The Well Digger

SHF_RE_Y2K_JackRay_TheWellDigger - 2016 // 01_initial

One morning when I was on our perch of yard, imagining and posing and contemplating like that, something took me by surprise: a big, deep laugh of an explosion. I felt it go through my body, then heard different parts of the valley laughing in return, like people in an audience who were far back from the microphone. It was Dutch the well-driller starting his engine again on the other side of our house. 

I ran to see. I had not noticed his truck turn in off the blacktop road and come up the gravel driveway. I hadn’t heard him banging things and coughing and talking with my brother. I had been a god lost in his thoughts instead of paying attention, and that was the surprise more than the sound.

The old machine man was there in our back yard, in his gray shirt and blue pants, waddling among the pipes and lumber and tires and whatnot of his well-drilling operation. He had brought a junkyard with him, to get water out of the ground with. His rig itself was junk put together, a little tower of mismatched girders still partly attached to the old flatbed truck that had brought it there. The big engine on wheels was silent, and there was no smoke yet. The old well-driller leaned down into the engine, grumbling in a voice that wasn’t completely American, reaching in and turning or pushing something. My brother stood nearby in his slouching, attentive way, holding his fingers in his ears. I plugged my ears the same way, just in time. The engine choked out another yell that made my insides vibrate, began to chuckle, then gasped sharply and was silent again. Dutch was cursing even before the noise had stopped. You could hear both him and the engine together for a moment, then it was just the old man lowering his voice, murmering insults in the cool morning just behind our house.

He called it old and junk and worthless and lazy. He used a wrench and screwdriver on it, tools he kept stashed here and there in the engine itself, because they were needed so often. It was the same thing every morrning, a hard time getting the engine going, though it would then run most of the day without trouble. My brother had told me, shaking his head and laughing, that the engine would probaly start right up if Dutch didn’t tinker with it first. We watched the ritual, and it was the part of the well-drilling day I liked best. You could still hear birds doing their morning singing, you might hear my mother or the girls giving a shout inside the house, and there was this strange engineer we barely knew, with his machine from an older time, mumbling and tinkering, partly in Engligh, partly in German, and the bang and clang of tools. It was just as interesting to me as what came next, but more mild.

“She’ll go now,” he might say, or, “If dat don’t do it I’m quitting for good.” He was a short man with short arms and legs, but thick and square all over — square head, square hips, square fingertips on the stubs of his many missing fingers. He was just as greasy and stubbled each morning as he had been at the end of the day before. His neck had been broken once and wouldn’t swivel now, so when he looked at you, he turned his whole body to face you. We had never known anyone like him, a grizzled, friendly bear in human clothes. I thought his bumbling about in the mornings might be an act, his way of playing, because he had built with his own hands this machine that could reach deep below the world, and once it started, it was heavy7, complicated work for him all day.

“Here we go or I’m de monkey’s uncle,” he said, and the engine stayed awake this time. It coughed up black smoke at first, like it had taken in too much night, then settled into its long daytime exhale of clear heat. Dutch faced us and clapped his thick hands together like he wanted us to applaud, and when we didn’t waved us away, like he was done with us forever. But now he had his serious work to attend to. He pulled and pushed his thick iron levers, tightening a rubber belt as thick and wide as as bookshelf. A big wheel skidded into a spin, and the whole derrick lurched, cables beginning their slow creep up and down. Then the big weight dropped, landing on an upright pipe, driving it a little deeper into the Earth, that pipe it had been hammering downward for days. And this would go on all day, the engine laughing destructively, the hammer banging, the old truck jumping with each blow, the ground itself shuddering. My mother and sisters all said it was driving them out of their minds.