This is the third time, Mrs. Caldwell. I keep disconnecting that hose. You keep filling your pool with my well water.
“Your point?”
“I want it to stop.”
“Mr. Harden, look at that pool. Eighteen thousand gallons. Waterfall, heated spa. That pool is worth more than your entire property. Your well sits under five acres of dirt doing nothing. My pool needs water. Be grateful I’m giving it a purpose.”
“You cut my locks. You sent your man onto my land at dawn.”
“And I’ll send him again tomorrow.”
She smiled, beautiful, vicious.
“What are you going to do about it, plumber?”
I didn’t do anything that day. I went home and started drawing on graph paper. Twenty-eight years of plumbing and one very specific plan for what should flow through that hose next.
My name is Jake Harden, and I’ve been a licensed master plumber in the state of Texas for twenty-eight years. I’ve sweated copper in 97-degree attics, laid cast iron under slabs in January mud, and rebuilt sewer mains that hadn’t been touched since Eisenhower was in office. I’ve worked on hospitals, courthouses, schools, and about four hundred residential systems across six counties. There isn’t a pipe, valve, fitting, or fixture made in the last fifty years that I can’t identify by sound, smell, or the way it feels when you tap it with a wrench. That’s not bragging. That’s just what twenty-eight years of crawling under houses and reading code books does to a man.
When I turned fifty, I retired. Not because I was tired. I could still outwork half the journeymen in Nacogdoches County. I retired because my grandfather’s five-acre parcel outside Garrison came up for sale when my uncle passed, and I’d been waiting thirty years to buy it back. Five acres of sandy loam with a spring-fed well, a three-bedroom ranch house my grandfather built in 1958, a detached shop, and enough post oak and pine to make the whole place smell like East Texas is supposed to smell.
The well was drilled in 1967, one hundred eighty feet into the Carrizo-Wilcox aquifer. Clean water, strong flow, thirty gallons a minute. My grandfather maintained that well like it was a member of the family, and I intended to do the same. The septic system was original too, a fifteen-hundred-gallon concrete tank with a gravity-fed drain field. I inspected it the week I moved in. Sound tank, good baffles, clean effluent line. I pumped it, replaced both access risers, and installed new PVC from the house to the inlet. Cost me four hundred dollars in materials and a Saturday afternoon. That’s the advantage of being a plumber. Your infrastructure never falls apart because you see problems before they start.
