The Water I Hauled for Orville

Gil

At about half past one, a pickup came down the section road and slowed at Orville’s lane.

This time it turned in.

It was Gil. He drove up the lane slow, with the dust rolling up behind him, and he parked at the edge of the yard and sat there in the cab for a while looking at what was in front of him.

My flatbed with the white tank. Three more trucks with three more tanks behind it. Five men from the co-op in their church shirts, holding hoses. Leola on the porch swing. Rory. Me. And Orville on his porch, with a coffee can beside him.

Gil got out. He is a big man, sixty-three, with a sunburned neck and a seed cap he wears even to church. He stood by his truck door and looked at us.

Nobody said anything. The only sound was the water running into the cistern.

Gil walked across the yard. He did not look at me. He did not look at Rory. He walked up to the porch and looked at the coffee can.

“Sixty dollars,” Garland said, from beside his truck. Just that, plainly, the way he reads you a scale ticket. “Sixty-two, actually. Somebody in this yard can’t count.”

Gil stood there a long time. I saw his jaw working. I saw him look out at the wheat, at his own ground, at the hailed-out east quarter where nothing was standing.

Then he looked at Orville.

“You told them,” he said.

“No, sir,” Orville said. “I didn’t tell a soul. I asked her not to make trouble, and she didn’t. She just brought water.”

Gil looked at me then, for the first time. I did not look away and I did not say anything. I did not have anything to say. I had said it all with the truck.

Gil turned around and walked out to the pole at the end of the yard where the pump breaker was. We all watched him go. He took a ring of keys off his belt, found the little one, and opened the padlock on the box.

He reached in. We heard the breaker go over with a clack you could hear across the whole yard.

Out in the pump house, the old well pump caught and started to hum.

Gil stood at the pole for a minute with his back to all of us. Then he closed the box, put the padlock in his pocket, and walked back to the porch.

“The coffee can’s yours, Gil,” Orville said. “Fair’s fair. It’s in the paper I signed.”

Gil looked at the can. Then he looked at the men standing in the yard, men he bought fuel from and sold wheat to and sat behind in church.

“Keep it,” he said. His voice was rough. “Orville, keep it. Buy yourself something.”

“I’d rather pay it,” Orville said.

“Then pay it on the third,” Gil said, “like you said you would.” He stopped. “I’m sorry, Orville. I’ve been, I’ve had a bad summer.”

“I heard,” Orville said. “I’m sorry about your wheat.”

That was the whole of it. Gil nodded to the men, one by one. He did not nod to me. He got in his pickup and drove back down the lane, slower than he came, and turned toward town.

Nobody said a word about him after he left. Nobody had to. By Monday morning everybody at the co-op knew he had turned the water back on in front of five men in their church shirts, and everybody knew why he had to.