The Man Who Brought Water

On Thursday night, the toilet didn’t flush.  In retrospect, I should have fled town then, but Serendipity is still undriveable, and I had no idea what was going to happen next.

After the toilet didn’t flush, we realized that it wasn’t just the toilet: every tap in the house gave nothing but a gurgle.

We didn’t have any water.

There was about a gallon of cold water in the pitcher in the fridge, so I took my vitamins and went to bed. When I woke up on Friday, the water coming out of the tap was brown. I found out secondhand that there was a boil order for the neighborhood because they’d been fixing pipes overnight. This happens all the time in Steubenville. We also found out that there’s been a water conservation order every since the severe cold last week. Several of Steubenville’s geriatric water mains burst over Christmas. They always do in severe weather. They bust so often that it’s a wonder we have any water mains left to burst. The city was desperately trying to keep the reservoirs full enough that they would still fill the water tower. But if they’d made a formal announcement about such a thing, we hadn’t been told.  Hardly anyone in town knew. Some people had apparently gotten automated text messages from the city, but not many.

Michael went out on foot, and came back on the city bus with several gallons of spring water, which we drank all day. I didn’t take a shower before bed and Michael didn’t do any dishes or laundry, because we wanted to abide by the water conservation order. The city hadn’t told us what not to do in a water conservation order, but something like that sounded appropriate.

The next morning, the toilet didn’t flush again.

The taps didn’t even gurgle this time.

The house had no water at all.

Just as I was wondering whether this was something wrong with our own house or the whole neighborhood, there was a knock at the door. Michael answered it and found our neighbor: not the stalking monster in the blue house, but the quiet older man in the white one on the other side. Adrienne plays with his grandchildren sometimes. I don’t even know if I’ve ever heard his name. He was holding one of those five-gallon blue jugs you put on top of coolers.

“Do you need some water?” he said. “My son brought me three of these and I only need two.”

Michael thanked him and hauled the jug to the kitchen. It turned out that the water was off all over LaBelle, and also in Lincoln Heights and Brady Estates. It was out in far more than half the town. There had been several more burst water mains overnight, even though it wasn’t cold anymore. The weather was as warm and beautiful as spring, but the pipes had just continued to break.

Again, a few people had gotten text messages, but not most of them. Somebody posted a screenshot of her text in the Buy Nothing group: a paragraph declaring that the water was out for the indefinite future, and that “water buffalos” would be parked at distribution sites. The water department apologized for what they called a “severe inconvenience.”

This time I went out, walking, if for no other reason than to see a water buffalo in a grim Appalachian neighborhood. It turns out that a water buffalo is a great big tanker truck with a tired-looking attendant standing at the backside, holding a slim garden hose. The buffalo was not providing containers to dispense into, however. People had to bring their own.

We already had water, thanks to our neighbor. I kept walking until I got to the grocery store, singing that Veggie Tales song that upset Archibald Asparagus.

The water was depleted at Kroger, but they did have dry shampoo, baby wipes and hand sanitizer. I grabbed paper plates and utensils. I couldn’t imagine what I was supposed to make for dinner if I couldn’t wash my hands after cutting up the raw chicken in the freezer, so I bought a frozen dinner. This water outage was going to be expensive, even though buffalos were dispensing the stuff for free.

 When I got back, desperate people were still lined up at the buffalo. I saw one family dragging a large picnic cooler on wheels, because they didn’t have any jugs.

We past an irritated, itchy day. At one point I took a miserable bath in the dry tub, pouring cold drinking water on myself from a gallon pitcher. My friend who used to live in rural Mexico suggested I catch the dirty water in a bucket to use for mopping, but I’d already let it run down the drain.

The next morning, there was still no water. The sink was dry. Our five-gallon jug was running low. I was itchier than ever. The guinea pig cage needed a scrub. And as for the bathroom, it was in the most disgusting, eye-watering state imaginable. I could manage with paper utensils and no cooking for about one more day. I could suffer through another cold pitcher bath. But I didn’t know what to do about the toilet.

There was another knock at the door– the older man next door again, with a flat of water bottles. We thanked him again.

A friend of mine picked us up to come visit her house at the other side of town. We piled into the car with a box of dirty dishes and a basket of dirty laundry. She let us use the dishwasher and the washing machine while I took a long, hot shower, and I loitered there as long as I could.

When I got back, the city was still not notifying anyone in a coordinated way. They seemed offended at us, for not conserving the water we hadn’t been told to conserve in the first place. Parents were fretting because they’d threatened to put off the beginning of school for one more day if there was no way for children to  bathe all weekend. One lady complained that she hadn’t been able to cook on Christmas and now they had nothing but pizza rolls for New Years because she couldn’t do the dishes. We were all ready to grab pitchforks at the mention of the local car wash, which was in an unaffected neighborhood and was open for business, with a line of cars down the block, not conserving water at all.

Our mayor has what is meant to be a purely ceremonial position. Just about his only power is to shame people, and he was using that power, shaming as best he knew how. He was the only one I saw referring to the water outage as an “emergency” rather than a “severe inconvenience.” He railed about how he’d wanted to prioritize fixing our pipes with last year’s budget. He’d recruited  a local man with a truck, who was actually bringing water from the buffalo to the houses of disabled people who couldn’t stand in line. He even posted photos of his own office building, which he’d turned into another free water distribution site.

I ate another frozen dinner.

There was another knock.

To my surprise, it was the kindly neighbor one more time. “Do you need some flushable water? It’s not for drinking!”

Flushable water sounded like the best thing in the world. The man took Michael out to his backyard, where he’d set up a brigade of buckets and pots and pans under all the gutters to catch the rain. He filled up the big blue five-gallon jug with murky water to splash into the toilet and siphon the mess down. And it worked– a miracle.

They say the water’s coming back on at midnight. There should be enough pressure to take a shower by morning, though we will still be under a boil order and a conservation order until Lord knows when.

It has not been a very fun first week of Christmas at the Pezzulo house.

But the mercy of friends and neighbors has certainly made it better.

And that truth is something that’s followed me my entire life: it has not been very fun, but the mercy of friends and neighbors has certainly made it better.

We’ll see where we go from here.

Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross, The Sorrows and Joys of Mary, and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.