Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

Ian’s mother said, “Ian.”

His father came across the circle with his arm out.

The grandfather sneezed into both of his hands.

Ian stood against the post.

Brenda said, “Get out now. Everybody get out.”

JUST LIKE A CURSE, rain fell for two weeks, hissing on shingles and in nearly naked trees, and the river, dammed by brush and rotted elms, began to rise. Sun sometimes shone, and sometimes the rain held off an hour, but the ground was always spongy, and mud was on everything. The river wound around the hamlet, in some places close to backyards, in others separated from yards by hillocks and cabbage fields. It was a dark autumn, and always cold; the cabbage stank in the early mornings and late at night. And the water table rose in response to the rain and pushed through deep foundation stones and up through cracked cement cellar floors, pooled around furnaces and freezers and water heaters, triggered sump pumps which gargled out the water which ran back into the ground and reappeared inside, rising slowly, in the darkness of the cellars looking black.

On the second day of flooding, Ethan came home from school with the mimeo’d message about the outbreak of head lice in the elementary grades. Marge had come up from sweeping pooled water in the cellar and her black boots glistened as she read the notice and cross-examined Ethan about school, while, forcing his head down, she raked through the fine brown hair, seeking nits.

“What’s a nit?” Ethan said.

“You’re clean,” she said. “A nit is the egg of a louse.”

“Louse?”

“A louse is one lice. Lice are a lot of louses.”

“What’s a person who’s a louse, then?”

“A nitwit. Please go up and change your clothes.”

“Can I look at the flood?”

“There isn’t any flood. There’s water in the cellar and go upstairs and change your clothes. Please. Everything’s fine.”

“How come you were down there, then, Mom?”

“I was sweeping water into the sump. It collects some places, and doesn’t go into the sump. If that happens, it doesn’t get pumped out. See? Please go up?”

“But doesn’t it come back in ?”

Marge sat on the floor and took one boot off. “That is not a nine-year-old question,” she said. “Up.”

Ethan said, “It’s a nitwit question.” He gave her his grown-up smile, irony and all, ruffled her thick light hair, and went up. Marge took off her other boot and leaned against the wall, stretching out her legs, to wait for Ben to come home.

HE CAME IN A red-and-black woolen shirt that was darkening with rainwater, and wire-rimmed glasses that were sheeted over, and thirty feet of black plastic pipe taped in a big crooked circle. As Marge held the door, Ben backed and sidled and swore—“Sell. We sell, and we move someplace where we can live on top of a hill and nothing runs in”—and then he was inside their small kitchen, talking in a low rant and forcing the pipe around the table to the cellar door.

Marge said, “You got it.”

“The pipe? You noticed, huh?”

“According to Ethan, who is correct, the water is welling up .”

“What?”

“That water’s coming up from the ground.”

“You noticed that too, huh?” Ben was down on the cellar steps now, pulling the pipe after him and grunting.

In a far, partly lighted corner, water ran in black smears down the wall stones and onto the cement floor. In the center of the floor, a hole three feet deep, about eighteen inches in diameter, received the runoff from the walls and floor. Tied to various beam jacks and ancient wooden posts, some with bark still on them, held in a web of white sash cord, was the sump pump with its copper float; when water in the sump reached a certain level, the float came up and the pump started. Water ran from it through black plastic pipe such as Ben wrestled with, and up through a broken storm window above their heads, and out onto the ground beside the house. The motor went on and off twice as they watched, and Ben cleared his throat and sniffed as if the need for pumping, the sound of the little motor, the invasion of water, were making his sinuses pour.

He lugged the pipe around the furnace to the other side of the cellar. There water pooled deeper than anywhere else, in a declivity that didn’t permit it to run to the sump. They looked at it, and as Ben began to swear Marge went upstairs and put her boots on.

Ben stood above the center of the pool which shimmered, bubbled slightly, in the light of a bulb on the ceiling. In the pool was a silted corroding pipe. He leaned the circle of black plastic pipe against the furnace, squatted in the water, almost sitting in it, and jammed a plastic joint into the pipe in the floor. “It fits!” he called. “I guessed, and I was right, and it fits ! I’m telling you, Marge, I’m going to pipe the goddamn water right the hell out of this old well or whatever the hell it is, directly into the faithful sump and its obedient pump, chug chug master, and we are home ! There will be no pooling of water in my house without written permission. The furnace will continue to roar, all the necessary machines will function, including us, and the home fires will burn. Marge?”

She stood a few feet away from him, and when he noticed her he smiled, and then they both were silent as he pushed the elbow joint deeper into the rusted socket. There was the sound of dripping, and of the pump cutting on and off, and then the louder yammer of the water pump forcing water upstairs from their well because the pressure to the faucets was low, and then, at the same time, the whir of the furnace fan. Then the machines completed their cycles and stopped, and there was only the sound of their breathing, of trickles and drips.

Ben cut the tape from the black plastic pipe and Marge took one end to stretch it away from him. She wove it among lolly columns and beam supports to where it would empty into the sump. “Mere victory,” Ben said. “Nothing great. Maybe a small cathedral’s worth of vision and ability and strength. Thank you.”

Marge, looking at the open end of the pipe, which still was dry, which carried nothing from the rusted drain into the sump, said, “It does flow up.”

“Water doesn’t flow up.”

“It wells up. It seeps. It’s like a spring, Ben, when the water table’s high. It comes up around the pipe you put there. It just comes up.”

“Jesus, Marge.”

She walked back to where he stood at the elbow joint and, stooping, pointed. In the silt around the pipe into which he had shoved the white plastic joint, water was bubbling up, stirring mossy brown sediment. The pool of dark water widened. Ben took the big janitor’s broom that leaned against the furnace and he began to sweep, long hard angry strokes, so that the pool ran over the lip of its margins and flowed along the inclines of the cellar, into the sump. He said, breathing hard, “It doesn’t work.”

“Nice try, though.”

“I really thought it would work. I thought seventeen dollars’ worth.”

“It was a good idea,” Marge said.

“I should have listened.”

“Ethan figured it out.”

“Yeah? He’s nine and I’m only thirty-five.”

“Ben has the advantage of years,” she said.

He threw the broom into the pool, which was widening again, and said, “I don’t really think it’ll get into the furnace.”

“No,” she said, “it probably won’t.”

“We’ll check on it.”

They were walking up the narrow steps.

“There’s an epidemic of head lice in school,” Marge said.

“Ethan’s okay?”