The leather folder held seventeen recipes, and after the last one Amos told the whole household to flop the book shut and go eat. But the folder was never the whole of the man, and tucked flat against the back cover, held in by an old boot lace, was a sheaf of loose pages that didn’t hold a single recipe. They’re dated, one line apiece at the top, the way a man writes when he’s too tired for decoration. Diary pages. Amos kept no ledger and owed nobody an account of himself, so these little entries are about as close as he ever came to writing his own history down.
This one is dated Monday, August 31, 1903, and the ink is thin in places, the way it goes when a man’s hand is tired and the well bucket’s been up and down all day.
Monday, August 31, 1903
Three weeks without a good rain and the creek’s down to a thread you could step across without wettin your boots much. This morning the well come up muddy, then it come up thin, and by noon it was suckin air. Martha’d already put the word out quiet the way women do, that we wash our face in the same basin and don’t throw the water, and I seen her pour the dish water out on the beans instead of the yard. A dry well puts a hush over a house like a sickbed does.
Amos’s note in the margin, scratched with the stub of pencil: “you don’t know what a man’s got till the well runs dry, and then you find out it was mostly water.”
I took the two oldest boys down with a pick and a spade and we went in the hole. It’s a good well, rock lined and cool down at the bottom, but the bottom aint where the water’s at no more. Dug two feet down through clay that come out in slabs, and the boys hauled it up on the windlass one bucket at a time, forty foot of rope for a bucket of mud. Near dark we hit a ledge of gray rock that rings hollow under the pick. That’s the water, trapped under the shelf, but it aint comin through without a charge, and I aint got powder to waste on a well.
Amos, lower on the page: “a man can set up on top of the ground and think he owns a place clean down to the water. but the rock aint signed no paper, and it don’t care who’s thirsty.”
Tomorrow I’ll break the ledge with a bar and a sledge while it’s cool, and if the Lord’s good it’ll come up sweet enough to drink. Tonight we haul one bucket from the spring down at the branch for the mule and we all sip from the same tin cup. Martha says it tastes better shared. I told her hunger cooks the meal and thirst sweetens the water, and she said that’s just a man’s way of sayin he aint got either one to spare.
