“Ruby’s OuthousE”

By George Bowering

                                  But Love has pitched his mansion in

The place of excrement

                        - “Crazy Jane Talks With the Bishop”

I begin with a photograph of my facial expression as I am apparently caught sneaking out of an outhouse. It is, of course, a staged event, one of many we photographed that day, which occurred in the summer of 1947, I think, maybe 1948. I could tell you a lot about 1948, which, I have long liked to point out was the greatest year in the history of civilization, but I have other fish to fry here, though in fact in 1948 I would not eat a mouthful of any kind of fish. You see, the outhouse in question was just across the street from my pal Willy's house and a block north of mine.

            On the day in question Willy and I made a series of “action” photos with his Kodak Baby Brownie and my Ilford Envoy. We were the bakelite boys, entranced by our own narrative, making the snaps that would appear in our black photo albums with witty or dramatic phrases written in white ink under them. “Close call,” it said beneath a closeup of Willy's ruminative face behind a jackknife that has apparently been thrown into the telephone pole an inch from his nose.

            Outhouses were not all that rare in the village of Oliver in 1947. There was still one a block south of my house, on the grounds of the Boy Scout Hall, which had for a few years been serving (the hall, not its outhouse) as part of the elementary school, and where I received his first strap and his first concussion (on two separate occasions).

            Sometimes I think my whole life has been a series of parentheses.

            If you went farther up the valley you would be hard-pressed to find outhouses in the middle of towns and little cities, certainly not in Penticton or Kelowna. Maybe in the orchards that crowded around Summerland or Osoyoos. But Oliver itself had existed only a little over twenty years. People’s houses, such as ours, were not yet hooked up to a sewer system. Back yards were situated over septic tanks or just septic fields. I guess it was understood that outhouses such as Ruby’s would not be around in a few years, but they dotted the townsite and we were reconciled to being rubes. If you were at the ball game of a Sunday and you were a guy and you had to have a leak, there was tall grass beyond the third-base side fence. The village hall was in deep right field, but come on!

            Before we came to Oliver when I was eight, we lived in Greenwood, and we made do with an outhouse and the Eaton’s catalog. The latter had lots of varied pictures of women in undergarments, so it was pretty early in my life that I made the usual boys’ association between fundament and foundation. Some English or Irish poet, I would learn, did likewise. Stink and undefined desire. I don’t mean to claim that I did a lot of abstract analytical thinking when I was a young boy, smart as I might have been. But I do remember that our mothers, Willy’s and mine, told us more than once to stay away from Ruby’s outhouse.

            So we were drawn to that unprepossessing building. But why? It was as if we were half our ages and there were some rumoured treasure over there across the street. If there was mystery it had to be a mystery that clung to Ruby herself. We didn’t even know her last name. We didn’t know what she did for a living. I know that now you are thinking what we didn’t quite know enough to be thinking when we were pre-teen lads.

            There was no Eaton’s catalogue in Ruby’s outhouse. She must have brought some kind of paper out with her, maybe even toilet paper. Oh, I remember how much I hated the shininess of that Eaton’s catalog on a cold morning in Greenwood. A few pages, the ones dealing with how you could order stuff and so on, were not so slick, but they disappeared quickly in a family of four. I’ll tell you, I was a happy boy when my mother finally brought home some war-time toilet paper. I even promised to be frugal as she demanded.

            I have told you elsewhere about what happened on Hallowe’en of 1945. The war was over and we kids were wondering what would replace it in our lives, what would be in the newspapers that wound up in those outhouses, how we could find something to be a steady backdrop to our lives, and I did not see the naughty meaning of that word “back-drop” till right now, but you can bet I am not going to expunge  (oh oh) it. This is a drawing we kids loved to make when we were in grade one or two:

But if you have forgotten, a bunch of my new friends invited me to take part in their attempt to ensure the continuation of prewar tradition, so that on Hallowe’en we four pushed over the outhouse in Wagner’s orchard, and planned to run in four directions once the building was down. I never made it to my direction, which, if I remember well, was west, the only uphill path. Instead I did not re-achieve my balance when the outhouse went horizontal, and I thus fell into the hole, whose contents were on the very liquid side of solid, which later seemed odd in that there had been next to no rain, and exactly no irrigation that fall.

            But that was another story, and this is, a lot of people would say, no story at all. Stay away from Ruby’s place, altogether, my mother advised me, not taking the time to supply any reasoning for her imperative. She may have mentioned something about private property, but really, Ruby had no fence and no hedge. There was a path across the corner of her place, where we kids would escape the bother of following the suggested right angle. There was no sidewalk on either street or avenue, so we were not all that flagrant in our trespassing. We were small town boys, and we didn't think there was anything peculiar about having outhouses showing their roofs here and there in people’s yards. If it was a dark winter’s evening and we saw a flashlight moving, we just felt a little sorry for someone.

            So what happened, you ask, and don’t give me that jackknife and so on. And I say, well, nothing happened, not in the sense you are giving me. There was no Murder in Ruby’s Outhouse. The Coyote Kids did not find the Secret of the Spanish Treasure. If that is the kind of thing you are looking for, I could have told you the story of the old lady who lived about a block north of Ruby’s place. Some people in Lawrence knew that she once gave Jesse’s brother, Frank James, a place to stay overnight. Frank and his horse

Jewel. I knew this; she told me the story herself.

            But it’s not a story I want to tell you about Ruby’s outhouse. It’s just a couple of questions I’ve kept returning to all my life since then. Why were we so darned interested in Ruby’s outhouse? And why did our mothers insist that we stay away from it?

            We hardly ever saw Ruby. She may as well have been a mythic figure such as Medea or Wonder Woman. We caught a glimpse of her once in a while, standing at her short clothesline or passing a window. What did she do, anyway? Maybe she worked in a packing house, sitting at a conveyor belt, plucking cull peaches or apples. Maybe she cleaned houses, though I have to say that I, and probably Will, never heard of anyone cleaning someone else’s house. Not in Lawrence. She sure wasn’t paying much for rent or groceries or clothing, so she didn't have to have a fancy job. If I had been ten years older I might have made some kind of guess, something that would go a long way to explaining why our mothers had a certain tone of voice when they told us to stay out of Ruby’s yard.