The Boy Carl Wrote to for Twenty Years

The pump

The drawings are what I would have missed if I had read only what Mateo wrote.

The second time through the yellow pad, slower, I noticed the drafts changed around 2010. They had been weather and the dog and soybean prices. Then, in the summer of that year, a letter from Mateo, twelve years old, that I had read before without understanding.

The village used a small gas pump to lift water from the river to a storage tank, and it had broken. For eleven days the women carried water up in buckets. His mother. His aunts. The older children, before school and after.

My uncle says the part inside is bad, a rubber part, but we do not have it and we do not know how to fix without it. I only wanted to tell you because it was a hard week.

The reply on the yellow pad ran four pages, with six drawings.

Carl spent his working life fixing small engines. He knew a diaphragm pump the way I know a pie crust. Without being asked, he drew it. The housing, the valves, the rubber diaphragm in cross-section, an arrow for every direction the water traveled. He drew the cracked rubber, and he drew the fix, which he said you could cut from a piece of inner tube using a coffee can lid for the pattern.

At the bottom he had written: I don’t know your pump. Ask somebody who does. But this is how mine works, and the principle is the same, I think. You find what is stopping the water. You fix that one thing.

Mateo’s next letter had three lines. We cut the tube. It worked. My uncle looked at the drawing and asked who is this man. I said, my friend in Indiana.

At sixteen Mateo wrote that he wanted to work with water for a living. He said it flat, the way you say what you had for breakfast. In the draft, Carl wrote, Then learn it better than I did.

The last letters, from 2025, were few. In August Mateo wrote that he had passed his certification with the municipal water authority and was officially a technician, twenty-seven years old, the youngest on the crew. No exclamation points. I think he was trying to be modest. But in the margin of Carl’s draft reply, in the squared-off capitals, there were two words and a drawing of a hand with its thumb up.

Good man.

I had never heard Carl say that about anyone.

The last page of the pad was dated the second week of September. I have been tired this fall. Don’t worry about it. It is the age. Dig the footings deep.

Carl died on the third of October, in the chair by the kitchen window, of his heart, in the middle of a Friday afternoon. I found him. I have not talked about it much.

He had been in the middle of a conversation.