The Rig Lights Across the Road

Sunday night

I picked her up at seven-thirty on Sunday evening. She was waiting on her step in her good wool coat and her church shoes, with her purse on her arm like we were going somewhere fancy.

She got in the pickup and saw the hard hat on the dashboard and stopped. “Oh,” she said softly. “Oh, Carrie. You’ve had it this whole time?” I told her I had kept it there since she moved.

She picked it up in both hands. She turned it over and found the name scratched in the band, and she ran her thumb across the letters. She held it in her lap the whole way out, both hands on it, like it was a baby.

I could see the rig from six miles away, a tower of light standing up out of the dark.

Neither of us said a word on the drive. I turned off the blacktop onto our county road, and the gravel popped under the tires, and the lights got bigger and bigger until they filled the windshield.

I pulled in by my pipe gate and shut off the engine. The generators hummed through the glass. “Help me out,” Mom said.

I let the tailgate down and helped her up onto it. She is seventy-six, and she has a bad hip, and it took both of us. Then I climbed up and sat beside her, and I put my old work jacket around her shoulders on top of her good coat.

The rig was right there. You could see the men on the floor moving in their coveralls, and the pipe swinging, and the lights laying out across the dry grass so bright you could have read a newspaper by them.

Mom looked at it for a long time. She still had Dad’s hard hat in her lap.

“Your daddy worked a rig just like that,” she said finally. “The winter your brother was born.” I told her I knew.

“No,” she said. “You don’t. You know he worked it. You don’t know what it was like.”

She told me then. How Dad would come home after a twelve-hour tour with his hands so cracked they bled into his gloves. How she rubbed bag balm into them at the kitchen table.

“We were going to lose the home place,” she said. “Your grandpa had borrowed against it, and wheat was nothing that year, and the bank was patient but not that patient. Your daddy worked that rig so we could keep it. Every dollar went to the note.”

“He came home the morning after Wade was born,” she said. “Straight from the rig, still in his coveralls, still with that thing on his head.” She tapped the hard hat. “He held that baby and he said, this boy will carry the land.”

“I have told that story a thousand times,” Mom said. “At every Christmas and every harvest, I have said, Roy always said the boy carries the land. I said it at his funeral.”

Across the road, the porch light came on at the home place.

The front door opened, and Wade came out. He had on his feed cap and his brown coat. He walked to the rail and put his hands on it, and he looked at the rig, and then he saw us. Two women on a tailgate in the light.