The Latrine

Last Updated on 7 months ago by Joel Samuel McQueen

( New and improved for 2025)

Part 1

Once upon a time in a village to the east, a boy fell down a latrine and lived. 

According to the old men in my village, who sat around drinking Johnnie Walker rum by the bamboo patch, the story even made the front page of one of the island’s sordid newspapers. The same one that islanders read with glee then used as toilet paper when things was scarce.  

Like all stories, this one I suspect has been transmogrified as it travelled from village to village and from mouth to mouth. Be that as it may, the current version of the “Latrine” isn’t any less authentic that the original in terms of its central moral or theme, which is that “even shit has a purpose.”  

 The boy’s name was Daniel. He was the youngest of four brothers. Physically, he was puny with large ears like his mother and a head too big for his body. The gray matter inside his head, however, due to countless hours spent indoors reading comic books and paperback westerns, was filled with fantasies and daydreams. 

For example, one day Dainel dug a hole on the family compound and jumped in. Not long after his three brothers walked by and seeing the oddity of Dainel in the hole sought to question him. 

“Boy, what the ass wrong with yuh” cried his eldest brother, “how yuh reach down dey.”

From the hole Daniel looked up to see the outline of three figures who faces blocked the sun like a solar eclipse. He froze.

“Boy, what the ass wrong with you. Yeh deaf or what?” cried the second brother who had the habit of repeating whatever his elder brother said.

“I wanted to see how far I could make it to China,” said Daniel. 

“China.” “Boy you mad for real,” said the eldest. 

“ Mad for real,” said his echo.

 Finally in an attempt to explain himself, Dainel told his three menacing brothers what his primary school teacher, Mr. Cumberbatch, had recently thought the class: That the world was in fact round and not flat, which meant among other things that his boyhood fear of    falling off the earth as say a ship travelling in a straight line on the sea was ignorant.  Secondly, it led him to believe that if the world was more or less like an orange,  it meant that digging a hole in the ground would lead to China. At this the three brothers roared with mocking laughter, having never heard such a thing.  

“Boy, yuh don’t play you stupid for truth,” said the eldest brother

“ For truth,”  said the echo.

“How so?”  asked Dainel with tears in his eyes. 

“Boy you think yuh could reach China with that little piece of shovel in your hand dey.” “Yuh go need something big like a tractor.” 

“That is what  trying  to see, but since I doh have a tractor I go use this pickaxe here ” cried Daniel.

“Boy, don’t make joke,” said the eldest, “get yah ass from that pit before we bury you down inside there today.”  

“Down there today,” said the echo once more. 

And with that the three  brothers  walked off, leaving Daniel down in the pit. 

Part 2 

The cocks crowed throughout the sleeping village as Daniel’s mother, Mrs. Ann, entered the kitchen to start her day. Standing in the semi darkness, she prepared her husband’s lunch then placed a pot of water to boil for tea. From the small kitchen window,  she watched the kitchen lights of another mountain village where  mothers just like had started their day   Just up the hill next to the latrine she heard the cock crowing in the fowl coop,  which brought to  her  present mind  a disturbing dream she had dreamt last night. Concerned, she pulled the gray curtain that served as a door to her sons’ bedroom and was about to enter when she heard her husband Mr. Frank calling.

“Ann,” he said softly.

“Morning dear,”  she said, standing at the threshold. 

“Meh breakfast ready?”

“Yes, dear, I coming,” Mrs. Ann replied, abandoning her earlier actions.

As she entered their bedroom, she saw in the darkness the outline of her husband muscular frame,which despite his age, was a casted dye of manliness  that pleased her at night. 

She was sixteen and a virgin when they met. Much younger than his thirty something.  He wasted no time making her his wife, which in those days was nothing more than a man making love to a woman until her belly swell.   And so together they had created  a family of four boys and could have went on to make for more had not the birth of  her last child having almost took her life. 

“I had a dream,” said Mrs. Ann, as she sat next to her husband on the edge of the bed. 

“Good or bad?”  asked Mr. Frank.

“I don’t know if to call it whether good or bad,” replied Mrs. Ann.

“So talk nah, talk nah,” said Mr. Frank.  

