“Thank you for calling, Mr. Samuels, and I’ll see you soon.”
He said, “Not soon enough,” and chuckled and didn’t mean the laugh.
I chuckled back and meant it, because coffee was waiting, and Bella, and a quiet hour before I went back out to clear a lonely lady’s pipe in a fifty-foot well. I said, “Good-bye, Mr. Samuels.”
He said, “Yes,” which meant he was listening to his whispering wife, not me, and then he said, “Yes, good-bye, thank you very much, see you soon.”
I blew on my coffee and Bella turned the radio off—she’d been listening to it low to hear if she’d won the fur coat someone in Oneida was giving away—and we sat and ate bran muffins with her blueberry jam and talked about nothing much; we said most of it by sitting and eating too much together after so many years of coffee and preserves.
After a while she said, “A professor with a problem.”
“His pump won’t turn off. Somebody sold him a good big Gould brand-new when he moved in last summer, and now it won’t turn off and he’s mad as hell.”
“Well, I can understand that. They hear that motor banging away and think it’s going to explode and burn their house down. They’re city people, I suppose.”
“Aren’t they ever. I know the house. McGregory’s old place near the Keeper farm. It needs work.”
“Which they wouldn’t know how to do.”
“Or be able to afford,” I said. “He’s a young one and a new professor. He wouldn’t earn much more than the boys on Buildings and Grounds. I’ll bill him—he won’t have the money in the house or at the bank, probably—and we’ll wait a couple of months.”
Bella said, “We can wait.”
“We will.”
“What did you tell him to do?”
“I told him to unplug the pump.”
“He wasn’t satisfied.”
“I guess I wouldn’t be.”
“Abe,” she said, “what’s it like to be young as that?”
I said, “Unhappy.”
She said, “But happy, too.”
“A little of that.”
She bent her gray and gold head over the brown mug of dark brown coffee and picked at the richness of a moist muffin. She said, still looking down, “It’s hard.”
I said, “It gets easier.”
She looked up and nodded, grinned her golden tooth at me, said, “Doesn’t it?”
THEN I SPENT the afternoon driving to New Hartford to the ice-cream plant for twenty-five pounds of sliced dry ice. I had them cut the ice into ten-inch-long slivers about three-quarters of an inch around, wrapped the ice in heavy brown paper, and drove it back to Brookfield and the widow’s jammed drill point. It’s all hard-water country here, and the crimped-pipe points they drive down for wells get sealed with calcium scales if you wait enough years, and the pressure falls, the people call, they worry about having to drill new wells and how much it will cost and when they can flush the toilets again. They worry how long they’ll have to wait.
I went in the cellar door without telling her I was there, disconnected the elbow joint, went back out for the ice, and when I had carried the second bundle in, she was standing by her silent well in the damp of her basement, surrounded by furniture draped in plastic sheets, firewood stacked, cardboard boxes of web-crusted Mason jars, the growing heaps of whatever in her life she couldn’t use.
She was small and white and dressed in sweaters and a thin green housecoat. She said, “Whatever do you mean to do?” Her hands were folded across her little chest, and she rubbed her gnarled throat. “Is my well dead?”
“No, ma’am. I’d like you to go upstairs while I do my small miracle here. Because I’d like you not to worry. Won’t you go upstairs?”
She said, “I live alone—”
I said, “You don’t have to worry.”
“I don’t know what to do about—this kind of thing. It gets more and more of a problem—this—all this.” She waved her hand at what she lived in and then hung her hands at her sides.
I said, “You go on up and watch the television. I’m going to fix it up. I’ll do a little fixing here and come back tonight and hook her up again, and you be ready to make me my after-dinner coffee when I come back. You’ll have water enough to do it with.”
“Just go back upstairs?” she said.
“You go on up while I make it good. And I don’t want you worrying.”
“All right, then,” she said, “I’ll go back up. I get awfully upset now. When these—things. These—I don’t know what to do anymore.” She looked at me like something that was new. Then she said, “I knew your father, I think. Was he big like you?”
