The Pump in the Side Yard

Afterward

I drove out past Fitzhugh at two thirty with my meter and my tape. Boone had already been there. He had called her from the road and told her the truth.

Her switch was burned too, the same fire ants. Her water stood at fifty-one feet. I changed her switch myself, and Boone came out Monday afternoon and set her pump back for nothing, with her grandson helping.

The woman in Stonewall had already paid Boone a deposit. He paid it back on Tuesday, and by the end of the week he had been out to four more places on his own, telling people what he had told them before had been wrong.

I do not know if the bank took his rig. I heard he sold his second truck and kept going.

I heard he quotes slower now and checks the switch first, every time, and tells people what a switch costs before he tells them anything else.

I did not report him. Wilma asked me not to, and I gave her my word. The way I figure it, the co-op counter did more than any state board could have done, and it did it by Monday.

Two more widows called me that month, one from Roff and one from out toward Vanoss, before they let anybody touch their wells. One had a bad switch and one had a bad pressure tank. Neither one needed a new well.

The windowsill

Wilma has water now, and she is careful with it, the way people who have carried it always are. She runs the tap a little longer than she needs to when she fills her coffeepot. I think she just likes to hear it.

On Thanksgiving, all of us were out there again, and Boone came with his wife and his boy. He brought a pecan pie his wife had made.

He and I stood out by the well casing after dinner, in the sun, and did not say much.

“You were right to do it the way you did,” he said finally. “I’d have hated you for calling the state. I’d have deserved it, but I’d have hated you.”

“It wasn’t my call,” I said. “It was your aunt’s.”

He nodded. We stood there a while longer.

Every time I go out there now, I walk past the lean-to and look at the tank. “Set 1994, Lloyd.” And under it, in white paint pen, “Reset 2026, Abel.” Someday somebody will write a line under mine.

And on Wilma’s kitchen windowsill, between a little clay pot of African violets and a photograph of Lloyd on his tractor, sits that old pressure switch with the burned black contact.

She dusted it off and set it there the Sunday Boone came. When the grandkids ask her what it is, she picks it up and turns it over in her hand and tells them.

She calls it her sixteen-thousand-dollar part.