The Widow Who Got Thirty Men and a Well

Del

When it was over I stood in the aisle with my face wet, telling everyone I was fine. Del waited until the aisle emptied.

Del is sixty-six, the quietest man I know, with the biggest hands in the county. He has run a boring rig in these hills for forty years, and he has never been known to say forty words in a row.

“How deep was Curt’s?” he said.

“Forty-four feet. Nineteen feet of rock in the bottom now.”

Del nodded slowly. “I carried those rings,” he said. “I was seventeen. Curt gave me a dollar.”

I had not remembered it. But I saw it: a gangly boy in a feed cap with a ring of concrete on a plank, and Curt holding out a dollar bill, grinning.

“A man from Rolla says eleven thousand eight hundred and fifty,” I said.

Del turned his cap once all the way around in his hands. “I’ll come out Monday with a probe,” he said. “I want to see what that shot did to the vein.”

“Del, I cannot pay you.”

He looked at me, and I saw something in his face I had never seen there. It was not pity. I know pity, and I would have turned it away. It was the look of a man looking at a job.

“Ollie,” he said, “that is not what I asked you.”