• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Papa also learned from the Nearings how to make a wooden yoke that fit over the shoulders, with cords hanging down on each side and hooks for buckets. When you shouldered the yoke, it took the weight off your arms, making it easier to carry the heavy five-gallon buckets of water.

Mama looked like an ox in her yoke, with Heidi on her back, as I followed her the quarter mile to a spring in the woods to fill the containers for the sailboat-style hand pump used in the kitchen sink. We used about a bucket of water a day, so every two days the containers needed refilling. Whenever anyone offered help, Mama refused, saying she enjoyed the task. The spring flowed silent and pure down from the “mountain” behind the farm to the ocean, passing through what we called our “enchanted swamp,” and gurgling into a pool formed by a fallen and mossy cedar log that curved from one sphagnum bank to the other. We paused a moment to stare at our reflections in the crystal face of the pool before Mama lowered her bucket in and pulled up quickly.

“Dammit,” she’d said more than once last summer. The spring got so low that the bucket hit the bottom, sending a swirl of organic matter through the water. She waited for the specks to settle so she could fill the second bucket and then, turning our backs on the disruption, we headed up the path. Mama’s shoulders were heavy with the weight of Heidi and the buckets on the yoke, her head bent down to watch the path for roots.

Not long after that it had rained, and the gardens were for the most part saved, but Papa wanted to prevent such a close call from recurring this summer.

“I have to focus on the garden,” Papa said, justifying it to himself as much as Mama. “The backhoe can do in one day what it would take me all year to dig myself.”

The Nearings had a pond with a stream running out to the edge of their garden for ease of irrigation, and local legend was that Scott had dug the pond by hand, a legend that was for the most part true, though he’d certainly had helpers. It never occurred to Scott to get a machine to dig his pond for him; it was what needed to be done and he did it, wheelbarrow load by wheelbarrow load—15,000 total, by Helen’s estimation. It took nearly three years to get it to a good size. Papa used to say he would dig a pond himself, like Scott, but that was no longer an option; he needed water by summer.

“I don’t blame you,” Mama said. “It’s too much work.”

“Yeah,” he said, and they were both quiet. Something about the silence said they were both thinking they were getting a little soft.

Soon enough it was confirmed: the backhoe was coming. I got as excited about the backhoe as we did about the UPS man—both were in the category of “things that came from the outside world.” When the backhoe rolled off the trailer in the customer parking lot, Papa directed it to the mossy area in the stand of cedar trees at the base of the garden. The driver put the claw under the trees to pull them out of the ground, then dug up the earth in mucky scoops and put the soil on a new patch of garden. We watched with wonder as the machine did in minutes what it would have taken Papa months to accomplish, the water rising to fill the hole as if it were dug in sand at the beach.

The pond was muddy at first but eventually became that rusty tea black—the color of rainwater in the barrels where the billy goats were drowned. That pond would be our salvation, bringing water to the dry months of summer. And for a few short years it, too, became a friendly place where Heidi and I liked to play.

Chapter Seven

Tribe

Lissie, Heidi, and Eliot in the garden (Photograph courtesy of the author.)

From the time Heidi was old enough to walk and at last a real companion, age one and a half to my five, I took responsibility for her education in survival. Barefoot training began as soon as the snow melted. She ran after me down the damp sawdust paths of the garden, the tilled soil of the beds, the cool indent of