Abram and the Dug Well
A true tale, taken from Fury and Grace, my memoir of love, death, art, politics, and the terror of tomatoes.
In Blount County, Alabama, the sun pushes down from above while the waterlogged air ensures no evaporating sweat will cool you. In 1906, my grandfather Abram’s mind wasn’t on the water in the air but the water under the dirt he was standing on. Of particular interest to him was how far he and his father were going to have to dig before they found that water. He was 15 that year, and the fact that he was only just now in the third grade was not out of the ordinary. At that time and in that county, there were no particular ages associated with different grades. Blount County was subsistence farming country. Children went to school as work allowed; their education simply proceeded along when their need to work in the fields didn’t.
The old well had run dry, giving up only brackish mud now. Abram and his father needed to dig a new one. The procedure was simple: pick up a shovel; start digging; stop when you hit water. Some wells in the area could go down fifty feet. Abram didn’t wonder how many days it would take to dig the well. He knew the answer. It would take one day from start to finish, even if that day had two sunrises and two sunsets. They weren’t going back to the house until they found water. That was his father’s way. They would take turns digging until they got the job done. With a square-point sharpshooter shovel, Abram’s father cut a four-foot circle in the sod.
In Blount County, what we now call the social safety net was family. Easy credit with rational terms was not available. Social Security, WIC, TANF, SSDI, and SSRI had not even been imagined. They paid for their food, furniture, house, and much of the farm equipment with the labor they spent farming. They grew and made for themselves what they could, but some things they had to buy, and that meant they had to grow a cash crop to sell. Their cash crop was cotton.
The first hour of digging a well was not the hardest by a long way, but it was the first hour and it had its own work. Your muscles were fresh, you were digging at the surface, but you were also taking the first discouraging steps on a long journey downward. Abram needed to step out of time as he knew it and step into an eternal now without the minutes that marked nothing except the slow progression as that round patch of grass near the cottonwood trees became a deep black void that ended in water.
When his father began to dig, Abram was surprised and discouraged at his father’s aggressive pace that seemed more angry than impatient. When faced with a job like that, another person might take the long view and settle into a sustainable pace that a man could keep up for many hours.
A wellhole cannot accommodate two diggers. When they could dig no deeper standing on the grass, Abram’s father stepped down into the hole and continued shoveling. They’d spell each other every half hour, one clamoring up, the other hopping down. When the bottom was almost too far down for his father to throw the dirt up and out, Abram handed him a large tin bucket and line. It took about a minute to haul up the bucket weighing about fifty pounds, empty it and send it down again, which gave the digger a quick break to catch his breath and straighten his back.
At some point after the noon meal they had dug the pit deep enough that Abram had to stand on the overturned bucket in order to reach his father’s hand and climb up out of the wellhole. After that, only his father dug. Abram ran the bucket up and down until it hurt to open and close his fingers and his shoulders felt leaden and stiff. He was amazed that father was still sending up buckets of dirt as fast as Abram could haul them up and empty them. By the time the sun was touching the tops of the cottonwoods behind them, he was pulling up the fifty-pound bucket about fifteen feet to the surface. Once he returned the bucket, looking into the mouth of the pit, all he could see was the blue of father’s shirt when he straightened up and turned with the shovel to load the next fifty pounds of dirt.
“Ready!” his father would shout in an odd, disembodied voice.
“Coming down!” Abram would answer as he sent the bucket back. As he watched his thoughts of supper and sleep disappear with the bucket down that black hole, he recalled as a distant memory that very morning when he had no notion they were going to spend an eternity digging a hole in the ground. That’s the way it was, working with father. They were both engaged in a fierce and wearisome contest against the elements, against mechanical failure, against human frailty, against their own desire to just be done with it. Because he worked with his father all day, six days a week, he knew that only vigilance, back-breaking work and orneriness kept the farm going.
Abram had been using the scraps of time while his father dug to build a ladder. Among the lumber left from other projects he found a board ten inches wide and several short lengths of lumber in assorted sizes approximately six inches long. He nailed each of the short pieces to the long board. When finished, Abram slid the ladder down the well. It offered only very shallow steps to climb, but it would do.
The last of the sunlight was fading when Abram’s father sent him to the house for a lantern. When he returned, Abram began pulling the bucket up. It wasn’t full. By its weight, it had only a couple shovelfuls of dirt in it. He quickly made a lark’s head around the lantern’s handle with rope and lowered it into the well. He called out for his father, then screamed for him, then screamed at him, and then just screamed as his father’s slack form appeared in the pool of light, collapsed kneeling at the bottom of the well.
Abram knew that his father was dead. Yet his father could not be dead. This could not be.
A gap in time began when Abram saw the back of that blue shirt in the lamplight and knew what he refused to know. He plunged down into the well with a coil of rope, looped it under father’s arms and climbed back up out of the well, all seemingly in one swift motion. He did it, he did it numb. He must have done it, but he couldn’t remember doing it.
He couldn’t pull his father up hand-over-hand; he was just too heavy. The only way he was able to make any progress was to squat about a foot from the edge of the hole and take the line in his hands. He straightened his arms, leaned into the weight with his back straight and strained with his legs. Abram’s stomach turned when, on his second heave, his father’s heels dragged against the bottom of the hole as he pulled the body upright.
His hands couldn’t hold the line, so he slipped them through the loops he had made earlier for the bucket. Then he balled both hands into fists so they wouldn’t slide out of the loops and he pulled harder. Heave. Each heave brought his father another sixteen inches closer to him. Heave again. Abram had to get him out of that well. Another heave. He would get his father out of that hole. Heave against the weight. He was bringing him up out of that hole. Heave against the sorrowful times to come.
When the edge of the pit crumbled and Abram lost a couple of feet, it was more than he could take. He knew he was going to drop his father. He knew that he would now have to dig the next well alone. He would now have to do everything alone. He sat stuck, unable to lift anymore yet unwilling to let go.
A cry rose within him. Why not just curl up and quit? Just let go and run for his mother? She would send for help. The cry uncovered and laid bare before him the choice that was his alone to make. No one would blame him. No one could expect him to do it himself. Abram rebelled. No, there was no help to send for. No, he would not quit and let someone else do his job. Yes, he could do this. Abram heaved.
His father’s body appeared. With the last heave, Abram pulled him up and out. He cradled his father’s head to stop it from hitting the ground too hard. Why? He wondered at that. He collapsed kneeling next to his father.
Abram didn't question what to do next. He threw the line and the bucket into the well and went down after them. Digging now wasn’t as easy as it had been before. By himself he filled the bucket, climbed up, pulled the bucket after him. Again and again, he climbed up and down with the bucket. After uncounted bucketfuls, the dirt beneath his feet crumbled and Abram sank to his knees in cold water.
The well was finished. He had done it. They would have water now. The well that had killed his father would keep them alive.
He spent a long moment alone there by the well. He would have to tell his mother and sisters that father was dead. There was a well to finish with a cover, a winch, and a pail. Father was dead. There was cotton to bring in. Father was dead. There were hogs to tend and butcher. Father was dead, and there was hay to bring in. Father was dead. There was milking to be done. He stood up and took one step towards the house. Left foot, right foot.