The Water I Hauled for Orville

The Tank

We have a white poly tank on our place, a 300-gallon one, that Rory bought used from a man who quit spraying. We use it for the stock tank in the far pasture when the windmill is slow. It sits on a frame that straps down on the bed of our gray flatbed pickup.

I want to get this right, because I know how men are about trucks. Three hundred gallons of water weighs about 2,500 pounds. Our pickup is a three-quarter ton with a flatbed, and it carries it fine as long as you drive slow and take your corners like you are carrying eggs.

I backed the truck up to our yard hydrant and started filling. It takes about twenty minutes from our well. I stood there in the sun with my hand on the side of the tank and felt it go from hot to cool as the water came up inside.

While it filled, I walked back over to Orville’s and looked at the old cistern.

Every farmhouse that age out here has one. Before the wells, people caught rain off the roof and ran it down a pipe into a concrete box in the ground, and that was their wash water and sometimes their drinking water. Mavis had kept hers working for the garden all those years.

The lid was a square of concrete about the size of a card table, set in a low concrete curb by the back step. I got my fingers under the edge and Orville tried to help me and I told him to sit down on the porch step before he fell over, and he did.

I slid the lid off. It was cool inside, and dark, and it smelled like a root cellar. There was maybe a foot of old rainwater at the bottom.

“Does Mavis’s little pump still work?” I asked him.

“Ought to,” he said. “It’s on the house power, not the well. Gil didn’t think of that one.”

Mavis’s pump was a little electric one in the basement, plumbed up to the kitchen sink with its own valve, so she could do her canning with soft water. If there was water in the cistern, Orville had water in his kitchen. It was as simple as that.

The First Load

I drove the truck across the yard slow, through the gap in the fence where the gate used to be, and backed it right up beside the cistern. The tank sat higher than the hole, so I did not need a pump. I just needed a hose.

Before I let any water in, I did what the extension office sheet says to do with a cistern that has sat. I poured in bleach from the jug I keep for the dog kennels, a measured amount and no more, and swirled it with a long board.

Then I hooked a hose to the valve at the bottom of the tank, dropped the other end down into that dark square hole, and opened it up.

The sound of water running into an empty cistern is like nothing else. It is hollow at first, and it rings, and then as it fills the sound gets lower and softer until it is almost a hum.

Orville sat on his porch step and listened to it with his eyes closed.

It took a long time to empty the tank by gravity. I stood there holding the hose in my faded maroon T-shirt with the sweat running down my back, and I did not mind it one bit. It was a few minutes before eleven when the hose started sputtering.

I had filled his cistern before noon. I went in his kitchen and turned the valve and flipped Mavis’s switch, and the faucet coughed twice and then ran clear.

He came in behind me and stood there and watched it run.

“Well,” he said. “Well, look at that.”

I filled a quart jar and made him drink it while I watched. Then I filled it again and made him drink half of that one too. He did it without one word of complaint, which told me how dry he had been.