The Heavenly Table(21)
Though Ellsworth couldn’t begin to imagine why anyone would pay a man to go around poking a stick in people’s privies, or why a man would want such a job in the first place, he nodded and said, “I bet ye seen some sights, ain’t ye?”
“I surely have,” Jasper said. “Ye’d be surprised at what goes on in a shithouse.” He looked about, then moved toward the wagon and lowered his voice. “Husbands a-cheatin’ on their wives, wives a-cheatin’ on their husbands. And that’s not nearly the worst of it. I’ve come across people doin’ things that would make your hair stand on end. It’s the privacy, see? That’s what attracts them. Ye step in and latch the door and everybody thinks you’re just takin’ a dump. Why, I bet ye half the girls in this town have lost their cherry in somebody’s johnny.” He took another step closer. “Then there’s other stuff, too. A couple months back I rescued a newborn out of one over on Hickory Street. The mother thought she was just havin’ pains from some cabbage she’d et for supper, but as soon as she started to strain, out plopped a baby right down in the slop. Didn’t even know she was expecting, or so she claimed anyway.”
“Good Lord,” Ellsworth said.
“Oh, it turned out fine,” Jasper said. “I ran him straight over to Doc Hamm’s once I pulled him out. They put my name in the newspaper and everything. Heck, the mother even said she was goin’ to name him after me, but then her old man, he got jealous, started claiming that I’d been spying on her, and, well, that put the stops to that. But you can ask Mr. Rawlings, the city engineer, I don’t need nobody’s permission. I got a legal right to check any outhouse in this town.” Then Jasper’s face turned dark and he lowered his voice even more, to the point where Ellsworth could barely hear him. “Found me another one, too, over on the south side, but it was already dead. Nothin’ but his little feet stickin’ up like a couple of peckerhead mushrooms. They never did find out who put him there.” He shook his head sadly and glanced down at the rat in his hand. A drop of blood dripped from its crushed skull and landed on the toe of his boot.
“Sounds like a helluva job,” Ellsworth said.
“It’s an awful of a thing to say, but hogs is cleaner than a lot of the people around here. And since they started building Camp Pritchard, the town’s nearly doubled in size. That’s a fair amount of fecal matter when you think about it.” Anytime he found himself in a conversation with someone, especially a stranger, Jasper liked to throw in a technical phrase if given the opportunity, so that the person would know he truly was a professional. “Fecal matter” was one of his favorites.
“I imagine so,” Ellsworth said.
“Right now the drinking water’s the main worry,” Jasper went on. “I find effluent running into a well, I got no choice but to shut it down.”
Ellsworth wasn’t sure how to respond, but he was damn glad he lived out in the country where a man had room to shit all he wanted. Clearly he was in the presence of an official who wielded a lot of power. After all, he thought, only someone with substantial pull could shut down a man’s water supply, no matter what sort of filth was floating in it. Taking a chance that the man might be in agreement, he said, “Well, these are modern times, I guess.”
Jasper’s face lit up and he gave the rat a good shake. “Yes, sir, they are,” he said, his voice rising with excitement, “but you still got a lot of people set in their ways. As Mr. Rawlings says, they want to hang on to their slop jars and corncobs and privies and jakes no matter what. Hell, I think half of them would do their business right out in the street if they could get by with it. You mark my word, though, if’n we don’t kill ourselves off first, someday everybody in the country will have indoor facilities, and I don’t just mean some hole sawed in the floor, either, like Chester Dotson’s got in his parlor.” He took a deep breath and wiped his nose with the same hand that held the rat. “Well, it’s been nice talkin’ to ye, mister, but I better get back to it. Last time I counted, there were still over eighteen hundred outhouses in this town, and I’d bet my buffalo gun at least one of them is causin’ trouble today.” Then he turned on his rubber heels and headed across the redbrick street, swinging the rat by the tail like a whirligig.
—
A FEW MINUTES later, Ellsworth halted the mule in front of a small white house. From a porch post hung a wooden sign that had a broom painted on it with a careful hand. Across the street, several men were squeezed together on a bench in front of the barbershop smoking, while another stood reading them a story from a newspaper in a theatrical manner, with much hand-waving and fist-clenching and verbal emphasis on certain words. The farmer set the brake on the wagon, then walked up to the porch. He knocked on the door and a voice inside called out, “It’s open.” He stepped inside a dark and musty room that smelled of stale sweat and straw and bacon grease. Hanging in one corner from a hook in the ceiling was a birdcage that contained what appeared to be a mummified parakeet. An old man with long white hair sat in a rocking chair in the opposite corner. Even though the air was stifling inside the closed-up room, he wore a thick woolen sweater underneath a butcher’s apron stained with spills from a hundred dinners. His eyes were covered with a translucent film that reminded Ellsworth of egg whites. The man leaned forward and sniffed the air. “You got a mule?” he asked.