The Pool My Neighbor Destroyed

Saturday morning Harlan’s grandson, who is good with computers, pulled the card. And there it was, in that gray dawn light, the whole of it, clear as day from the angle of Harlan’s shed: Glenda Shaw bringing that skid steer through the gap, crossing my grass, setting the bucket, and pushing my children’s pool into the mud while she sat up in the cab with that tight satisfied mouth. You could even see, at the edge of the frame, the back door of my house, and two small shapes behind the glass.

I could have done a lot of things with that video. My sister wanted it on Facebook by noon. The sergeant, when Petey told him it existed, wanted it for the file. And I will be honest and tell you I wanted, for about a minute, to put it everywhere, to let the whole internet see Glenda Shaw’s face while she did it.

But that is not what won. I want to be careful to tell you the true thing here, because the true thing matters. The video did not win. The video just made it so no one could call my little girl a liar. What won was the fish fry. What won was that I told the truth plain to my neighbors, to people’s faces, over catfish, the old way, and my neighbors did what neighbors are supposed to do, which Glenda Shaw had forgotten was even a thing that people did.

Because here is what happened the next week, and it is the part I will tell my grandchildren.

I came home from the Farm Bureau office on Wednesday and there were eleven trucks in my yard.

Dewey Rinker, who sells and sets pools out of a lot on the highway, had heard it at the fish fry secondhand, and Dewey had called me Monday and said he had a twenty-seven footer, a floor model, a bigger one than we’d lost, and that it was mine, no charge, “and don’t you dare argue with me, Dana, I knew your daddy.” And he had brought it, and he had brought his two boys, and Harlan Pell was there on a lawn chair bossing everyone though he could not lift a thing, and Russ’s brother was there with his level, and the Dillards, and three men from the fire department in their off hours, and Carla and four other women with casserole dishes, and the pastor, and a couple of high school kids somebody had rounded up to dig.

They took out the old bent frame. They hauled off the ruined liner. They releveled the ground where the mud had dried, and they set that bigger pool in one single long Saturday of work, forty people in and out of my yard, and somebody ran a hose from Harlan’s well too so it would not kill my pump, and by Sunday afternoon it was full. It was blue. It was cold. It was ours, and it was bigger than before, and it had been built by the hands of half the people on our road.