Soup Du Jour

 Welcome back, brave reader, to the sinister world of daylight grave-robbery and general subterranean malpractice. I shall, as ever, endeavor to leave  no grizzly crevice or bloodstained nook less than obsessively scrutinized.

    Today's dastardly exhumations took place in the corpse-rich town of Maysville, Kentucky. My partner in crime was Brad "Daddy" Harne of Flemingsburg, whose probing prowess remains unrivalled in all the land--except by my own, of course. There isn't a pontiled pit in existence that could evade his shimmering rod or outwit him with even the craftiest of clay plugs. Bottles have been known to migrate to the deepest and wettest corners of the pit and hide upon hearing of his impending arrival. Did it do them any good? Never! The proof lies sparkling in his display cabinets for all to see.

    The probes were soon flashing like scimitars in the mid-morning sunlight. T'was no time at all before we had cornered ourselves a nice little wood-liner on the property line about ten paces behind the house (or where the house had once stood--we were in a vacant lot). The six-footer hit no layers on its descent, but felt like it was moving through a huge clay cap. Would she be deep? If so, there was bound to be water down there.

    We're neither of us big fans of wet holes. They tend to make your whitey-and-tighties browny-and-downies. But any digger worth his salt will never be cowed by even the most fearful case of plumber's butt. We've all learnt to just grin and bear it (no pun intended) when our partners' hindquarters start smiling up at us from the murky depths. And let's not forget the bailing, hauling of slopping buckets, and their subsequent emptying on someone's well tended property-- thank the heavens for old sheds that no one ever bothers to look behind.

    After a few vain, curse-accompanied stabs at the ground with our shovels, it was time to call upon Old Spuddy to help us out. Since it was still too early in the day for bending, I opted to be the one who'd wield The Great Iron Beast.

    Down, down we went into the brick-laden, clay-packed unknown. At the helm stood giddy Hope, bellowing his maniacal chanteys. While down in the hold-- bound, gagged, but never entirely forgotten-- lay Common Sense, dreaming of part-time weekend jobs and familial picnics in the park.

    What a clay plug it was! Four feet of it had already come out and there was no end in sight. It could only be freed in huge, shovel sized, back-breaking clumps. You'd try to throw it out of the pit, but it would stick to the shovel and wind up back in the pit. Either that, or it would land in a completely different place than you'd aimed for and roll back in just to spite you. Yes... it had personality!

    His Bradship had just entered the abyss after one of my hellish shifts, when the much dreaded words "light bulb" suddenly offended my ears -- that's second only to "Voldemort" when it comes to inviting gloom and doom to fall upon one's head.

    "You have simply got to be kidding me," I moaned, as the previously animated world around me rapidly wilted and died.

    "Well...hang on...I'm not sure yet... give me a second."

    " You can have an hour if it'll change that verdict."

   I lit a cigarette and manfully struggled to ward off the onrushing tide of pessimism that was threatening to consume me.

    "I'll be a son of a bitch!" came a cry from the pit. "You're not going to believe this!"    I was there in an instant, and he was right: I did not believe what my eyes were suggesting. They were trying to tell me that, squeezed gently between his forefinger and thumb, was a gorgeous light amber igloo ink, circa 1865.

    "Geez, man! That's the finest light bulb I've ever seen!"

    "Trust me, I've never been happier to be so wrong!"

       Brad returned to his shoveling with renewed zest and vigor, but within minutes, was blistering the heavens with expletives once more, as water began to seep up into the trench he was digging. Only on the high seas might one expect to hear such an exotic vocabulary. It went off like fireworks and shot crackling and blazing into the horrified Sunday morning skies. Even the shameless river buzzards that perennially circle the western bluff seemed to take fright and scatter.

    And so began the bailing. I was the rope-a-dope man, whose job it was to haul up the buckets of slop and dispose of them--carefully! Brad's task was to dig a deep hole at one end of the pit for the water to collect in and maintain a dry ledge for us to stand on while we drained the privy.

    After an hour or so, we had most of the standing water out. How I wound up more slimed than he, I will never know. I was covered in the stuff! Brad decided to probe for the bottom. What a shock for us both when the rod ran into natural clay after only a foot.

    "I didn't feel a damned thing down there," he groaned. "There must have been a tee totaling, frugal old hag living here in the 1860's."

    "Or a neat-freak who had the thing dipped after every bowel  movement," I added, scornfully.    

