of the triple-seater outhouse at school and in my dream, Goat, the doctor’s idiot son, sat on the roof with his back to me. The outhouse was filthy with excrement and bits of dirty magazine pages, and I was so disgusted I woke up. For a moment I thought I had wet the bed. Then the fuzziness of sleep left me and I realized how badly I had to pee.
Each of us had our own pail, not the pretty chamber pots the cataloguessold to slip under the bed; our chamber pails were large and made of white enamel with a black rim around the top and a white lid. I used mine instead of the outhouse most nights, and then emptied the night soil into the manure pile in the morning. My father and brother stepped onto the porch in the middle of the night and peed into my mother’s flower patch, though she called them dogs for it. The outhouse sat to the side of the barn, close to the fence surrounding the sheep pasture and orchard. Over its history the outhouse had been moved several times and had been knocked over by neighbor boys on several Halloweens. It now leaned towards the barn and groaned when anyone stepped into it. There was no toilet paper, only magazines and catalogues to wipe with. There were always spiderwebs over the toilet seat and, above all else, the outhouse stank. Flies buzzed around your head, mosquitoes bit your behind, your ankles, your arms, the back of your neck. When I was very young Dan told me things lived down that hole, huge hairy things. So I didn’t sit, I barely hovered. The fear of those unnamed, unseen things in the outhouse was still with me, at night, when reason flew away. Now I squatted over the chamber pail in my bedroom, trying to avoid making contact with the rim because it was so cold. When I got back into bed, it was a long time before I warmed up enough to fall asleep again.
When light started up the sky, I dressed listening to the snoring of my brother and my father, and the clear high whistle of my mother’s sleep. I put on the blue dress I’d wear to the funeral later in the day, and pulled the rags from my hair but left the curls in disarray; there was no use combing them yet. I intended to start milking early on this day of Sarah Kemp’s funeral, but when I went out to bring the cows into the barnyard, I found that my father and Dan had left the gate to the sheep pasture open in the night. The cows were down near the creek, more curious than hungry, sniffing at the damage my father had inflicted on the Swede’s fence. On the other side of the fence, Johansson’s goat stood guard, lip-curling and sniffing the air.
The Swede himself lived in a cabin the size of our parlor, the size of the cabin that my father had built for our hired hands. The Swede didn’t have an outhouse behind his cabin, as everyone else in the valley did. He built his outhouse right over the creek, so his refuse was flushed away by the water downstream to the reserve. People living on the reserve used water from that creek as drinking water, and theSwede knew it, but he also knew they wouldn’t complain. He kept a small weedy garden that Mrs. Bell despised him for, and a bunch of scraggly chickens that he fed in summer by stringing fish above the coop. The chickens didn’t eat the fish, they couldn’t reach them, but flies laid eggs on the fish and their maggots, wriggling, dropped to the ground. The chickens ate the maggots.
In fall the Swede hunted on my father’s property for deer without my father’s permission. He owned a three-legged Lab that shat freely all over the yard around his house and would have come into our yard, but my father fired the shotgun at him, always missing. The dog was yellow and yellow-eyed. It sometimes ran as if it had four legs, as if it still had the ghost leg that had been caught in a coyote trap. It was because of this, my father said, that he always missed the dog. Both the Swede and the dog smelled like fish.
The Swede had built his fences with living trees for fence posts; he
Each of us had our own pail, not the pretty chamber pots the cataloguessold to slip under the bed; our chamber pails were large and made of white enamel with a black rim around the top and a white lid. I used mine instead of the outhouse most nights, and then emptied the night soil into the manure pile in the morning. My father and brother stepped onto the porch in the middle of the night and peed into my mother’s flower patch, though she called them dogs for it. The outhouse sat to the side of the barn, close to the fence surrounding the sheep pasture and orchard. Over its history the outhouse had been moved several times and had been knocked over by neighbor boys on several Halloweens. It now leaned towards the barn and groaned when anyone stepped into it. There was no toilet paper, only magazines and catalogues to wipe with. There were always spiderwebs over the toilet seat and, above all else, the outhouse stank. Flies buzzed around your head, mosquitoes bit your behind, your ankles, your arms, the back of your neck. When I was very young Dan told me things lived down that hole, huge hairy things. So I didn’t sit, I barely hovered. The fear of those unnamed, unseen things in the outhouse was still with me, at night, when reason flew away. Now I squatted over the chamber pail in my bedroom, trying to avoid making contact with the rim because it was so cold. When I got back into bed, it was a long time before I warmed up enough to fall asleep again.
When light started up the sky, I dressed listening to the snoring of my brother and my father, and the clear high whistle of my mother’s sleep. I put on the blue dress I’d wear to the funeral later in the day, and pulled the rags from my hair but left the curls in disarray; there was no use combing them yet. I intended to start milking early on this day of Sarah Kemp’s funeral, but when I went out to bring the cows into the barnyard, I found that my father and Dan had left the gate to the sheep pasture open in the night. The cows were down near the creek, more curious than hungry, sniffing at the damage my father had inflicted on the Swede’s fence. On the other side of the fence, Johansson’s goat stood guard, lip-curling and sniffing the air.
The Swede himself lived in a cabin the size of our parlor, the size of the cabin that my father had built for our hired hands. The Swede didn’t have an outhouse behind his cabin, as everyone else in the valley did. He built his outhouse right over the creek, so his refuse was flushed away by the water downstream to the reserve. People living on the reserve used water from that creek as drinking water, and theSwede knew it, but he also knew they wouldn’t complain. He kept a small weedy garden that Mrs. Bell despised him for, and a bunch of scraggly chickens that he fed in summer by stringing fish above the coop. The chickens didn’t eat the fish, they couldn’t reach them, but flies laid eggs on the fish and their maggots, wriggling, dropped to the ground. The chickens ate the maggots.
In fall the Swede hunted on my father’s property for deer without my father’s permission. He owned a three-legged Lab that shat freely all over the yard around his house and would have come into our yard, but my father fired the shotgun at him, always missing. The dog was yellow and yellow-eyed. It sometimes ran as if it had four legs, as if it still had the ghost leg that had been caught in a coyote trap. It was because of this, my father said, that he always missed the dog. Both the Swede and the dog smelled like fish.
The Swede had built his fences with living trees for fence posts; he
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