The Art of Waiting by Belle Boggs

Author:Belle Boggs
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-55597-945-4
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 2016-06-20T16:00:00+00:00

I sometimes had nightmares involving broken eggs with yolks and shells, but lately those had been replaced by pleasant dreams about babies. I dreamed of the heft of their little torsos, the sweet smell of their heads, their laughing faces. None of them looked especially like me or Richard, and I wasn’t even aware, in my dreams, that they were ours.

But that was what I was thinking about the next morning when I woke up: babies. Then I remembered the well-drilling rig still parked expensively up my hill, and the uncertainty.

Richard stayed home in case we didn’t hit water, so we could decide together whether to give up or tell them to drill in a different spot. The men started early. By now I could tell by sound alone when they were drilling and when the truck was idling. I sat on the sofa and tried to work while Richard stood at the window and watched. “Something’s changing,” he said after a while. “There’s more water.”

I got up and looked at the place where the rig blew waste and exhaust into the woods. “It always looks like that,” I said. “It looked like that yesterday.”

But a few minutes later, Richard reported that the men were mucking around with shovels and a scoop cut from a plastic gallon jug. They were fitting a new length of PVC onto the exhaust pipe and digging a trench in the grayish sludge that had once been solid rock. We were still guessing at what it could mean when Mr. Maness came to the door.

“You’ll be okay now,” he said. “You’ve got five gallons a minute.”

We high-fived; we did a dance of happiness. Five gallons a minute would be enough for us, and even enough for a family. I stepped onto the damp porch in my socks and watched Mr. Maness make his way back to the rig, where he had still more to do: additional drilling to get beneath the vein, then extracting the thirty-four sections of drill bits that had finally, far below, found water. It could have easily gone the other way. We have some neighbors with deep, dry wells and others who could supply an entire farm with water. We wound up in the middle, but we never intended to start a farm.

“That’ll be plenty,” Mr. Maness reassured us again, before he and his crew left in their three trucks. “Plenty for the whole house.”

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