Standpipe

A novel

In Callow Reach, a fenced lime town on a dry plateau, the water runs three hours a day. At six the bell rings, the keeper sets her key in the first mark of the pumphouse wheel and turns it a quarter, and four hundred people in a line past the cooper’s wall try to stand still. At nine the street is dry. It has been a quarter for thirty-one years.

Odile Brask has kept the wheel for twenty-two of them. She keeps bees on the pumphouse roof, and long ago she stopped opening the cream envelopes the city sends. Every year the city’s Survey writes a new volume of honest figures about the town, and every year it ends the same way: The people of Callow Reach are by nature quick to hoard and quick to fight. Recommended: that the schedule be kept.

Then Rena Dray, a scholarship girl from the city sent to learn the wheel, lowers a line into the reservoir and finds it full to the top. In the city, Teodor Lisle, the soft-spoken man who keeps the town’s figures, goes down to the basement and opens the first volume. And when a man dies in the line, Odile turns the wheel past every mark, all the way open, and sits down on the step.

Nobody is a villain. Nobody makes a speech. Standpipe is a quiet novel about a town, a wheel, and the water under them.

Coming to Amazon in paperback and Kindle.

Start with the short story it grew from, free to read: Standpipe, the short story.