ALL OF US AT THE SAME TIME
©Jo Dereske 2014Chapter 18
Drains and Vegetables
Without warning, the plumbing in the little house ran amok. The drains bubbled when the toilet was flushed. The bathtub wouldn't empty. The toilet backed up. Dish water swirled but didn’t go down the drain.
"Maybe the septic tank's full," Ray said when he stopped by. “We’ll have it pumped.”
"So where's the septic tank?" Kipling asked.
“Out there.” Ray waved away from the house. Mike had built the little house – there were no printed plans – but when Ray asked him about the septic system, he began rocking in his chair, unable to answer.
“I can find it,” Ray assured us. “I’ll find the septic pipe first. It’s buried three feet down to keep it from freezing.”
“How?”
"I'll witch it," Ray told Kipling and asked me if I had a wire coat hanger.
When I gave him one from the closet, he used a pair of pliers to fashion two L-shaped pieces out of it. Kipling watched in disbelief as my brother slowly circled the little house, five feet out from the building, holding the short ends of the coat hanger Ls loosely in his fists, arms out in front of him, the long ends pointing straight ahead, his face a study in concentration. On the west side of the little house, the long ends suddenly and magically crossed over one another and Ray stopped and marked the ground with his heel.
"Well, here's where the pipe comes out of the house," he announced.
"No!" Kipling challenged.
Ray brought a steel rod from the shed and sunk it three feet deep into the sandy earth. It clinked against something solid, exactly where Ray claimed.
“That’s just a rock,” Kipling insisted.
But when they dug down three feet, they uncovered the clay pipe of the septic line.
We all tried using the coat hanger "witcher," walking over the same ground that Ray had. Nothing happened. Kipling paced it again and again, but the hanger arms didn’t budge.
"If you don’t believe, it doesn't work," Ray told him. “I’ll find the septic tank now.”
Kipling surrendered the pieces of coat hanger and Ray walked back and forth across the yard along the septic line trajectory between the little house and the ravine. But now the wire hangers didn’t magically cross for him, either. He couldn’t find the septic tank.
"Have you become an unbeliever?" Kipling teased.
Ray frowned. "Do you think maybe there isn’t a septic tank?"
"There has to be," Kip said, and then more hesitantly, "doesn't there?"
But there wasn't. They spent the afternoon digging along the pipeline three feet beneath the lawn, where they discovered only a clogged clay pipe emptying directly from the little house into the ravine which emptied into Weldon Creek which emptied into the Pere Marquette River which emptied into the wide blue waters of Lake Michigan and eventually into the Atlantic Ocean.
My brother, the environmentalist and energy-conscious world citizen, was appalled and embarrassed. He and Kipling made immediate plans to install a septic and drainage system.
"I'll call in a backhoe," Ray said. “I know somebody good in Custer.”
But Kipling had other ideas. “A backhoe would too intrusive,” he said. Louise and Mike would be upset by its presence. And too noisy; the machinery would scare the birds he was so diligently feeding. A backhoe would disrupt the wildlife and tear up the grass.
"I'll dig it," he asserted. I wasn’t surprised. It was exactly the kind of project he relished.
“If you will, I will,” Ray said. Within minutes they had marked four corners with stakes and attached strings to each stake, marking off the digging area. They took up shovels they’d chosen from the dozen in the barn after hefting and selecting their favorites, and plunged them into the sandy earth.
"Why do we need a septic tank?" Louise asked repeatedly, the news slipping away as quickly as we explained. "Who's digging it?" "How much will it cost?" And then she’d forget what was happening and begin questioning us all over again. Mike was thrown even more off-kilter by Ray and Kipling’s digging up the yard, shuffling back and forth, wringing his hands and softly cursing.
“Why wasn’t a septic tank ever installed?” I asked Louise.
“Because your grandfather didn’t need it.”
“He didn’t?” I asked in surprise.
She shook her head. “He thought it was rude to poop inside a house. He used the old outhouse until he died.”
When I woke up the next morning at six-thirty she was already sitting outside in her lawn chair. I immediately crossed the driveway, expecting the digging and explanations the day before had confused her.
"You're up early, Aunt Louise," I said cautiously.
"I'm just worrying." She waved her hand toward the septic tank hole, but her eyes sparkled. "What else can I do but worry? I can't get out there and dig."
It was warm and sunny, and all day long Ray and Kipling removed sod and planned out the drainfield. Barbara brought the children over and I took them on a walk around my trail. Louise and Mike, unaccustomed to so much bustle, stayed outside to watch, Louise sitting in her chair, Mike wandering aimlessly and nervously, sometimes examining the garden, once picking up a bottle of cola I was drinking.
"I'll put this away," he said, and wandered off toward the barn with the half-full bottle.
And so finally, the old outhouse was being used again, even down to night-time visits with flashlights and hastily donned jackets and sneakers.
After the first day’s digging, the septic tank excavations became Kipling's projects. As close as he and Ray were, Kipling preferred to work alone, maintaining a schedule and pace suited to himself, all under his control. The sides of the holes were perfectly perpendicular, the digging done in layers, smoothly and orderly from one edge of the hole straight across to the opposite side.
