The Widow Who Got Thirty Men and a Well

Monday and after

I will not tell you Wade became a saint. I do not think that is how a man changes, and I would not trust one who did. But I will tell you Monday.

At seven in the morning a grader and a dump truck came down my lane, and Lonnie climbed out with his shirt on right side out. He said Wade had sent him, and none of it was to be charged to me.

They built a stone swale to carry the runoff from his road cut around my place instead of through it. They poured a concrete cap over Curt’s old well, and Lonnie scratched one word in it with a nail while it was wet. Curt’s. Then he hung Curt’s dented bucket on a nail on the new well’s post and set the nail with a hammer so it would never pull out.

Wade came at noon, in work boots that were not clean, and asked if I would read something. It was two pages, a different paper than the first. It said there would be no blasting within five hundred feet of any occupied well next to his land, that he would pay to test every neighbor’s well before and after any shot, and that every buyer on the ridge would be given a copy, with the neighbors’ wells marked on the plat.

I read it all this time, the small print too. There was no line in it about claims.

I thanked him. It is not easy to thank a man who offered you four hundred dollars for your husband’s well. But I found it was lighter to carry than the other thing.

The county’s lab results came back that Wednesday with one word stamped in red. Safe. I keep the paper in my Bible, in Isaiah, at the forty-first chapter. He closed his six lots on the twenty-ninth of October, by the way. I would like to call it a reward, but I think people simply buy houses from a man who stands by his word, and they had begun to hear that he was working on it.

The Two Rivers Well Fund has dug three wells since. A man out on the county line. A widow in the next township. A young couple with a baby, in a snowstorm, with forty men standing in the drifts with shovels. Wade was in that line. I am told he dug the whole way down and did not say a word.

I do not pray the way I used to. I used to ask for things. Now I say a name, and then another, and I let the water go where it goes. I say Curt first. Then Corah. Then Del, and Bill, and Roy, and Cloyd, and Lonnie, and thirty men by name, as many as I can remember. And the last one I say the way I said it the first time at the sink, with nobody there to hear me.

Lord, be with Wade.

You say the name. You do not get a receipt. And then one morning, on the ninth day, you stand at a dry sink in your housecoat, and you hear the trucks.

This story is a dramatization. Names, characters, and details are invented, and any resemblance to real people or events is coincidental.