Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

He said, “But no water — for how long? The weekend? All week?”

I heard a woman whisper in the background with the harshness of a wife making peace, and then he said, “Uh — I mean, do you know when you can come?”

I said, “When’re you up?”

“Excuse me?”

“When do you wake up?”

“We’ll be up. Just tell me when.”

I said, “I’ll be there tomorrow morning, early, if that’s all right.”

“I mean, how early?”

“You get up, Mr. Samuels, and you have yourself a comfortable breakfast, and I’ll be there for a cup of your coffee.”

He hung on the line, waiting for more. I gave him nothing more, and he said, “Thanks. I mean, we’ll see you tomorrow, then. Thank you.”

“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.