Don't Beat Her With Two Dead Chickens

Hannah here is the septic story I was telling you about.



Millie and Ben had a volatile relationship to put it mildly. One time he beat her up with two dead chickens and Millie had enough. The following is an excerpt from the book, “Bordellos from Silver City to Ketchikan” by Max Evans.

This brought a thought to her mind. She drove to Bayard and bought a sack of slack lime. This stuff will eat and dissolve amalgamated steel. She put it in the trunk of her car. Then she went into the back of the bar and had one of her workers take the concrete slab off the septic tank. She got a rake and started trying to correct the rose gardens. (Situated by the septic tank and the ones Ben had destroyed) Millie figured the odds of her plan reaching fruition at fifty-fifty. They were in her favor that day, however. She told Ben to get back in the bar or go home. She was still giving him a chance. He went back in the bar. She was thinking that if he returned, that would be it. She’d barely started back on the roses when Ben returned, telling her what a bitch she was for leaving him in jail over the long weekend, and uttering various other complaints. Millie just took it and kept on working until he moved right up against the opening of the septic tank. Then, in a sudden move, she raised the rake like a spear and drove it right into his middle, knocking him into the thick fluid, saying “Now take a drink of that, you blubbered headed sot.” He came up gasping for his life and she shoved him back under with the rake. He was harder to keep under than she had figured. After about the fourth dunking, she raised the rake to whack him on the head, when she heard a scream. In the intensity of her endeavor, she hadn’t heard Ronnie Smith and the entire band drive up. She stopped the rake in mid-air and put it out Ben’s blindly grasping hands, yelling at the band, “Help, help the poor son of a bitch is trying to drown himself.”

Millie says, “I intended to drown him in that shit, pour the lime over and let the honey wagon suck him up and haul him to the dump.” At the time, though, she held that back, explaining to the band that publicity of her sweet husband trying to commit suicide in a septic tank would be all bad. Besides, he smelled so terrible, she doubted that they’d accept him in such a clean place as a hospital, dying or not.

Millie say, “I want to tell you, that for the next three or four months, when he’d break out in perspiration, he smelled like shit. He was taking five showers a day.

Ben and Millie divorced after he beat her so badly that she almost lost her sight. Millie later found the love of her life.

Hannah, like Sadie Orchard, Millie had a heart of gold, just don’t beat her up with two dead chickens. It was a fun book but I will put it in the book exchange.


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