This Life Is in Your Hands_ One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone - Melissa Coleman [58]
“At Mary and Dick’s, a porch is called a deck,” is what I wanted to tell Mama, running toward the glass door, where I could see her inside the light. Suddenly I was on my back, my forehead pounding, the bright orbs of goats’ eyes exploding in my head. When I opened my own eyes, a circle of penises and noses hung over me.
“She ran into the glass window,” someone said.
“Get a flashlight and shine it into her eyes,” someone called.
“You’ll have a bump,” Papa said, bending over and touching my forehead with his warm hand. “Can you hear me?”
I nodded. Someone was shining a flashlight in my eyes, so I closed them.
“Should we take her to a doctor?” a voice asked.
“She’ll be fine,” Papa said. “I don’t need a doctor to tell me that.”
He carried me inside to look in my eyes in the light. Then Mama picked me up, holding me instead of Heidi for a change, and pretty soon I felt okay.
“I’m hungry,” I said, and soon everyone walked over to the main house to eat. Nigel came and looked at my bump, coming close with his green eyes, ski-jump nose, and thick, sandy-haired bowl cut.
“You thought the window was a door.”
“So.”
“Ha. Ha.”
“Shuddup.”
By the time we headed home in the jeep, everyone had forgotten about my accident.
“These saunas get better every time,” Papa said, humming to himself.
“Yes,” Mama said.
“Plus qu’hier et moins que demain,” Papa said. “More than yesterday and less than tomorrow.”
“I do know that much French,” Mama said. Her voice was little.
I drifted to sleep on the drive, my body spent from the heat of the sauna and collision with the window. When the jeep growled to a stop, there was the safe embrace of Papa’s arms lifting me onto his chest. As he carried me across the farm to the house, my eyes opened to see the stars wheeling overhead—Orion’s Belt, the Seven Sisters, the Big Dipper, Cassiopeia, the thick band of the Milky Way—so bright against the darkness as the waning moon melted into a lump of butter in the black pan of sky.
Again the snow melted, and the waters rose up from the earth.
“I’m going to hire a backhoe to dig an irrigation pond,” Papa announced to Mama one morning, employing the short tone he used to hide discomfort. The summer before there’d been a nasty dry spell, forcing Papa and apprentices to carry water from the well to irrigate the gardens. Even the bicycle-powered water pump and healthy young apprentices were no match for the lack of rain, with helpers pedaling furiously for only a small return in water. If not for convincing the local volunteer fire truck to come irrigate the fields, we’d have lost our biggest moneymaking crop, the sweet corn, to drought.
“People who say, ‘I would like to buy a farm,’ usually have in mind land rather than water,” the Nearings wrote in Continuing the Good Life. “Yet land without water is all but useless. Whether they are thinking of themselves and their family, their farm livestock, their growing crops or their own hour-to-hour and day-to-day needs, they must include water among their basic necessaries. In homesteading the two prime requisites are enough land and an abundance of unpolluted water.”
Most of our water came from the stone-lined well below the house that Helen guided Papa to dig that first spring via her mystical skill with the dowsing rod. Finding water, Papa had learned, was one thing; managing it was another. When he was building the well, the stones that held in the earthen walls loosened and fell out with muddy splashes until he conceded to using Helen’s cement to stabilize them. Once completed, the well had a homemade well sweep for fetching water that the Nearings had seen used abroad. It looked like a giant fishing pole braced on a stand, with another smoothed cedar pole hanging down like the fishing line and a hook for attaching the bucket. You’d pull the pole down and it would push the bucket into the water while at the same time lifting a rock weight attached to the fishing-rod end. When the bucket was full,