There are, I suppose, some advantages to growing up poor, though while you are in the process of doing it, you certainly are not aware of them.

You take it one small step at a time and swear all along the way that if the Lord ever does deliver you into the land of plenty, not all the power of Satan and his minions will drag you back again.

Until I was in the eighth or ninth grade, we did not have running water in the house. We had a kitchen sink, which we filled with buckets from the well, then simply drained the water out onto

the ground, and there was a small room designated the bathroom, which it would actually

become when the folks could afford indoor plumbing.

Our water, for drinking and bathing and any other purpose for which it was needed, came from a well dug 40 feet into sand and gravel by my father and a couple of helpers and lined with concrete well sections something a little over 3 feet in diameter, I would speculate.

In even the driest of years, there was at least 3 or 4 feet of cold water down there, ours for the taking with a couple of buckets on a rope spooled on a shaft that we turned with a steel handle to raise and lower the buckets. As one bucket came up full and sloshing, the other was going down to get a load. After a few years of cranking the water up that way, Daddy went high-tech and bought a hand pump, one of those red cast-iron ones with a big arm on it, and then all we had to do was prime it and jack the water up a gush at a time.

A year before they actually installed the plumbing, Mother decided to go ahead and buy a tub and lavatory and commode and have them set up in the bathroom, which had been used pretty much as a junk room for six or seven years, though there was a slopjar (or chamber pot or whatever you prefer to call them) in the corner, to be used should someone, as the British say, be “taken short” and not be able to make it the hundred feet or so to the outhouse.

Her theory was, obviously, that if she could afford to save part of her paltry salary from Banks Hardware and buy the fixtures, the least Daddy could do was to put in an electric pump and route pipes from the well.

Once the tub was in the room and situated in its permanent position, nothing would do but to use it, so Daddy and I would lug in buckets of water from the well and fill it by a third or so, easy enough in summer, when the water was bearable, though in the winter half of it would have to be heated on the stove to raise the temperature to the point that we could stay in there long enough to get wet. Toting water in those big galvanized buckets was a hell of a job, but, hey, we had a bathtub! Most of my friends had always had them, and they even had spouts with handles, and all

a prospective bather had to do was turn a handle and the water came streaming in.

Some kinda miracle, I’m telling you. We could fill the commode tank, but using it was out of the question, since we didn’t have a septic tank until the plumbing came. It was one thing to run gray water onto the ground from the kitchen sink, quite another to . . . you get my point.

One of the funniest things I remember about the early bathroom was hearing one of my female cousins come shrieking out of it one day, babbling on about the commode not working. I ran in to see what she was talking about.

“What do you mean, it ain’t workin’?”

She shrugged. “I flushed and everything, just like at school, but the handle just jiggled. It

wouldn’t flush.”

I lifted the lid and abruptly turned away, slammed the lid down, and yelled at her, “You take’n a . . . why did you use that commode? There ain’t no pipe goin’ out the bottom, fool. And there ain’t no water in it!”

“How come?” She pointed at it. “If if ain’t got water and you can’t use it, what is it settin’ there for?”

“It’s . . . it’s for someday,” was all I could say.)

Whoever got to take a bath last (this would be me or my brother) had to bathe in the water the other three had bathed in, which meant that he came out about as clean as he would have

slithering out of the coffee-colored Luxapalila.

The soap I had to use, selected according to the degree of grime I was wearing, was either lye, which Mother or Grandmother made, or Ivory or

Octagon, none of them what you’d call easy on the skin, but they weren’t easy on germs either.

They would all get the most persistent dirt or grease off of you and kill every germ within two or three feet and leave you clean enough for church or school. The fragrance was what I’d call Le Strong Soap, and none of it came in a fancy wrapper, if it came in a wrapper at all.

Now, before that big cast-iron white-porcelain bathtub came floating into our lives, all of us had to bathe in a galvanized tub (number 3, maybe, though my knowledge of tub sizes has fogged a little), which we kept in the wellhouse, where in time a pump would be mounted to lift the water from the well a lot faster than we could with a rope and buckets or with that old hand pump.

In the summer we filled the tub outside or in the pumphouse, but in the winter we bathed in the

kitchen, only 15 feet or so from a gas heater, fueled by propane from the submarine-shaped

tank out by the driveway, and hot water was a matter of heat and turn and pour.

Those washtubs were round, too, and less than three feet in diameter, which means that there was no stretching out and luxuriating in fragrant bubbles, the way you see cowboys do in movies after a long, dusty trail drive, just before they get out and dry off and go and pick out a whore.

We’d step in, fold our legs, and ease down into the water, which through displacement would rise all the way to a boy’s armpits or neck.

There were forced tub baths two or three times a week most of the year, maybe one a week

during the winter; in the dead of summer, when there was no school, I could beg off if I’d just

come out of the Cold Hole, a spring-fed swimming hole backed up behind a gravel dam on a nearby creek, or out of the river.

Sometimes, when the water was too cold to tolerate without too much griping, I was permitted to stand up in the tub and swab down a little, what Mother called a spit bath or a whore’s bath. (She was sternly against swearing, but she had no aversion whatsoever to dragging whores into a conversation.

Her favorite term for some floozy she didn’t like was “that two-bit whore.” I asked her once about it, and she said that she got it from the Bible: the reference to whores, that is, not to two-bit, which meant a quarter, not twice-bitten.

This is how come I feel comfortable using it here.

Then the day came that Daddy announced proudly the water was about to come. Mother and my

brother and I stood in the bathroom with all the faucets open and listened to the sighing of air

from the pipes after he turned the main valve on, then gurgling, and finally a feeble stream began

in the tub and lavatory, then built to strength and finally gushed. The commode filled and shut

off, and I reached and flushed it. It worked just like the ones at school. I felt like inviting my

cousin back for another shot at it. My, what a brave new world that had such marvels in it.

I don’t often think about that aspect of my life, but it often crossed my mind years ago when one of the kids came raising hell with me about a commode that had stopped up or wouldn’t flush or quit running or a lavatory faucet or shower head that kept dripping.

I always wanted to scream,

“Five commodes and three showers and five lavatories on this place! What the hell would you

do if . . . .” But I didn’t say anything, knowing that they could never fathom that old world I

came from.

To them it was merely the Dark Ages, and they didn’t believe half of what I told

them about it anyway. I just dutifully fixed what was broken and took it all for granted once

again.



Paul Ruffin, the 2009 Texas State Poet Laureate, may be reached c/o English Department, Box 2146, Sam Houston State University, Huntsville, TX 77341-2146, e-mail eng_pdr@shsu.edu.