless you stopped him, he would run wires across doorways and over pictures. Also he didn’t measure when he cut holes for wall plugs and when he had finished putting the new wall plug in our bedroom, Don said bitterly, “It looks like a small raft in a large quarry.” Orville also had a special kind of wall plug that even when just installed wiggled dangerously and made the lights flash on and off like beacons.

  The time my Bendix shrieked and jumped up and down when I put anything bigger than a washrag in it, I called Orville and he came sullenly down and told me there was sand in our hot water tank. I told him to take the sand out and he did but after he had gone I tried out the Bendix and it didn’t scream but it whirled like a transport propeller and threw a geyser of water out the soap hole. I called Orville and he said, “That’s just the fledamora plankstaff. It will slow down after a while.” It didn’t, but I got used to it. Then after a time Orville went back to South Dakota and the Bendix began shrieking again and jumping up and down when I put anything bigger than a handkerchief in it so I called New-motor Marvin, and guess what the trouble was?

  Anybody who has girl children over the age of ten knows the necessity of either having two bathrooms or learning to comb your hair and put on your lipstick by looking in the dog’s pan.

  Don and I decided to make the small bedroom next to our room into a combination dressing room and bath for us and to put a tub in the other bathroom and give it to the girls—which was certainly locking the barn after. . . .

  This was still during the war and basins and bathtubs were impossible to get, to say nothing of carpenters and plumbers. We had a friend around the Point who was a good amateur carpenter and who offered to do that part of the work for us in the evening and on the weekends. Through the ferry-commuters’ grapevine we heard that there was a plumber living at the other end of the island who also sold plumbing supplies and could get us the fixtures and install them. Don immediately contacted this phenomenon, a Mr. Curtis, and one evening he came to the house and we showed him the bathrooms and he drank brandy, and the deal was made including a large septic tank which Mr. Curtis was going to install in the south patio with a sump down on the beach. We were also at that time putting in a road which was at the deep-cut, knee-deep-mud stage but which, Mr. Curtis assured us, after some brandy, would make bringing in the pipe and fixtures a cinch. Just a cinch!

  The carpentering of the bathrooms went along very rapidly. We bought hand-wrought black strap hinges and knotty pine and in no time at all our friend turned them into closets and drawers and shelves.

  The plumbing seemed to be at a standstill. Don called Mr. Curtis and called Mr. Curtis and called Mr. Curtis, and Mr. Curtis said his back hurt, he couldn’t work in the rain, he was using his secret powerful influence to get the fixtures, was the road paved yet (it was barely bulldozed), he would let us know.

  Weeks later, about eight o’clock one evening, Mr. Curtis and his wife
appeared. Mr. Curtis wore a light polo coat and a brown Fedora. His wife had on jeans and a mackinaw. This was not too unusual a combination in a place where husbands go to the city while wives dig clams and get wood, but in the case of the Curtises it had a special significance, we learned. We offered them a drink which he readily accepted in the cause of his back and she refused, rather wistfully I thought. Don threw another log on the fire and we prepared to settle down and discuss the current ferry strike. To our amazement Mr. Curtis downed his drink in one gulp, leapt to his feet and said, “Sorry, Don, but we must get to work.” Firmly he took his wife’s arm, led her into the service room and handed her a pick. She chipped where he pointed.

  They worked pretty steadily after that. She did all the heavy work, chipping cement, digging the hole for the septic tank, laying the sewer pipe, and so on, not done by Don and his carpenter friend who also dragged all the pipe and the fixtures down the road and set them in place. Mr. Curtis, who never once removed his polo coat or Fedora, in addition to directing the job, did a little screwing on of different things. He performed this rite delicately with his tapering fingers.

  We had quite a celebration when the job was finished. Two bathrooms, wheeee! Then the girls reported that if they wanted to take a bath in their new tub they had to fill it with the shower because the faucets wouldn’t turn on. Don said, “Nonsense!” and went masterfully upstairs with his pipe wrenches. He came out in a minute soaking wet and told me to call that “fellow Curtis.”

  There was no answer at the Curtises’ house. I called every day for a week but there was never anyone home.

  Then one very rainy morning Don and I were getting dressed to go to town. I finished first and was downstairs drinking a cup of coffee when I heard an agonized howl from upstairs. I ran up and found Don on his knees by the washbasin, his forefinger in a hole in the floor shouting, “The shutoff—find the shutoff!”