Butch Coomer, Human Guinea Pig
My three older brothers didn’t usually play with me. At nine, twelve and fifteen they had outgrown the kinds of games a five year old liked to play. So, I learned to explore the woods around our new house, alone, and learned to ride a couple-of-sizes-too-big bicycle on Sunset Lane, alone, and hunted for pollywogs and tadpoles in the small lake and stream that were in a marshy area not too far from Butch Coomer’s house, alone.
Did I say “house?” Actually, I remember it as being a very small, several room shack. It had a tar paper roof that leaked when it rained and plywood sheets for siding. The floor was always covered with dirt and mud from everybody’s shoes so I don’t really know what it was made out of. As with other houses on this prestigious lane, Butch’s house had no indoor toilet. I’m not certain it if had a well or if they had to carry water to the house for cooking and drinking. Only those with a well could take a bath at home, as no one could transport enough water to fill a tub. I suspect his didn’t.
Our house did have a well: It was hand dug by my dad and us four boys, under the barn after it had been put in its place on our property. The bigger boys helped dad dig it to about four or five feet deep. We would all crawl under the house – remember, it was sitting on skids perhaps a foot and a half or two feet off the ground – crouch as low as possible and dig. They used the short handled army trenching shovels, since a regular shovel had too long a handle for them to use underneath the barn.
Then, they would lower me in a bucket and I would dig with that little shovel. When I’d filled the bucket they would haul it up, drag it out from under the barn and dump it in an ever-growing dirt pile beside the house.
All five of us took turns digging. But to me at five years old, all I remember is that it was me. Alone. In a dark, damp, cold pit in the ground underneath a big barn that smelled of cow dung and chicken poop. Alone. Digging with that little shovel.
Sometimes one of the other boys would shine a light down the well to see how deep I was and if we had hit the water table yet. But I would know that: I’d be standing in cold water! Exactly why we dug the well in that spot, under the house, instead of beside the house I can only conjecture. Since the temperature in winter might drop to a minus thirty degrees Fahrenheit – that’s -30! – an outside well and its plumbing would certainly remain frozen most of the long winter.
But as a five year old I neither knew this nor cared much about the physics of freezing water. So I dug. When I did finally reach water, they pulled me up for the last time and finished digging, then casing, the well. They assembled a one inch pipe and connected it to a large, anodized metal hand pump bolted to the shelf in the room that served as our kitchen - and during the first winter, also served as our dining room, reading room, library, bedrooms, closet and guest rooms.
I learned to prime the pump by pouring a ladle of water from a bucket kept on that shelf down the top of the pump, then pump the handle up and down, up and down, listening to the sucking sound as the pump tried to coax the well to give up a little water for us. And I learned the true joy of the rewards for my efforts when pure, icy cold water came gushing out of the pump and into the little sink.
We would always fill our bucket so there was always water to prime the pump the next time. Woe to you if you left the little bucket empty!
Did we escape having our pipes frozen? Usually. But occasionally my dad and older brothers would let themselves down through the trapdoor they’d rigged in the kitchen area, light a blowtorch and gently thaw out the pipe. When it seemed ready to accept our efforts, another one of us would prime the pump and heave on the handle.
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But as I said, Butch’s house didn’t have a well. So Butch looked filthy and smelled filthy. He was about the age of my brother Dick, perhaps twelve or so. While his mom worked he was to watch his two younger siblings. But they pretty much took care of themselves, hardly venturing out of their house even on the best of days. I don’t know what they did to pass their days: They didn’t come outside much and I didn’t enjoy going in their house so I rarely saw them.
Butch seemed to talk a little slow. Even to me, at five, he sounded like he was never fully awake. My brothers called him names like moron, or idiot, or sometimes imbecile. I didn’t know exactly what those words meant, but I sensed they meant he wasn’t normal.
When we weren’t digging that first summer, Butch would try to play with my brothers. The oldest, Skip, was too busy with work on the house to play. But Dick and Ernie liked to play cowboys and Indians with Butch.
I remember he liked to be the cowboy. He’d chase through the marsh, getting soaked and covered with mud. Then race through the woods yelling and slobbering after them. He’d use his fingers as pistols and shoot his imaginary revolvers as he ran. And they would pretend to shoot arrows from imaginary bows, whooping and yelling in their best warrior style.
Then, one day in fall, when the sun shone its warmest and the leaves were offering our eyes their most glorious colors, Dick and Ernie got one of the metal pipes we’d used for the well and sunk it deep in the ground so about four feet of it stuck straight up.
It was planted on a little knoll overlooking the marshy pond, maybe a quarter mile from the end of Sunset Lane.
This day, when the Indians captured the cowboy, they stripped him to his shorts and tied him to the pole. Using rope, they secured his ankles, then tied his waist tight to the pole so he cried out, and pulled his arms behind him, tying his hands behind the pole. Lastly, they tied a bandana around his eyes, knotting it behind the pole so his head was pulled hard against the metal.
I watched from a little distance: I’d never before seen them be so rough with him. Now, they filled a bucket from the pond and repeatedly doused him, cleaning the “white man’s stench from him.”
Wet and cold, tied and blindfolded, Butch began to cry out. They danced and shouted all the more – were they still playing? I couldn’t be certain – dousing him, poking him with sticks and terrifying both him and me.
