“It won’t happen,” he said, polishing his ring. “There’s no water under Mesquite Flat. Old Eli proved that himself. The only thing deep in that lot is a fool’s grave, and now there’s a fool to match it.” Hettie heard about it the way you always hear about such things in a small town. She said nothing.
She had a promise to keep and promises don’t argue. They just get kept. She hired the only man who still believed in Eli, a young driller named Tom Bayliss, 26, who had apprenticed under Eli as a boy and loved the old man like a father. Tom came cheap because nobody else would hire a Callaway man and he came willing because he, too, remembered Eli swearing the water was there.
With Eli’s old maps and notes spread on a barrel head, the two of them studied the dead well and Tom did the arithmetic Eli had never had the money to finish. “He stopped at 90 ft,” Tom said quietly. “His notes figure the water table at maybe 140. He was 50 ft short, Mrs. Callaway. 50 ft and a lifetime.” “Then we go 140,” Hattie said. “And if it’s not there, we go 160.
We go until we find his water or we find the bottom of the world.” So they began and the town, which loves nothing so much as watching a thing it has already decided will fail, settled in to watch. It was brutal work. A cable tool rig pounding the same hole hour after hour, day after day.
The great iron bit dropping and lifting, dropping and lifting, chewing through rock a few inches at a time. Tom worked the rig and Hattie worked beside him, bailing out the cuttings, cooking his meals, keeping his books, paying out her savings to the foot. 100 ft. 110. The men of Mesquite Flats strolled past in the evenings to peer down the dusty hole and call out their encouragement.
“Strike anything yet, Widow Callaway? Maybe a little lower? Try China.” She let them laugh. Eli had taught her that a laughing man can’t see straight and a man who can’t see straight will always underestimate you. And being underestimated, Eli used to say, is the cheapest advantage a body can have. So, she smiled, and she paid out her money, and the bit kept dropping.
120 ft, the rock changed. Tom could feel it in the cable, a different hardness, the kind Eli’s notes had predicted just above the water. 130, Hattie’s savings were nearly gone now. She had perhaps a fortnight of drilling left, and not a dollar more. And she lay awake those nights wondering if she had done a terrible thing, if grief had made a fool of her after all, if she would lose everything Eli left her chasing a dead man’s dream into the bottom of a hole.
Those were the hard nights. In the dark of them, she would take out the things she had of Eli, his worn leather notebook, the brass compass he’d carried for 40 years, the pipe he never quite gave up, and she would remember the man himself, not the town’s crank, but her husband, the way he could stand in an empty field and tell you, just by the lean of the grass and the smell of the wind, where the water hid, the way he’d courted her at 19 by witching a well for her father’s farm when three other men had failed, the 41 years
they’d had, the children they’d raised and seen off into the world, the slow gentle ending when his great strong hands had gone soft and thin in hers. Folks thought she was burying her good sense in that hole in the ground. They didn’t understand that she wasn’t burying anything. She was digging him back up, not the body on the hill, but the truth of the man, the rightness of him, the thing the town had laughed away.
And some mornings, looking at the dwindling money and the dust coming up the casing, that was the only thing that got her out of bed and back to the rig, the certainty that whatever else she lost, she would not, would not, let them be right about Eli Callaway. 138 ft on a blistering morning at the end of June, the bit broke through. Tom felt the cable go suddenly slack and strange, and then a sound came up out of the earth that neither of them had ever heard before.
A deep, rushing, gurgling groan, like the planet itself drawing breath. And then the water came. Not a seep, not a trickle. It came up the casing under its own pressure, cold and clear and sweet, rising and rising until it spilled over the lip of Callaway’s folly and ran out silver across the dusty lot in the morning sun. An artesian flow, pushed up from a deep cold reservoir Eli had sworn was there for 10 laughed-at years.
Hetty Callaway knelt down in the spreading water in her good black dress, and she put her hands in it, and she wept. Not for herself, but for the man who had been right all along and had not lived to see it. “You weren’t wrong, Eli,” she whispered. “You just weren’t done.” The news ran through Mesquite Flat like fire.
Folks came to see it and could hardly believe their eyes. Cold sweet water bubbling up out of the famous dead hole. More water than the whole town’s shallow wells put together. And it never slowed, never thinned, just kept coming up out of the deep dark earth as if it had been waiting 11 years to be asked. Augustus Crane came too and stood at the edge of the lot with his jaw working and did not, you may be sure, drink a cup on the church steps.
But the true reckoning, the thing that turned that whole town’s laughter into something it would be ashamed of for a generation, did not come that June. It came the following summer, the year the rains failed entirely and the great drought rolled down over the Arizona territory like a judgment. You have to understand what such a year does to a country like Mesquite Flat.
The clouds come and give nothing. The shallow wells the town had always leaned on dropped, then soured, then went to dust. The creek vanished. Crane’s wells, shallow themselves for all his bluster, drawing from the same thin surface water as everyone else’s, turned alkaline and bitter, then sank too low to reach, and the great water monopoly he had built his fortune on dried up in his hands because Crane had never owned deep water at all.
He had only ever owned the same desperate trickle as his neighbors and sold it dear. And while every well in Mesquite Flat failed, one well kept flowing, cold and sweet and tireless, pushed up from a reservoir far below the reach of any drought on a worthless lot a 68-year-old widow had bought to keep a promise to a dead man. The whole town came to the dry well.
They came with buckets and barrels and pleading faces, the proud and the poor alike. The men who had called out “Try China” now standing hat in hand at the lip of Callaway’s folly. They came begging for water. And here is the part of the story they tell longest in Mesquite Flat. Hetty Callaway could have made herself the richest woman in the territory that summer.
She held the only water for 40 miles in a year when men would have paid in gold for it. She could have done exactly what Augustus Crane had spent his whole life doing, charged what the thirst would bear and grown fat on her neighbors’ desperation, and called it just deserts for all their years of laughter. She didn’t.
She opened her well to the whole town and charged nothing but what it cost to keep the rig and the pump in repair. To the poor families she gave the water free. To the children she gave it free and cold and let them splash in the runoff on the worst of the hot days. And the sound of children laughing in clean water in the middle of a killing drought became for the old folks of Mesquite Flat the thing they remembered longest about that whole terrible year.
She set Tom Bayliss to building troughs and pipes to carry the water out to the gardens of the families too old or too sick to haul it. She turned a dead man’s vindication into a living town’s salvation, and she did it without one word of triumph, without one backward glance at all the years of scorn. Word of it spread far beyond Mesquite Flat.
