Every Other Day
I hauled on Thursday. I hauled on Saturday. I hauled on Monday.
The clinic opens at eight, so on work days I filled the tank at six, drove it over by half past, and let it run while I drank my coffee on Orville’s step. On my days off I went later, in full sun, so anybody on the road could see.
Our houses sit a quarter mile off the section road, but there is nothing between us and that road but open wheat. You can see a white tank on a gray truck from a mile off out there. You can see it from the air.
On the second Saturday, Gil’s pickup came down the section road at about ten in the morning. It slowed down when it got even with Orville’s lane. It did not stop. It sat there idling for maybe half a minute, and then it went on.
I did not wave. I did not do anything at all. I stood by the cistern and held the hose.
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“He saw,” Orville said from the step.
“He saw,” I said.
“You’re going to get in trouble on my account.”
“Orville,” I said, “I’m putting water in a hole in the ground. That’s all I’m doing.”
He sat there quiet for a while. Then he said, “Mavis would have liked you. She’d have said you were stubborn as a Hereford bull.”
“I’ll take that,” I said.
Leola
Leola Haag came out on the Wednesday of the second week. She is 84 and she has known Orville since they were both in the eighth grade at the country school that is a pile of stones now. She drives a big old sedan very slowly down the exact middle of the road.
She came every week with a pie, and that week it was gooseberry. She got out of the car with the pie in a towel and stood in the yard looking at my truck and the hose and the open cistern.
“What in the world,” she said.
Orville told her. He told it short and he made Gil sound better than he was, because that is the kind of man Orville is.
Leola set the pie down on the porch rail and put her hands on her hips. “Gil Sperling,” she said. “I taught that boy his Sunday school lessons. He used to cry if he got his shoes dirty.”
“Now, Leola,” Orville said.
“Don’t you now Leola me,” she said. “Does the rest of the church know about this?”
“No,” Orville said. “And they’re not going to.”
Leola looked at me over the top of his head. She did not say anything. She did not have to. I had known her long enough to see her deciding something.
She cut the pie on Orville’s kitchen table and we ate it there with the faucet running clear water into the coffee pot, and nobody said Gil’s name again that day.