The Pump in the Side Yard

Running the pump in a barrel

The switch could have been the whole story, but I was not going to tell an old woman her well was fine until I knew it.

So I set the pump up in the drum, standing on its end, with the intake down in the water and the pipe running out across the grass.

I ran the other end of the pipe back into the drum so the water would circle.

Then I checked the motor with my meter before I put any power to it. The windings read right where a half-horse ought to read, and nothing leaked through to the case.

My generator is a seven thousand watt with a 240 volt twist-lock outlet, because half the things on a lease run on 240. I wired the pump leads into a cord with the right plug, pulled the starter rope and let it settle.

“Stand back a little,” I told Wilma, though there was nothing that could hurt her. She stood back anyway, holding the porch post.

I plugged it in. The pump hummed in the drum, and three seconds later the pipe jumped and water came running out the far end and splashed back into the barrel, steady as a garden hose wide open.

I let it run a full minute. You do not want a submersible running long out of a deep hole, because it needs the water moving past it to stay cool, but a minute in a drum told me what I needed. The pump was good.

Wilma looked at the water going round and round in that barrel, and then she looked at me.

“He told me it was burned up from running dry,” she said quietly. “He said that’s what happens when the water goes down. The pump sucks air and cooks.”

“That does happen,” I said. “It just didn’t happen here.”

Taping the well

The well casing stuck up out of the grass about two feet, a white casing pipe six inches across with the cap off. Boone had left it open, with a feed sack thrown over the top and a brick on the sack.

I pulled the sack off and looked down. Nothing but dark.

In the oil field, we gauge tanks with a steel tape that has a brass bob on the end. You lower it till it touches bottom, and you read the cut on the tape.

For water you rub a little chalk or paste on the tape, and where it comes up wet is where the water stands.

I chalked the bottom hundred feet of the tape with a carpenter’s chalk stick and lowered it down hand over hand. It went down and down. At a hundred and four feet, the bob touched bottom and the tape went slack.

I reeled it up slowly. The chalk was wet and dark from the bob all the way up to the forty-four foot mark, then dry and blue above it.

“Wilma,” I said, “your water’s standing at forty-four feet. The hole is a hundred and four deep. You have sixty feet of water sitting in that well right now.”

She did not understand right away. I could see her working at it.

“So it’s not dry?”

“No, ma’am. It’s not dry. It’s not anywhere close to dry.”

She went in the house. I thought maybe she had gone to cry and wanted to do it alone, and I started coiling up my tape.

But she came back out with a manila folder that had been folded and unfolded so many times the crease was soft as cloth.

Inside was the well log from 1994. The driller had written it out by hand. Total depth, one hundred five feet. Water first found at thirty-eight feet. Static level, forty feet.

Thirty-two years, two droughts and four dry summers, and the water had dropped four feet. That is all.