All Chapters of Burying the Village Well, Digging up Regret: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

I had just gotten home from work when my phone buzzed with a video call from Grandpa, which I answered right away.But Grandpa didn't appear on the screen. Instead, it was the angry, flushed face of Peggy Mitchell, one of the residents at the village Grandpa lived in, that showed up. A crowd of other villagers had gathered behind her."Fred Sherman! Look at the mess you made!" Madam Mitchell screamed into the phone, her spit splattering onto the lens."The water from the village well stinks! All we're pumping out now is muddy water! Everyone who's been drinking the water got diarrhea, and now, the whole village is here! You must've cut corners and pocketed the kickbacks when you handled this project."But now that the pipes are destroyed, the water's contaminated, and the entire village is in chaos, you happily hide away in the city to enjoy your riches? You'd better get your ass here now and put up the money to dig us a new well!"All the way in the back, Grandpa was being shove

I scoffed in anger. "You're accusing me of ruining the well? The rainstorm went on for three days, but no one even bothered to get a cover for the well. That's how the mud and silt got in. The water got contaminated because nobody bothered to maintain the well during the storm. It has nothing to do with the construction work."I repeated my explanation once more.But Madam Mitchell simply jutted her chin out and screeched back at me, "Stop using the rain as your excuse! The rain hit the neighboring village too, so why is it that their well is perfectly fine, huh? You must've embezzled the money for the well and bought shoddy pipes!"And don't forget that you charged every household 20 dollars when you dug that well! There are over 100 households here, so that's over 2,000 dollars! Don't you dare swear to me that you didn't pocket any of that money!"Her words got the crowd going, and they all started lashing out at me, shouting their heads off about the 20 dollars."She's right! I

The villagers stopped obsessing over whether I'd embezzled the 20 dollars they handed over."That's right! You shouldn't forget your roots, Fred!" Madam Mitchell immediately changed her tune.She crumpled the invoices in her hand into a ball and tossed them onto the ground. Straightening her back, she once again assumed the righteous air of an elder dispensing moral judgment."When your grandpa was sick, and you guys didn't even have a scrap of food left in the house, I lent your family a loaf of bread! And Derek also gave you an old winter coat to wear. All of us in the village have done you favors before. Now that you're rich, and the well is no longer usable, who else is going to take responsibility to fix it, if not you?"They started dogpiling on Grandpa and me again, but even as I took in Madam Mitchell's seemingly righteous retort, I simply scoffed at her."You guys have done me favors, you say?"I stared straight into her eyes and stepped toward her. "I was only six years

Grandpa pulled through. The doctor said he suffered from acute myocardial ischemia. After taking off his mask, the doctor sighed."If you had brought him in ten minutes later, he would've been beyond saving."The doctor's words stabbed me in the heart like a dagger. I spent the entire night sitting beside Grandpa's hospital bed. I stared at his ashen face. I listened to the heart monitor beeping away.It felt like I'd plunged into an icy abyss, and my heart turned into a block of ice. I no longer felt even the slightest lingering attachment to Hopeville.After heading into the stairwell at the end of the hallway, I lit a cigarette. It'd been ages since I last smoked one, but right now, I needed the nicotine to soothe my nerves and suppress my urge to commit murder.I pulled out my phone and made a call."Hey, Jocelyn."I'd called Jocelyn Hill, a construction crew supervisor that my company often dealt with."Hey, Fred. It's pretty early. Do you have an urgent job for us?" she a

After a brief flash of confusion, I figured out why that happened.The geology around Hopeville was fairly unusual. Freshwater ran through the shallow layers of the ground, but brackish water lay deeper underground.Part of the reason it cost me over 80,000 dollars to set up the first well was that I'd hired an expert surveying team to identify a suitable underground water source. The team had to run multiple tests and install several layers of filtration systems before we managed to bring up fresh, clean water.But the villagers had tried to save money and dug blindly into the ground, so they had broken straight through into the layer filled with brackish water."The water was nowhere near fit for human consumption!" Gemma continued to fill me in. "The water quality was seriously beyond acceptable standards. It was bitter and unpleasant. When they boiled it, a thick layer of white mineral scale formed at the bottom of the kettle."People got diarrhea from drinking it. Even the vi