(Power by Joseph McFadden cont.)

Mabel glances through the window and down the hill as she works. She has a feeling. Something terrible and final is going to happen. This is now the third afternoon he has gone straight from his car to the outhouse. Watching from the kitchen window the first time, Mabel thought he was ill when he ducked his head and entered the privy. He had never been in the place. Only women and children and old feeble men visit a privy. The grown men go to the bushes, or hunker in the back of a stable, or sit on a log mounted across joists in a corner of the barn. He came out the door almost immediately, leaving it open, walked completely around the building, re-entered, and stood inside looking down at the seat. He ducked his head coming out, then put the big black hat back on his head. He did this with one hand, the front brim rolled to a point with the edges curled up. He can dip water out of the spring with the brim and drink from the rolled point. But the rolled point serves mostly for one-handed hat-tipping by the brim to the ladies on the streets of town. Willard displays elaborate courtesy in public.

This time she watches him close the privy door, take a foot long board out of his overalls pocket, and nail it to the door and the adjacent wall. Nailed shut. Oh my God, what could he be planning now? She stands at the counter, her hands gone idle, thinking, musing. Then, by intuition she knows. It's the pecan orchard all over again ... The outhouse has become an unmanageable nuisance, and a government intrusion into the most private of human necessities. Once a place of escape and hiding and seclusion and relief, it now has become political, a place dark, threatening, and dangerous. The WPA reign over Southern outhouses converted them from open privies to deep pits to catch all the discharges. They poured a concrete slab, with the throne mounded in the middle, to cover each pit, the throne capped by a plywood seat with an opening designed for adult anatomy. Finally they bolted the slant-topped privy to the concrete slab. The WPA left instructions to use only store-bought toilet paper; biodegradable, they said, but Willard Mills has a penurious frugality of his own. The old mail order catalogues and newspapers are good enough for women and children. The men use mostly corncobs and shucks, down in the barn, and leaves in the woods.

According to the WPA, collected matter in the pit undergoes a spontaneous dissolving, self-sterilizing process, turning to liquid and seeping away into the earth. They assured Mabel this would happen, and not to worry. But the government never reckoned with the hard-packed red clay of Lafayette County, Mississippi. As stubborn as all the rest of the land, it seals itself against receiving the first drop, and the pit, three times grave-size and much deeper, slowly and steadily fills. Mabel and the children view this rising pool of black thick liquid with growing alarm and fear. It bubbles and gives off gases; some smell explosive like methane, and flies rise in a swarming vortex through the seat hole. The WPA says they do not breed there. When the level eventually rises near the seat it sends back an instant splash of foul liquid against the seated rear end. Women rage against this insult, and children fear it to the point of constipation. Both feel the instant need to sit in a tub of water.

Worse things happen: Children fall through the seat holes in privies. In the old days, a toddler covered in excrement, wandering back to the house alone and squalling, aroused pity and bawdy humor. But now, unwatched, they drown in the fermenting foul fluid of the pits. Several have been rumored.

Everybody preferred the old outhouses. Standing on a hill side, or over the ledge of a gully, away from the dwelling house, at the end of a well worn path, they carried less serious threats. There the droppings collected in rising pyramids slowly dissolving into the earth. The open back below the seat let in the sunshine and the weather, and the sharper warning odors escaped into the winds. Doodlebugs bored and mounded dirt along the spreading borders, flies swarmed and fed and hatched, and the bees, the honey bees, outnumbering the flies, crawled about extracting something here. Could the mysterious flavor and exotic aftertaste in honey be the taint of an essence, of something stronger, of pure musk, of the same haunting anal smell of sex whiffling through the privy on the breezes of a hot day? In old beliefs, the deposits from women gave off much more in the way of tantalizing odors dwelling there among the stinks than do those from the boys and old men. And the dangers were less than those of drowning in the foul pitch-black fluid. On the old seats, people had to be careful what they dangled down; an occasional snake might strike or bite, and a snake could crawl head first into a gaping invitation. The unknown beneath them made the women nervous. And the sting of a black widow spider spinning its web under the seat endangered the hanging male genitalia. Everybody learned to stand on the seat and hunker over the hole, and the children bent their heads down to look and play bombing away at the insects below. But in the new toilets the threatening fluid rises and rises, and when it reaches a certain level the responding splash comes up through the hole. The sulfuric stink, and the rising black bubbling, working fluid, create fear and revulsion. Even the women take to the woods.

The time has come again for the government to return, move the privy over a new pit, and fill the old one. When this happens the fill dirt pushes the slime out and it flows down the hillside, creating a foul stench for days in the hot sunshine. Mabel dreads it. Willard dreads it, too, and now he plots a solution to the problem, she fears.

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