“You know it,” I said. “Bigger. Didn’t he court you one time?”
“I think everybody must have courted me one time.”
“You were frisky,” I said.
“Not like now,” she said. Her lips were white on her white face, the flesh looked like flower petals. Pinch them and they crumble, wet dust.
“Don’t you feel so good now?”
“I mean kids now.”
“Oh?”
“They have a different notion of frisky now.”
“Yes they do,” I said. “I guess they do.”
“But I don’t feel so good,” she said. “This. Things like this. I wish they wouldn’t happen. Now. I’m very old.”
I said, “It keeps on coming, doesn’t it?”
“I can hear it come. When the well stopped, I thought it was a sign. When you get like me, you can hear it come.”
I said, “Now listen: You go up. You wrap a blanket around you and talk on the telephone or watch the TV. Because I guarantee. You knew my father. You knew my father’s word. Take mine. I guarantee.”
“Well, if you’re guaranteeing.”
I said, “That’s my girl.” She was past politeness so she didn’t smile or come back out of herself to say goodbye. She walked to the stairs and when she started to shuffle and haul the long way up, I turned away to the well pipe, calling, “You make sure and have my coffee ready tonight. You wait and make my after-dinner coffee, hear? There’ll be water for it.” I waited until she went up, and it was something of a wait. She was too tired for stairs. I thought to tell Bella that it looked like the widow hadn’t long.
But when she was gone, I worked. I put my ear to the pipe and heard the sounds of hollowness, the emptiness under the earth that’s not quite silence—like the whisper you hear in the long-distance wires of the telephone before the relays connect. Then I opened the brown paper packages and started forcing the lengths of dry ice down into the pipe. I carried and shoved, drove the ice first with my fingers and then with a piece of copper tube, and I filled the well pipe until nothing more would go. My fingers were red, and the smoke from dry ice misted up until I stood in an underground fog. When nothing more would fit, I capped the pipe, kicked the rest of the ice down into the sump—it steamed as if she lived above a fire, as if always her house were smoldering—and I went out, drove home.
I went by the hill roads, and near Excell’s farm I turned the motor off, drifted down the dirt road in neutral, watching. The deer had come down from the high hills and they were moving carefully through the fields of last year’s corn stumps, grazing like cattle at dusk, too many to count. When the truck stopped I heard the rustle as they pulled the tough silk. Then I started the motor—they jumped, stiffened, watched me for a while, went back to eating: A man could come and kill them, they had so little fear—and I drove home to Bella and a tight house, long dinner, silence for most of the meal, then talk about the children while I washed the dishes and she put them away.
AND THEN I drove back to the house that was dark except for one lighted window. The light was yellow and not strong. I turned the engine off and coasted in. I went downstairs on the tips of my toes because, I told myself, there was a sense of silence there, and I hoped she was having some rest. I uncapped the well pipe and gases blew back, a stink of the deepest cold, a
nd then there was a sound of climbing, of filling up, and water banged to her house again. I put the funnel and hose on the mouth of the pipe and filled my jeep can, then capped the check valve, close the pipe that delivered the water upstairs, poured water from the jeep can through the funnel to prime the pump, switched it on, watched the pressure needle climb to thirty-eight pounds, opened the faucet to the upstairs pipes, and heard it gush.
I hurried to get the jeep can and hose and funnel and tools to the truck, and I had closed the cellar door and driven off before she made the porch to call me. I wanted to get back to Bella and tell her what a man she was married to—who could know so well the truths of ice and make a dead well live.
SATURDAY MORNING the pickup trucks were going to the dump, and the men would leave off trash and hard fill, stand at tailgates, spitting, talking, complaining, shooting at rats or nothing, firing off, picking for scrap, and I drove to see the professor and his catastrophe.
