The Well That Held All Summer

On the morning of the hundred and twelfth day, I woke at ten till five and could not think what was wrong.

I lay there with my hand flat on the quilt, trying to find it. The window was open an inch. The air coming through smelled like something I had not smelled since March, wet iron and cut grass and a penny held under the tongue. The tin roof on the pump house was ticking as it drained. Tick, my heeler, was asleep across my ankles with his chin on my shin, and he was not panting.

Then it came to me. It was quiet.

For a hundred and twelve mornings, the first sound of my day had been a truck door. After that, the clank of a tailgate. After that, the slap of a hose coming off the fence, and the long, hollow rush of water going into a tank. I had heard it before my feet touched the floor every single day since the fifth of June, and I had gotten so used to it that the silence woke me up like a shout.

I put on my robe and my husband’s old barn boots and walked out the back door with the dog. Down the lane, a hundred yards of gravel, with the sky in the west gone the color of a bruise that is starting to heal. There was a skin of red mud on the gravel. In the bar ditch, a thread of water the width of my hand was running toward the creek, carrying a feather and a bit of cotton trash.

It had rained in the night. I will tell you about that. I stood on my porch in my nightgown and watched it come, and I will tell you what it sounded like on the pump house roof.

But what I want to tell you first is what I found when I got to the end of the lane, where my mailbox and the cattle guard stand by the road. I put my hand on the mailbox post to steady myself. I stood there a long time, and Tick sat down on my foot. I did not understand what I was looking at.

To tell it the right way, I have to go back to the spring, when we all still thought it was going to be an ordinary dry year.