Four Hundred Feet of Line to Grandma’s Barn

He nodded slowly. He did not ask why. Everybody in our valley knows everybody’s water, and I think he had already guessed. “How you planning to backfill four hundred feet by hand?”

“I was going to rent a skid steer tomorrow.”

“No you’re not,” Gus said. “I’ll bring the tractor. Got a blade on it. Be back after dinner.”

And he walked back to his truck and left, just like that.

I want to say something about that, because it is the thing I keep coming back to. Gus did not make a speech. He did not ask me what Corbin had done. He looked at an old woman’s pasture and a young man’s trench, and he did the arithmetic, and he went to get his tractor.

By one o’clock I had three hundred feet open. I stopped and greased the chain like the rental man said. Grandma brought me a sandwich and a jug of iced tea and sat on an overturned bucket while I ate it.

“Your dad would be mad at Corbin,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“He’d be madder at himself, though. For not writing it down.”

“Dad didn’t think he needed to.”

“No,” she said. “None of us did.”

She was quiet a while. The horses had wandered back toward the barn. Smoke was looking down the county road, the way he does.

“I don’t want you to hate him, Rowdy,” she said.

“I don’t hate him.”

“Good. He’s not a bad boy. He’s a scared one.” She brushed crumbs off her coat. “Scared men do dumb things. Your grandpa did a few.”

I finished the trench by a quarter after two, the last fifty feet coming up to the pole gate by the barn. I dug the hole for the hydrant by hand, down past five feet, and laid a bed of drain rock in the bottom so the hydrant could weep without freezing.

Then I started laying pipe.

You uncoil poly in the sun if you can, so it relaxes and lays flat. I rolled the first coil out along the trench and let it sit in the heat while I made up the joint at my shop. Insert coupling, two clamps, tighten, check. Then down into the trench, and walk it out, and kick it to the bottom with my boot.

That was when two more trucks pulled in.

The first was Royce, the young fella who rents the old homestead place up the road. He is twenty-six and works for a well driller out of Manhattan, and he had a set of pipe wrenches and a level in his hand before he was all the way out of his truck.

“Gus called,” he said. “Where you want me?”

The second was a woman about my mother’s age who I knew from church, a widow who runs sheep on the bench above the river. Her name is Idella, and she had brought a cooler of pop and a pan of brownies and a pair of leather gloves. She handed the brownies to Grandma and pulled on the gloves.

“I can hold a pipe level as well as any man,” she said, and she could.