His house was tilted. It needed jacks. The asbestos siding was probably all that kept the snow out. His drain-pipes were broken, and I could see the damp spots where water wasn’t carried off but spilled to the roof of his small porch to eat its way in and gradually soften the house for bad winter leaks. The lawn at the side of his drive was rutted and soft, needed gravel. The barn he used for garage would have to be coated with creosote or it would rot and fall. A child’s bright toys lay in his yard like litter. The cornfield behind his house went off to soft meadow and low hills, and everything was clean and growing behind where they lived; for the view they had, they might as well have owned the countryside. What they didn’t own was their house.
He met me at the back steps, all puffy and breasted in his T-shirt, face in the midst of a curly black beard, dirty glasses over his eyes like a mask. He shook my hand as if I were his surgeon. He asked me to have coffee, and I told him I wouldn’t now. A little boy came out, and he was beautiful: blond hair and sweetly shaped head, bright brown eyes, as red from weather as his father was pale, a sturdy body with a rounded stomach you would want to cup your hand on as if it were a breast, and teeth as white as bone. He stood behind his father and circled an arm around his father’s heavy thigh, put his forehead in his father’s buttocks, and then peeped out at me. He said, “Is this the fixing man? Will he fix our pump?”
Samuels put his hand behind him and squeezed the boy’s head. He said, “This is the plumber, Mac.” He raised his eyebrows at me and smiled, and I liked the way he loved the boy and knew how the boy embarrassed him too.
I kneeled down and said, “Hey, Mac.”
The boy hid his face in his father’s behind.
I said, “Mac, do you play in that sandbox over there?”
His face came out and he said, very politely, “Would you like to play with me?”
I said, “I have to look at your pump, Mac.”
He nodded. He was serious now. He said, “Daddy broke it last night, and we can’t fix it again.”
I carried my tool pack to the cellar door—the galvanized sheeting on top of it was coming loose, several nails had gone, the weather was getting behind it and would eat the wood away—and I opened it up and started down the stone steps to the inside cellar door. They came behind me, then Samuels went ahead of me, turning on lights, scuffing through the mud and puddles on his concrete floor. The pump was on the wall to the left as I came in. The converted coal furnace in front of me leaked oil where the oilfeed came in. Stone foundation cracking that was two hundred years old, vent windows shut when they should have been opened to stop the dry rot, beams with the adze scars in them powdering almost as we watched: that was his cellar—and packing cartons and scraps of wood, broken chairs, a table with no legs. There was a stink of something very bad.
I looked at the pump, breathed out, then I looked at Mac. He breathed out too. He sounded like me. I grinned at him and he grinned back.
“We’re the workers,” he said. “Okay? You and me will be the workers. But Daddy can’t fix anymore. Mommy said so.”
Samuels said, “We’ll leave him alone now, Mac.”
I said, “How old is he?”
Mac said, “Six years old.”
Samuels said, “Three. Almost three and a half.”
“And lots of boy,” I said.
Mac said, “I’m a worker.”
Samuels said, “All right, Mac.”
Mac said, “Can’t stay here? Daddy? I’m a worker.”
Samuels said, “Would we be in the way? I’d like to learn a little about the thing if I can.”
Mac shook his head and smiled at me. He said, “What are we going to do with our Daddy?”
Samuels said, “Okay, buddy.”
Mac raised his brows and shrugged his little arms.
Samuels said, “Out, Mac. Into the yard. Play in the sandbox for a while.” He said, “Okay? I’ll call you when we need some help.”
“Sure!” Mac said.
He walked up the steps, arms slanted out to balance himself, little thighs pushing up on the steps. From outside, where we couldn’t see him anymore, the boy called, “Bye and I love you,” and ran away.
Samuels held his arms folded across his chest, covering his fleshy breasts. He uncrossed his arms to push his glasses up on his face when they slipped from the bridge of his flat nose. He said, “The water here—I tried to use the instruction book last night, after I talked to you. I guess I shouldn’t have done that, huh?”
“Depends on what you did, Mr. Samuels.” I unrolled the tool pack, got ready to work.
