The Creek Behind My Farm

Why I never charged a dime

I did not start teaching right away. I was eleven when Danny drowned, and I was thirty the first June I stood in that water with somebody else’s child on my hand. There were nineteen years in between, and I will not pretend I spent all of them wisely. I spent a good many of them not going near that creek at all. I married Harold. We buried my folks. I thought I had put it behind me the way you are supposed to.

But you do not put a thing like that behind you. You only get better at carrying it where it does not show.

What changed me was a thing I heard at the feed store, the summer I was thirty. A family three roads over had lost a boy in a farm pond. Not my creek, not my doing, nothing to do with me at all, a different family and a different water. But I stood there by the seed corn and I heard the women talking low about that poor mother, and something in me came all the way loose that had been working loose for nineteen years.

I thought, there is a safe piece of water behind my own house. The safest water in this county. And there are children in this town who cannot swim, the way my brother could not swim, and some day the creek or the pond or the quarry is going to take one of them on a hot afternoon when somebody turns their back. And I know how to stand in water and hold a child up. I could not hold Danny up. But I am a grown woman now, and I could hold these.

That was the whole of my reasoning. I never charged a dime because you do not charge for the thing that is keeping you alive. The children thought I was teaching them. The mothers thought I was being kind. Harold knew, a little, but even Harold never knew the whole size of it. The truth is I needed that water full of living children more than any one of them ever needed the lesson. Every June that I did not lose a child was a June I could stand to live through. Every little one who learned to float on my hand and came up grinning was Danny, in a way I could never have explained to anybody and never tried to. I was not saving them. They were saving me, over and over, forty summers running.

I told the Lord once, standing waist-deep in that cold water with my feet gone numb and a child kicking and laughing in my arms, I told Him, this one too. You took Danny, and I understand that I will never understand it, but I am going to keep this one, and that one, and the next one, and every single one You send down that bank to me, for as long as I can stand up in this creek. And He let me. Forty years, He let me, and never took a single one.