The Widow Who Got Thirty Men and a Well

The man on the ridge

The ridge above my place was a hay farm for as long as I can remember. When the old owners passed, their heirs sold all hundred and forty acres to a man from the city named Wade.

I did not take against him at first. I want that on the record. He came down my lane in June in a clean white truck and boots that had never met a cow, called me ma’am, and asked after my chickens.

He was building a neighborhood, he said. Twenty-two homesites and a stone gate. I asked what he would do about the rock, since that whole ridge is limestone.

“We’ll shoot it,” he said easily. “Controlled blasts. Licensed crew. Forty-eight hours’ notice to every neighbor.”

I pointed out my well to him. It sits a hundred and ten feet from the fence line where his road cut would come through.

He smiled. “Ma’am, that’s three hundred feet from anything we’ll do. I wouldn’t worry about it for a second.”

He was off by a hundred and ninety feet, and I think he knew it. But I wanted to believe him.

Ten fourteen on a Tuesday

The notice came taped to my mailbox on Monday afternoon. Blasting, Tuesday, between ten and noon. Forty-eight hours, he had said. It had been about twenty-six.

I was at my kitchen table at ten fourteen, shelling the last of the field peas, when the whole house jumped.

It was not a boom. It was a shove, as if somebody had taken the house by its corners and shaken it once. The dishes rang. The hens went up screaming. My Bible slid off the shelf and landed open on the floor.

I went out to the side yard. White dust from the ridge was drifting over the pasture. The little roof over Curt’s well was standing. I pulled the cover and looked down, and I did not hear what I always heard, a faint clean tick of water settling far below.

I filled the kettle, and the water came out the color of strong tea. By Wednesday it was creek mud. By Thursday it came in coughs, with sand in it. Thursday at five in the afternoon, the pump ran two minutes, sucked air, and shut itself off. I turned the tap. It made a long dry sigh. Then nothing.

I sat down and cried, and when I was finished I took Curt’s old lantern out to the well and shone it down the hole.

Where there should have been a clean dark shaft and a coin of water, there was a heap of broken concrete and gray clay jammed in the throat of the tile, nineteen feet down. One ring had cracked clean across. Another had slid sideways, the way a stack of plates does when you bump the table.

Curt had set those rings with his own hands. I put the cover back and sat on the curb a long while with my palm on the concrete. It was still warm from the sun.