The Widow Who Got Thirty Men and a Well

What I handed him

Wade stood beside his truck in his clean hat and his boots that had never met a cow. He looked at the rig and the ring stack. At the raw ditch running to my house. At thirty men with their caps in their hands who did not say a word to him.

He looked at Lonnie last. Lonnie stood by the well with a shovel, his shirt still on inside out. He did not nod and he did not look away. It was his Saturday.

Wade took his sunglasses off and folded them in his hand.

“Mrs. Vann. I came down to…” He stopped and looked at the well. “What is going on here?”

“I am getting a well, Mr. Wade.”

“I was told you had a hole in the ground.”

“I did,” I said. “It was the only one I had.”

Nobody laughed. I was still holding the dipper. Hershel had filled it again. I held it out to him.

“You’ll want to taste this,” I said. “It is the sweetest water on this road.”

He looked at the dipper. He looked at me. For a moment he looked like a man trying to remember what he had come down the lane to say. Then he took it and drank all of it. When he lowered the dipper I saw his throat working, and I saw that his eyes were not quite dry.

“That is good water,” he said.

“It isn’t mine, you know. It belongs to those men.”

“I owe you an explanation,” Wade said, and it was not the voice he had used in the trailer. “I have a note due the thirty-first of October. One point nine million dollars. I have to close six lots by then or I lose the property, and my lender said any claim on a neighboring parcel would stop the closings. I knew your well was too close. I told myself it was an old hole and four hundred dollars was fair. I hadn’t slept in three weeks.”

I did not forgive him that day. But I did not hate him either, and I was surprised how much room that left.

“What would a new well have cost?” he said.

“Eleven thousand eight hundred and fifty dollars. The man from Rolla. Ask Del what it cost today.”

Del stood with his arms folded, looking at Wade the way he looks at a stretch of ground he is about to bore.

“Thirty-six hundred and forty dollars in materials,” Del said, “and the church paid it out of the offering plate. Thirty men, nine hours, free. I’d have charged eight thousand for that labor on a Tuesday.”

Wade took a checkbook from his back pocket, walked to the hood of his own truck, laid the book down on it in the white sun in front of thirty men, and began to write.

He tore the check out and carried it across my yard, and he did not hold it out to me. He held it out to Del.

“Eleven thousand eight hundred and fifty dollars. The full price. Whatever you want done with it.”

Del did not take it. He looked at me.

“Mr. Wade,” I said, “the well is already dug. These men dug it. I don’t need your money for a well that is finished. But there is a cap in Del’s truck. I’d like you to put the check in it.”

“A cap?”

“The Two Rivers Well Fund,” Del said quietly. “Corah’s idea. We started it Thursday night. Next time somebody’s well goes bad, and somebody’s will, we do this again and it comes out of the same cap. We had four hundred and nineteen dollars in it before you drove up.”

Wade looked at the check. Then he looked, for a long time, at the thirty men in my yard. I swear I watched him count.

He walked to Del’s truck and took the feed-store cap off the dashboard, a green one sweated through at the band, with four hundred and nineteen dollars of crumpled bills in it. He folded the check in half and put it in.

Nobody clapped. We are not a clapping sort of people either.

But Corah put her arm through mine and said so softly that only I could hear, “Whosoever shall give to drink unto one of these little ones a cup of cold water only, verily I say unto you, he shall in no wise lose his reward.”

“He’s not a little one, Corah.”

“They are all little ones, Ollie,” she said. “On the day their wells go dry.”