To tell you this story, I have to tell you another one. Or two. Or many.

First of all, you have to understand Mom.

Mom cleans house like dental hygenists clean teeth: thoroughly, quickly, and several times a day. There isn’t a surface in moms house that isn’t sanitary, perhaps even sterile. Odds are, mom’s kitchen counter is a more germ free place than some operating rooms.

Anyway, now you have to know about Kate. My aunt Kate probably never thought of Mom as much of a housekeeper, because Kate cleans. I mean, kate CLEANS.
Here’s some things you might find astonishing or humerous but are actually true facts about my Aunt Kate:

Kate weekly removes all the heat registers in the house and runs them through the dishwasher in the garage.
The dishwasher in the garage is there solely for the purpose of washing such items as the heat registers, the wheelcovers off the car, the BBQ grill, and the mailbox.
The dishwasher in the kitchen is there only for the purpose of washing her “good” dishes, a set of Countess Pattern prewar Havilland Limoges.
The kitchen itself is only used for cooking on special occasions.
The basement has a kitchen too, a stove and fridge (in flawless condition, circa 1946) and a laundry sink (clean enough to store raw meat in)where the “regular” dishes were washed (all Fiestaware)

Everyone ate in the basement because NOBODY went upstairs except for special occasions, and the only occasion special enough I remember was the death of her husband, my sainted uncle ted.

The kitchen sink was where she washed the wall switch and outlet covers. Weekly. Once a month she shampooed the carpet. ON her hands and knees. With a bucket and a brush.

Kate carried a snub-nose 38 special. They were the last white family to live in Gary, Indiana. She weighed 88 lbs all her life from the time she was 18. They had a grand piano on which her daughter took, and later gave, lessons. It was french polished. By hand. She refinished it herself.

Ny Kate’s standards, which were incredibly, embarrasingly high, my mom was a slacker, and that fact was never left unmentioned.

Now I can tell you the REAL story.

Dad loved to hunt pheasant and quail. To this end, we always had dogs. Some better at flushing quail than others, but all good family dogs. One of my favorite, though, was Ginger. Ginger was a purebred brittany with a pedigree a mile long, field trial champions in her ancestry. Ginger was one of the favorite dogs of my life.

When dad got her, we at first tried to keep her indoors, but that didn’t work out so well. Ginger had just never had any experience with not shitting everywhere. So she ended up being an outside dog.

One sunday morning, deep in the fall, Mom went to a family shopping trip with Kate and several of the other sisters/aunts/whatever. They all got in a big van and went to Chicago for a day of outlet stores and bargain shoes.

About nine AM, dad gets out of bed, his one day off in two weeks, and starts working on his persistent honeydew list, and I hear a ruckus outside.

There are dogs all around Ginger’s cage. SHe has come into heat, and is the most popular mutt in town, with every neighborhood cur looking to tear a piece off. Dad goes outside to chase off the neighbor dogs, and when he gets there, he finds the dogs gone, and Ginger perched atop the doghouse. The reason soon becomes obvious, as there is a badger the size of a big dog trying to get on top of the doghouse and
at Ginger. Dad yells to me in the house and I come running out, he’s grabbed a rake and is whacking away at this thing (a BADGER!) and yelling for me to get his shotgun. I run back in the house and grab his 870, thumbing three shells into the magazine as I run back outside. Dad has the badger chewing on the (METAL!) end of the rake as he tries to keep it away from him and the dog, and he flips the rake handle at me and grabs the shotgun. I grab for the rake handle and miss, klutz that I am, and the badger heads for dad.

Ginger, more alert and coordinated than me, and normally the gentlest dog on the surface of the planet, sinks her teeth into the badger’s neck, and I learned, firsthand, what the meanng of “making the fur fly” is. I didn’t know where the dog started and the badger began, and Dad, who had fallen on his backside when the ruckus started, was trying to get a bead on the badger without aiming at the dog.

At some point, and I remember this quite clearly, the dog, whose teeth never left the badger’s neck, had it’s hind leg in the badgers mouth, both it’s front paws on the back of the badger’s head. They seemed to be able to levitate, for no part of their body seemed to be touching the ground.

I grabbed a hind leg, I never did figure out which animal, and hauled it into the air, at which point the badger stopped ministering to the dog’s foot and started lunging at me. I let go posthaste, and dog and badger hit the ground, split apart for the first time, and I leapt to the top of the doghouse. Ginger leapt into my arms, shitting and pissing in terror, and dad, who finaly has a clear shot, sends the badger to Allah. Unfortunately he is sore of back because of the earlier fall, and he hasn’t quite had time to bring the shotgun to his shoulder. So the recoil turns his right shoulder and shoulderblade into something resembling a moebius strip. I drop the dog, who has, in her struggle, covered me in shit, and jump down to help dad up.
It’s now 9:05. Time flies when you’re having fun.

The dog has a nasty open wound on it’s hind leg, and I help dad limp over to the truck so we can run the dog over to the vet for stitches. By ten thirty we’re home and relatively settled in.

Dad has messed up hs back sufficiently that he ends up being off for three days, but that first day, his shoulder black and blue, his back out of alignment, and his ass sore from having fallen on it in the hard indiana clay, he’s incapable of doing anything but sitting in his chair and taking aspirin- he’s sweating, the pain is so intense.

I bring the dog into the house, after the vet, she’s a little freaked yet and we put her on newspapers in the landing between the basement and the kitchen, a 4′ square area with three doors where she can be contained. She’s doped up and in the process of trying to relieve herself falls in her own shit and flings scraps of shit-covered paper on moms spotless walls. Where it sticks like flypaper. After a while she sleeps. I’m in the basement washing up in the laundry sink (never allowed n the house proper as dirty as I was) and after washing up somewhat, the adrenaline wears off somewhat and I crash on the steps next to the dog. Apparently I’m so exhausted myself that I end up laying on the landing, snoring softly, while the dog, drugged and out of it, continues to shit and piss in it’s semi-comatose state.

At around three PM mom and the clan come home. Everyone gets in their own cars and drives off, except mom, of course. And Kate.

Mom walks up the basement stairs. I’m laying asleep on the landing, covered in dogshit, as are the walls and the steps. The dog is barely awake, licking my face and wagging her stubby tail, one leg wrapped in bloody bandages. Dad is moaning in his chair in the living room. And the stench is amazing. My aunt Kate took one look, and started cleaning. At one point she was actually using a mop on me, and rinsing me off with a hose. When she was done, the house was so sanitary that dirt didn’t go near it for almost a month. I have one of the claws from the badger in my toolbox. Mom didn’t talk to dad for three days. Ginger later chewed a hole in the garage wall and broke her neck jumping off the cab of the truck.

How in the hell did I ever survive childhood?