The Water I Hauled for Orville

The Afternoon Rory Came

The second Saturday of the third week, Rory took the afternoon off from the co-op and rode over with me for the two o’clock load. It was the hottest day of the month. The thermometer on the porch post said 106 and the wind had quit entirely.

He wanted to see it, he said. I think he wanted Gil to see him there too, standing in the yard beside me, so nobody could say his wife was out there alone doing something foolish while he looked the other way.

I held the hose. Rory checked the straps and the valve and then walked the whole cistern with his eyes, the way he looks at a grain bin, for cracks in the concrete around the lid. He found one hairline crack and said it would hold another fifty years.

Orville came out on the porch step with a glass of water in his hand. He had started doing that, holding up a glass to me while I worked, like a toast. He was thin as a fence post in his light blue shirt and his suspenders, and his white hair stood up in the heat.

“To the water girl,” he said, and drank it down.

Rory laughed. It is not often you hear Rory laugh out loud. He went up and sat on the step beside Orville, and the two of them talked about wheat prices and the hail and the old days of threshing crews while the tank emptied out behind me.

I listened to them with half an ear. The wheat went on to the edge of the sky behind that little white farmhouse. There was not a cloud anywhere, only that hard blue, and the hot August sun on the back of my neck.

Checking on Him

I am not a doctor, and I never pretended to be with Orville. But I have taken more pulses than I can count, even if most of them belonged to dogs and horses, and I know the look of a body that is struggling.

So every hauling day, after the hose was running, I sat beside him on the step and held his wrist for a minute. He let me. He said my hands were cold from the tank, and it felt good.

His pulse was steady. His color was better than it had been that first Tuesday, when his lips were dry and cracked and he could not remember the last time he drank. I made him show me his pill bottle and count what was left.

“You’re as bad as Mavis,” he said.

“Somebody has to be,” I said. I wrote his doctor’s number in Hays on a card and stuck it to his refrigerator with a magnet shaped like an ear of corn. I wrote ours under it, and Leola’s.

He looked at that card a long time after I put it there. He did not say anything about it. But the next time I came, he had moved the magnet so the card sat right at eye level, where a man standing at the sink could not miss it.