     The prospect of a useless use-layer is hardly a thing of loin-stirring proportions, but my turn had arrived and duty was calling. I could hear plenty of shards clinking away beneath my shovel, and when they finally began to surface, they inspired a whole series of "oohs" and "ahhs." There was a complete C.B. Owen cobalt soda. . . in five parts, a pontiled fancy cologne. . . with its left shoulder missing, the mouth and base of an olive Swaim's Panacea, and other less identifiable goodies to cry over. The vein of trash seemed to be about six inches deep and very sparsely populated (the sort you just don't find whole bottles in). Only one feeble, wobbly little stick of hope remained to prop myself up with: could the layer at the back of the pit (where the holes had been) be where all the treasures were hiding?

    As I worked my way towards the center of the pit, the shards of pottery and glass seemed to be increasing and growing in size. Whole puffs were starting to appear! The layer was now over a foot deep. Even the fill above the use-layer was producing some whole items. I took out a hunk of the clay wall above the trash vein and exposed the large, black base of what I imagined would be a broken ale bottle. I dug along the length of it  until I had one entire side in view. Would the other half be there? I gingerly wiggled it free and was happy to see that the bottle was intact. It didn't appear to be embossed, so I handed it up to Brad without thinking any more of it.

    "You might want to have another look at this one," came my partner's response from on high. "It is embossed, you know."

    "Really? Hand it here then."

    He passed the bottle back down to me. I gave it a good rub on my shirt and began my inspection. "San... Joaq...uin Wine... Bitters," I read through the grime of the bottle's surface. "Wow! What a beauty! I've never even heard of such a thing."

    "You're not the only one!" uttered Brad in a somewhat incredulous tone.

This latest discovery had made Brad rather antsy and I could tell that he wouldn't last more than another five minutes as a spectator. I still had one side of the pit to uncover, so I redoubled my efforts in order to give myself the best chance of completing the task at hand before his patience finally ran out.

    The wood walls of the pit had been preserved by one hundred and fifty years of standing water at the bottom of the hole. I could clearly see where the crossbeam ran along the wall at the base of the privy. This was where most of the debris appeared to have collected as it was tossed in from above. I was pulling out huge sections of chamber pots and pitchers, but very few bottles. Once I'd made it to the wall, I simply dipped my hand into the ooze and began groping around along the bottom of the pit by the crossbeam. I was exploring a small recess under the beam when I finally got a hold of something that felt promising. Oh yes! It felt distinctly soda shaped. Another C.B. Owen perhaps? Out she came. It was a cobalt soda, alright. I wiped off the muck and the embossing that greeted my eyes sent me into a delirium.

    "What the hell is it?" cried Brad, from the spinning, nebulous world above.

    "It's a bloody Brosee! I dug a Brosee! A freaking Brosee!" I really was beside myself with glee; dancing and hopping around in the muck like a possessed imp.

    "Is it in good shape?"

    "It looks a-b-s-o-l-u-t-e-l-y p-e-r-f-e-c-t!" I squeaked.

    "Damn! That's the second ever to come out of the ground around here. . . in fifteen years! That might well be only the third or fourth that's ever been seen!"

"Right, I'll come out now," I chirped, pleased as punch.

"Yeah, now that you've dug the entire use-layer," Brad jested. "I'll remember that the next time I'm pulling out cobalt sodas and rare bitters and you're sat drooling on the edge of the hole!"

    There was actually a sizeable slice of layer left to dig through and we were both wired with anticipation. Our only problem was that we had underestimated the dimensions of the pit and would have to tunnel about three feet under the wall we'd created in order to complete the job. Brad was tying himself up in knots down there; he was digging downhill whilst attempting to perch on some rocks and bricks he'd positioned to keep himself out of the quagmire that bubbled and squelched around him. As he ventured forward toward the true wall of the pit, he was forced to perform increasingly miraculous feats of contortionism, which had me in stitches up above.

  "I feel like a performing seal down here!" he barked. "We ought to advertise and charge an admission fee for this crap!"

  "Hell yes! I'd pay ten bucks for what I've witnessed during the last twenty minutes or so."

  "Well, you weren't looking too hot yourself when all of that slop was falling out of the bucket onto your head," he retorted, with a certain satisfaction. "If you'd had longer ears, I could easily have mistaken you for a chocolate Easter bunny."   

  The rest of the pit was fairly disappointing. It seems the seats had been over the center of the hole as that's where the largest accumulation of refuse had collected. Brad did find a Dr Jayne's Hair Tonic and several other common meds, puffs, etc.

Here's the list of killer broken stuff:

Swaim's Panacea/pontiled, light olive.

Two I. Nelson/Old Bourbon/Maysville barrels.

Heimstreet cobalt hair bottle.

C.B. Owen cobalt soda.

Pale cobalt sided Sandwich cologne.

Pontiled fancy cologne.

That's just the stuff I can remember!

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