Bath Time and Long Underwear

Note: Dad says I got the facts wrong. Check out his correction at the bottom.

Bath time for these couldn't have been that bad, right?

My mother told about a time when they had five children, the youngest a small infant, and they went to visit my aunt and uncle for a week. After they returned home, the water company came to my aunt’s house to see if the water meter had broken, or if there was a leaky pipe. Nope, it was just the effect of seven extra people--baby diapers to be washed (my aunt’s three kids were long past this), five more kids to bathe, etc.

Since this blog is not about my mother, I won’t tell you about her mother’s “cleanliness is next to godliness” attitude, or the warfare against germs that went on in their house. I won’t tell you about her growing up in California in relative comfort, either. For my dad, things were a little different.

When my father and his sister were small, baths were not communal, but the first kid in got the hot, clean water. Each succeeding child got colder, dirtier water, until it was finally tossed after the last one bathed--pure old country tradition. But also, rural community reality.

When you consider that his father built their home by hand, room by room, this bathing ritual shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise. The bathroom (really just a water closet) had a curtain for a door, and you had to warn approaching footsteps that it was already occupied. A rain water cistern was dug in the yard, used for cooking, bathing, and flushing the toilet.  This meant they wouldn’t have to trudge to the communal well with its water pump any more, and combined with the new indoor toilet, must have come as a serious relief in the Illinois winters.

Sharing the tub happens sometimes.

Needless to say, my aunt was shocked when my mom ran bath water for her first child, and then drained the tub once he was clean. "Aren't the others getting a bath as well?" Confused, Mom just looked at her as she replaced the plug, and started to fill the tub again. Five kids. Five tubs of water. No wonder the water company was concerned at the sudden spike in usage.

When I expressed my, um, appreciation of the different lifestyles Mom and Dad had experienced as children (telling Dad he had married up), he started to tell me an anecdote of P.K., a child he knew from school.

P.K. had a mother who each fall would sew him into a union suit.  There was no chance to take it off, let alone bathe, until the spring, when she would literally cut him loose. In their small Illinois farming town, some neighbors would share a twin outhouse located on the property lines between the houses. Not a fun place to be in the cold or dark, but you did what you needed to do.

One day in the fall, not long after P.K. was sewn into his warm undies, he and a friend were in one of the outhouses, cleaning a rifle. They choose the pit toilets as a safer place to test-fire than the house, since no one wanted a hole in the roof over the winter. It must have been hot in that enclosed space, or at least warm enough that P.K. took off his outer layers, one by one, as he worked on the gun.

Finally, P.K. and the gun were stripped to their last layer. P.K. finished his cleaning, and put the rifle back together. As he was looking down the barrel, checking the sights, the rifle went off unexpectedly. Fortunately, the gun was pointed down, not at his buddy or the side of the outhouse, which would have made for some seriously drafty business. Unfortunately, it was pointing straight into the pit, and the bullet went right into a fresh “deposit”. Poor P.K. and his six-month undies were splattered.

Remember, his union suit was probably the only one he had, and the question of whether they could have afforded a new one is probably moot. After all, there was nothing wrong with it structurally. And why ruin good stitching? His thrifty (and probably annoyed) Old Country mother made him wear them all winter. Poor P.K. And poor anyone else in his vicinity. He must have been truly ripe by spring.

According to Dad, P.K. wasn't the one cleaning the rifle. His buddy was. This being a shared outhouse, it was a two-hole number. P.K. was leaving a deposit while the buddy pointed the gun into the other hole. Blam went the gun, splat went the poop. All over P.K. I leave it to you to decide which version you prefer. Me, I prefer not to think about poop all that much, anyway.