A Deer In The Bathroom

We dressed the buck and carried-him back to the house. Since we didn’t have a barn, we put him in the bathtub. To this day I am not sure why, but it seemed like the right thing to do at the time. It was deer season and we both had tags, but we couldn’t hang it in a tree in the yard. My uncle had just cut most of the larger trees down. Anyway, we stashed the deer and went to do our homework. It wasn’t such a big deal in our way of thinking, just another trip to nature’s supermarket. But, we did surprise a few people!

First, my sister Vickie came home from school and like teenagers today threw her books on the sofa and headed to the bathroom. Only a few minutes passed before Larry and I heard a blood-curdling scream. The deer! I’ll never forget Larry’s grin as he said, “Guess Vick found Bambi.” Now, most country girls are not normally very skittish around dead critters, but you don’t find one in the bathtub everyday. I’m sure all the blood and gore kind of grossed her out. In all the years I’ve known Vickie it was her shortest trip to the toilet. Vickie found our storage procedures to be extremely gross and told us both as much. I suspected it was because not everybody had an indoor toilet, so it was kind of like a shrine for us. We showed it to all our visiting relatives. But, Larry and I didn’t worry much about Vick’s raving, because we had fresh meat.

Shortly after our sister’s venture into the bathroom of horrors, mom came home. Again, we’d settled down to our homework and Vick had started supper. I remember she was in the kitchen peeling potatoes and Larry and I were still at the kitchen table laboring over fractions. Mom, as usual, entered the living room with a cup of coffee and relaxed in her old oversized chair. She deserved her rest; she was and still is a great woman. She worked hard so we tried to make her tasks at home that much easier by helping out. Oh, we got into trouble at times and could cause her some grief, mostly messing around in the woods or lakes, but all in all we assisted her a lot. I guess she had been setting there only a couple of minutes when she got up and went into the bathroom. Larry and I grinned at each other as we waited for the scream…. it never came, but mom did.

“Daniel Boone, you and Mister Crocket get that deer out of my tub so I can get a bath.” was all she said. Nothing rattled that woman! Well, I say nothing but once she did panic a little when we accidentally set the house on fire by burning plastic milk cartons in the woodstove. Larry and I removed the carcass from the tub and took it out behind the house. Mom told us that since we had enough energy to play games to scare people we could use that energy to cut up that deer. It took us a long time to cut and wrap that deer, but we did the job. Now, when all of our families get together for the holidays the deer in the tub will usually come up. Larry will always look at me and give me a grin; some thing’s from childhood don’t have to be spoken.

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