“Duane, stay on the highway,” I said into the phone. “Do not go near them. I am calling the sheriff, and then I am calling my granddaughter.” I put the old tablet down on my end table, where the little green dot was holding perfectly still on my father quarter section. Eighty four years old, in my socks and my undershirt, I felt something I had not felt since the day Marlys passed. I felt sharp. I called Pierce County Sheriff dispatch, and told the night woman who I was, and she said, “Mr. Vanderhoof, we will have a deputy there in twelve minutes.”
Then I called Jenna. She picked up on the first ring, in her kitchen in Velva, and she did not ask a single question. “Grandpa, I will pick you up in five minutes,” she said. “Put on your boots.” Her little Honda came up 11th Avenue like a rocket. We drove the fifty four miles to Rugby in thirty nine minutes, under a sky full of northern lights, with my granddaughter driving and me watching the green dot on the tablet. Neither of us said a word. Somewhere past Surrey, she reached over and put her hand on mine. It was warm.
At the field approach north of Rugby the whole quarter was lit up. Floodlights on poles. My own Rig No. 1, with the mast raised to its full height, standing against the stars like a lighthouse. Darrell in the cab. Rick beside the truck in his Carhartt coat, with a cup of coffee and a smile on his face, and the third man in the Vanderhoof Drilling jacket kneeling in the weeds with his clipboard. A deputy cruiser was already coming down the section road with its lights on. Duane Lindgren was leaning on his pickup at the end of the approach, grinning.
A rig on a gravel road found water, a brother in law tried and failed to steal a field, and eleven dollar bills were framed on a wall.
Rick saw us and the smile came off like a lid. “Earl,” he said. “What are you doing out here at this hour?” I walked up to him slowly, with Jenna holding my arm. “I could ask you the same, Richard,” I said. “It is my land. That is my rig. Those are my minerals.” The man with the clipboard stood up. He was young and soft handed and he did not look like a driller. “Mr. Vanderhoof, I am Wes Dunning, with Badlands Exploration,” he said. “Your son in law told us he held the power of attorney for this property. He gave us a signed lease. We are drilling a test well tonight.”
The deputy, a tall woman named Halvorsen, took the lease from his hand and read it by flashlight. “Mr. Dunning, this document is dated September second,” she said. “It lists Mr. Rick Strand as the lessor. Mr. Strand, do you own these minerals?” Rick opened his mouth, and the northern lights flickered across his face. “Earl signed it,” he said at last. “Check the signature.” Jenna took the paper from the deputy and held it under the light. “Grandpa signs his name with a big V and a long line under it,” she said steadily. “This one does not.” The deputy nodded slowly.
Rick sat down on the running board of the rig. It was strange to see a grown man deflate like that. “Earl, I paid for it with the eleven dollars,” he said, giving a crazy sort of laugh. “I owed Darrell and his people fifty thousand dollars. A man in Williston told me the Vanderhoof quarter was sitting on something. Carla found the geologist report in Marlys things last spring, and told me.” He swallowed. “Earl, I am sorry. I thought, he is old, he is alone, he will never even drive up here to look.” I stood in the glare of the floodlights, and I thought about that, and then I walked over to the mast.
I put my hand on the cold steel of Rig No. 1. The same rig that drilled my father new well in 1965, when I was twenty five. “Mr. Dunning, you may as well finish what you started,” I said. “I know what is under this field. It is not oil, son. It is water. Marlys and I had it tested in 2019. An aquifer, two hundred feet thick, cold as ice, sweet as sugar. Enough to supply Rugby and every farm in Pierce County for a hundred years.” I looked at Jenna, whose mouth was open. “I kept the rights because I wanted to give it back.”
They drilled all night. I stayed. Duane ran the controls, Jenna brought coffee, and Rick, under the deputy supervision, worked the pipe, shivering in the cold, because I told him that I wanted him to see what he had been trying to steal. At nine in the morning, six hundred feet down, the water came. It shot twenty feet in the air, silver in the sun, and fell on the weeds. I walked into it. Eighty four years old, in my boots. I cupped my hands and drank, and it tasted like my father barrel, and like my wife kitchen, and like a promise kept.
I signed the water rights over to the Pierce County Water District that spring, with a clause naming it the Marlys Vanderhoof Well, and a rule that it can never be sold to a private buyer. Mr. Dunning left town, his lease torn in half. Rick took a plea for attempted forgery and was sentenced to a year of probation and two hundred hours on my crew, which he served, digging trenches for the new pipeline to Rugby. Carla cried for a month and then came to my door with a hot dish. We ate it in silence, and then we ate it in laughter.
The eleven one dollar bills hang in a frame on the wall of my shop, over the workbench, with a small brass plate beneath them. The Bid. Last summer at the family reunion, at the VFW hall on 2nd Avenue, Jenna stood up with the microphone, and held up that gold painted drill bit, and said, “Folks, this is a genuine Vanderhoof drill bit. It brought water to ten thousand people. Who will give me a dollar?” Nobody laughed. Fifty relatives stood up, one after another, and put a dollar in my cap.