The fire announced itself clearly around the middle of the morning. It was not visible yet from the field, the smoke column was and had been, but the actual flame line came into view first from the top of the Bell property's fence post where Tom Hendricks' son had climbed to get a vantage point. He called down that he could see it on the western ridge of the Crandall property and it was moving fast. Evie was uncovering the outer vessel mouths as fast as she could work down the line pulling shale covers and setting them aside reaching into each pot with the dipping bucket to transfer water into the larger barrel. Every pot in the outer two western rows held somewhere between a third and two-thirds capacity water she had put in over the past several days that had been slowly seeping outward but had not yet depleted.
It was not an enormous quantity per vessel. Multiplied across sixty-some pots, it was enough to make a difference which was all she'd ever asked of any individual part of the system. Dorothea Hendricks was running the barrel team, two large barrels on a cart filled from the vessel dipping operation, moved along the break line and poured at intervals across the cleared and disturbed soil. She directed it with zero wasted words which Evie found immediately comfortable. They worked through the outer rows in parallel, Evie uncovering and dipping, Dorothea moving barrels, the men tearing and widening.
The pump broke at ten-thirty. Not entirely, the handle mechanism seized, which was different from a structural failure, but no less immediately useless. The piston had been working under increased demand since she'd started sharing the well, and she had noted the stiffening in the handle twice over the past week without finding a two-hour window to fix it properly because there was always something that needed doing more urgently than a pump that was still technically working. It stopped working. She was at the well when it happened, filling a bucket for the barrel team, and the handle went stiff, and then made a sound like something bending inside the mechanism, and then would not move at all in either direction.
She stood with both hands on the handle and felt the dead resistance in her palms and said one short sharp word that was not suitable for general company. The smoke was visible over the roof of the barn now. She went under the well housing and looked at the mechanism. The problem was the piston seal. It had rolled and jammed under the increased draw rate.
Something that happened to hand pumps worked past their design capacity. She had a replacement seal in the tool cabinet in the barn. She knew this because she had bought it in the spring when she noticed the first sign of wear, then set it aside to address when there was time, and stopped thinking about it. She got the seal. She rebuilt the pump seal in eight minutes with her hands and a wrench and one moment where the new seal tried to roll the same direction as the old one, and she held it in place by sheer pressure until it seated properly.