Scrawk!

THE EGG AND I--Beffy MacDonald--Lippincott ($2.75).

That loud literary cackle last week was not only Betty MacDonald's, whose The Egg and I is leading U.S. nonfiction lists. It was also her readers', who were finding her account of life on a primitive Oregon chicken ranch one of the funniest books ever written about chickens, friends and neighbors.

Author MacDonald, thirtyish, was born (in Boulder, Colo.) while her father, a mining engineer, was away from home. So grandmother ("Gammy"), "prompted by the same inner urge which made her wear her corsets upside down" with the bust fitting snugly around her hips, rushed out and fetched a veterinary. He had retired for the night and arrived breathless, clad only in his long underwear. Her mother sent him packing, with the result that Author MacDonald was born without medical assistance.

It was Gammy who really prepared Author MacDonald for her adult life in the wilds. Mother and Daddy were husky, outdoor types. They loved danger and "were always walking logs over deep terrible ravines; walking into black dangerous mine tunnels; wading into swift turbulent streams and doing other scary things. Gammy, on the other hand, carefully avoided danger and was constantly on the alert for it." In the sweltering summer Gammy shut the doors and windows against the dangers of mountain air. At the first clap of thunder she and the children would hurtle under the bed. On walks they would stop every few feet to listen for rattlesnakes. She was also on guard against eagles, hawks, bees, horseflies, mosquitoes, ticks, leeches, timber wolves and mountain lions. "We [children], of course, never told brave, fearless Mother and Daddy about Gammy and the dangers of outdoor life, and they probably wondered why they, so strong and daring, should have produced this group of high-tensioned rabbits."

But Mother also made a fatal contribution to her daughter's future. "Along with teaching us that lamb must be cooked with garlic and that a lady never scratches her head or spits, my mother taught my sisters and me that it is a wife's bounden duty to see that her husband is happy in his work. ... It is depressing enough for a man to know that he has to work the rest of his life without the added burden of knowing that it will be work he hates!"

Holy Grail. So when Author MacDonald married Bob, an exmarine, who seemed to be well established in the insurance business, she decided to learn about length of premiums, renewals and actuarial climacterics. But on the honeymoon Bob began to talk about hens. "When he reached the figures--the cost per hen per egg, the cost per dozen eggs, the relative merits of outdoor runs, the square footage required per hen--he recalled them with so much nostalgia that listening to him impartially was like trying to swim at the edge of a whirlpool." "Why in God's name," cries Author MacDonald, "does everyone want to go into the chicken business? Why has it become the common man's Holy Grail?"

She never found out, though they at once bought 40 acres and a log house high up near the cold shoulders of the Olympic Mountains in the "most rugged, most westerly, greatest, deepest, largest, wildest, gamiest, richest, most fertile, loneliest, most desolate" countryside she had ever seen. The house had no running water, little roof, and the vines were crawling across the floors. But the first body-numbing summer had to be spent building cozy quarters for the chickens before work could be done on the house. The soil produced lavishly. The stock was prolific. So was the local population: the countryside was studded with illegitimate kinsmen, the result of neighbors indiscriminately "laying up" with each other. It was in fact a husbandman's paradise--but rather like a paradise on the dark side of the moon. Author MacDonald had sometimes dreamed of a little haunt far from the clawing hands of civilization with its telephones, electric appliances, artificial amusements and artificial people. After nine stimulating months with the mountains, the trees, the rain and the chickens, "I would have swooned with anticipation at the prospect of a visit from a Mongolian idiot."

Bats in the Bedroom. Author MacDonald lists some of the things she never got used to: the hen; the gasoline lantern; the outhouse at night; no radio; no telephone; "bats hanging upside down in the cellar, flying in the open bedroom windows . . . making my skin undulate in horror"; dropping-boards and chicken lice; wet, cold, soggily miserable winter, "and spring so warm, so lush and fragrant that I wanted to roll on my back and whinny."

She also failed to get used to: baby chicks which had to be tended at least every three hours and spent most of their time trying to stick their little boneheads into drinking fountains so that they drowned; getting up at 4 o'clock in the morning; bears and cougars; syphilitic Indians; drunken Indians who once paid her a threatening visit when she was alone at night; Author MacDonald got rid of them by grabbing a gun and shouting in her fright: "Shi'll oot!" [I'll shoot! ] which she thinks must be Indian for Get out!

Old-Fashioned Buttonhook. But the visiting salesmen and neighbors were some compensation. There was the local abortionist who came up when news of Author MacDonald's being " 'that way' went the rounds of the mountains and valleys along with the news about the contagious abortion in the Helwig herd of Jerseys and the impotency of the Green bull." " 'Drop up some evening with six dollars,'" said the abortionist, " 'and I'll fix you good as new. . . . Took care of Mrs. Smith when she was six months along and got rid of three for my own wife at three months. Just a plain old-fashioned buttonhook.' "

There was the man who sold spices, patent medicine, lice powder, chocolate, etc. Said he, looking deep into Author MacDonald's eyes: "I heard you got a new baby; organs all back in place O.K.?' . . . After I had put his mind to rest about my organs he told me about his hernia and I'm sure would have showed it to me if I had been a customer of a little longer standing."

Bile & Bilge. There was also Mrs. Hicks, with whom Author MacDonald once shared a ride to town. "We also shared the car with Mrs. Hicks' liver and her bile, neither of which functioned properly. ... She drove, as did all the natives of that country, on the wrong side of the road, very fast and with both hands off the wheel most of the time. During the course of the drive, she missed by a hair two other cars, a cow, a drove of horses, a wagon and a road scraper but not a feint in the blow by blow account of the fight between her liver and her bile. Her liver was so sluggish that it had constantly to be primed in order to make it pump her bile. . . . Just before we went into the auditorium of the schoolhouse, she took two of the priming pills and I was very disappointed not to hear liver's motor start and a cheery chug-chug-splash as it pumped Mrs. Hicks' bile into her bilge. . . ."

Nothing Lah-de-dah. Above all there were the Kettles, Tobacco Readers who mismanaged a fertile farm and spent most of their time borrowing from the neighbors. Maw Kettle was a mountainously fat woman in a very dirty housedress. When Author MacDonald visited the Kettles, Maw shouted at the dogs to "stop that goddamn noise." Then she hospitably kicked a path through the dog bones and chicken manure. Author MacDonald staggered; her nose had been dealt "a stinging blow by the outhouse lurking doorless and unlovely" near the porch. Once she ventured to wonder why the Kettles, who had a good stream, did not install a bathroom. Maw Kettle was incensed: "And have every sonofabitch that has to go, traipsin' through my parlor? When we start spendin' money like drunken sailors, it won't be for no lah-de-dah toilet."

The Kettle cattle kept eating up Author MacDonald's garden. One day Bob steamed down to protest. "The dignity and force of his entrance were somewhat impaired by the fact that as he came abreast of the back porch he found himself face to face with Mrs. Kettle, who was comfortably seated in the doorless outhouse reading the Sears, Roebuck catalogue, and instead of hurriedly retiring in confusion, she remained where she was but took active part in the ensuing conversation."

Bob is the hard-shelled fact in The Egg and I. Under Author MacDonald's whimsical (and sometimes Rabelaisian) threnody is the consciousness that Bob, tireless, devoted and efficient, was patiently pioneering a successful farm out of some fallen buildings and overgrown fields. He became one of the best chicken farmers in the countryside, and after two years was making so much profit that he could think of buying a bigger & better farm.

How much Author MacDonald has made has not been publicly totted. Sales of her book for the last three months: 256,000 copies.

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