The Well That Held All Summer

My electric bill in July was four hundred and twelve dollars. I sat at my kitchen table with the envelope and the checkbook and my reading glasses on, and I did the arithmetic of a woman on Social Security, and I wrote the check. And I told the Lord, standing at the sink, that I did not know how much longer I could do this. I said it plainly, in my regular voice, the way you tell a neighbor that you might be coming down with something.

The Lord did not answer me that I could hear. But the hum did not change that night either.

My son called that Sunday, and I told him about the hose. Wiley is fifty-one, a careful man who works for the state in Oklahoma City.

“Mom, you are going to burn that pump out,” he said. “Then where will you be? Then you’ll be one of them.”

“Wiley,” I said, “I was one of them in 1956.”

I had never told him about Ona Dobbs. I told him then, standing in my kitchen with the phone cord stretched across the room, the buckets and the dipper and the peppermint, and he was quiet a good long while.

“All right, Mom,” he said. “All right.”

The morning the pump stopped

On the eleventh of August, at ten past four in the morning, the pump quit.

I knew it before I was awake. I sat up in bed in the dark with the quilt in my fist. The click was gone. The hum was gone. The house had the soundless feel of a church after everybody leaves.

I put on my boots and went out to the pump house in my nightgown with a flashlight, and I watched the gauge needle on the pressure tank drop to nothing. I stood there with the light trembling on the grease-pencil numbers on the door, Ancel’s numbers, and I thought, well, that is it, then. It’s finished, and it will be my fault.

I called Merlin. He was the first number I thought of. He answered on the second ring, and he sounded like a man who had been waiting for the phone.

“It’s the pump,” I said. “It’s quit.”

“I’m on my way,” he said.

He came in six minutes, in a pair of striped pajama pants and his lineman’s boots, with a ladder and a toolbox and a flashlight on a strap around his forehead. He did not speak. He opened the gray control box on the pump house wall, and put his hand in, and looked at something, and breathed out through his nose.

“Starting capacitor,” he said. “It’s cooked.”

“Is the pump all right?”

“The pump’s fine, Ludie. The pump is fine. That’s a forty-dollar part.” He closed the box. “Hold this.”

The part was not in his truck. He drove to Altus at five in the morning, to a supply house that opens at six, and he waited in the lot until the man arrived. He was back by a quarter to seven. I stood at the pump house door the whole time and did not go in the house, and Tick sat with me. Aurelio had come by at a quarter to six with his buckets, found the water off, and just sat down on his tailgate to wait, with a thermos, saying nothing.

Merlin put the new part in, and he threw the breaker, and the click came, and then the hum.

I sat down on an upturned bucket.

When I looked up, Merlin was setting a second capacitor, still in its box, in an old Folgers can on the shelf over the door. “That’s your spare,” he said, and wiped his hands on his pajama pants. “It’s the only part on this whole setup that can fail you in an afternoon.” He looked at the lid of the can. “Don’t pay me for it.”

“Merlin.”

“Don’t,” he said, and he got in his truck and left.

I sat in the hum of the pump and listened to it as if I were listening to a sermon.