The Well That Held All Summer
The fence
That is where I woke up, and where I went out with my husband’s boots on, down the lane, through the mud, with the dog.
Now I will tell you what was on the fence.
Along the bottom strand of the wire, starting at the cattle guard and running north toward Eula’s corner, for the length of a good city block, there was a row of containers. They had been set down one beside the other on the wet grass, all the same distance apart, like pews. Every one of them was full to the brim with brown water.
The first was a Folgers can, the same kind that held my spare capacitor, with a wire handle. The next was a blue enamel stockpot with the lid on, and I knew that pot because I have eaten Joanne Speer’s chili out of it at three funerals. The next was a gallon pickle jar from the church kitchen. The next, two white five-gallon buckets, scrubbed, side by side. They were the same two buckets Graciela had carried to my back door on the fourth of June, and the water in them had a leaf floating on it.
A galvanized pail, dented, with a rope bail. I knew it too. Hobart has carried that pail to his barn every morning for sixty years.
A blue plastic barrel from the Brunners’ pickup, filled halfway, because a barrel full is more than a man can carry. A plastic milk jug with the top cut off, with a pattern of little stars drawn on the side in purple marker.
And near the end, a Ball jar, quart size, with a square of yellow gingham tied over the mouth with a rubber band. A grandson must have filled that one, because Eula Pickens does not walk any further than her own mailbox these days. But the gingham was from her kitchen.
Each container held the same thing. Plum Thicket Creek had come up in the night, a foot deep in the channel, running, and sometime between two o’clock and a quarter to five, on the first morning that water had moved in that creek bed since the end of May, every household on Rock Chapel Road had gotten out of bed in the dark and the rain and walked down to the water in its boots, and filled whatever it owned, and carried it up the hill to my fence. Half a mile, in the mud.