Jasper’s face lit up and he gave the rat a good shake. “Yes, sir, they are,” he said, his voice rising with excitement, “but you still got a lot of people set in their ways. As Mr. Rawlings says, they want to hang on to their slop jars and corncobs and privies and jakes no matter what. Hell, I think half of them would do their business right out in the street if they could get by with it. You mark my word, though, if’n we don’t kill ourselves off first, someday everybody in the country will have indoor facilities, and I don’t just mean some hole sawed in the floor, either, like Chester Dotson’s got in his parlor.” He took a deep breath and wiped his nose with the same hand that held the rat. “Well, it’s been nice talkin’ to ye, mister, but I better get back to it. Last time I counted, there were still over eighteen hundred outhouses in this town, and I’d bet my buffalo gun at least one of them is causin’ trouble today.” Then he turned on his rubber heels and headed across the redbrick street, swinging the rat by the tail like a whirligig.
—
A FEW MINUTES later, Ellsworth halted the mule in front of a small white house. From a porch post hung a wooden sign that had a broom painted on it with a careful hand. Across the street, several men were squeezed together on a bench in front of the barbershop smoking, while another stood reading them a story from a newspaper in a theatrical manner, with much hand-waving and fist-clenching and verbal emphasis on certain words. The farmer set the brake on the wagon, then walked up to the porch. He knocked on the door and a voice inside called out, “It’s open.” He stepped inside a dark and musty room that smelled of stale sweat and straw and bacon grease. Hanging in one corner from a hook in the ceiling was a birdcage that contained what appeared to be a mummified parakeet. An old man with long white hair sat in a rocking chair in the opposite corner. Even though the air was stifling inside the closed-up room, he wore a thick woolen sweater underneath a butcher’s apron stained with spills from a hundred dinners. His eyes were covered with a translucent film that reminded Ellsworth of egg whites. The man leaned forward and sniffed the air. “You got a mule?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“Thought so,” the man said, tapping a crooked finger to his nose. “Mules got a smell all their own. I used to have a team of ’em back when I could see.”
“That right?” Ellsworth said. He found that he couldn’t stop staring at the dried-up bird in the cage. He wondered if the man had forgotten it, or just couldn’t bear to part with it. This room, he thought, must get awful lonely at times.
“Well,” the man said, “what you need?”
“The sanitation inspector mentioned you got brooms for sale.”
“You mean Jasper?”
“He told me you was his uncle,” Ellsworth said.
“Is he still wearing that goddamn helmet?”
“He had one on, yeah.”
The old man laughed. “Don’t get me wrong, Jasper’s all right, but sometimes I think that job might have gone to his head.” He paused and spat into a tin cup he held in his lap. Then a sly grin spread over his face. “I don’t reckon he mentioned his dick, did he?”
“What?” Ellsworth asked, a little startled.
“Didn’t think so,” the broom maker said. “If ye ask me, that’s what he should be proud of. Hell, anybody can count turds, but there’s few men alive hung like ol’ Jasper. He’d give one of them bull elephants a run for their money.”
“Well, I only talked to him for a minute or two.”
“Yeah,” the man said, “he’s right ashamed of it, and I blame his mother for that, her and that goddamn religion of hers. She did everything in her power to ruin that boy. Why, I had me a cock like that, I’d have the women a-crawlin’ around here on the floor begging for it.”
Ellsworth coughed and cleared his throat. “So, about the brooms,” he said.
“Yes, sir,” the old man continued, ignoring him, “they’d think they’d had a log chain drug through ’em by the time I got done, by God. I’d put…”