I ran home, through the woods, past the pond, down the dirt trail we called a road and across the small clearing that served as a yard and parking place. Had I heard my mother calling? I hoped so.
But no, the house was empty. Neither of my parents was home from work yet and Skip was nowhere in sight.
Later my brothers came home. They looked tired and dirty, but somehow happy and satisfied, as though they had done something that day they had wanted to do for a long, long time.
When I went to that little knoll a couple days later, Butch wasn’t tied up and the pole was gone. Had I really seen that? No one ever spoke of that incident again, not Ernie, not Dick, and not Butch. Too this day I wonder if it was real or did I have a really bad dream?
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Sometime in winter that year – 1947 – around the time of my sixth birthday, Grandpa Wilkins, my maternal grandfather in Pennsylvania, suffered a heart attack. Fearing he might die, my mother hurriedly flew to see him.
This left us five “men” to fend for ourselves. Skip was still busy helping insulate and frame the section of this barn in which we were to live all winter long, and neither Ernie nor I knew anything about cooking, so Dick was “volunteered.” He had joined the Scouts, so he welcomed the opportunity to learn how to do even more things and work on some Merit Badges at the same time.
As a matter of fact, Dick did so well in Scouting that he became the youngest boy to be awarded Eagle Scout in Alaska up to that time, and he was one of perhaps four Scouts to attend the World Jamboree in Innsbruck, Austria, in 1950. On the way home from the Jamboree he toured several famous European cities, most memorably Venice. There, he was treated to the sight of the city’s Death Row: a stone basement that, during most of the year, was slightly above water. But annually, during the period when the city’s canals are inundated beyond capacity, the water pours through the barred windows of this prison, flooding Death Row and drowning the condemned who occupy its cells.
A picture postcard of the era, which he brought home to share with us all, shows an arching, stone causeway between the city courthouse on one side of the canal and Death Row on the other. The windows of the basement are barely a foot above the normal water level, and you know the prisoners can see daily the fate that awaits them at the spring high tide.
But in 1947 he wasn’t yet so accomplished a cook. We ate watery soups, crusty oat cereal, brittle spaghetti and who knows what else.
After a couple days of being ashamed of the food he was preparing, he decided to use Butch as his “tester.” Dick had labored over a huge pot of peas he was cooking for a ham and pea soup. He knew we all liked pea soup, and if this dinner was actually edible he’d earn the praise – and perhaps forgiveness – of us all.
Late in the afternoon he had Butch come over to taste the soup. Ladling some into a bowl he watched Butch eat it all. Then eat a second and third helping. There was plenty – Dick has used our ten quart pressure cooker as the pot – so Butch ate ‘till he was full. Then, saying it was “pretty tasty” he went back down the road to his own house. We all waited for dad to get home so we could all sit down for dinner.
But before we could taste it for ourselves, one of Butch’s little brothers knocked at our door. Butch was very sick, he said. Butch was holding his stomach and vomiting all over the floor. Could we come with him to help, since his mother wasn’t home yet?
Ernie was left to watch me; Dick and Skip ran down the road to see what was wrong with Butch. My dad got home just after that, and he too went to the little shack at the end of the lane. In minutes they had brought Butch back and loaded him into our car. Dad and Skip drove him to a doctor who lived on Spenard Road partway into town.
Dick dumped the pea soup into the pit that was out back of the house where we put all the kitchen scraps. That pit was about halfway from the door to the privy – the outhouse that sat in the woods a hundred feet or so from the house. After we threw food into the pit we’d shovel some dirt over the food to help keep wild animals from being attracted to it.
What was wrong with our dinner, I asked. Dick said the cans of peas must have gotten dented because Butch got very sick from the soup. He called it botulism. I didn’t know what it was, but was happy that Butch got better in a week or so.
Maybe having Butch as the guinea pig for that batch of soup saved all our lives that day. I think about that sometimes.
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Dick really learned to enjoy cooking during the two weeks my mom was gone that winter. To this day he can throw together a pretty decent meal and make a lot of it from scratch, too.
He made a very memorable batch of spaghetti, I recall. Again using the ten quart pressure cooker as his pot, he filled it full of water, added a shaker of salt, and brought it to a boil. Then he opened five pounds of spaghetti noodles – Army surplus food in mess hall-sized packages – and dropped them all in the water.
In minutes the noodles started to boil over the top of the cooker.
“Bring another pan,” he yelled to nobody in particular. “Bring another pot,” he yelled again. We did, and he filled that one too. A second and third burner were lighted on the stove.
Three more times he yelled for another pan and three more times we came running with a container to catch the overflow from the pressure cooker. Noodles and froth covered the stove, his clothes and the floor. There weren’t burners enough to handle the pots, so some sat on the 50 gallon drum that we used as our heater.
From this little incident we boys learned several important lessons that have served us all very well in life:
- spaghetti noodles expand, perhaps exponentially, as they cook;
- adding too much salt to boiling water creates a frothy head that resembles good draft beer;
- you needn’t cook five pounds of spaghetti noodles in a ten quart cooker for five people’s dinner;
- Unless you want to eat spaghetti till your mom gets home!
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