The Water I Hauled for Orville

The Glass

After Gil left, Orville got up out of his chair. It took him a minute. He went down the steps one at a time with his hand on the rail, and he walked out to the hose that ran from the yard hydrant.

His own hydrant. With his own well water in it, for the first time in nearly a month.

He had a glass in his hand, one of Mavis’s good ones with the little wheat stalks painted on the side. He turned the hydrant handle and let the water run a minute to get the hot out of the hose. Then he filled the glass.

I thought he was going to drink it. He had earned it.

He walked across the yard to me instead, slow, in his light blue shirt and his suspenders, and he held it out.

“First one’s yours,” he said.

I took it. The glass was cold and wet in my hand. I drank it standing there in that dry yard in front of everybody, and it was the best water I have ever had in my life, and I am not too proud to say I cried a little into it.

Leola said, “Well, somebody give me a glass too, I’m not made of stone,” and everybody laughed, and that was the end of it being serious.

After

We stayed until the sun was down low in the west. The men emptied their tanks into the cistern anyway, because Garland said it was a shame to haul it back home, and you never knew when you’d need it. Somebody brought out a cooler of pop. Leola had another pie in her car.

I sat on the porch step beside Orville while the light went gold on the wheat. He did not say much. He did not need to.

“Thank you, honey,” he said once. Just that.

“You’d have done it for me,” I said.

“I would have,” he said. “But I’m too old to lift the lid.”

On the third of September his Social Security came in on time. He walked across the yard to our house before eight in the morning and asked Rory to drive him to Gil’s place, and he paid him the rent and the $60 in cash, out of the coffee can, and Gil wrote him a receipt and shook his hand.

He used the extra two dollars to buy Leola a bag of lemon drops.

It rained the next week, finally, an inch and a half in one night. I went over in the morning to check on him and found him on his porch step with a cup of coffee, looking out at the wet wheat shining.

The cistern lid was still propped open, full to the top.