A Kindness With No Closing Date

Corinne Waddell hauled water for two years and never once thought it was strange.

She had done it as a girl. Two galvanized buckets, a spring box at the bottom of the hill, forty-one steps back up with the bails cutting rings into her fingers. Everybody on Sawmill Branch hauled water then. It was not hardship. It was Tuesday.

Then she married Dell, and the second spring they were married he sold a walnut log off the back of the place and paid a man to bring a rig up the hollow and put in a well. Corinne stood at the kitchen sink that first evening with her hand on the tap and did not turn it. Just held it, the way you hold a thing you did not work for. Dell came up behind her and said, well, go on then. She turned it. Water came, cold and hard and loud in the sink, and she cried into it and told him she was being foolish, and he said no she was not, and they drank coffee at eleven at night like a couple of children.

For forty-one years she turned that tap without thinking about it once, which is what a kindness becomes when it keeps on. It quits being a gift and starts being the house.

Dell died in October, between the last of the beans and the first hard frost. The following February an ice storm took the power out for nine days, and Corinne did what her mother had taught her hands to do before she could read. She went down the hill with two buckets.

The power came back on a Thursday. The furnace lit. The freezer hummed. And the tap in the kitchen ran about four seconds and quit.

She did not call anybody. She was sixty-six years old and grieving and tired past the place where a person makes decisions, and what she thought, standing there with a dry tap in her hand, was: well. That was Dell's well. It ran while he ran. Some things belong to a season, and then the season closes, and a sensible woman does not stand in the kitchen arguing with it.

So she hauled. Two years of it. Down the hill in the blue dark with the buckets banging her shins, back up with her shoulders burning, through two winters and two Augusts. She did not complain to anybody, because she did not think of it as a hardship. She thought of it as the truth of her life now, and she thought she was being brave about it.

Her nephew Ray came up in the spring of the second year to set a new step on the porch. He carried his toolbox past the buckets by the door twice before he said anything. Then he asked her what the buckets were for, and she told him, and he set the toolbox down and walked out of that house without a word and went down to the pump house.

The breaker had tripped in the ice storm and never been thrown back. He pushed it up with his thumb. It took him less than a second.

He hollered up the hill for her to try the tap.

The water came. Cold and hard and loud in the sink, the same as the first evening. Corinne stood there with her hand on it and did not turn it off for a long while. She was sixty-eight, and she cried into that sink the same way she had at twenty-five, and for the same reason and not a different one. The water had never stopped being hers. It had never stopped at all. A breaker had been off, and she had been carrying.

The breaker was off, not the well

I am not going to dress this up. There has been enough of that since the funeral. What Corinne decided at that dry tap is the same thing you decided somewhere between the casseroles and the paperwork: that the good years were his, and the kindness came in through him, and now that he is gone the arrangement has quietly closed.

Nobody said it to you. You would never have said it out loud. It just settled, the way silt settles, and now you live under it and call it realism.

So let us go and read the actual sentence God wrote about His own kindness, because it says something about its length that changes the whole shape of your kitchen.

Know therefore that the LORD thy God, he is God, the faithful God, which keepeth covenant and mercy with them that love him and keep his commandments to a thousand generations.Deuteronomy 7:9

Read the measurement at the end of it. A thousand generations. Not a lifetime, not a marriage, not the good stretch between two hospitals. Moses is standing in front of a people about to walk into a hard country and he does not hand them a mood. He hands them a number so large that no family has ever run long enough to test it.

You are standing inside a kindness that never had a closing date written on it anywhere. I am not offering you that as comfort, I am reading it to you off the page: Deuteronomy 7:9 calls Him the faithful God who keeps covenant, and the Holy Spirit is the one taking a line written for a whole nation in a desert and setting it down in one quiet kitchen where a woman lives on her own now. His faithfulness did not come in through your husband. It came through Himself, and it goes out the same way.

A thousand generations is nobody's wages

Now, a careful reader stops at the middle of that verse, and I want you to stop there with me, because it is the place this article could go wrong and I am not going to let it.

With them that love him and keep his commandments. If you read that as terms, you will spend the rest of your life auditing yourself and you will never once look up. So do the arithmetic Moses is doing. A thousand generations is somewhere north of twenty thousand years of people. Nobody's loving has run that long. Nobody's obedience has. The number is far too big to be a wage, which is exactly why he put it there: it tells you whose faithfulness is actually holding the thing up, and it is not the faithfulness of the family in the verse.

You have a covenant that did not lapse when the man who prayed at your table stopped praying at it. Scripture says God does not change, in Malachi 3:6, and the Holy Spirit is not in the habit of quoting a dead man's kindness at you; He quotes God's, which was underneath every one of those forty-one years and was never the thing you were actually drinking from.

Look again at what Corinne got wrong. She was not wrong that Dell dug the well. He did. He sold the walnut and hired the rig and stood behind her at the sink and told her to go on. She was wrong about one thing only: she thought the water came out of Dell.

My covenant will I not break, nor alter the thing that is gone out of my lips.Psalm 89:34

You were not attached to God through your marriage, and you are not detached from Him through your widowhood. God said He does not alter what has gone out of His lips, and that is written in Psalm 89:34, and the Spirit who sealed that promise over you is the same Spirit who is in the room right now with the dishes in the sink and the second pillow still on the bed.

What actually closed

Something did close. I am not going to insult you by pretending otherwise. The bed closed. The chair closed. Sixty years of somebody knowing what you meant before you finished saying it closed, and there is no verse that makes that smaller than it is.

But grief is a poor surveyor. It draws a line around everything that stood near the loss and marks the whole parcel gone. That is why a woman can bury her husband and quietly bury the goodness of God in the same hole, without ever once deciding to.

Right now, as you read, the oath that was sworn over you is standing exactly where it stood the week before he got sick. Lamentations 3:22-23 says His mercies are new every morning and His faithfulness is great, written by a man looking at a burned city, and it is His Spirit who keeps handing that same morning to a woman who has stopped expecting anything from mornings. Nothing about His side of this went into the ground.

The breaker is not the well. What you lost is real, and it is not the source, and it never was.