The Widow Who Got Thirty Men and a Well

Lonnie went into the ditch with a shovel. He was the thirtieth man. I counted twice, standing on my back step, to be sure.

At ten the women arrived with foil pans and slow cookers and set up on sawhorses under the walnut tree. Fried chicken. A banana pudding the size of a washtub, and nine pies. I counted those too.

Before the first ring went in, I took Curt’s bucket down off its nail in the pump shed. The blast had dented it and loosened the handle. I carried it out to the new circle and set it on the grass. Del saw it and said nothing. He took a length of new rope from his truck and tied it to the handle himself.

By noon there were nine rings in the ground, each one swung out over the yard like a giant wedding band and set down with a sound like a church bell struck once and muffled.

At noon, Ozzie stopped them. I saw the whole yard go still. Thirty men stood in the high white sun with their caps in their hands and dirt to the elbows, and they bowed their heads.

For once, Ozzie did not pray long. He thanked the Lord for the day and the strong backs. He asked that the water come clean. And then he said, “And Lord, be with Wade.”

Something went through the men like wind through corn. Nobody moved. But I saw Lonnie, at the end of the line, put his hand over his eyes.

“Amen,” said thirty men. They ate standing up, in about nine minutes, and went back to work.

Two fifty-one

By one o’clock there were fourteen rings in the ground. Bill climbed down into the tile on a rope seat at one-forty, with a headlamp on his cap and a short spade, to dig the mud from under the bottom ring so the stack could settle into the seam. A chain of men hauled up what he loosened.

I sat on an overturned bucket a few feet from the hole. I did not know what I was doing until Corah laughed. I was holding a rope. There was no rope in my hands. I was holding it in my mind, the way I had held it on a July night forty-nine years ago, and my hands were closed around nothing and would not open.

Corah took my hand and said nothing. She has known me sixty-three years and learned that is generally better.

At two fifty-one, Bill’s voice came up out of the ground, small and strange with an echo in it, and every man in the yard stopped moving.

“Del. I’m wet.”

Del took off his cap and leaned over the ring. “How wet?”

“To my ankles.” A pause. “To my shins. Del, it’s coming in around the spade. It’s coming in like somebody turned on a faucet.”

“Come on up,” Del said, and his voice did something I had never heard it do. “Bill. Easy now.”

They hauled him out. He came up that hole grinning, mud to his eyebrows, like a boy who has stolen a pie.

It was Curt. It was exactly Curt, the grin, the mud, the eyes. I had not seen it in four years, and there it was on another man’s face in my own side yard. I put my hand over my mouth.

Del lowered a lantern on a cord and looked down a long time. “Forty-seven feet,” he said. “Right where I said. It’s cold and it’s sweet, and there’s plenty of it.”

Nobody cheered. We are not a cheering sort of people. What came instead was thirty men letting out a breath, and a few handshakes. And somewhere in the crowd a man began to hum “Shall We Gather at the River.” Ozzie joined him, and Corah, and then half the yard. I could not sing. But I listened to it go up past the walnut tree into the high clear sky.