The Pump in the Side Yard

Water

Wilma came around the side of the house and stood beside me at the lean-to. Ruel and Cletus came too, and Delia, who had driven out at ten thirty and had been sitting in Wilma’s kitchen pretending to read a magazine.

“You want to do it?” I asked Wilma, nodding at the breaker box.

She stood there for a second. Then she reached up and pushed the breaker over.

For a moment nothing happened. Then the switch clicked, and somewhere down under that yard, ninety feet below us, the pump came on.

You could hear it through the ground if you stood still, a low hum, and you could hear the water start to move in the pipe.

The needle on the gauge sat at zero. Then it climbed. Ten. Twenty. Thirty. Forty. At fifty the switch clicked off and the pump went quiet.

Wilma did not say a word. She turned and walked into the house, through the back door and into the kitchen, and the rest of us followed her like ducks.

She turned on the kitchen tap. It coughed, and spat air, and coughed again, and spat a little rusty water. Then it ran clear, a good strong stream, so loud in that quiet kitchen that it sounded like rain on a tin roof.

She got a glass down out of the cabinet, the same jelly glasses she had used for forty years, and filled it under the tap. Then she walked back out onto the porch and down the steps into the yard.

She stood there in the sun by the well casing, and she drank the whole glass without stopping. Every drop.

Nobody said anything. Ruel took his cap off. Cletus looked down at his boots. Delia put her hand over her mouth.

When Wilma was done, she held the empty glass against her chest for a second and looked out at the post oaks.

“Lloyd would have liked that,” she said.

The writing on the tank

Before we left the lean-to, I went back and looked at the tank again. “Set 1994, Lloyd.” His handwriting was big and square, the way old farmers write, like they are filling in a feed ticket.

I had a white paint pen in my truck that I use for marking valves on the lease. I went and got it.

I did not ask anybody. I just knelt down and wrote, under Lloyd’s line, in the best printing I could manage. “Reset 2026, Abel.”

When I stood up, Wilma was in the doorway of the lean-to, looking at it. I had not heard her come.

She did not say anything for a minute. Then she came over and put her hand on my arm, and kept it there.

“He always said you were the one that had sense,” she said. “He told me that the day Delia brought you home. He said, that boy knows how a thing works.”

I did not trust my voice right then, so I just nodded and put the cap back on the paint pen.