The Words of the Mouth

by Ronald Smith

CHAPTER SIX

  We had to build a septic tank. The JCB digger arrived on the coldest day of the year, late in January, and began scooping out a hole about eight feet deep in a spot where I reckoned there were no water mains. As the shovel scooped deeper into the sheer-sided pit, I watched numbly while a long, snake-like copper pipe at least two inches thick was wrested out of the earth; the pipe ripped away from its coupling and water gushed out, immediately beginning to fill the hole.

  While the pit filled steadily, Jamie and I rushed about trying to find the toby to turn the water off. We found several, but all they did was to turn off other people's water.

  I told the JGB operator to dig another hole alongside the first one, so that we could get to the broken coupling. But as soon as he had dug down to eight feet, all the water from the first hole rushed in, filling it as well. We were faced with a major disaster. I could see the flood eventually engulfing the nearby village.

  At this point, the other three men turned to look at me with a 'what are you going to do now' expression on their faces. There are certain things people you are paying to work for you won't do; it was up to me to go in there, find the pipe, and bend it over. I recalled grimly how the day before, I had spent half an hour trying to bend and seal a half-inch copper pipe, and couldn't close it.

  I snatched up a nearby claw hammer like a tomahawk and let out a scream of rage as I plunged towards the ice-filmed water, because I knew how awful it was going to feel. To find the broken pipe, I had to dive under about five feet of muddy, freezing water. I could feel it bubbling up, but I couldn't find the pipe. I had to go under again and again, for what seemed like half an hour, groping with my right hand which became numb and unfeeling, until I fumbled upon the pipe. Clutching it, I stood up with water gushing into the air and all over me, and bashed it three times with all my might, completely sealing it off.

  When I crawled up the bank, I was blue with cold. There was no hot water in the house for a bath, because we had shut it off. Only my rage and heat from the exertion staved off pneumonia.

  From that moment it began to dawn on me that everything was up to me, that I had to throw myself into whatever I did with no holding back.

  I left the septic tank until summer, after that, because the hole had to remain dry long enough for the concrete to set.