his palm, his face intent and listening-like under his bandaged eyes.
Then his fingers were quiet and his face turned toward Merry. He got up and took the two steps to the porch- pen. He reached for Merry, his face turned to me. I moved closer and he touched my wrist. I lifted Merry out of the pen and put her on the porch. I lifted the pen, which was just a hollow square of wooden rails fastened together, and set it up on the porch, too.
Timmy sat down slowly on the spot where the pen had been. He scraped the dirt into a heap, then set it to one side and scraped again. Seeing that he was absorbed for a while, I took Merry in to be cleaned up for dinner and came back later to see what Timmy was doing. He was still scraping and had quite a hole by now, but the dirt was stacked too close so that it kept sliding back into the hole. I scraped it all away from the edge, then took his right arm and said, “Time to eat, Timmy. Come on.”
He ate and went back to the hole he had started. Seeing that he meant to go on digging, I gave him a big old spoon Merry sometimes played with and a knife with a broken blade, to save his hands.
All afternoon he dug with the tools and scooped the dirt out. And dug again. By evening he had enlarged the hole until he was sitting in it, shoulder deep.
Mama stood on the porch, sagging under the weight of Merry who was astride her hip and said, “He’s ruining the front lawn.” Then she laughed. “Front lawn! Ruining it!” And she laughed again, just this side of tears.
Later that evening, when what cooling-off ever came was coming over the ranch, we heard the jingle of harness and then the creak of the hayrack and the plop of horses’ hooves in the dust.
Father was home! We ran to meet him at our gate, suddenly conscious of how out-of-step everything had been without him. I opened the gate and dragged the four strands wide to let the wagon through.
Father’s face was dust-coated and the dust did not crease into smiles for us. His hugs were almost desperate. I looked into the back of the wagon, as he and Mama murmured together. Only half the barrels were filled.
“Didn’t we have enough money?” I asked, wondering how people could insist on hard metal in exchange for life.
“They didn’t have water enough,” said Father. “Others were waiting, too. This is the last they can let us have.”
We took care of the horses but left the water barrels on the wagon. That was as good a place as any and the shelter of the barn would keep it-well, not cool maybe, but below the boiling point.
It wasn’t until we started back to the house that we thought of Timmy. We saw a head rising from the hole Timmy was digging and Father drew back his foot to keep it from being covered with a handful of dirt.
“What’s going on?” he asked, letting his tiredness and discouragement sharpen his voice.
“Timmy’s digging,” I said, stating the obvious, which was all I could do.
“Can’t he find a better place than that?” And Father stomped into the house. I called Timmy and helped him up out of the hole. He was dirt-covered from head to heels and Father was almost through with his supper before I got Timmy cleaned up enough to come inside.
We sat around the table, not even reading, and talked. Timmy sat close to me, his fingers on my wrist.
“Maybe the ponds will fill a little while we’re using up this water,” said Mama, hopelessly.
Father was silent and I stared at the table, seeing the buckets of water Prince and Nig had sucked up so quickly that evening.
“We’d better be deciding where to go,” said Father. “When the water’s all gone-” His face shut down, bleak and still, and he opened the Bible at random, missing our marker by half the book. He looked down and read, “‘For in the wilderness shall waters break out, and streams in the desert.’” He clapped the book shut and sat, his elbows on each side of the book, his face buried in his two hands, this last rubbing of salt in the would almost too much to bear.
I touched Timmy and we crept to bed.
I woke in the night, hearing a noise. My hand went up to the cot and I struggled upright. Timmy was gone. I scrambled to the door and looked out. Timmy was in the hole, digging. At least I guess he was. There was a scraping sound for a while then a-a wad of dirt would sail slowly up out of the hole and fall far enough from the edge that it couldn’t run down in again. I watched the dirt sail up twice more, then there was a clatter and three big rocks sailed up. They hovered a little above the mound of dirt then thumped down-one of them on my bare foot.
I was hopping around, nursing my foot in my hands, when I looked up and saw Father standing stern and tall on the porch.
“What’s going on?” He repeated his earlier question. The sound of digging below stopped. So did my breath for a moment.
“Timmy’s digging,” I said, as I had before.
“At night? What for?” Father asked.
“He can’t see, night or light,” I said, “but I don’t know why he’s digging.”
“Get him out of there,” said Father. “This is no time for nonsense.”
I went to the edge of the hole. Timmy’s face was a pale blur below. “He’s too far down,” I said. “I’ll need a ladder.”
“He got down there,” said Father unreasonably, “let him get out!”
“Timmy!” I called down to him. “Father says come up!”
There was a hesitating scuffle, then Timmy came up! Straight up! As though something were lifting him! He came straight up out of the hole and hovered as the rocks had, then he moved through the air and landed on the porch so close to Father that he stumbled back a couple of steps.
“Father!” My voice shook with terror.