Ray brought the septic tank delivery man over to inspect the excavations before he delivered the concrete tank; they stood at the edge of the hole.
"This isn't dug," the delivery man marveled, shaking his head, "it’s sculpted. Goddamn piece of art,"
Next Kipling began the drainfield, twenty feet from the septic tank, a twenty by twenty-foot excavation that would hold gravel and a grid of perforated plastic pipes. Every morning he carried a bucket out to the freshly dug holes and scooped out frogs: sleek angular green frogs, warty brown toads, squishy mottled green frogs. Sometimes there were twenty or thirty, fallen in during the night chasing bugs by yardlight.
Mike often and tentatively circled the holes. Once he brought an ax from the barn and I held my breath as he stood uncertainly beside the drainfield excavation before hanging the ax on the wall in the shed and wandering away.
"What's that other hole you're digging?" Mike asked Kipling, motioning to the twenty- by twenty-foot hole for the drainfield.
Before he could answer, Louise spoke up. "He's digging a hole to bury all that dirt from the first hole."
Kipling uncovered the skeleton of a dog, a few shreds of black hair still attached. He reburied it near the barn. Neither Louise nor Mike claimed to know its origin.
A fat, agile chipmunk, bright-eyed, shiny-coated, young and fleet, hung around the drainfield hole. He ran up the pole of the nearby birdfeeder, stuffing his cheeks with corn and seeds, then down to a pile of bricks where he lived. He was industrious all day long and soon didn't care whether we were standing in his way or not. He simply skirted our feet with barely a flick of his tail. He was curious and emanated a chipmunky sense of humor and mischievousness. He ducked into a sparrow birdhouse and created bedlam. The birds dive bombed and scolded him until he popped out again.
Soon Kipling could very quietly hold a peanut in his hand while the chipmunk dashed up and grabbed it and raced off to his house with his bounty.
Louise asked Ray to move her lawn chair closer to the drainfield so she could watch Kipling dig. Ray and Barbara joined us and we all sat in the warm sun chatting and teasing Kipling about his method of peeling off one layer of dirt at a time. The chipmunk was perched on the birdfeeder stuffing his cheeks when I spotted Morris stalking across the yard toward us, his tail switching.
"Oh no!" I shouted and jumped up from the grass. Kipling made a move toward Morris who was now just beneath the pole that held the birdfeeder. But we were both too slow. The chipmunk, sensing a disturbance, ran down the pole and directly into Morris.
"Stop him!" I screamed.
"Good Morris,” Louise called in encouragement. “Get him!"
It was over in an instant. Nearly too swift to see, Morris killed the chipmunk and immediately dropped it, losing interest. He ambled over to Aunt Louise, purring, leaving the still quivering little corpse beside the pole.
Louise fondled his ears and praised him. “What a good hunter.”
Next, Morris rubbed against my leg and I jerked away, repulsed and disgusted. "Stupid cat," I said too low for Louise to hear.
"Well, that's what cats do," Kipling said as he climbed out of the drainfield hole with his shovel so he could remove the chipmunk's body.
Maybe, but I noticed it was a few days before I saw Kipling pet Morris again.
1931 Bill went to a meeting. I went to an auction sale of beautiful old things. I bought a Tiffany lamp and a chair for not much money. The lady next to me said it had all belonged to a woman in the front row her and her husband but they were now in debt to their necks. I felt bad but I love the lamp and chair.
The new concrete septic tank dangled over its perfectly formed and hewn hole at the end of a chain, ready to be lowered into place. The backhoe operator halted its descent and hopped out of the cab. “Not big enough,” he shouted. “I need more wiggle room.”
My first thought was, All that careful work. But there was no time for excuses. Ray and Kipling jumped into the hole with shovels and for several minutes, it was like watching a cartoon: shovelfuls of dirt flying out of the hole as they broke down the smooth sides and geometric angles.
After the septic tank was installed, there remained a huge pile of dirt to dispose of. Kipling began methodically shoveling it into a blue wheelbarrow with the words, "Louise's" painted in yellow on the side – there was another wheelbarrow in the barn, red with the word, "Mike's" painted in green on its side. He tipped each wheelbarrow full of dirt into the ravine. As the dirt pile diminished, when he reached bare ground, he used a hoe and rake to scrape up the last little bit of dirt and revive the grass.
Finally, when he was completely finished and the dirt from the eight foot deep septic tank hole and the excess dirt from the drainfield was all tipped into the ravine, not a sign of his digging remained except for the grassless square over the septic tank, no sign of all the activity that had taken place there.
However, Kipling had so carefully removed the dirt that when he was finished, the four stakes he and Ray had originally set out to mark the excavation’s dimensions were still in place.
“It’s nice to have a septic system again,” I told Louise the next day.
She frowned and glanced out at the unmarked lawn, then back at me with a touch of sympathy, as if I were confused, saying nothing.
1931 I found this four-leaf clover: it means Hope, and I have to believe in it. No job in sight for Billy. He went to the south side looking for work, and I came home for Mother’s birthday. Brought her some beautiful cloth for quilt pieces. R is here. I KNOW she stole my silk slip in Chicago.
