Three-holer Outhouse
Chapter 18 from Bill Owens' upcoming book "Chicken Heads"
At age fifteen, I could ride a horse, milk a cow, drive a car, and shoot several kinds of guns.
That summer, Mom sent me to Montana to work on her brother’s farm. When I arrived, Uncle Orv and my cousins had already started harvesting summer wheat.
My job was driving a jeep that was pulling a flatbed trailer. All summer, I bucked hay bales and stacked them next to the barn.
I slept in the shed with the hired hand, an American Indian, who was driving one of the wheat trucks. At 15, I was considered too young to drive a truck alongside a moving wheat harvester. That was the Indian’s job.
One evening, the Indian used a small electric planer and built himself a small box for holding fly fishing hooks. I asked him to build me a fly box. Later that evening, his hand slipped, and the planer took off the tips of three fingers. The next day, he went to town to see a doctor and never came back.
I clearly remember suppers at Uncle Orv’s. He and my cousins were covered from head to toe with wheat dust. Twenty-five years later, Orv got lung cancer and died. They said it was from wheat dust.
Supper was as follows: Uncle Orv and the cousins covered their plates with white boiled potatoes. They mashed them with a fork and covered them with white gravy. They ate everything, cleaning their plates. Next came a large piece of meat. When finished, they used a piece of white bread to soak up the meat juices.
Dinner was finished with a cup of black coffee served in a white cup. Every night we ate the same thing, meat and potatoes. Uncle Orv’s farm did have a patch of eating-corn. He also grew pumpkins and a few vegetables. Eating vegetables was not part of a wheat farmer’s life.
Down by the barn, there was an abandoned three-hole outhouse. I noticed a large hole in the door. I knew the hole was made from a shotgun because I could see the lead pellets in the back wall. At supper, I asked my cousin about the shotgun hole in the door of the outhouse.
He smiled and said, “We had a hired man named Luke, a North Dakota Indian. Every time I sent Luke out to work, he would disappear for an hour in the outhouse. I got fed up with him hiding in the crapper, so I went to the house and got my shotgun. I walked to the crapper and in a loud voice, I said, ‘Luke, you got a one-in-three chance.’ I put the shotgun to the door and pulled the trigger.”
The next day, I went down to the outhouse and looked for blood
.
Bill Owens' Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Visit my websites
Support Bill’s Archive & subscribe to Substack
Bill Owens’ Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. “Friends of Bill” will get a print and access to the full interactive book “The Delco Years.” Monthly and Annual subscribers will get special content and my thanks.