'WIDE MEADOWS': THE PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH (A CONTINUING SERIES)

Editor's note: This is an chapter from Jean Bell Mosley's book that was first published in 1960.

Our barn was sturdy and roomy and comfortably cobwebbly, but not the biggest one in the valley. Our cows were just placid, old, cud-chewing cows. Even the hound dogs couldn't boast a pedigreed hair on their black and tan sides. But the well! There was something a man could brag about. Something that lent stature and prestige to the whole farmstead. Eighty-five feet deep she was, through solid rock, drilled with a diamond drill!

Few relatives, friends, or strangers ever set foot in our house but what they were shortly invited to imbibe of its bright, crystal waters, hand-drawn from some mysterious subterranean depths, where, according to Grandpa, it was surely concocted and specially dispensed by some rare and gifted Neptunian servants.

Brushing aside Grandma's or Mama's more plebeian offers of a cup of tea or coffee, Grandpa, ever the genial host, would say, "Come out and have a drink of my well water," and lead the way like some old Ganymede out through the kitchen to the well porch, his mustache twitching with excitement and a gleam in his eye like one about to reveal a wonderful phenomenon.

"Steve, it isn't any more your well water than it is the rest of us," Grandma would mildly complain. But Grandpa drank more of it than the rest of us, especially while he plowed the corn, planted the wheat, and cut the hay.

"Wahhhhter! Wahhhter!" There wasn't a place on the whole farm where we couldn't hear him. Even when he was working clear up in the Fifteen Acre Field. Old Stono and Simms, and mountains of lesser degree rising on either side of the valley, would catch up the stentorian demand and relay it diminishingly down the valley until it died away in one last mournful entreaty to save a dying man.

"I wish just once all the neighbors would come a running' with a bucket of water," Grandma said. "Cure him of some of the tomfoolishness. A jug of water in the shade ought to keep cool till noon."

Lou and I, who had to traipse barefooted through the sweltering hot berry patches and stubble fields with the water, heartily agreed.

The well porch was a pleasant place, and Mama said Grandpa just got to thinking about it out there in the hot fields and that's what made him holler for so much water. The same roof that covered the long back porch extended over it, but you stepped up two steps, through a latticed archway which set it aside from the rest of the house. Enclosed by honeysuckle vines ad old-fashioned spice roses, it was a cool, quiet little outside room, visited often by hummingbirds and honeybees. In one corner was the big well rock, six feet square! And in the exact center of this, the pump, a grayish blue-tin enclosure with a turned-down spout in front and crank on the side.

"Works on the centrifugal principle," Grandpa had explained many times, in minute detail and at great length.

Hanging on a whitewashed corner support was the gourd dipper, a commodious affair, holding more water than the average person could consume in three ordinary drinks, but when Grandpa wanted to take a drink, he wanted to water himself all over, Grandma said. He'd pump the dipper sloppily full, hold it appreciatively out in front of him for a few seconds like he was proposing a silent toast to the world in general, then bring it drippingly to his mouth. When he didn't have his Sunday clothes on, he'd turn the dipper up so far that the water would spill out and run down the ends of his mustache and drip off on his shirt. Then, if there was any left in the dipper when he was through, and it was a hot day, he'd look at it thoughtfully for a minute, remove his sweat-stained hat and splash the water on top of his head, letting it run down behind his ears and through his bushy white eyebrows. With a loud and satisfied and protracted, "Ahhhh," he'd carefully hang the dipper back up, mop his brow, and proceed with the day's work.

On summer nights the well porch was a mecca for the whole family. It was cool and fragrant and through the window in the honeysuckle one could see the big wagon-wheel moon roll up over the hills, softening the landscape in its silver light and making calico patterns of shade out under the cherry tree. Lou and I bounced our rubber ball against the near-by chimney, caught lightning bugs, and prodded the night toads about the dew-damp yard. From the porch came the comfortable muted talk of the grownups and the soft creaking of the rocking chairs.

Of course there was another well down at the barn, probably from the same vein of water. Certainly the water was just as clear and sparkling, once you got it. The trouble with the barn well was that you had to pump and pump and pump to fill the big mossy, wooden trough where the animals drank. Every day Lou and I had to fill that trough, and on Saturdays we had to pull the big wooden stopper and scrub it out with ashes and sand. And then, if you got hot and tired pumping, you were obliged to go to the house for a drink, for drinking from the barn well was forbidden. The platform of big sandstone rocks wasn't put together too snugly and it was pointed out that some holes were big enough for a cat or rabbit to fall through.

"What we need is a new pump, and all this mortared up, and new capping rock," Grandpa had said, time after time.

"Take a hundred and fifty dollars, Steve," Grandma had always replied, in a tone that ended the matter.

Next: Grandpa goes in search of a new well pump.