The Pump in the Side Yard

Boone’s reason

He did not answer right away. He stood on that porch looking at his boots, and the grandkids watched him through the screen door, and the wind moved in the post oaks.

“I’m three months behind on the rig,” he said finally. “The payment’s forty-eight hundred a month. The bank’s been calling. I’ve had two jobs fall through since August, and I’ve got a boy starting at the tech school in January.”

He swallowed.

“I came out and saw that old well, and I thought, it’s thirty-two years old. It’s going to quit on her anyway, sooner or later. I thought, I’ll drill her a good deep one, she’ll never have to worry again, and I’ll make the payment. I talked myself into it on the drive out.”

He shook his head. “I knew the switch was bad. I saw the ants. I knew it, Aunt Wilma.”

Nobody said anything.

“I’m not going to say it was all right,” Boone said. “I know it wasn’t. I just wanted you to know why.”

I watched Wilma’s face. I have known that woman twenty-six years, and I have never once seen her be cruel. But I have seen her be hard, and she was hard then.

“Your mama would be ashamed,” she said quietly. “Iola would be ashamed to her bones. And so am I.”

Boone flinched like she had slapped him. She had not raised her voice once.

“You let me carry water in milk jugs up these steps for four days,” she said. “At seventy-six. You took my check at my own table, and you ate a piece of my pie while I wrote it.”

“I know.”

“And you were out at a widow’s place in Stonewall. And somebody’s mother past Fitzhugh.”

He did not deny it. He just stood there.

What Wilma did

Then Wilma did a thing I will remember the rest of my life.

She came down the three steps, slow, one hand on the rail, until she was standing in the grass right in front of him. She is a head shorter than Boone. She looked up at him a long time.

“You go to every single one of those people Burl’s talking about,” she said, “and you tell them the truth before Abel gets there. Every one. And if their pump’s good, you put it back for nothing.”

His eyes were wet. He nodded.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And then you come eat,” she said. “Dinner’s on in fifteen minutes. You’re still Iola’s boy.”

She turned and went back inside. Boone stood in the yard with his hat in his hand, and Delia, who had not said one word, uncrossed her arms and went to him and put her hand on his shoulder.

“Come on in,” she said. “Wash up.”

He did come in. He sat at the far end of the table and said almost nothing, and he ate very little.

But he was there, and he bowed his head with the rest of us when Wilma said grace, and when she thanked the Lord for water she did not look at him and did not need to.