The Rig Lights Across the Road

The rig

The dirt work started the first week of October, right after we finished drilling wheat on the other side of the section. Two dozers and a motor grader built the location out of our own red dirt, a flat pad the size of a football field with a caliche road coming off the county road.

Then the trucks came. I counted them from the school parking lot when I drove home, a long line of them with flags on the loads, crawling up the county road like a parade.

It took them most of a week to rig up. Men in coveralls and hard hats worked from daylight to dark, and then the night crew came and kept working. The derrick went up on a Tuesday. By Thursday, it was drilling, and it was lit all night.

If you have never seen a drilling rig at night in flat wheat country, I do not know how to tell you. It stands up out of the dry grass like a church steeple strung with Christmas lights. You can see it from the highway five miles off.

That Thursday evening I came home from school and did not go in the house. I poured a cup of coffee from the pot Jim had left on, pulled my old tan canvas work jacket on over my jeans, and walked down to the gate.

It was dusk. The sky in the west had gone orange the way it does in October, low and wide and burning. The red dirt road ran between my gate and the home place, and the dust from the last truck still hung in the air.

I stood at the pipe gate with my coffee cup in my hand. My dark blonde hair was still up in the ponytail I wear to school. The rig rose out in the field behind me, its work lights coming on one bank at a time against the darkening sky.

And across the road, on the front porch of the white two-story house where I learned to walk, my brother came out.

He had on his feed cap and his brown coat. He put both hands on the porch rail, the way Dad used to stand there and look at the weather. And he looked at that rig. He did not wave. Neither did I.

We stood like that, the two of us, with a gravel road and a lifetime between us, until it was too dark to see his face.

The small mean thing

I am going to tell you the truth about that first night, because I promised myself I would tell this story honestly or not at all. Something small and mean in me felt good.

I stood at that gate and looked at my brother’s face, lit up by my lights, and I thought: there. Now you know. Now you have to look at it every night.

I am not proud of that. I went to bed that night and I could not sleep, and it was not the generators keeping me awake.

By the third night, the good feeling was gone. It turned on me. I would look out the kitchen window and see his porch light on, and him standing out there with his hands on the rail, and I would feel sick.

Jim found me at the window at eleven o’clock Saturday night and asked if I was okay. “I wanted him to feel it,” I said. “And now he does, and I don’t like it.”

Jim put his arms around me from behind and rested his chin on top of my head. “That means you’re still you,” he said. “That’s good. That’s the part I married.”