The garden produced: peas and beans, lettuce, spinach and carrots, while we guarded the upcoming corn, the broccoli, melons and tomatoes, from insects and predators. It was a race to pick zucchini before they ballooned to unusable size. Mike had plucked Kipling’s coddled peanut plants from the ground and thrown them atop the compost pile, deeming them foreign invaders. Kipling hadn’t anticipated the exuberant production of green bean plants and we were inundated. I tucked green beans into every sauce, stir fry, and vegetable medley. I canned dilly beans, froze bagfuls and gave them away.
We eagerly watched and waited for each newly ripened vegetable so we could serve it to Louise and Mike, announcing that it was from “Mike’s garden.” Mike ducked his head and Louise praised his “agricultural prowess.”
But Louise’s pride unexpectedly turned destructive. I sat on the patio with her while Mike picked a melon from the garden and carefully carried it in both his hands to the outside faucet where he attentively washed and cleaned it before presenting it to Louise, proudly setting it on the patio table in front of her.
“How could you pick this?” she laid into him. “It’s not your garden. How could you pick what you didn’t plant? It’s not even ripe.” Mike was deflated and uncertain.
“Uncle Mike can pick anything he wants,” I assured her loud enough so he could hear. “It’s his garden. It was his long before we arrived.”
But she could only grasp that Mike had transgressed on what she now viewed as ours. Kipling, who’d been washing the truck, turned off the hose and joined us. “C’mon, Mike,” he said. “I just saw a deer,” and off they went, Mike’s attention diverted to the enemy deer while Louise steamed.
The deer had not been persuaded by the strip of corn Kipling had planted for them near the woods. They’d accepted it as an hors e’ oeuvre, an invitation to come on in, browsing their way through his corn patch and progressing to the main garden by the house, appearing early in the morning or at dusk. Mike advised him to hang aluminum foil, tie hanks of hair to the fenceline, to pee around the borders, or leave a radio playing. Nothing worked.
The deer slipped in at every chance, leaving their hoof prints and bare-leaves as evidence. When they were chased, they bounded a few graceful leaps into the orchard where they rose up on their hind legs and stripped the lower branches of leaves and ripening fruit. Kipling never abandoned chasing them, but gradually his enthusiasm for the task waned to throwing a few stones and shouting.
“Well, what can you do?” Mike told him, shrugging.
1931 Still in Michigan. I’m doing nothing but eating. Oh boy, how I can eat! We went to a Lithuanian picnic. More food! Danced to P’s accordion until I almost fainted. I’ll bet I danced with every man there, even old Stalys.
It’s warm here, sticky. We went swimming at Round Lake yesterday and to the beach at Lake Michigan today. Just beautiful warm and breezy. I miss Billy. I received two letters from him and some money to buy flowers for Mother’s birthday. He’s doing a little work here and there but no real job in sight. He moved into one room.
Donora’s had a terrible fire. Mother and I cooked food for them and took over
blankets. Mother is especially terrified of fires.
We rented a post office box in town to avoid confusing Mike when he made his either infrequent or multiple trips to the mailbox at the end of the driveway – and also to save our mail from being flung over the bank, which he occasionally did with their own – I’d made a probably-illegal agreement with the postmistress to only deliver ads and second class mail to Louise’s mailbox; the rest went into our post office box to guarantee its safety.
When I stepped inside the small brick post office, the postmistress saw me and sang out, “I see you got a letter from your mother today.”
She’d been a friend of my mother’s before my mother moved to California a few years earlier to help care for her parents who were in their nineties. I was aware the postmistress occasionally jotted notes on the backs of my envelopes when I wrote to my mother and my mother did the same on the flip side of her letters to me.
We chatted a few moments: it’s been an especially nice summer; wild asters are starting to bloom; kids will be back in school before you know it, those things you say. I took my mother’s letter to the car and settled into the driver’s seat and rolled down the windows before I slit it open with my car key. A wasp buzzed in through the window and veered back outside on its own.
My mother wrote that she planned to visit Michigan in two weeks. It was a surprise. Usually, she planned her trips months in advance. I felt a vague disquiet over this unexpected visit. It was her custom to make a few calls or write a letter informing us she might visit, waiting for a signal that we approved of her timing before she scheduled her trip.
The remainder of her letter was chatty with her Auxiliary club news, her doll collectors’ group and volunteer stints. She had always been an active woman, one of the many service-oriented women who’d been young and impressionable during World War II and adopted that era’s spirit of service.
I refolded the letter, slipped it back into its envelope, thinking she must be missing my brother’s children, and maybe even us.
Telling Louise of any event in advance only triggered too much anticipation, tension and obsession, so for the time being I kept her sister-in-law’s impending visit to myself. The two of them shared fifty years of a close and tangled relationship.
1931 Mother finished the quilt so I mailed it to Mrs. B. in Chicago. Mother didn’t ask for enough money so I told Mrs. B. more. I’m drying a few apples for winter. Rain, finally.
Next Tuesday, Chapter 19: We face legalities