Reimer’s Loose in Darp Altneijv

Reimer’s Loose in Darp Altneijv 
     by Clandestine Dougie 

Mom selected where we were to throw the slop. The kitchen gathered about 5 gallons of it every week. In summer it got tossed who knows where. In winter, though, it’s “traces” were more readily noticeable. If not Rudy, then I carried the pail out of the kitchen into the garage and out the back door where we stood on the doorstep and slung the murky mess in the direction of the big evergreen just a dozen yards away. Of course, the slop froze during the night. By the end of winter the frozen pile stood 2 to 3 feet high, often partly covered in snow, except in April when it began to thaw and smell. In later years I wondered if we were the only family in all of Altona who had that much hillbilly in us. I don’t recall any other family slinging its  slop out the back door of the house. I don’t recall any other family throwing slop onto the yard anywhere, except ours. I have felt a modicum of shame about our rudeness of manners, but mostly I have been proud of my family. Of us Reimers. 
     Once Rudi, my eight year old brother, younger by 3 1/2 years, jumped up and hung onto the attic opening just above the landing between our house and the attached garage. Since there was no lid over this opening, you could jump up and hold onto the two by fours that framed it. I heard him scream. I ran out the door to see him hanging there. I asked him what was the matter and he sounded incoherent. I believed something was wrong so I grabbed his legs and began to pull. I thought he was afraid of letting go. He screamed even louder. I tried pulling harder, calling for him to let go! He bellowed twice as hard. And then I stopped and noticed that with his eyes and his head he was attempting to get me to push him up. His eyes and face were making frantic up movements. So, I grabbed his legs again and pushed him higher. Now he let go the “hole” and I dropped him down beside me. Blood streamed down his hand. Apparently there had been a nail sticking right through his finger. It was bent in such a way that there was nothing he could do to loosen it because his weight pulled him down further onto the nail. No place his feet could reach to push against. He asked me, crying, “Why didn’t you lift me up? Why did you just keep pulling me down? Why were you so stupid?” What could I do to explain? How do you defend against accidental stupidness?
     Dad hated carrying out the cash-and-carry pail. Situated in the basement immediately beside, and in the sleepy warmth of, the Booker furnace, it needed emptying at least once a week. I knew that he hated the job because he inevitably waited half a week too long and it would fill up to and over the brim. The emptying process meant first successfully lifting the 5 gallon pail out of the tin container with the seat and lid. Once out of there (which feat itself took a prodigious effort, as anyone knows about 5 gallon pails full of an uncomfortable mixture of solids and liquids that have you also gagging while exerting). Once up and over, the 80 pound pail travelled the width of the basement, moved up a flight of eight stairs, got walked through the garage 20 feet to the back door, was lifted up onto the doorstep and then stepped gingerly out onto the icy backdoor landing and from there (in the fresh air) onwards to the toilet, the biffy. 
     Two full 5 gallon pails are hard enough for a man to carry. But one! One massy pail with its inevitable imbalance, pulling hard at either the right or left side of the body, is triply difficult. The distance from the back door to the outhouse was easily 150 feet. Oh Gauntlet! Oh Narrow Way! Oh Nemesis! You see, all winter the snow deepened in the back yard. That 150 feet became a monstrous obstacle course. The hard path, just ten inches wide where dad‘s steps had trodden it down (because it was not the path not taken!), increasingly deepened as winter wore on. Actually, the path increasingly rose upward and simultaneously packed down as more snow fell. And on each side of that hard ten inch wide path the snow rose and stayed soft. 
     I know that you know what I am about to tell you. I’m lying in my bunkbed in the basement, I hear dad scrabbling near the furnace and I realize what he’s about to do. When he gets to the first set of stairs I hear him say, “Oh, no! Obviously, the overfull container has sloshed and dribbled. I hear him proceed through the back door and then I don’t hear anything for a while.      
     However, shortly, from somewhere halfway down the path, I do hear a terrible outcry. A single word! And I know exactly what has occurred. It comes out later in dribs and drips. The snow beside the path has risen high enough to mean that he’s had to hold the 5 gallons higher than before so the bottom doesn’t scrape the snow, tilt and spill. 
     Suddenly, the unthinkable happens. His foot slips off the path and into the soft stuff and his body tilts sideways and he falls completely flat on his back, face up, into the snow, as if he’s about to make a snow angel. Unfortunately, the pail does not tip the way any normal human would like it to. Instead, its bottom hits hard against the uneven snow, the pail loses its proper center of balance, lays down on its side and empties itself immediately and entirely over the body of the person who is now lying bug-eyed in the snow, who seconds before was walking gingerly upright in the direction of two-holes. 
     Now, covered from head to toe in filth, dad jumps up raging in denial, and then in disbelief. Actually, no, he does not jump up, but struggles and writhes in a futile panic (probably likenable to Jacob desperately wrestling the angel) to get his body upright as quickly as possible. In order to do that, he has to flail around in the snow, in the brown stuff, until he is able to turn over onto his side and then onto all fours (face likely nose-deep in the snow, or nearest facsimile) and then that way slowly raise himself up to sitting, and eventually standing.
      From the basement, my first indication that there has been an incident is the sound of dad‘s voice calling out very loudly one word only,    
     “No!”
     Then again, a minute later,
     “No!”
     And two minutes after that, 
     “No!” A pause of 10 seconds followed by “No!” 
     Then again, “No! No! No!” No swearing or lengthy harangue but just a repetition of the single negative, as if in an attempt at whitewashing the event, of erasing the past. 
     All is quiet for a bit and I have decided that things are OK, and then I hear a sudden even stronger declaration, “No!” Pause. “No!”
    Intermittently, throughout the day, dad breaks into this particular song. This song of one word only, “No!” and then later suddenly any old time out of the blue (brown, really), 
     “No! No!”
     And tomorrow he teaches Sunday School, hoping, I’m sure, that the smell hasn’t stuck around, uncleanable by even “…all great Neptune’s ocean.”