Catherine had three horses partly because of their need to keep one another company and partly because when it came to Catherine her father was a soft touch. They were kept at her grandparents’ and to her disappointment the horses didn’t care for chickens. They especially disliked the rooster Bob, who was arrogant and charged them crowing. He also charged Grandpa who kicked at him but rarely made contact because Bob was so deft. He was generally pleasant to Catherine seemingly thinking she was part of his brood.
Her grandmother was a bit capricious ordering chicks the post office delivered in a big box. Grandmother liked colorful feathers in her barnyard though she would get ordinary leghorns for reliability. The eggs were always white which Catherine’s aunts favored. Her daffy older brother wouldn’t eat eggs, odd for a farm kid but then he was a problem in every respect. That’s why her father treated her like a son. Her grandpa’s farm dog, a collie, used to retrieve the cows every day but thoroughly ignored the chickens though he would growl at the rooster if he approached which frightened the rooster. Grandpa only liked to eat brown eggs thinking they were healthier but then he was full of errant theories. Her father who was the banker in town said that this was because Grandpa was a Swede, and Swedes are known for their eccentricities. There were Rhode Island Reds and Plymouth Rocks for brown eggs, a few Golden Comets, a scattering of Anconas, and French Marans for variety and color. If you’re a farm woman you struggle for anything different from the farm routines.
Catherine’s father was American and grew up on the farm, while her mother was English. After he graduated from college he got a job with a big New York City bank with an office in London. He met her mother at a dance hall and he said that it was “love at first sight.” Her mother was younger and impulsive and desperately wanted to live on a farm and he lied saying that that was where he lived though he had no intention of returning to farm life. So they married in England and came back home to Montana. She was plainly furious when they reached Montana and moved into a grand nineteenth-century home in the village. She simply asked, “Where’s the farm you promised?” and he ignored her. She was already pregnant and knew she had to take his lie calmly.
When her parents quarreled which was frequently her mother would go out to his parents’ and sleep in the small quarters she had organized for herself up in the cold attic in winter. She’d take Catherine along when she was small. In the winter she’d carry a large stone she had heated on the stove up to the attic, wrapped in a blanket to keep their feet warm. Everyone knew that if your feet were warm the rest of the body was easy with enough blankets. Of course by 5:00 a.m. their feet were cold but that’s when her grandparents got up for breakfast to start the day. Catherine liked being with Grandpa at the kitchen table when he would sit waiting for it to get light outside, a very long wait in the winter but then the kitchen was warm from the wood-burning stove. Grandpa would invariably eat a half dozen brown eggs, ham or bacon or pork chops, and fried potatoes, also a bowl of Wheaties with pure cream. It doesn’t sound healthy but he worked on the farm until he was ninety. He wouldn’t have a tractor, believing that motor exhaust poisoned the ground, but plowed and cultivated with two large Belgian draft horses. Once when Grandpa had pneumonia her dad plowed the thirty-acre plot and was a physical wreck for a week. He was so proud that he had done it and her mother had to take many photos of the banker behind the plow yelling “gee” and “haw” so the horses would turn at the end of the row.
Catherine was a dutiful daughter, if generally ignored as her parents hopelessly tried to manage her brother. She went to Sunday school voluntarily. Her parents were members of the Methodist Church in Livingston but never attended except at Christmas and Easter. She had a good teacher who had told her to pick the same place to pray each morning. She couldn’t quite manage it. At home in town she’d go out to a thicket of Russian olive and aspen trees or, if the weather was too bad, down to her secret place in the basement where she had an altar covered with her favorite stones, arrowheads, a pretty white coyote skull, and her first teddy bear. She loved the Gospels and read them often and still did. At the farm she’d say her prayers in the henhouse. She prayed that her parents would stop yelling at each other and her father would stop drinking so much. Nothing happened and the teacher said it must be God’s will which puzzled her about the effectiveness of prayers like it does many.
Although she didn’t want to, Catherine’s mother helped her shovel snow off a big patch of ground outside the henhouse so the chickens could go outside on sunny winter days. Bob the rooster seemed infuriated by his confinement and attacked her mother chasing her across the yard. She was embarrassed to run from a chicken. Catherine rescued her by shouting and waving her arms for Bob who ran back to the comfort of a crowd of hens.
“I’m going to kill that bloody rooster,” Mother screamed. Catherine had never heard her mother use that dread word. She had tears of fury in her eyes while Bob was quite happy back annoying the hens.
Catherine had a friend, Laura. They would ride horses together. Laura was slow, or so everyone thought. Then one day when they were feeding the chickens Laura said calmly in a voice different from her usual one that she could actually read and write and that she only acted retarded because it made life easier. Both of her parents were severe alcoholics and were nicer to her under the assumption that she was “out to lunch.” Catherine understood because drinking was behind many of her parents’ quarrels too. The only one that knew Laura’s secret was their cranky family doctor who not oddly approved of her behavior.
The small town had three churches, Lutheran, Catholic, and Methodist. All of the Norwegian farmers and ranchers were Lutherans. If you had a big place it was a ranch, and a smaller one was a farm, often originally part of an early homestead that had been carved up and sold off because it was too much land for a single farmer just trying to get by. It was muttered that the Catholics did well as they had so many children, hence free labor. The Norwegians usually had smaller places and the largest spreads of all were owned by the white Anglo-Saxon Methodists who had moved in with money in banks in the mid-nineteenth century in hopes of getting rich raising cattle. It didn’t happen though there had been boom years around the First World War and would be after the Second.
Catherine’s brother Robert ran away when he was fifteen and she was nine, still fascinated by her grandparents’ chickens. Robert sent a number of postcards from Los Angeles where he said he worked in a Standard Oil station and had started taking drugs. Their father flew out once to look for him but failed. Robert told her years later that he had seen Father from a distance and hid in a car behind the gas station. Father had relentlessly bullied Robert to make him into his own image.
Meanwhile, her parents went through a period when they were sure they had failed as parents and were especially nice to her. They diminished their late afternoon cocktails to a single martini. When they had had several they used to yell at Robert who was brilliant but made poor grades. Their father thought Robert’s downfall was his reading. In his early teens Robert had read Dostoyevsky, James Joyce, and many French poets which his father felt had altered his behavior in negative ways. It later occurred to Catherine that if great literature changed your behavior then so what? Their father was unable to see that his bullying led to Robert’s rebellious nature. He did not spare the rod. It was also hard on Mother, which was why she would retreat to the farm so often. She was painfully homesick for London, altogether logical since she’d moved to raw Montana on the basis of the lie that she was going to be a farmer’s wife. She had a housekeeper named Gert who worked for the family and became a confidante. Later on when Catherine was eleven Gert explained to her that the fundamental problem of her parents’ marriage was this lie about the farm. Since childhood her mother had fantasized about being a farmer’s wife and perhaps taking the farm over when her husband died. Gert advised Catherine, “A man will tell a hundred lies to get into your pants.” Catherine was a late starter and didn’t quite understand why a man would want to get in her pants. What would he do there? Soon afterward her mother gave her her first sex lecture which she found stupid and embarrassing. Later on in the spring a boy in the field behind the school took out his hard penis, pointed it at her, and yelled, “Bang.” It was the silliest thing she had ever seen, even sillier than Grandpa’s pigs screwing, or Bob mounting a hen for a few seconds. Catherine knew that her friend Laura would pick up change from boys for lifting up her dress and showing herself bare. Laura had told her that boys were dumb as male dogs for anything sexual and she needed a little money because her parents never gave her any. They spent every spare penny on drink.