The Water I Hauled for Orville

The Late Fee

Gil Sperling owned both our houses. He owned the section of ground around them too, mostly wheat, and he rented the two old farmhouses on the east side because nobody in his family wanted to live in them.

My husband Rory and I had rented the bigger one for six years. Rory works at the co-op in Plainville, loading feed and running the fertilizer spreader in the spring. We pay $650 a month, and we pay it on the first.

Orville had rented the little white house for eleven years, since he sold his own farm north of Zurich and his wife Mavis got too sick for stairs. She passed four years ago. He stayed because the rent was $450 and he could not find anything cheaper in the county.

Orville’s money was his Social Security and nothing else. It went into the little bank in town on the third of every month, the same as it had for twenty years.

“This month it didn’t come,” he told me, standing by the pump house. “The bank got bought out. Something with the new numbers. It came the sixth instead.”

“So you paid Gil on the sixth.”

“I paid him the $450 on the sixth,” he said. “Cash, in his hand, at his pickup. And he said there’s a $60 late fee in the paper I signed.”

“Is there?”

“There is,” Orville said. He did not argue with true things. “I told him I’d have it on the third of next month. I’ve never once been late, Tessa. Not in eleven years.”

“And he cut your water.”

“He said he’s got to teach me not to make it a habit,” Orville said. “At my age.” He laughed a little, and that was worse than if he had cried.

I looked at the dish pan in his hands. It was dry. I asked him when he had last had a drink of water.

He thought about it too long.

What I Could Not Do

I want to say plainly why I did not get in my pickup and drive to Gil’s place and scream at him, or call the sheriff, or call anybody at all. It is because Orville asked me not to.

He took hold of my wrist right there by the pump house. His hand was dry and light as paper.

“Please don’t make trouble, honey,” he said. “Gil can put me out. He told me so. I’ve got nowhere to go. There’s no place in this county for four hundred and fifty dollars, and I’m not going to that home in Hays to die in a room with a stranger.”

“He can’t just cut a man’s water,” I said.

“Maybe he can’t,” Orville said. “But he can decide not to renew me in March. And then where am I?”

I did not have an answer for that. Rory and I rent from the same man. If Gil wanted us gone, we would be gone too, and we have two dogs, a mule, and a hay barn’s worth of things that would not fit anywhere else in Rooks County.

So I did what he asked. I did not make trouble. I made water.