This Life Is in Your Hands_ One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone - Melissa Coleman [88]
“Flying-di-dying,” Heidi chimed.
“Flying-di-dying,” we chorused. And we were.
Until it was replaced a couple years ago, I thought of Heidi every time I drove over that bridge, her hair nested and sweater on backward, arms flapping, eyes alight. Flying-di-dying still.
My eyes opened to a child’s cry in the night, air cool, fire banking in the stove. Outside I could hear the branch of the ash tree rubbing with a creak-shush on the edge of the roof, my skin prickling with goose bumps.
“I half to pee, I half to pee,” Heidi cried from below me in the bunk. “I haaalff to peeee.”
No rustlings came from Mama or Papa in the addition, so I slid down the bunk ladder and patted the lower bed with my hands until I found Heidi’s taut shape and fingers reaching out to meet mine in the darkness.
“Come on.”
We shuffled to the door and lifted the latch to a wall of subzero air. The moonlight lit the snowy clearing with a pale luminescence, like the wintry scenes in our book about the Tomten making his night rounds.
“Mama says no pee scars by the doorstep.” The outhouse being too far to go in the dark, I pulled Heidi over the edge of the patio to the snow-covered yard, teeth clicking furiously, the cold burning our bare feet. Heidi squatted and pulled her leggings down, moonlight lighting the perfect rounded W of her bum hanging over bent legs, steam rising around her from the hot rush of pee.
“Ggg-got on my leg.”
“Just pull up your pants, hurry.”
“Got-a wipe.”
“Use snow,”
“No-no-c-cold.”
Unwiped, we left the pee scar in the snow and dashed for the door. I pulled the edge of it open with my fingernails, pushed Heidi up the step from under her bum, and helped her back into bed.
“Snug me,” she said into the dark. I clambered into her bunk, pulled the blankets over us, and Heidi stuck her ice-block feet between my calves until our combined body warmth began to thaw us out. There was the odor of pee, but underneath Heidi smelled like baby, clean as if she’d just been born and hadn’t gone for weeks without a bath. You couldn’t help but love that sun-warmed honey smell, the comfort of it filling my chest as I fell to sleep.
We learned to hold our poop at night because a trip to the outhouse was too scary in the dark. Our outhouse didn’t have a toilet seat and lid like the Nearings’ did, just a slit in the floor that we squatted over above the hole in the ground. In the dark you were afraid of what was down in that hole, and even more afraid you might fall in.
About once a year we moved the outhouse, which meant Papa or an apprentice dug a hole as deep as he was tall. Then they lifted the small A-frame and carried it to the new hole, covering the old one with the dirt of the new one. At first, Papa found spots that had nice views of the farm through the window, but after a while it was more about privacy and distance from the house. Sometimes you’d forget that it’d been moved and follow an old path to find a filled-in hole indented in the earth from the sinking of the decomposing organic matter, like an ancient grave. “Old poop paths,” we called them.
“If the ground doesn’t thaw soon, we’ll be up shit creek,” Papa said one morning that spring. The poop mountain was rising closer below the gap in the floorboards, and he had to push it down with a shovel.
“Pee-yew,” Mama said as it began to thaw. “Be sure to use lots of peat moss.” The soft tufts of moss were harvested from the swamp and dried for wiping our bums and dumping in the hole to absorb odor.
“Yikes!” Heidi and I agreed when using the outhouse.
One day Mama heard Heidi’s crying coming from the woods. Running in the direction of the sound, she followed it along the path to the outhouse, where, to her shock,