What I found in the switch box
So that was Friday. I got to Wilma’s at a quarter to two with my generator in the bed of the truck, a fifty-five gallon plastic drum full of water I had filled from my own hose that morning, my meter and my tool bag, and the steel gauge tape I use on the oil tanks.
Before I touched the pump, I went to the pressure tank. It sat in a little lean-to against the north side of the house, a blue steel bladder tank about the size of a water heater, with the pressure switch screwed onto the pipe beside it.
Any honest pump man checks the switch first. It is the cheapest part in the whole system and it fails the most.
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Out here, half the time it fails because fire ants crawl inside it looking for warmth and get crushed in the contacts.
I took the cover off with a nut driver. The inside was packed with dead fire ants, a little brown wad of them jammed down between the points.
One set of contacts was burned black and pitted, like somebody had held a match to a penny.
I stood there and looked at it for a while. Wilma came around the corner of the house and stood beside me, and I showed her without saying anything.
“What is that?” she said.
“That’s your pressure switch. It tells the pump when to come on. These contacts are what close and send it power.”
I touched the black one with the tip of my screwdriver. “This one’s burned up. The pump never got the message to run.”
“Is that bad?”
“It’s about forty dollars, Wilma. They have them at the farm store on the highway.”
She did not say anything. She put her hand on the side of the tank, and I saw her fingers find something written there. I looked closer. In black marker, faded but still plain, it said “set 1994, Lloyd.”
“He wrote that the day they finished,” she said. “He wrote it on everything. The water heater, the furnace, the inside of the barn door. He said a man ought to know when a thing went in.”
I nodded. Lloyd had been gone four years that spring. He died in his recliner after a day of hauling hay, which is about how he would have picked it.