The Creek Behind My Farm

A whole summer to get her in

Then there was Birdie.

Her real name was Fay Dittmer, but her daddy called her Birdie because she was so small and quick, and the name stuck. Birdie was the hardest child I ever taught, and I taught her the longest, a whole summer, all six weeks and then some, because Birdie did not just fear the water. Birdie hated it. She had decided, somewhere in that stubborn little heart, that the water was her enemy, and a child who has decided a thing is harder to move than a child who is only afraid.

I did not push her. I never pushed any of them. But I did not give up on her either, and that is a different thing. Every Tuesday and every Saturday, all June and into July, Birdie Dittmer came down to that creek and sat on the gravel bar with her arms crossed and her chin out, and every Tuesday and every Saturday I sat right down beside her and let her hate it at her own speed.

We made a deal, Birdie and me. She did not have to swim. She only had to come. All she had to do was show up at the water and be near it, and she could do whatever she wanted once she got there. So she came. She came and she sat and she glared at that creek like it had wronged her, which, I came to understand, in her mind it had, because a cousin of hers had had a bad scare in a river the summer before and Birdie had seen it.

It was the last week of July, long after the other children had finished and gone home for the summer, just me and Birdie and the cottonwoods, when she stood up off that gravel bar all on her own, and walked down the slope, and waded out to her waist, and turned around and looked at me with those fierce little eyes, and said, Fine. Teach me.

I taught her. It took the rest of that summer and most of the next, but I taught Birdie Dittmer to swim, and she grew up to be a woman who is not afraid of one single thing in this world that I have ever been able to find. She runs the grain elevator in Harlan now. She is the one who called me, off the park board, about naming the water. She is the one who told the mayor the sign was already made, because she had made it herself, in the elevator shop, out of a piece of good oak, and she would not let anybody talk her out of it.

I think about Birdie when I think about the ones who did not want to be saved. Sometimes the saving is just sitting beside somebody at the edge of the thing they are afraid of, for as long as it takes, until the day they stand up on their own and wade in.