The Widow Who Got Thirty Men and a Well

Four hundred dollars

I walked up the ridge on Friday morning in my husband’s barn boots and my church dress, a quarter mile of fresh gravel past a pile of shot rock the size of a pickup truck.

The job trailer sat at the top, white, with a window air conditioner humming. Wade was inside at a folding table with a coffee. When I knocked, I will give him this, he had the grace to stand.

I told him all of it, plain and in order. I did not cry. I had done my crying in the kitchen. He nodded in the right places, and when I finished he said, “Mrs. Vann, I am sorry to hear that.”

I thought, well, that is a start.

“But I have to be straight with you,” he said. “We ran a seismograph on that shot. It came in well under the limit. That was a hand-dug well, fifty years old. Those old wells fail. I would be doing you a disservice if I let you think it was our blast.”

He slid a paper across the table with a pen laid on top of it.

“Here is what I’m prepared to do,” he said. “As a good neighbor. Four hundred dollars, today, cash from the petty box, for your trouble. All I need is your signature on this release, so we can close it out and stay friends.”

The paper said I would never make a claim of any kind against his company for any damage to my property, known or unknown, past or future. The money was already in a bank envelope next to the pen.

“Four hundred dollars,” I said.

“Ma’am, a fifty-year-old hole in the ground is not worth a great deal.” He said it kindly, which was the worst part. “And honestly, a woman your age, out there alone, I’d think about whether you want to keep fighting a well at all. Four hundred buys a lot of bottled water. I have a lender who doesn’t like loose ends, and I need it signed today.”

Today. He wanted my name on a paper before his lunch came.

I did not sign. I know my hand did not move. A quiet came over me that I recognized. It was the quiet of the pump shed the day I found Curt.

“I will pray on it,” I said.

He laughed, not meanly. He laughed the way you laugh at a child who says she will ask her grandmother. “You do that,” he said. “But the offer’s good till five.”

I left the paper and the four hundred dollars on his table and walked back down the ridge. I will not dress up that walk. Somewhere around the shot rock I said out loud, to nobody, that I hoped the man’s own well ran dry, and I meant it.

Then I came into my side yard and saw Curt’s bucket swinging on its nail, and I heard myself say another thing. I said, “Lord, I do not want to hate a man over four hundred dollars.”

That was the first prayer. I did not know a hundred people would pick it up before the week was out.