The Pump in the Side Yard

Saturday morning

The sky was so clear Saturday it looked washed. Early November in Pontotoc County can go either way, but this one was dry and sunny, maybe sixty-five by late morning, with the post oaks still holding their brown leaves.

I was standing at the farm store counter at seven thirty-two. The switch was a standard 30-50, the same kind I would put on a stock tank pump on a lease. It was thirty-nine dollars and some change, forty-two and change with tax.

I got back to Wilma’s by eight fifteen and went straight to the lean-to. I cut the power at the breaker, then pulled the old switch off the pipe, cleaned the threads, wrapped them with tape and put the new one on.

Then I checked the air in the pressure tank. Most people do not know a bladder tank has a valve on top just like a tire.

With the water off and the pressure at zero, it should hold about two pounds under where the pump kicks on, so twenty-eight pounds on a 30-50 switch.

I put my tire gauge on it. It read twenty-seven. Lloyd’s tank, thirty-two years old, still holding its air like it was new. I topped it off with my little compressor and stood there a minute with my hand on it.

Ruel pulled in at nine forty-four in his old blue work coat, with a thermos of coffee and a box of doughnuts from the gas station.

Cletus came at nine fifty-five in a brown canvas vest, with his splice kit and two rolls of tape.

Wilma met them on the porch. She had her white hair combed and her good white blouse on, the way she dressed for company, and she shook both their hands.

“I appreciate this,” she said. “I don’t know how I’ll ever repay it.”

“You fed me every Fourth of July for thirty years,” Cletus said. “I reckon you’re ahead.”

Going over the pipe

Before we set anything, we went over every foot of it. Cletus walked the whole length on his knees, checking where the wire was taped to the pipe, looking for a nick in the jacket or a place where Boone had scraped it on the casing coming up.

He found one spot about fifty feet up where the tape had come loose, and he wrapped it fresh. The wire itself was clean. No cuts, no burns.

Ruel checked the safety rope. On a submersible you tie a poly rope to the top of the pump and run it up alongside the pipe, so if the pipe ever breaks you can still fish the pump out. Boone’s rope was there and tied right, I will give him that.

At the top of the pipe was the pitless adapter. That is the fitting that lets the water pipe come out the side of the casing underground, below the frost line, and run to the house. Ours sat about four feet down in Wilma’s casing.

To set it, you screw a length of steel pipe called a T-handle into the top of the pitless, and you use that to lower the last of it down and slide it into its seat.

Boone had left his T-handle lying in the grass. Even Ruel shook his head at that.

I checked the O-ring on the pitless. It was fine. I smeared a little food-grade grease on it so it would seat smooth.

“All right,” I said. “Let’s put it back where it lives.”