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The Man From Hunter Brothers
The house we lived in when I was seven had been built on stumps. It was
twelve feet above the ground on the downhill side but on the other side
there was a veranda almost level with the ground. It was a typical house in
a middle class neighborhood, but you could tell, if you knew, that there was
no sewage system because a drain from each house opened to the gutter beyond
the sidewalk. Patterns of frothy tumbling rapids told of washing routines in
our street. In a few cases a septic tank had been put in later for that
wonderful thing, the flush lavatory, but we only had a backyard dunny. There
was a wooden box seat with a hole over a very large iron bucket called a pan
and there were always flies, in spite of our putting sawdust on top. My
brother Barton was always in trouble for not putting the lid down.
The city of Brisbane, Australia, employed the Hunter Brothers Company to
collect full pans and replace them with empty ones twice a week. Granny
called them the night soil people. Mother said it wasn't nice to talk about
them, as if by not talking about them we had a flush lavatory, or the man
from Hunter Brothers didn't exist. The work was done in the private morning,
before daylight. Sleeping on the veranda, I could see the man if I woke up
early. He stopped the truck in front of our house, jumped down from his seat
and ran to one of the shelves at the back of the truck from which he plucked
an empty pan and put it on his left shoulder. With his right hand he grabbed
a little cart full of sawdust and came down by the side of the house at a
fast trot, pushing the cart, legs bent. A few minutes later he returned,
this time with the full pan. You could tell it was heavy on his shoulder and
I wondered if the slops spilled on him.
In the dark he always looked filthy, looking down at the ground ahead as he
rushed along. Fearful really. Some parents threatened their children, "The
man from Hunter Brothers will get you."
Barton used to laugh and joke about
the dunny, and Mama said he had a dirty mind. He used to say to me "Watch
out sis or you'll get caught in the dunny by the man from Hunter Brothers."
It was almost the worst thing I could imagine to be caught in there and I
developed holding powers, never to visit the dunny in the dark. You could
lock the door but even to be seen close up by this man was somehow dreadful.
One day in summer the man from Hunter Brothers came when it was getting
light. As he went by I looked through the slats of the blinds with a kind of
fascination, a curiosity for the horrible. He was certainly thin and dirty.
On the return run he had his face towards the dawn and he looked up. I saw
right into his eyes for just a few seconds. And I remember now what I saw
but I never told: he had the kindest face. The blue eyes that normally had
to see in the dark were watery in the brightness of the morning. His lips
were pursed a bit, determined perhaps, or maybe from the awful weight. He
could have been anyone really.
—Elizabeth Bernays
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