1.005 Boucher Street, Chico

In 1915 the Chatfields left Los Molinos and moved to the up-and-coming agricultural town of Chico, buying a fairly new two-story corner residence in the Chapmantown district, a working-class neighborhood near the Diamond Match Factory. In those days most people rented; few owned their own homes. With only two upstairs bedrooms–the boys sharing one, the girls the other–the house was small for such a large family but the older boys were on their own by this time. Downstairs, Nellie created a tiny sleeping space for herself in an alcove under the stairway, keeping the small, downstairs bedroom for company. Grandpa slept in the shed.

During the First World War, Nellie supplemented what little income the family had by raising caged guinea pigs in her overgrown yard and selling them to the U.S. Army; they used the shy creatures for running in the trenches to detect mustard gas, like caged canaries are used for detecting gas in the coal mines. After the war, she and her younger children gathered the fallen black walnuts from her numerous trees, spending the walnut season husking and shelling. Their fingers cracked and stained from the black outer shells, they packed the freshly cleaned nuts in pint and quart glass canning jars and sold them alongside the road, making a goodly sum.

Verda, Grandma Nellie, Nella Mae; in front: Ina, Noreen (Babe)

In her tiny alcove, Nellie hung a curtain for privacy, shielding her twin bed with a small dresser at its foot. Everyone was forbidden to go near her space. Under the bed she kept hidden a large, flat, coat-box with her burial clothes folded neatly inside: a gray shroud, a slip, a pair of white cotton underpants, a girdle, a new pair of shoes, and silk stockings. Grandma always thought she’d die young. Her children were aware of the box and respected their mother’s privacy. When Mom and her kids came to Chico, Mom, to keep them in line, threatened that if they didn’t behave she’d make them look at Grandma’s shroud. On one of Mom’s visits, Nellie opened the funeral box and finding the stockings rotted, sent Mom to the store to replace them. Roy, still living at home with his mother when she passed away years later, had to replace them again.

The family bathed in the kitchen. The large, round, aluminum washtub hanging on the porch was filled with water from the kitchen pump handle and heated on the woodstove, then transferred a pot at a time to the tub. The older girls shared the bathwater, and then the small children, as many as could fit in the tub, bathed together. After their baths, the greywater was bailed out the back door into the garden. My grandmother washed her hair with rainwater collected in a barrel on the porch, with a wooden lid placed over it after a storm. She scolded her grandkids when they floated paper boats in it. It was soft water, unlike the hard well water. When she was younger, her dark hair was beautiful and went nearly to her waist. She wore it in a tight bun, only letting her hair down at night to brush it.

Sitting down to a meal with her ten children at the table, Grandma proudly noted that the Chatfield name would never die out, her having six fine sons. As it turned out, five of the boys never had children, and Howard, the only son who did, had all girls. With six of Nellie’s children and Howard’s five daughters (his oldest was five years younger than Babe) in the Chico school system, a local teacher looked over her spectacles while reading the roster at the beginning of the new school year and inquired in disbelief, “Is there no end to you Chatfields?”

Nellie Chatfield lived in this three-bedroom shingle and clapboard house for nearly forty years, raising her children, holding firm reign, and breathing her final breath in this house.

to be continued …

© 2017. Catherine Sevenau.
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