Each fall, mid-November, the men of the family gathered at camp to close it up for winter. This involved draining the pipes, cleaning out the fridge, nailing down anything come loose, a general battening down of the hatches. They worked hard all day, then, come evening, played cards, drank cider, and so forth.
Next morning, a couple of the boys were hauling the dock out, when Pudgy and Joe from across the lake tooled up in their fishing boat. Greetings were exchanged. Pudgy said, “None of my business, but roundabout two o’clock this morning I heard an awful racket over this side of the pond. Looked like a cop car or three, maybe a fire engine, sirens going, lights flashing and so forth.
“Oh yuh,” Mike says. “That was us.”
“Gom,” Joe says -- meaning, What happened?
Mike explains (he’s a lawyer so he does a lot of explaining).
Seems Nub woke in the night to the call of nature and headed for the outhouse. He evidently forgot the boys had dug a new hole and moved it three rods east that afternoon. It was dark and Nub was in a hurry. Long story short, he fell into the old hole.
The boys heard him hollering, so they rushed out, shone a flashlight down the hole. He was pretty well stuck and coated. Nobody volunteered to jump in with him, but somebody fetched the come-along and instructed him to cinch himself under the arm pits. Which he did. Quite a lot of suction working against them, but they managed to haul him out.
Nobody wanted to touch him (or get too close, for that matter), in the condition he was in, so they dragged him down to the dock (for his own good, despite vigorous protest) and rolled him into the lake.
Water’s pretty chilly in November and Nub surfaced screeching bloody murder. Evidently the neighbors thought somebody was being murdered so they called the cops, hence the sirens and lights and the one fire engine for good measure.
Mike says, “Sorry if we woke you fellas up.”
“No problem,” Pudgy says.
Joe says, “Gom,” meaning, We was just wondering.
