He still comes out to fix the pump

Water quit Tuesday afternoon. My mother had the tap going for beans and it coughed twice and went to air, and after that it didn't do anything at all.

I went down and put a light on the pressure switch. Points are burnt black. It's the switch that came with the house, so that would make sense. Could be the pump too, and the pump's a hundred and eighty feet down.

I called Dean. He said Saturday. He said don't take anything apart before he gets here.

He married my sister in ninety-four. She's been gone since 2011. He's still got a key to the shop.

Rapid's three hours if the road is dry. He drives out every few weeks and there's always something waiting on him. The cattle guard sank on one end last fall. That step off the back door has been rotten since before her.

She met him at a dance in Mission. She was four years older than me. She used to send him out here to get me when I wouldn't answer the phone, and he'd sit in the yard with the truck running till I came out.

First time he came to the place was the summer before the wedding, helping my dad put up hay. I was twenty-five. I found reasons to be up in that loft twice that afternoon.

My brother didn't come to the wedding. He said what he had to say about two weeks ahead and then he had to be in Gordon that day. You can always be in Gordon.

A new girl at the tribal office had me spell my mother's name last year. I spelled it. She spelled it back wrong. On the phone people hear me and go the other direction, and I quit keeping track of which way it's going to be.

Ma's eighty-one. She won't have anybody in this house but me and she can't be in it alone.

He eats here when he comes. She sends a plate out to the truck with him besides. There's a cup on the second shelf that's his.

The propane bill doesn't come here. Hasn't since 2019. The driver left the ticket in the storm door one time and the name on it wasn't ours. I put it in the drawer.

This house takes eight hundred gallons a winter. My check doesn't go anywhere near that.

Last January he drove out because the heater quit in the stock tank, and then it got bad and he stayed the weekend. Sunday night he loaded his tools around nine and the truck wouldn't turn over. Twenty-six below with the wind up.

I put the charger on it and we got in the cab to be out of the weather. No heat, since it wouldn't run.

We didn't say much. He said the county had the wing plow out on 18 and they'd still be at it come morning. I said something about what a switch costs now against what it used to.

Then he put his hand on my leg above the knee and left it there.

I didn't move it off. We sat like that a while and then we did the rest of it.

We went in and I left the charger on the truck overnight. Ma was still up with the radio on, the station out of Chadron she gets at night. She asked him if he'd eaten. He goes two hundred and forty pounds and she asks him that every time.

He took the couch. Roads were no good anyway.

In the morning he had the truck scraped and running before I was up. He came in for coffee and told my mother that step would have to come out in the spring and she said she'd been saying that for years. He was gone by eight.

He hasn't said anything about it since.

He called that Wednesday about a part for the tank heater. Same voice he's always had. I stood in the kitchen and said I'd have the money for it and he said don't worry about that.

At her funeral Dean stood in the back by the coats and nobody moved down for him. Afterward he carried plates out to people's cars, then sat in his truck in the lot a long while with it running. My brother came to that one and left before the food.

My cousin's boy asked me at the powwow grounds last summer who the wašíču is that keeps showing up out here. I told him he's family. He said since when. He just didn't know.

He put a new float in the toilet tank in March. In June he stood at the open door of his truck long enough that I thought something was coming, and then he said the cap on the well sounded dry and he'd bring grease.

Saturday he got here around ten. Went down the basement and put his thumb on the switch and it chattered at him.

He had the new one out in the truck already. Thirty-eight dollars at the hardware in Martin. He knew what it was from what I told him on the phone and he didn't say so.

I held the light. That's the job now, with my hand how it is.

I ran a blade for the county twenty years, signs and culverts toward the end of it. A pipe gate took my left hand in 2014. Wind out of the northwest put it into the post. Two fingers don't close. I do what I can.

He told me to hold it steady and then he said sorry.

He got it in and sent me up to run the tap. It spat air and then it came brown.

Ma stood there with the pot waiting on it. He hollered up from the basement that the shutoff under the sink was weeping and he'd get at it next time.