"A Well Driller in the Rain," a short story
by John Bart Gerald
Once there was an honest man. He was a well driller. His eyes had filled with the first two wells of his life and after he could see through the surface of the earth to water awaiting his rig, not with his eyes but something like memory already there. What others called imagination the well driller knew was real.The only odd thing about people in those parts was that they'd swear up and down they didn't believe in anything. Otherwise it was a rich plentiful land like a watering place and people were known to sell themselves into a kind of slavery for the price of entry. It was also a dangerous place to love anyone for there was a local saying which went,"When a man starts to love, means he's about to die."
The well driller's love was moments of sighting water.
When war came it took most of his brothers away. The well driller went off to the National Guard Armory where he learned to fix a jeep and wait. His sisters married the men of privilege who never have to serve. But their children were vacant eyed and without understanding. The righteous people said the war was wrong. Others said it was right. Both grew fat and prosperous on the sacrifice of others. Modern thinkers pointed out, it wasn't whether you won the war or not but whether it sold guns.
In the summer that the rains stopped, all the shallow wells went dry. The corn rose no higher than dog's ears. The baseball diamonds gave festivals of dust. The grass turned into burnt amber witness that someone had been burned. Even the sparse leaves of the trees whispered in the dry wind, water.
The second year without rain, people frightened. Some men were caught praying in private. Heat came upon their women when they were alone. Some sold themselves for water. Others drank their tears.
The well man drilled between hills where the land ran together, beside old stream beds, in hollows of the forest where the great old trees grew. Sometimes he sank the shaft straight down through granite. He always struck water -- it was like coming home each time the drill bit through and the pump spurted its own find instead of the tank water fed the rig to keep the bit cool. That was his way of making love to the land.
He said, "I just do it for the money," but when someone couldn't pay he drilled for them anyway. And paid his crew just the same. "Just paying for the company," he called it.
"And we can do without a self-appointed Christ," his crew said, counting out their cash on the diesel hood. What they meant was, that like most of us they preferred to choose themselves whom they were going to crucify.
In that rainless second summer he was drilling at an old farm where the well went dry first time in over a hundred years. Cow pond was a spider web of cracked mud. Mid-afternoon the color of water from the cooling pump changed. He shut off the tank and out of the black hose trickling through the pebbles, filling footprints in the dust, was bright red water.
A child who came to the farmhouse door thought he saw the well driller standing in a pool of his own blood.
From then on you could tell the men of his crew because they wore red work boots. And the well driller was known as the only man could squeeze blood out of a stone.
When the reservoir water got too low the town people started falling sick. If it wasn't one thing it was another. Some people thought there was a great plague but the truth was it was just bad water, catching as hatred. Some townfolk went up into the hills for their water, asking mercy in all sorts of cagey ways, or sometimes as simply as a child asks for a glass of water.
Some people were annoyed that the well man was doing so well, as though he was responsible for the drought and hardship all by himself.
The well driller left his rig going with the crew and went up to Round Hill to meditate. He did this on occasions such as the murder of a relative, the birth of a son, or when he could cop a little nookie. He would find an open space among the trees where even his family couldn't find him.
In his communing with God the well driller tried to find out why it wouldn't rain. Understanding God was not so different from sighting water. His god, knowing the hardness of this well drilling heart, told him he could make it rain, all the well driller had to do was cry.
The well driller had not cried for many years. His family had wrung him dry of tears when he realized he had lost them to his wife. Afterward they could not hurt him deeply. It was possible that even the prospect of his own death could not break him into tears. And he drilled his wells moodily, considering, while the late August heat scorched the landscape turning slowly to desert.
Toward the end of summer melons were the size of crab apples. Trees turned early blazing with the colors of fired earth. Even the evergreens looked like they were rusted out. A reporter asked the well driller what would do this to the land ? The well driller said it was probably due to the ozone layer or some experiment by the Air Force.
He tried harder and harder to cry. He tried because people suffered and the times were so hard. But the everyday cruelties of life were just more plentiful than before, no crueler. The tougher things were the more it seemed to delight the people who sat around the bar say Tuesday nights with their eyes glistening like pools down the end of well shafts, grinning like crescent moons on a dust dry night. They didn't seem any more likely to cry than the well driller, or the vets (who back when it rained had heard machine gun fire on their tin roofs), or the men whose families had simply thrown them away, or all the broken hearted spared for another round of self-sacrifice.
The well driller tried to love his wife and children. They cried easy enough when they didn't get what they wanted.
Then one afternoon he knelt down over a well shaft on a job just completed two hundred thirty feet down through granite after twenty feet of loam. He thought he could see a sparkle where his mind's eye and eyesight came together in those depths that let him be whole. He was always finding the water for other people that no one could find for him. "I've caught you so I can free you," the eye of the well seemed to say. Until the well driller was kneeling in the waters of some greater well where his god like a well driller looked for love in the human heart, striking with sudden lightning for what we deny eachother.
For a moment he was a child again standing in the rain. He stood up and cried out with the pain of a man who finds he has come home to himself but all the people he cared about have passed away. "Forgive my hardness, Lord," he said, reaching up toward the heat laden sky thick with clouds and the land's dust, pleading with his god who would not leave him alone, until the first drops of a ten day rain puckered the ground with little puffs of dust, and the storm broke with a sharp crack of thunder covering the poverty of tears in the well man's eyes with torrents of rainwater like a near flood.
First published in Ploughshares, v.3, #3,4., Boston, 1977.
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