…he already knew what was down there.
Prewitt is seventy-nine. He stood in that ditch with the flake of white paint in his palm and he told me the ground I was drilling wasn’t ground. It was a gravel pit. His grandfather sold sand out of that corner from 1919 until the dust came, and when it played out they spent four years filling it with everything the place couldn’t burn — dead machinery, a header, a hay rake, two wagons. Then they graded it flat and ran cows over it and nobody wrote it down anywhere, because in 1938 who did.
That accounts for paint at sixty feet. It accounts for the curved piece with the rolled edge, which he turned over twice and said was off a fender.
What it doesn’t account for is why he wanted the hole filled that same afternoon.
He told me the rest of it sitting on the tailgate. His father had a younger brother, Emil, who left for California in the spring of 1938 in a Ford truck the family had bought used and painted white because that was the paint they had. Emil never wrote. For sixty years that was the family story — the brother who went west and didn’t look back — and Prewitt said he’d told it himself at Christmas more times than he could count.
Then he said his father, dying in 1996, told him not to ever dig in that corner.
That’s all he said. That’s all he’s ever going to say.
I filled the hole. Ten yards of bentonite chip, tagged and logged, and I moved the rig four hundred feet north and hit good water at ninety-one.
He paid me for both holes. He didn’t ask what I thought, and I have never once been out that way since.
