Curtis, part fifteen

Leta spent her entire Sunday throwing rotten produce away and dumping out jar after jar of home canned fruit and vegetables that obviously had been sitting for years. Her husband had disappeared after lunch—to deliver two days worth of gathered eggs to the distributor, he said. This gave her the quiet to work. The kitchen table was too large for her to drag out to the back yard, so she settled with a board over two of the side tables from the living room. One was rickety, making the makeshift table rather unstable, but she made do. While cleaning the disaster of a kitchen had been her original plan for the day, learning about the cellar with its decaying produce changed her plan very quickly.

After all, they needed to eat, and Curtis was very unwilling to drive to the market every day. The old icebox had no ice to keep anything. And in her estimation, they couldn’t live solely on eggs and dairy products.

In addition to sorting the vegetables and washing the emptied jars, Leta also churned butter, milked the cows, made supper and cleaned one cabinet, where she stored the few dishes she had managed to clean. Before he disappeared, Curtis brought a large chicken to the back yard. Of his 200 or so laying hens, he selected that one for her to prepare for his supper.

But she didn’t have time, she told him at six-thirty when he returned to the house, finding the chicken in the cage in the back and smelling a mostly vegetable stew simmering on the stove. She had been too busy cleaning the cellar.

“Then we better have it tomorrow,” he said pointedly.

The truth was that Leta had no idea how to kill and clean a chicken. While she had spent parts of her summers on her Uncle John’s farm, learned how to milk the cows and frequently helped feed the livestock, she had never participated in any of the killing. Her uncle, aunt, cousins and even sisters thought she was far too sensitive to do so. She wasn’t sure how to share this information with her husband. After all, she had been showing her farm prowess over the past two days, and she knew that he definitely considered all steps of preparing food woman’s work.

“I scrubbed the three milk canisters from the cellar,” she said, as she poured him a fresh glass of water. “We should be able to sell at least one canister of milk per day. Your cows love to produce. I can get three buckets each, counting both morning and evening. I figure we could do one of milk and a half-one of buttermilk and then there’s the butter. We can get two or three pats a day, and will only use one ourselves, at most. That is, if you have someone who’ll buy it.”

“We’ll probably use it all,” he mumbled.

She turned to him questioningly; his face lacked expression. Then he cleared his throat and said, “How about some fresh biscuits to go with that stew?”

“Right now?” She asked. “But the stew is nearly done.”

“I said, it would go good with biscuits, I think,” he answered then rose from the table. “Let me know when they’re ready.”

Then he walked out the door.

To be continued.