“So listen nah” she said: “I was sitting in the yard with one ah them white bucket we use to tote water but this one was full of ripe mangoes. And I doh lie to tee you them mangoes sweet for days.  And I don’t even chewing it, I just swallow mango whole.  I eating cutlass mango, starch mango, Julie mango, paw-paw, donkey stone, long, La Brea gyal, rose, doux-doux, calabash, apple mango, turpentine and sugar gyal mango.”

“Eh heh,” said Mr. Frank, “I know how you love yah mango for real.” 

“But listen nah,” cried Mrs. Ann, “I eat three mango and meh belly start to wok meh for so.  And I can’t hold it nah, and just so I take off and run to the latrine just before meh belly bust.”

“Eh heh,” said Mr. Frank once more.

“And I sit down on the latrine and I totoing. And the more ah go, more come. Next thing I know the whole latrine almost full with shit,” cried Mrs. Ann.

“Not so,” said Mr. Frank, with a slight smirk on his face. 

“Cacaca,” cried Mrs. Ann, “You taking meh for joke.” 

“Not so my wife,” said Mr. Frank, “I does listen to what you saying meh dear.”

“Then what the dream mean” asked Mrs. Frank?

“I doh know for sure, but you might need a little purge or something,” he said, in an attempt to make light of the situation

 that would turn out to be no joking matter. 

Part 3

It was still dark when Mr. Frank left for work.  Despite the many years he had travelled this same dirt road, the village dogs managed to produce a tepid uproar that consisted of a series half-hearted yaps and barks that all quickly evaporated in the cool morning. From the gallery perched on the hill, Mrs. Ann watched for her husband to appear in the distance.  Finally, she saw him, his masonry tool bag on his right shoulder, walking   towards the family car—the money pit. The British made Hilman was as reliable as a horse with a broken leg. Every month it seemed it was in need of repair, which caused Mrs. Ann to complain that the car was by now worth more than a child.   

Mr. Frank cranked the engine and prayed:  “O man greatly loved, fear not, peace be with you; be strong and of good courage.”On the third attempt, the sluggish motor groaned with displeasure.  With his foot on the pedal, he fed the metal beast a piss of gas which it guzzled greedily, then roared, then settled into a constant metallic rattle.  That was the easy.  The hard part was the drive down the hill.  Because in those days no one thought to cut the road wide enough for cars to U-turn that were parked on the hill, Mr. Frank began each day with an awkward and even dangerous descent in reverse. And so with one hand over the front passenger headrest, Mr. Frank looked back into the future. 

Part 4

 The day Dainel finally ended up at the bottom of the latrine was hardly a surprise.  He had a habit of sleepwalking and from time to time would awake late at night to march around the family compound before finally falling asleep. Sometimes he was found  among the dogs that lived under the house or even in the fowl coop next to the hens.  And so on this particular morning, as Mrs. Ann returned to the boys’ bedroom  after seeing her husband off to work, she thought nothing of the fact that Daniel was missing.  She walked barefoot into the dirt yard and the cool morning air. 

“Dainel,” she called with a slight agitation in her voice.  When no one answered, she took the narrow path that led to the bottom of the house where the hounds lived, hoping to find her wayward son.

 “Here it is big Saturday morning and this boy sleeping when the yard want sweeping,” she cried from the mouth of the dusty kennel. 

“Daniel, you don’t hear meh, come out from out of dey,” said Mrs. Ann.  

There was silence except for   the perturbed family mutt, which having been awoken from its dream of possessing the biggest bone in the world, snapped its salivating jaws several times at the air but never opened its eyes.

She returned to bedroom and finding her remaining sons still asleep, she ordered each boy out of bed. 

“Getup, all you lazy so and so,” she cried.

 Sensing their mother’s anger, the trio sprang out of bed and into action, performing   an overdramatic scene of fake exhaustion that included excessive eye rubbing and head scratching  that was meant to pacify Mrs. Ann’s anger. 

“Where is your brother, where is Daneil?”  asked Mrs. Ann  with growing concern.  The trio shrugged their shoulders. Then like toy soldiers, the youngest looked to his elder who in turn looked at the eldest, who spoke a few choice words that startled his mother. 

“Am I my brother’s keeper,” he said. 

