They shit in the same pit

“They shit in the same pit” is a crude expression of shared ancestry and proximity, but in the novel it carries more than the intimacy of a common past. Max Devore applies it to the great-grandfathers of himself and Mike Noonan, describing a connection rooted in the logging camps of the TR; the phrase also resonates against the town’s history of racial exclusion, grudging accommodation, and silence about the people who once lived at Tidwell's Meadow.

The phrase and its immediate context

Max tells Mike that their great-grandfathers worked in the same camps and were neighbors when they were not in the woods, apparently near the site of Boyd's Marina. He summarizes that closeness with the phrase, then adds that the two loggers’ descendants had gone on to produce millionaires. He presents this as evidence that the system was working as it should, even if it took three generations.

Mike initially takes the remark as a veiled criticism of Lance. He answers that his own family came from Prout's Neck on the coast: his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather were fishermen, trapping lobsters and casting nets rather than cutting timber. The mismatch unsettles him, however. Though he offers an explanation for the Arlens’ history, he senses that Max’s statement may contain some truth about a connection he cannot immediately place.

Family history and the TR

Mike reflects that the Arlens were a large Maine family, most of whom still lived in Massachusetts, and that members of the family in the 1880s were mainly quarrymen and stonecutters in the Malden-Lynn area. He concludes that Devore was teasing Mattie, but qualifies his own conclusion: Max, then eighty-five, might have misremembered part of the story, yet he was not much of a practical joker. The phrase therefore remains a small but persistent disturbance rather than a settled piece of genealogy.

Its image of unseen continuity suits Mike’s growing sense that lives on the TR are joined by concealed ties. Elsewhere, he recognizes the same metaphor in John Storrow’s account of small-town connections, where the past dies slowly. The expression gives that buried social network an indecorously physical form: generations may change their occupations and fortunes, but they remain connected through shared places and histories.

A wider history of belonging

The phrase acquires a further resonance beside the history of the Black musicians who settled at Tidwell's Meadow around the turn of the century. More than forty people, many related and many members of the musical group first called The Red-Top Boys and later Sara Tidwell and the Red-Top Boys, bought the meadow and substantial lakeside land. The purchase prompted an uproar and a protest meeting against what residents described as the arrival of a horde. Instead of the shanty town some locals expected, the group built neat white cabins around a larger building that may have served for meetings, rehearsals, or performances.

Local acceptance remained conditional. The community’s self-description of peace rested on keeping to oneself and, pointedly, not taking charity; the narrator identifies this as a defining local virtue. The musicians performed around western Maine for more than a year, perhaps nearly two, and became popular on the circuit. Yet they eventually left after playing county fairs in the late summer of 1901. Their cabins then supplied summer-rental income to the Day family until the 1933 fires destroyed them.

The surviving newspaper clippings expose the racial hierarchy beneath the language of neighborliness. Reviews praise the performers through patronizing stereotypes, calling them “our Southern blackbirds” and “our rhythmic darkies,” while describing Sara Tidwell in explicitly racialized terms. A later account of Jared Devore’s hostility depicts the racialized boundary of The Street and Sara’s refusal to stay away from it. Against this history, a phrase about ancestors sharing a camp or a pit does not erase exclusion; it makes inherited proximity impossible to confuse with equality.

Narrative function

The novel introduces the expression as reported speech in a conversation about family origins, then returns to it as a compact refrain: Mike repeats it while trying to understand the connection Max has invoked. Its bluntness contrasts with the circumlocutions surrounding local memory, including the euphemisms used for the Black musicians and the silences around what happened to them. The phrase can name genuine interdependence, but it also evokes a shared ground on which wealth, race, and belonging remain unevenly distributed. In that tension, it becomes a verbal shorthand for the TR’s hidden connections and its reluctance to confront what those connections contain.