Coronas.”
“It is close enough for me to find,” said Timmy. “Will you wait?”
“Until our water is gone,” said Father. “And until we have decided where to go.
“Now it’s time for bed.” Father took the Bible from the stack of books. He thumbed back from our place to Psalms and read the “When I consider the heavens” one. As I listened, all at once the tight little world I knew, overtopped by the tight little Heaven I wondered about, suddenly split right down the middle and stretched and grew and filled with such a glory that I was scared and grabbed the edge of the table. If Timmy had come from another planet so far away that it wasn’t even one we had a name for-! I knew that never again would my mind think it could measure the world-or my imagination, the extent of God’s creation!
I was just dropping off the edge of waking after tumbling and tossing for what seemed like hours, when I heard Timmy.
“Barney,” he whispered, not being able to reach my wrist.
“My cahilla-You found my cahilla?”
“Your what?” I asked, sitting up in bed and meeting his groping hands. “Oh! That box thing. Yeah, I’ll get it for you in the morning.”
“Not tonight?” asked Timmy, wistfully. “It is all I have left of the Home. The only personal things we had room for-“
“I can’t find it tonight,” I said. “I buried it by a rock. I couldn’t find it in the dark. Besides, Father’d hear us go, if we tried to leave now. Go to sleep. It must be near morning.”
“Oh yes,” sighed Timmy, “oh, yes.” And he lay back down. “Sleep well.”
And I did, going out like a lamp blown out, and dreamed wild, exciting dreams about riding astride ships that went sailless across waterless oceans of nothingness and burned with white hot fury that woke me up to full morning light and Merry bouncing happily on my stomach.
After breakfast, Mama carefully oiled Timmy’s scabs again. “I’m almost out of bandages,” she said.
“If you don’t mind having to see,” said Timmy, “don’t bandage me again. Maybe the light will come through.”
We went out and looked at the dimple by the porch. It had subsided farther and was a bowl-shaped place now, maybe waist-deep to me.
“Think it’ll do any good to dig it out again?” I asked Father.
“I doubt it,” he answered heavily. “Apparently I don’t know how to set a charge to break the bedrock. How do we know we could break it anyway? It could be a mile thick right here.” It seemed to me that Father was talking to me more like to a man than to a boy. Maybe I wasn’t a boy any more!
“The water is there,” said Timmy. “If only I could ‘platt’-” His hand groped in the sun and it streamed through his fingers for a minute like sun through a knothole in a dusty room. I absently picked up the piece of stone I had dumped from the bucket last evening. I fingered it and said, “Ouch!” I had jabbed myself on its sharp point. Sharp point!
“Look,” I said, holding it out to Father. “This is broken! All the other rocks we found were round river rocks. Our blasting broke something!”
“Yes.” Father took the splinter from me. “But where’s the water?”
Timmy and I left Father looking at the well and went out to the foot of the field where the fire had been. I located the rock where I had buried the box. It was only a couple of inches down-barely covered, I scratched it out for him.
“Wait,” I said, “it’s all black. Let me wipe it off first.” I rubbed it in a sand patch and the black all rubbed off except in the deep lines of the design that covered all sides of it. I put it in his eager hands.
He flipped it around until it fitted his two hands with his thumbs touching in front. Then I guess he must have thought at it because he didn’t do anything else but all at once it opened, cleanly, from his thumbs up.
He sat there on a rock in the sun and felt the things that were in the box. I couldn’t tell you what any of them were except what looked like a piece of ribbon, and a withered flower. He finally closed the box. He slid to his knees beside the rock and hid his face on his arms. He sat there a long time. When he finally lifted his face, it was dry, but his sleeves were wet. I’ve seen Mama’s sleeves like that after she has looked at things in the little black trunk of hers.
“Will you put it back in the ground?” be asked. “There is no place for it in the house. It will be safe here.”
So I buried the box again and we went back to the house.
Father had dug a little, but be said, “It’s no use. The blast loosened the ground all around and it won’t even hold the shape of a well any more.”
We talked off and on all day about where to go from here, moneyless and perilously short of provisions. Mama wanted so much to go back to our old home that she couldn’t talk about it, but Father wanted to go on, pushing West again. I wanted to stay where we were-with plenty of water. I wanted to see that tide of Time sweep one century away and start another across Desolation Valley! There would be a sight for you!
We began to pack that afternoon because the barrels were emptying fast and the pools were damp, curling cakes of mud in the hot sun. All we could take was what we could load on the hayrack. Father had traded the wagon we came West in for farm machinery and a set of washtubs. We’d have to leave the machinery either to rust there or for us to come back for.
Mama took Merry that evening and climbed the hill to the little grave under the scrub oak. She sat there a long time with her back to the sun, her wistful face in the shadow. She came back in silence, Merry heavily sleepy in her arms.
After we had gone to bed, Timmy groped for my wrist.
“You do have a satellite to your earth, don’t you?” he asked. His question was without words.
“A satellite?” Someone turned restlessly on the big bed when I hissed my question.