Resisting the temptation to imprint a pot spoon unto eldest son’s backside, Mrs. Ann instead returned to the yard. In the distance, she could hear the creaking latrine door swinging on its rusty hinges, as the earthy smell of shit arose with the rising sun. Someone must have left the latrine door open, she said to herself. Then a second  thought entered the window of her mind.  “Meh boy, meh boy,” cried the barefooted Mrs. Ann, running frantically up the hill.

Part 5

High above the sleeping village, silver rays of moonlight entered the small holes in the galvanized roof of the latrine where Daniel had fell. The pit, itself, was six feet deep but only half full. That was Daniel’s good luck. For had he fallen into it six months to a year from now, who could tell to what heights the family’s daily excrement could have reached. As it was, he was up to his waist in the stuff.  And like a fly stuck in a fly trap, he writhed before reaching a state of exhaustion.  For his second effort, he plunged into the darkness at a rope he imagined was there, grabbing instead a handful of nothingness.  A nothingness so profound that he quickly lost all sense of any boundary between himself and the world outside himself. 

In his state of delusion, he thought he heard  a voice of condemnation  speaking  to him in the blackness.  

“Dainel, you go dead here today,” said the voice. 

“Who dey,” cried Dainel? 

“Don’t’ ask meh blasted business; I is meh self,” said the voice. 

“How I reach here,” asked Dainel?

“How else but somebody push yuh,” said the voice.

“Who could do something so,” said Daniel.

“And Cain kill Abel, boy don’t play the fool, said the voice with irritation.

“OhGodoh,” I doh want to dead,” cried Daniel.

“KJV,” boomed the voice as the dream ended. 

 Then Daniel awoke. 

“Mammy, mammy,” he cried in wailing voice that traveled as far as it could to the mouth of the wooden toilet bowl, before returning to the stench below. And what a stench it was.  So foul and wretched as to cause a stray dog to vomit up his last meal.

To pass the time in the pit, Daniel thought of his dear mother, who he imagined would be awake by now preparing breakfast for his father.  More than anyone else, it would be her—emptying the chamber pot or posy that morning into the latrine that would discover him.  Such a thought was most comforting.  But then a second more disturbing thought occurred to him that made him cry:  that one of his bothers’ might be the one to empty the said chamber pot or posy. 

“If is one of them I go sure dead here today,” Daniel whispered to himself. 

Part 6

By nine o clock, the talk of what had happened to Mrs. Ann’s son had spread like a bush fire across the village, causing the men, women and children to gather outside the latrine. Inside, a congregation of anxious elders, including Mr. Frank, who was called from his work in town, now stood around the latrine hole thinking about the best thing to do. A small flashlight was shun into the pit, revealing a gross kingdom of maggots and worms that thrived on  the sea of   human excrement.  Then  a rope used to tie goats was lowered with great expectation. 

“Grab it boy,” shouted Mr. Frank.

 As the rope began to rise with Daniel on the end of it, a burst of premature cheers filled the small latrine, spilling outside to the waiting crowd.  Then he fell. 

“Someone would have to go down the pit,” cried Mrs. Ann. 

All eyes looked towards Mr. Frank, who in turn looked down into the pit then shook his head several times.  In the end, it was decided that he would be lowered by his feet.  And so with Mr. Frank grabbing his son by his two arms, he was finally pulled to safety.   

For several weeks after his fall, Daniel was isolated in the bedroom he once shared with his brothers. He also refused to talk.  Each morning and at night, Mrs. Ann dutifully washed her son with Detolle disinfectant along with a secret selection of bush picked from the yard. Meanwhile, Daniel’s three brothers were ordered to  take turns  serving  their little brother his meals from his sickbed, which was bad enough, but was mild when compared to the second  task of emptying Dainel’s chamber pot or posy twice a day.  For his dumbness,  a Catholic priest and even an obeahman woman were called to pray from him, both  for a small fee of course.  

Eventually when Daniel  did talk, it was mostly to ask for something he wanted. And so by ands by  the family learned to live with Daniel, who in addition to not speaking  stopped attending school and instead stayed at home to help his mother around the house. 

As for the old latrine, it was demolished with the pit being filled with dirt. Then one day Daniel planted a lemon tree on the site, which produced lemons as big as grapefruits that the entire village longed for.