The Egg——Sherwood Anderson
MY father was,I am sure,intended by nature to be a cheerful,kindly man.Until he was thirty-four years old he worked as a farmhand for a man named Thomas Butterworth whose place lay near the town of Bidwell,Ohio.He had then a horse of his own,and on Saturday evenings drove into town to spend a few hours in social intercourse with other farmhands.In town he drank several glasses of beer and stood about in Ben Head's saloon-crowded on Saturday evenings with visiting farmhands.Songs were sung and glasses thumped on the bar.At ten o'clock father drove home along a lonely country road,made his horse comfortable for the night,and himself went to bed,quite happy in his position in life.He had at that time no notion of trying to rise in the world.
It was in the spring of his thirty-fifth year that father married my mother,then a country schoolteacher,and in the following spring I came wriggling and crying into the world.Something happened to the two people.They became ambitious.The American passion for getting up in the world took possession of them.
It may have been that mother was responsible.Being a schoolteacher she had no doubt read books and magazines.She had,I presume,read of how Garfield,Lincoln,and other Americans rose from poverty to fame and greatness,and as I lay beside her—in the days of her lying-in—she may have dreamed that I would some day rule men and cities.At any rate she induced father to give up his place as a farmhand,sell his horse,and embark on an independent enterprise of his own.She was a tall silent woman with a long nose and troubled gray eyes.For herself she wanted nothing.For father and myself she was incurably ambitious.
The first venture into which the two people went turned out badly.They rented ten acres of poor stony land on Grigg's Road,eight miles from Bidwell,and launched into chicken-raising.I grew into boyhood on the place and got my first impressions of life there.From the beginning they were impressions of disaster,and if,in my turn,I am a gloomy man inclined to see the darker side of life,I attribute it to the fact that what should have been for me the happy joyous days of childhood were spent on a chicken farm.
One unversed in such matters can have no notion of the many and tragic things that can happen to a chicken.It is born out of an egg,lives for a few weeks as a tiny fluffy thing such as you will see pictured on Easter cards,then becomes hideously naked,eats quantities of corn and meal bought by the sweat of your father's brow,gets diseases called pip,cholera,and other names,stands looking with stupid eyes at the sun,becomes sick and dies.A few hens and now and then a rooster,intended to serve God's mysterious ends,struggle through to maturity.The hens lay eggs out of which come other chickens and the dreadful cycle is thus made complete.It is all unbelievably complex.Most philosophers must have been raised on chicken farms.One hopes for so much from a chicken and is so dreadfully disillusioned.Small chickens,just setting out on the journey of life,look so bright and alert and they are in fact so dreadfully stupid.They are so much like people they mix one up in one's judgments of life.If disease does not kill them,they wait until your expectations are thoroughly aroused and then walk under the wheels of a wagon—to go squashed and dead back to their maker.Vermin infest their youth,and fortunes must be spent for curative powders.In later life I have seen how a literature has been built up on the subject of fortunes to be made out of the raising of chickens.It is intended to be read by the gods who have just eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.It is a hopeful literature and declares that much may be done by simple ambitious people who own a few hens.Do not be led astray by it.It was not written for you.Go hunt for gold on the frozen hills of Alaska,put your faith in the honesty of a politician,believe if you will that the world is daily growing better and that good will triumph over evil,but do not read and believe the literature that is written concerning the hen.It was not written for you.
I,however,digress.My tale does not primarily concern itself with the hen.If correctly told it will center on the egg.For ten years my father and mother struggled to make our chicken farm pay and then they gave up that struggle and began another.They moved into the town of Bidwell,Ohio,and embarked in the restaurant business.After ten years of worry with incubators that did not hatch and with tiny—and in their own way lovely—balls of fluff that passed on into semi-naked pullet-hood and from that into dead hen-hood,we threw all aside and,packing our belongings on a wagon,drove down Griggs's Road toward Bidwell,a tiny caravan of hope looking for a new place from which to start on our upward journey through life.
We must have been a sad-looking lot,not,I fancy,unlike refugees fleeing from a battlefield.Mother and I walked in the road.The wagon that contained our goods had been borrowed for the day from Mr.Albert Griggs,a neighbor.Out of its sides stuck the legs of cheap chairs,and at the back of the pile of beds,tables,and boxes filled with kitchen utensils was a crate of live chickens,and on top of that the baby carriage in which I had been wheeled about in my infancy.Why we stuck to the baby carriage I don't know.It was unlikely other children would be born and the wheels were broken.People who have few possessions cling tightly to those they have.That is one of the facts that make life so discouraging.
