The Pump in the Side Yard

The pump was lying in the grass of my mother-in-law’s side yard like something that had been shot and left. Ninety feet of black poly pipe lay coiled beside it, and the wire was still taped to the pipe every ten feet.

Wilma Hatchett stood on her porch steps with her arms folded against a breeze that was not even cold. She was seventy-six years old, and she had been without water since Tuesday. It was Friday afternoon.

“Boone says it’s dry,” she told me before I got the truck door shut. “He says the water’s gone down with the drought and the old hole is done. He’s going to drill me a new one.”

Boone Tatum was her nephew, her sister’s boy, and my wife Delia’s first cousin. He was also the only well driller with a rig within thirty miles of her place south of Ada, which out here in Pontotoc County means he was the only well driller most people knew.

I walked over and looked at the pump. It was a little half-horse, two-wire submersible, stainless steel, about two feet long. The intake screen was clean.

There was no sand caked in it, no rust bleeding out of the seams, nothing that looked like a pump that had been sucking air and cooking itself.

“How much did he say it would be, Wilma?”

She did not want to tell me. I could see it in the way she looked out past the post oaks toward the road, the way she did when the preacher went long and she was thinking about her roast.

“Sixteen thousand,” she said. “Three hundred feet, he says, to get under it. I gave him two thousand down Wednesday so he could get me on his schedule. He thinks two or three weeks.”

How it started

Delia had called me Thursday at about two in the afternoon. I was out on my lease route east of town, standing on a catwalk over a stock tank with a gauge line in my hand, and I nearly let her go to voicemail.

I am a pumper. I have been one for twenty-two years. Every morning I drive a route of thirty-one wells, check the pumping units, gauge the oil in the tanks, write down the numbers and fix what I can fix with what I carry in the truck.

What I fix, mostly, is electric motors, switches, belts and the little things that keep a big thing from running.

A pumping unit that will not start is almost never a dead motor. It is almost always a contact, a fuse, a breaker or a wire some critter chewed.

“Mama’s out of water,” Delia said. She was at the school, I could hear the dish machine going behind her in the cafeteria kitchen.

“Since Tuesday. Boone pulled the pump. He says the well’s dry and she needs a new one, and Abel, she already wrote him a check.”

“How big a check?”

“Two thousand. The whole thing’s sixteen.”

I took my hard hat off and stood there in the wind on top of that tank and looked out over the pasture.

Sixteen thousand dollars is not unheard of for a new well in southern Oklahoma. Ten to twenty is about what they run, depending on how deep you go and what you hit.

But Wilma’s well had been drilled in 1994. Lloyd, her husband, had been out there with the driller every day of it, and I had heard him tell the story at every Thanksgiving since I married into the family. Good water at forty feet, he used to say, and plenty of it.

“What’s she doing for water?” I asked.

“Hauling it from the church in milk jugs. She flushes with a bucket. She’s heating dishwater on the stove.” Delia’s voice went thin. “She’s seventy-six, Abel. She carried those jugs up the porch steps herself because she didn’t want to bother anybody.”

“I’ll go out tomorrow after my route,” I said. “Don’t let her give him another dime.”