The Widow Who Got Thirty Men and a Well

Dry

Anyone who has gone without water knows it is not the thirst. You can always get a drink. It is everything else.

You cannot flush, or wash a dish, or wet a rag for the back of your neck on a hot afternoon. Eleven hens will go through three gallons on a September day. I had a rain barrel by the chicken house, fifty-five gallons, and I spent it on the hens first. Then the toilet, a dipper at a time. Then myself, from a dishpan, in the bedroom with the door shut, like a girl of nine.

Corah called that night. She has known me since the third grade, and she lives three miles off in a ranch house with a good deep well. She said she had made too much supper. I said I was fine. I did not say a word about the well.

On Saturday I loaded four five-gallon jugs in my old Buick and drove to her spigot, and I made it look like an errand. She watched me roll the jugs under her hose, and I felt her not asking. I was grateful and ashamed in about equal parts.

The gas was not the cost. The cost was the sink. I would walk into my kitchen first thing in the morning with my mind somewhere else, and my hand would turn the tap on its own, and I would stand there listening to it sigh. Every morning something in my chest dropped, as if I had lost him again.

That afternoon a well driller from Rolla drove out. He was kind. He looked at the hole and whistled, and he wrote it on a paper in a clean engineer’s hand. A new well entirely, with a new pump and line to the house.

Eleven thousand eight hundred and fifty dollars. Six weeks out.

I looked at that number and I looked at my twenty-one hundred and forty. I thanked him and walked him to his truck. I told not a soul, not even my daughter in Springfield, who would have driven down that night and lectured me about moving.

So I prayed and I carried water. The prayer was short. Lord, you know what I have, and what I do not. I did not ask for a well. I asked for the anger to leave me and for water to come.

What Corah did on Sunday

I went to church that Sunday because I have gone every Sunday since I was seven, and I was not about to quit for a hole in the ground.

Our church is a white frame building at the bottom of Bluff Road with a bell and a gravel lot. We have a men’s Wednesday breakfast, a prayer chain that works by telephone, and a pastor named Ozzie who preaches too long.

Near the end, when Ozzie opened the floor for requests, Corah stood up. She is seventy-four, and she keeps the prayer chain. Fourteen names, fourteen telephones, in a spiral notebook. She reads the list every week in a clear flat voice.

She did not have the notebook in her hand.

“I have a request that is not on the list,” she said. “It is for Ollie Vann.”

I felt the whole room turn the way a field of wheat turns, all at once.

“Ollie has been without a drop of water since Thursday. Her well was cracked in the blasting on the ridge. The man who owns the ridge has offered her four hundred dollars to go away. And she did not tell a one of us, because she is the proudest woman in this county and would sooner carry water in a thimble than ask for help.”

I wanted to disappear into the pew.

“I know because I stopped by yesterday and looked in her rain barrel and her cooler,” Corah said. “I am not asking you to be angry. Ollie says she does not want to hate him, and I believe that is the Lord’s doing. I am asking you to pray. For Ollie and her well, and for that man’s heart.”

She opened her Bible and read it in that flat clear voice.

“When the poor and needy seek water, and there is none, and their tongue faileth for thirst, I the Lord will hear them, I the God of Israel will not forsake them.”

Then she shut the Bible and sat down. Ozzie came down from the pulpit, which he does not usually do, and stood in front of my pew. “Ollie,” he said, “may we pray over you?”

I could not say yes. I nodded.

They came. The women first, with their hands on my shoulders. Then the men from the back pews, caps held against their chests. Then the children, pushed forward by their mothers.

Corah made me count afterward. A hundred and four people stood in a ring four deep and prayed over a widow with no water. Ozzie prayed for the well, he prayed for me, and he prayed for Wade by name.

When I heard that, the hot knot I had carried in my chest since Friday loosened a little. Not all the way. But it loosened.