The Last Well

The heat in Mississippi did not behave like heat anywhere else in the United States. In Arizona, heat was honest—it announced itself with a ferocity that demanded respect and then left you alone if you gave it that respect. In Mississippi, heat was a presence. It lived in the house with you. It sat in the corner of the room while you ate your dinner. It pressed against your chest while you slept and followed you into the bathroom and waited for you in the yard where the magnolia trees grew thick and green and refused to acknowledge that summer was supposed to be dying.

Silas Winslow felt this heat every day of his sixty-three years. He felt it in the Winslow plantation house, which had been built in 1842 by his great-great-grandfather and had never, in eighty years of Silas's life, been cool for more than three consecutive days. He felt it in the wellhouse, where the family well—the Winslow Well, dug by hand in 1847—had been slowly, patiently, running dry for the past twenty years.

The Winslow Well was the last well in Natchez that could claim to have been dug by hand. It was twelve feet in diameter and eighty feet deep, and it had supplied water to the Winslow family and the two families that lived on the plantation grounds for more than a century. But the water table had been dropping for decades, and twenty years ago, the well had stopped producing water that was safe to drink. It still produced water—there was always water, eventually, if you waited long enough and bailed the well with a bucket and a prayer—but the water was brown and tasted of iron and earth and something else that Silas could not name but recognized as the taste of endings.

His grandfather had died in the well. Not fallen in—though that was what most people assumed when they heard the story. No, Elias Winslow had died of exposure while repairing the wellhouse roof, caught in a summer storm that had come out of nowhere and turned the wooden scaffolding into a slip-and-fall hazard. Silas had been ten. He had stood in the yard and watched the men carry his grandfather's body out of the wellhouse, and he had understood, for the first time, that death was not an abstraction. It was a man-sized thing that could be carried on a wooden board by four men who were also your relatives.

His father had died of alcoholism. This was not unusual in Natchez aristocratic families, where the men had inherited land they could not farm, titles they could not use, and histories they could not escape. His father, Reginald Winslow, had spent his last ten years in a rocking chair on the porch, drinking bourbon that cost more than most men in Natchez made in a week, watching the heat rise off the driveway and knowing that he would never do anything to change it.

His sister, Catherine, had married a man named Edward who came from Jackson and had a degree in accounting and a face that Silas had never been able to remember. Edward had not come to the plantation. He had come for the wedding and then returned to Jackson and sent Catherine letters that Catherine never forwarded to Silas. Catherine had come to the plantation once, five years after the wedding, and stayed for two weeks. She had cried every night. Silas had heard her from his room, through the walls that were thick with magnolia leaves and family secrets. She had returned to Jackson. Silas had not seen her since.

Silas was the last Winslow. He was also the only one who had not left.

While his father had sat on the porch and his sister had fled to Jackson, Silas had done something different. At twenty-five, he had enrolled at the University of Mississippi in Oxford and studied hydrology—the science of water movement, distribution, and quality. This was not what a Winslow did. The Winslows had always been landowners, not scientists. But Silas had always been different from his family. Where they had accepted their fate with the graceful resignation of men who believed that history had already written their part, Silas had believed that history was a document that could be edited.

He graduated in 1952 and returned to the plantation with a degree in hydrology and a determination to find water. Not the brown, iron-tasting water that the Winslow Well was producing. Real water—clean, clear, abundant water that could fill the well and fill the cisterns and fill the lives of the people who lived on the plantation grounds.

He spent three years studying the local geology. He read geological surveys from the state university. He walked the plantation grounds with a notebook, noting the places where certain plants grew (sedges and willows indicated shallow groundwater), the places where the earth was damp even in August (indicating subsurface water flow), the places where the old Chickasaw trails had crossed streams that no longer existed (indicating ancient waterways that might still have dormant channels).

He found something. Or rather, he found a possibility.

Based on his analysis, Silas believed that there was an underground aquifer beneath the plantation—deep, perhaps two hundred feet down—that was fed by rainfall in the hills thirty miles to the north. The aquifer had been known to geologists but was considered impractical for domestic use because the depth required equipment that a single family could not afford.

Silas did not have equipment. But he had determination, and he had a basic understanding of drilling technology. He saved his money—money from a small pension his grandfather had left him, money from selling a few of the plantation's unused tools and furniture—and in the spring of 1955, he hired a drilling crew from Jackson.

The drilling took six weeks. Six weeks of noise and dust and men who spoke languages Silas did not understand (they were from Alabama, and their accent was as foreign to him as any European tongue). Six weeks of watching the drill bit descend deeper and deeper into the earth, past the topsoil, past the clay, past the limestone, into territory that the Winslows had never reached in one hundred and thirteen years of living on this land.

On the forty-second day, the drill hit water.

Not the brown, iron-tasting water of the old well. This water was clear and cold and, when Silas cupped it in his hands and tasted it, sweet. Pure, even. The kind of water that made you close your eyes and thank whatever gods still listened in Mississippi.

Silas stood at the drilling site and wept. Not the dramatic weeping of a man overcome with emotion, but the quiet, involuntary weeping of a man whose body had been holding tension for three years and was finally allowed to release it.

The water flowed for three days straight. Silas watched it flow from the drilling site into a channel he had dug himself, a channel that carried the water to the old wellhouse, where he had installed a pump and a storage tank. The tank held five thousand gallons. It was full in two days.

Silas had water. Clean, clear, sweet water. Enough for the plantation house, enough for the tenant cabins, enough for the gardens and the livestock and the cisterns.

He was sixty-three years old.

He stood in the yard of the Winslow plantation on a hot July morning and watched the water flow from the pump into the storage tank, and he thought of his grandfather, who had dug the original well by hand. He thought of his father, who had drunk himself to death on the porch. He thought of his sister, who had fled to Jackson and never looked back. He thought of the Winslows, who had lived on this land for one hundred and thirteen years and who would, with his death, cease to live on this land.

The water was here. But he was too old to drink it.

He would live for another seven years. Seven years of clean water in the Winslow house, seven years of green gardens, seven years of livestock that did not die of thirst. But he would never again feel the relief of that first cup of water—never again experience the shock of sweetness on a tongue that had tasted iron and earth for so long. He would grow accustomed to the water, as men grow accustomed to anything, and it would become normal, and normal is the enemy of gratitude.

Silas Winslow died in 1962, at the age of seventy, in the bed his great-great-grandfather had slept in, in the house his great-great-grandfather had built, surrounded by the heat that had been his constant companion for six decades. The water pump continued to work after he was gone. The tenant farmers who replaced him did not know that the water had almost not existed. They turned the handle, and water came, sweet and cold, and they assumed it had always been this way.

This is how histories end. Not with a bang, not with a tragedy, but with a man who found water too late to drink it, and the men who came after him who never knew how close they had come to thirst.

The heat in Mississippi did not change. It lived in the house with the new tenants, just as it had lived with the Winslows. It pressed against their chests while they slept and followed them into the yard where the magnolia trees grew thick and green. And when they turned the handle of the water pump, water came—clean, clear, sweet—and they did not think about Silas Winslow, who had found it too late, or his grandfather, who had died in the old well, or his father, who had drowned himself in bourbon while the earth slowly dried up around him.

They simply turned the handle, drank the water, and went about their lives, as men always do, carrying with them the invisible burdens of histories they did not know and could not escape.

The last well of the Winslow family had produced its last miracle. And then it became just a well, like any other well, producing water like any other water, in a house that was just a house, in a heat that was just heat, in a Mississippi summer that was just one of countless Mississippi summers, each one identical to the last, each one forgetting what the previous one had known.