On a pipeline you test before you weld. Every job, every spread, you weld a test joint in front of the inspector, and they cut it into straps and bend them, and if the metal holds you get a number.
That number goes beside every weld you lay on that job.
The rule on our spreads is a little steel stamp, the low-stress kind with rounded dots instead of sharp edges so it does not start a crack.
You tap it into the pipe a couple of inches from the toe of the weld on the upstream side. Your number, right there in the steel.
It sounds like nothing. It is the most honest thing I know. When a weld fails X-ray, they look at the number and they know whose it is.
When a weld holds for forty years under pressure, the number is still there under the coating, and it is still yours.
I married at twenty-six. He was a frac hand then, a good worker and funny, and for a while it was a good marriage.
We had Vi when I was twenty-seven. She is eleven now and has my dark hair.
We split four years ago. Nobody cheated and nobody hit anybody. We just wore each other down with rotations and money and being tired at the same time.
He moved to a crew in Texas that pays better and works him two weeks on, one off. He sends his support on time.
He met Shawna at a welding supply counter in Williston. She had a little business going with one rig and her brother as the hand.
He helped her finance the second rig the year they married.
I do not hate Shawna. She is thirty-four and works hard, and she is good to my daughter when Vi stays with them.
Vi says she braids her hair better than I do, which is probably true. I braid mine the fast way, to get it under a welding cap.
The call for the tie-ins had come the first week of September, a slow week.
The mainline crews had run on ahead and the tie-in work on the north end had backed up, the hard ones, where the line crossed a coulee and a county road and two old lines at angles nobody liked.
“We need you up there Monday,” the foreman said. He was an older man, a good one, finishing his last stretch before he went home to Montana for the winter. “It’s the crossings. Twenty-some tie-ins. I’ll have Duane meet you out there. Bring Cody.”
Cody Lenz is my helper. He is twenty-four and grew up on a cattle place near Arnegard, and he grinds the cleanest bevel I have ever had handed to me.
He talks the whole drive out and goes quiet as a church the second my hood comes down.
We left the house at five that Monday, Labor Day, with the sun just coming up red along the edge of the breaks.
Pipeliners do not get Labor Day. Vi was asleep. My neighbor would get her to the bus.
The line was a sixteen-inch gathering line, standard wall, coming out of a cluster of wells and running south to a compressor station.
On the north end the ditch ran eight feet deep in places, cut through gumbo that turns to grease when it rains and to powder when it does not.
That stretch it did not rain. The wind came out of the northwest every day at twenty and gusted to thirty-five, and the dust off the spoil pile got into everything.