The Pump in the Side Yard

Delia on the tailgate

Delia got there at three thirty, straight from the school, still in her hairnet because she had forgotten to take it off. She saw the barrel and the pump and the generator, and she saw my face, and she knew.

I showed her the switch and the tape and the well log. I did not dress it up. I just laid it out the way I would lay out a bad meter reading to my foreman.

She sat down on the tailgate of my truck and did not say anything for a long time. Wilma went inside to make coffee with jug water.

“He’s my cousin,” Delia said finally. “We used to sleep on the same pallet on the floor at Grandma’s on Christmas Eve. He taught me to drive a stick in her pasture.”

“I know it.”

“Why would he do this? To his own aunt?”

I did not have an answer for her then. I would have one by Sunday, but I did not have it then.

“Are you going to report him?” she asked. “The state licenses well drillers. You could call.”

“I thought about it,” I said. “I asked your mama on the porch while you were on the road.”

What Wilma had said was this. “He’s Iola’s boy.” Iola had been Wilma’s younger sister, and she had died three years ago this past August.

“I will not have my sister’s boy reported to the state with her gone and not able to stand up for him. And Abel, I don’t care about Boone today. I care about water.”

That settled it for me. Calling the state would have taken weeks, made a mess of the whole family, and not put one drop of water in her kitchen.

She had no water that day, and that was the problem in front of us.

“So what do we do?” Delia said.

“We put it back,” I said. “Tomorrow.”

Who I called

Setting a pump at ninety feet is not something you want to do alone. The pump and the motor weigh maybe twenty-five pounds, the pipe and wire maybe forty more dry, but it is the length that gets you. Ninety feet of pipe wants to coil and twist and get away from you.

A big outfit uses a pump hoist or a rig. On a shallow well like Wilma’s, with poly pipe, three men can do it by hand.

One feeds it into the casing and two hold the pipe behind him, walking it toward the hole in a straight line so it does not kink.

I called Ruel Yoder first. Ruel is sixty-two and has a cow and calf place on the county road north of Wilma’s. He had set the pump on his own well twice, once when it was new and once when lightning took it.

“Saturday morning?” he said. “What time?”

“I’m going to the farm store when it opens at seven thirty to get the switch. Ten o’clock.”

“I’ll be there at nine forty-five,” Ruel said, which was Ruel.

Then I called Cletus Barnhill. Cletus is fifty-eight and runs a hay operation and fixes small engines out of a shop behind his house. He had known Lloyd since they were boys in 4-H.

“Boone told Wilma what?” Cletus said. There was a long pause on the line. “I’ll bring my splice kit and some electrical tape. You never know what he did to that wire.”

Neither of them asked if I was sure. Neither of them asked what it paid. They asked what time and what to bring, which is how you know who your neighbors are.