The Creek Behind My Farm
The girl who went on
Not all of them stayed little. That is the strange gift of doing a thing for forty years in one small town. You teach a child to swim, and then you turn around, and the child is grown and has a child of her own standing on your gravel bar.
The one I think of most is Dana Kessler. Dana came to me the summer she was eight, a serious little thing, all elbows, the kind of child who wants to know why the water holds you up and will not be satisfied with because it does. She took to it like she was built for it. By ten she was swimming the length of that pool and back without stopping. By twelve she was the one I trusted to keep an eye on the little ones while I worked with a scared one on the bar.
Dana grew up and went to the junior college and then on to the nursing school in the city, which is a long way for a girl from Harlan to go. She is a nurse now, has been for better than fifteen years, in the emergency department of the big hospital two counties over. She came back a few summers ago, between shifts, and stood on the bank and watched me work and then waded in to help, in her good clothes, and we taught a wave of five-year-olds together, the two of us, like no time had passed at all.
Afterward she sat with me on Harold’s bench and dried off, and she told me something I have held close ever since. She told me that every time a child comes into her emergency room pulled out of a lake or a pool or a flooded ditch, every single time, she thinks of me, of this creek, of standing waist-deep learning to float on my hand. She said she went into that work because of this water. She said, Mrs. Ruth, do you have any idea how many children are not in my emergency room because of what you did down here. Do you have any idea.
I did not. I do not. You cannot count a thing like that. You cannot count the children who did not drown. There is no number for it, no sign you can put up, no ledger. It is the opposite of a count. It is all the funerals that nobody in this county ever had to hold, forty years of empty churches on terrible afternoons that never came.
Dana is a part of why those afternoons never came. And so are the three or four hundred others I taught, because a good share of them grew up and taught their own children a thing or two about the water, and watched them a little closer at the lake, and I will never know the half of it, and that is as it should be. You do not do it for the knowing.