Since the boys were enjoying themselves chasing each other around, I figured it would be a good time to scoop up some manure. Cleaning was an everyday practice with horses. Flies and angry neighbors made it a necessity. I still didn’t have a wheelbarrow, but doing clean-up regularly kept my load from being too great. I was using the shovel I’d found in the shed. I think it was a snow shovel with a flat portion and a long handle. Of course, I’d accidentally dropped plops on my way to the garbage bin.
“That’s not practical,” the man said, watching me with an amused look on his very handsome face. “You need some kind of cart, and how are you going to deal with dumping the garbage can when it’s all full?”
“That’s a good question,” said. “Don’t you have someone who comes around to pick up the trash?”
The officer, Frank, shook his head and tried to take the shovel away from me. I held on, so, of course, more plops hit the dirt.
“Let me do it. You don’t have to do everything by yourself.”
Another head shake from me, and Frank shrugged his shoulders and gave up. I quickly cleaned the piles that had fallen off the shovel and tossed Frey’s goodies in the trashcan.
“Nope,” Frank said. “No garbage collection now. We used to have a guy who did that, but he moved away, retiring to the village where his children live. You know his old house. It’s the one with the corral and the trough you emptied out.”
That announcement caused me to dump a whole shovelful. Exasperated by my carelessness, I sighed, then scraped the stinky stuff back into a pile that I could lift and carry again
“Bill used to take care of our village trash,” I said, remembering the way he’d smiled at me whenever he saw me.
Bill had been a nice man in his thirties, but unfortunately, according to Old Mother, he’d been born wrong and had the brain of a child. Bill liked to talk and talk, even though he really didn’t have much to say. The villagers were rude to him and said he wasted their time. The children made fun of him.
I’d liked Bill and used to bring him cookies whenever I made some. Bill loved to pet Frey, although he had his own pal, an ancient nag with bones like a skeleton horse. The gelding’s name was Clarence, and Old Bill said that his “old bag of bones” was his best friend in all the world. How could you not like someone who talked to his horse and shared half of each cookie with his best friend, the carthorse?
Once I deposited the last bit of poop into the bin, I turned to face Frank. “So where do we dump the trash, and how is it going to get there?”