The Water I Hauled for Orville

Why Gil Did It

I found out the reason from Rory, who heard it at the co-op, which is where you hear everything in our county.

The hail in June had taken Gil’s whole east wheat. Every acre of it, a week before harvest. He had insurance, but not enough, and he had bought another quarter two years ago at the top of the market.

He was behind on his land payments. Two of them. The bank in Hays had called him in and sat him down.

“Garland at the scale house says Gil’s been in there arguing about a fuel bill,” Rory said. “Says he’s never seen him like this. Gray in the face.”

“So he’s squeezing Orville over sixty dollars,” I said.

“I guess Orville’s the one he figured couldn’t squeeze back,” Rory said.

I sat with that for a long time. I want to be fair to Gil. I have been behind on money myself. I know what it does to a person to lie awake doing sums in the dark.

But I have never cut the water off on an old man with a bad heart in a heat wave, and I never will. Being scared does not make that right. It just explains how a man got there.

The Third Week

By the third week it had not rained in thirty-one days. The ripe wheat had gone the color of an old paper sack. The ditches were dust. Every afternoon the wind came up out of the southwest like an oven door opening.

I kept hauling. Orville kept sitting on the step to listen to the water. It became our time together, in a way. He told me about the dust years his folks had lived through, and about Mavis, and about the first tractor his dad bought in 1946.

One morning, while the hose ran, he told me how he had proposed.

“At the county fair,” he said. “In the sheep barn. She was showing a ewe that would not stand still. I held the halter for her, and when the judge walked off I asked her right there.”

“In the sheep barn,” I said.

“It smelled like sheep,” he said. “She said yes anyway. Fifty-eight years.”

He was quiet for a while. Then he said, “This was her cistern. She’d be glad somebody’s using it.”