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C HAPTER 10 111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111 The Water We Had to Drink SOON APrER \VILLIE DUFF RECEIVED HIS COURT SETTLEMENT FROM THE SUN Oil Company, he moved us out ofhis sister's renthouse into the COtllltry, fifteen miles from Livingston, and us with no car. There was no family automobile tllltil I bought a 1952 Dodge sedan for $300 when I was a freshman at Lamar State College ofTechnology. He installed us in a tiny house rented for six dollars a month from Carl Vinson. When we left that house several years later, my father had not been able to pay the rent for eighteen months, so we left without saying goodbye to Carl, owing him over a htmdred dollars back rent. The house in the country was located across the road, Texas Farm to Market Highway 1276, from a country store operated by Estol Collins. The only Indian reservation in Texas, home to the Alabama-Coushatta Nation, was down the highway a few miles. In the other direction was the sawmill commtmity of Camp Ruby, abandoned by all but a handful of families after the Carter Lumber Company finished cutting all the timber in that part of the Piney Woods and vanished. What was left were fallen-down houses, huge piles ofsawdust in which weeds and briars and saplings grew, the company commissary store, Camp Ruby Baptist Church, and a collection of residents too weak, tlllmotivated, ambitionless, played-out, slow-witted, and lacking in imagination to follow the company's lead and get the hell out. Our house had three rooms. The first one you entered was the living area, complete with a woodstove connected to a pipe nmning through the roof. To the right was a bedroom where my parents slept, and through a door to the rear was the third room, a combined kitchen with a table for meals, another woodstove for cooking, and a bed in the corner where I slept along with my sister tllltil we both got so old we rebelled against sharing a mattress. At that IX'int Nancy moved all her sleeping to a sofa in the living room. A little shelf was attached to the wall by the back door, and on it were a bucket, a tin dipper, and a wash basin. That was the plumbing. Outdoors to the right was a bored well, as oPIX'sed to what was called a dug welL Bored was 40 THE WATER WE HAD TO DRINK 41 upscale and high-tech in the context of East Texas COtmtry living and marked a properry as much more desirable than one with water provided by a dug welL I remember my father explaining its merits to me in detaiL "The main thing, Gerald," he said, "is you can cover up a bored well with something to keep stufffrom falling in. You can't do that with adugweiL" "What kind of stuff?" "Trash. Squirrels, birds, cats, dirt," he said. "Stuff like that. Another thing, see, is that bored wells are a lot deeper than dug wells, because, you see, they're bored. Not dug." "A machine did it," I said to my father. "Yeah. That's right, and that machine boring so deep will put you into a purer water table. You'll get right down into a stream of water, a river maybe, tmdemeath the ground. With a dug well, you get a whole lot of nm-off and rain water. Gets all muddied up." That was a comfon to a degree, except that the water from our bored well did get muddied up from heavy rains, giving it an off-yellow color. It also contained some species ofsmall many-legged insects resembling shrimp which had to be strained out through a mesh filter, and the water from it had to be pulled up by hand in a thin metal container anached to a rope which ran through a pulley. I was the main drawer of water and hewer of wood for the Willie Duff family enterprise, and I must have pulled up thousands of gallons of water during the years we lived in Carl Vinson's rent house. I didn't mind the water-drawing, for the most part, except on Saturdays when I had to fill tubs of it for the rinsing of the clothes my mother and my sister washed in the machine kept on the front porch. It was a wringer-washer, which meant you had to watch your fingers when nnming wet...

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