“I figured it wouldn’t turn off on account of an air block in the pipes. The instructions mentioned that.”
“Oh.”
“So I unplugged the pump as you told me to, and then I drained all the water out—that’s how the floor got so wet. Then it all ran into that hole over there.”
“The sump.”
“Oh, that’s what a sump is. Then that motor like an outboard engine with the pipe—”
“The sump pump. The water collects in the hole and pushes the float up and the motor cuts in and pumps the water out the side of the house—over there, behind your hot-water heater.”
“Oh.”
“Except your sump pump isn’t plugged in.”
“Oh. I wondered. And I was fooling with the motor and this black ball fell off into the water.”
“The float. So it wouldn’t turn itself off if you did keep it plugged in. Don’t you worry, Mr. Samuels, we’ll pump her out later. Did you do anything else to the well pump?”
He pushed his glasses up and recrossed his arms. “I didn’t know what else to do. I couldn’t make it start again. We didn’t have any water all night. There wasn’t any pressure on the gauge.”
“No. You have to prime it.”
“Prime it?”
“I’ll show you, Mr. Samuels. First, you better let me look. Right?”
“Sorry. Sorry. Do you mind if I stay here, though?” He smiled. He blushed under his whiskers. “I really have to learn something about how—this whole thing.” He waved his arms around him and then covered up.
I said, “You can stay, sure. Stay.”
I started to work a wrench on the heavy casing bolts, and when I’d got the motor apart from the casing, water began to run to the floor from the discharge pipe over the galvanized tank.
He said, “Should I ...”
“Excuse me?”
“There’s water coming down. Should I do anything about it?”
I said, “No, thank you. No. You just watch, thank you.”
After a while the trickle slowed, and I pulled the halves apart. I took the rubber diaphragm off, put the flashlight on the motor, poked with a screwdriver, found nothing. I expected nothing. It had to be in the jet. I put the light on that and looked in and saw it, nodded, waited for him to ask.
He said, “You found it?”
“Yessir. The jet’s blocked. That’s what it sounded like when you called. Wouldn’t let the pressure build up,
so the gauge wouldn’t know when to stop. It’s set at forty pounds, and the block wouldn’t let it up past—oh, twenty-eight or thirty, I’d say. Am I right?”
“Uh, I don’t know. I don’t know anything about these things.”
I said, “When this needle hits forty, it’s what you should be getting. Forty pounds of pressure per square inch. If you’d read the gauge you’d have seen it to be about thirty, I calculate. That would’ve told you the whole thing.”
“I thought the gauge was broken.”
“They generally don’t break. Generally, these things work. Usually it’s something simpler than machines when you can’t get water up.”
He pushed his glasses and covered up, said, “God, what I don’t know.”
I said, “It’s hard to live in a house, isn’t it? But you’ll learn.”
“Jesus, I hope so. I don’t know. I hope so. We never lived in a house before.”
“What’d you live in? Apartment houses?”
“Yeah—where you call the janitor downstairs and he comes up while you’re at work and you never see him. Like magic. It’s just all better by the time you get home.”
“Well, we’ll get this better for you.”
He frowned and nodded very seriously. “I’ll bet you will,” he said. It was a gift he gave me, a bribe.
I said, “So why don’t you go on up and ask the missus for about three inches of aluminum foil. Would you do that? And a coat hanger, if you don’t mind.”
“Coat hanger?”
“Yessir. If you don’t mind.”
He walked across the floor to the wooden steps that went upstairs above the furnace; he tried to hide the sway and bounce of his body in the way that he walked, the boy coming down the outside concrete steps as the father went up the inside ones. “Do you need any help?” the boy said.
I said, “Mac, you old helper. Hello.”
“Do you need any help?”
“I had a boy like you.”
“A little bit big, like me?”
“Little bit big. Except now he’s almost a daddy too.”
He said, “Is he your daddy now?”
The Stories of Frederick Busch Page 2
