The Pump in the Side Yard

The co-op

We cleaned up and loaded the generator and the drum. Wilma tried to give Ruel and Cletus money, and they both refused it like she had offered them a snake.

She made them each take a jar of her plum jelly instead, which they did not refuse.

Ruel put his cap back on and looked at his watch.

“Well,” he said, “I need feed anyway.”

“I need some too,” Cletus said, though I happened to know he had bought feed on Thursday.

The co-op in town is the kind of place where the men stand around the counter on Saturday afternoon with nothing they need to buy, drinking free coffee out of foam cups and talking about cattle prices and rain. At two o’clock it is full.

I was not there. I went home and slept for an hour. But I have heard it from enough people now that I can tell it to you about the way it went.

Burl, who runs the register, looked up when Ruel and Cletus came in together, both still in their work clothes, both with a jar of plum jelly under their arm.

“Y’all look like you’ve got something to say,” Burl said.

Ruel took his cap off and set it on the counter.

And then he told it. Not mean, not loud, just plain. Wilma Hatchett had lost her water. Her nephew had pulled her pump, told her the well was dry, and quoted her sixteen thousand dollars with two thousand down.

Then Cletus told the rest. A forty-dollar switch full of fire ants. A pump that ran fine in a barrel. Sixty feet of water standing in the hole. Three men, one hour, water at the kitchen tap by noon.

He did not say anything about Boone’s character. He did not have to. He just set the facts out on the counter one at a time like a man laying out tools.

Burl did not say anything for a while. Then he said, “Boone quoted my sister’s place last spring. Said the same thing about dry.”

A man by the seed rack said Boone had been out to his mother-in-law’s in Stonewall in September.

By the time Ruel and Cletus left, the whole counter had heard it, and by Saturday supper, I suspect half the county had.

Iola’s boy

The phone calls started that evening. The first one was from a widow out past Fitzhugh, eighty-one years old, whose pump had quit on Thursday.

Boone had come out Friday and told her the well was going and he could get to her in a month for fourteen thousand.

“I haven’t paid him yet,” she said. “Burl gave me your number. I hate to bother you on a Saturday.”

“You’re not bothering me,” I said. “Is your water off right now?”

“Since Thursday.”

I drove out there Sunday after dinner, and I will tell you about that in a minute. But first I need to tell you about Sunday morning.

Sunday after church

Wilma does Sunday dinner every week after church, and every week some combination of family shows up. That Sunday it was Delia and me, our two grown kids and their families, and Wilma’s other daughter from Shawnee.

We came back from church a little after twelve. Wilma had a pot roast in since seven, with potatoes and carrots around it, and her kitchen smelled like every Sunday of my married life.

Wilma was at the sink running water just to run it. She had done that six or seven times since Saturday. She said she liked the sound.

At twelve forty-five, a white flatbed truck with a pipe rack and Boone’s business name on the door pulled into the drive and stopped at the edge of the yard.

The kitchen went quiet. Even the grandkids stopped.

Boone sat in the truck a long time. I could see him through the window, his hands on the wheel. Then he got out and walked across the yard toward the porch, slow, like a man walking into cold water.

He looked older than fifty. He had shaved but missed a spot under his jaw. He had his good shirt on, the one he wore to his mother’s funeral.

Wilma went out on the porch. The rest of us followed, but we stayed back by the door. Delia stood next to me with her arms crossed so tight her knuckles were white.

Boone stopped at the bottom of the steps. He looked at the well casing, at the cap bolted down, at the place in the grass where the pump had lain for four days. Then he looked up at his aunt.

“Aunt Wilma,” he said.

“Boone.”

He pulled an envelope out of his shirt pocket. It was a bank envelope, and it was thick, and his hand was shaking a little.

“That’s your two thousand,” he said. “All of it.”

He held it out. Wilma did not come down the steps to take it. She just waited. After a moment, Boone climbed the three steps and put it in her hand.

She opened it and looked inside. It was twenty hundred-dollar bills. Some of them were new and some were soft and creased, like they had come from more than one place. I learned later his wife’s brother had loaned him part of it.

“Thank you,” Wilma said. She folded the envelope and put it in her apron pocket.

Then she said, “Now tell me why.”