The Farmhouse We Painted in Nine Days
Twenty-Two Gallons of White
He came back on Saturday the twenty-first at seven in the morning with the bed of his pickup full of paint.
I mean full. He had cleaned out every gallon of white at the hardware store on Main and the farm store on the highway. Twenty-two gallons. Rollers, pans, brushes, drop cloths, blue tape, two extension poles, and a five-gallon bucket of spackle.
“Dad, how much did all this cost?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“It matters to me.”
“It’s your grandpa’s house,” he said. “It’s on him.”
That was all he would say about it. My dad is not a talker.
We had not been at it an hour before the first truck turned in off the county road.
It was Walt Simms, the commander of the American Legion post in town. Walt was seventy-two, an old Vietnam Army man with a white flattop and a voice like gravel in a coffee can. He had a flatbed trailer behind his truck with two ladders, a pressure washer, a generator, and a cooler.
“Gene,” he said to Dad. Then he looked at me. “Kayla.”
“Walt. How did you hear?”
“Your daddy told me at the Legion fish fry last night that his granddaughter was moving into Roy’s old place because Ed Deckard raised her rent the week Josh shipped.” Walt set the cooler on the porch. “Took me about four seconds to figure out what that meant. How many rooms?”
“Nine, counting the kitchen and the bath.”
“Huh.” He turned around and hollered at his truck. Two more men climbed out of the cab, both of them about his age, both in Legion caps. “Dale, Pete. We got nine rooms and a porch.”
By ten o’clock there were six trucks in the yard.
The Pump
The well was the part that scared me. You can live without paint. You cannot live without water, not with three kids, not seven miles from town.
Walt knew a man. Walt always knew a man. This one was Harold Pruitt, who had been a plumber in our county for thirty-eight years and retired to sit on his porch and complain about how nobody could sweat a copper joint anymore.
Harold drove out Saturday afternoon in a white van with his old business name still painted on the side. He walked out to the little concrete block well house and opened it up.
“Submersible,” he said. “Roy put this in, what, ninety-six? Ninety-seven? Pump’s down about a hundred and sixty feet.”
“Can you fix it?” I asked.
“I can pull it,” Harold said. “Then we’ll know.”
Pulling a well pump is not a job for one man. It took Harold, my dad, Walt, and two of the high school boys who had come out with the ag teacher. They ran the pipe up through a pulley on a tripod, twenty feet at a time, and laid it out in the grass. It took most of the afternoon.
When the pump came up at last, Harold turned it over in his hands like a man reading a newspaper.
“Motor’s burnt,” he said. “Wire’s good, pipe’s good. You need a new pump and a new pressure switch.”
“How much is that?”
He named a number. It was not small. It was more than a month of Ed’s old rent.
Then he said, “I got one in the van.”
“You what?”
“I got one in the van. Bought it for a job in 2019 that never happened. It’s been riding around back there ever since, waiting for somebody that needed it.” He looked at me over his reading glasses. “I reckon that’s you.”
“Harold, I can’t let you just give me a pump.”
“You’re not letting me do anything, young lady. Your husband is at Fort Bliss getting ready for Kuwait.” He went to get the pump.
The co-op came out Monday morning and set the meter back in. At four o’clock that afternoon, with the new pump down the hole and the pressure switch wired, Harold opened the kitchen tap. It coughed, spit rusty air, coughed again, and then ran clear and cold.
Wyatt cheered like it was a touchdown. I had to go stand in the pantry for a minute.