The Widow Who Got Thirty Men and a Well

The first bucket

By three-fifteen the pump was set and the ditch crew said the line was in. At three-thirty, Del came to me.

“Ollie, I’d like you to draw the first bucket. The first one doesn’t go through the pump. It goes the way Curt did it.”

He took me by the arm. They had left a circle of bare ground around the well with the men standing back along the edge, waiting. Corah was at my elbow. Her grandson Hershel, fourteen, stood by the pump shed with the dipper. Curt’s bucket sat on the curb of the new well, on its new rope.

I took the rope in both hands. It was exactly the weight I remembered, the rough pull of the fiber across calluses I thought I had lost. I let it down a long way into the dark. I felt the slack, and then the rope jerked twice.

I hauled it up hand over hand with my heart going like a hen’s.

It came over the curb brimming, and the water in it was clear as window glass. It was so cold the outside of the bucket sweated. Hershel handed me the dipper. I dipped it and held it to the light.

“Del,” I said. “You first.”

He shook his head.

“You carried the rings both times,” I said.

He looked at me a long while. Then he took the dipper in his big hand and drank slowly. When he lowered it there was water on his chin, and he did not wipe it.

“Sweet,” he said. “Cold. Ollie, it tastes like it did the first night.”

That is when I heard a truck coming down my lane.

It was a white truck, new, with a gold stripe, and it came slowly down the gravel past the long row of dusty ones. Every man in the yard knew it. I watched thirty heads turn one after another, like sunflowers following the light.

The truck stopped at the edge of the yard. The engine went off. For a good ten seconds nothing moved at all.

Then the door opened.