Ellen Prentiss Campbell

Artesian Springs

    All afternoon Grace and her daughter had waded deep into the blackberry thickets, armored in heavy overalls and work boots against the fierce thorns, lurking snakes, and poison ivy. Sweat dripped down Grace’s back. A grasshopper, drunk with heat, cruised through the air and landed in her hair.

    “Let’s call it a day. We have enough,” she said to Kate over the chirring rasp of the katydids and crickets.

    Grace and Alan had bought the old farm six years ago, for the views. She had grown up spending summers on her grandparents’ farm in Missouri , and wanted that for her children. Alan had indulged her. The house, the original chestnut logs sheathed in clapboard, perched on the crest of a ridge. You could look north from the porch down the meadow and out over the dark green forest to the receding, repeating blue Alleghenies or east to Will’s Knob where at night the tiny red eye of the fire tower blinked. The farm had been in the same family for a hundred years until they came.

    The first summers, they reveled in the space and quiet, so different from their city home in Pittsburgh . Alan wrote while she reclaimed the peonies, roses, and lilacs from years of neglect and a tide of honeysuckle. Their two daughters spent hours in the woods and creek.  At night, after the girls were asleep, she and Alan spread an old quilt on the lawn and lay together, watching fireflies and shooting stars, making love with appetite forgotten since they had children.  And then they went inside to bed, curled up together beneath the carved oak headboard of the antique bed that had come with the house, and fell into deep sleep. Those summers seemed a long time ago, now.

    Last summer their eldest daughter, Frances, had turned fifteen and a flood of hormones invaded her. She was restless and bored, pined for her friends in the city, picked fights with Kate, mooned over the boy from the farm down the road. So this year they had sent her to camp with her best friend. Alan had remained in town, teaching summer school, and joined Grace and Kate at the farm on weekends. Grace had both wanted the respite of separation and hesitated to leave him alone, and he knew it.

    “It’s over. I won’t see her, I promise,” he had whispered across the bed on her last night in Pittsburgh . “What will it take for you to believe me?”  

    “I don’t know,” she had said and rolled away. She still did not know.

    Now, hot, itchy, Grace and Kate pushed out of the brambles and walked back to the house. At the back steps, hidden from the road, they stripped to panties and bras.

    Whispers of breeze blew up the hillside and evaporated the sweat. A wasp buzzed over the buckets of sweet fruit. Grace would make jars of preserves, and freeze some fruit for cobblers and pie. She loved a kitchen fragrant with the steam of cooking fruit; it brought back the childhood summers on her grandmother’s farm in Missouri .  

    “I wish we had an outdoor shower here, like at a beach house,” said Kate. The farmhouse was so old that indoor plumbing had not been added until years after it was built. The unused outhouse still stood behind the lilac hedge in a far corner of the yard. The biggest upstairs bedroom had been converted to a bathroom decades back when running water was piped inside. The best view in the house was to be had from the old claw-foot tub, but there was no shower.

    “You can use my bath oil,” said Grace. Luxurious sandalwood, a conciliatory offering from Alan. She could not yet bring herself to use it.

    “Thanks!” said Kate, running upstairs. Grace heard the bathroom door slam. The girl had become modest and private, hiding the body Grace used to know as well as she knew her own. Grace imagined her now, deep in the tub, warm water lapping over her sharp hipbones, her small, perfect breasts. Kate would soon be in full thrall to adolescence. Already, at home in Pittsburgh , she took long showers, letting the water run until her father called through the door, “Turn it off!”  Already she slept late, the drugged sleep of young bodies in metamorphosis. There was a current of change eddying through the family, a contagious restlessness that had caught Alan, too.

    Grace took her turn bathing after Kate finished. She inhaled the residual sandalwood steam from her daughter’s long bath. Even second hand it was a beautiful fragrance. She toweled dry and inventoried her reflection in the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door. Hair just going gray, but still more blond than ash. Breasts beginning to droop and a little belly acquired since her forty-fifth birthday last year. She sighed and shrugged into the terry cloth robe.

    For dinner they ate blackberry cobbler with vanilla ice cream. When Alan came for weekends, they had regular meals. He needn’t know about their sly rebellion. Grace washed the dishes, Kate dried, and they played Scrabble until bed.

    Grace lay in the big old bedstead with her shade up so that moonlight could stream in the open window with the soft breeze and the buzz of katydids, the plaintive call of whippoorwills. She wanted to call Alan and share the beauty of the silvered night, but the phone worked both ways. Let him call her, if he wanted to.

    Bright sunlight poured in the next morning. She had slept late; the sun was above Will’s Knob. Grace swung her feet onto the cool wood floor, grabbed the cotton kimono from the nail on the closet door, and went to the bathroom. When she turned on the faucet it only hissed and gurgled, dry. She hurried downstairs to try the kitchen sink. No water, not even a rusty red trickle. Everything she counted on was drying up this year. She picked up the phone and called Alan. He answered on the first ring. So at least he was home.

    “There’s no water,” she said.

    “Is the pump working?”

    “It was last night. We didn’t have a storm.” 

    The prior summer the pump had been struck by lightning, burnt out, and replaced.

    “Talk about a money pit. A new well.”

    “I wish you were here.” If he were here he would take charge, calm and reassuring.

    “I’m sorry, but I have a class to teach. Get drinking water in the village, use the cistern for wash water. Ask Guy who he would recommend.”

    “Can’t you come?”

    “What do you think I could do you can’t? Dig a well with my bare hands?”

    Grace hung up. She was surprised by how angry she was, as though the dry well were his fault too, another rent torn in their life. She scooped blackberry cobbler out of the casserole, reserving the last for Kate. The phone rang, Alan calling to apologize. She let it ring and took her breakfast outside. She savored the comfort of the sweet food and sat, rocking and eating, in the porch swing. The morning mist rose in the meadow and hung tangled in the treetops. Two deer stepped out of the forest, head and shoulders breaking through the mist like cartoon animals stepping out of the page of a book. The screen door slammed and the deer bounded away. 

    “There’s no water,” Kate said.

    “I know.”

    “What’s the matter?”

    “I think the well has run dry. I’m going down to the village to get water from the spring, and ask Guy about the well.”

    “I’ll come with you.”

    “Then have something to eat, there’s cobbler. Get dressed.”

    They loaded the big plastic jugs into the back of the station wagon and drove down the ridge road to the village. Grace passed the two bars, the post office, and stopped in front of the general store. There, a spigot ran constantly into an old stone trough. She remembered Alan’s enthusiastic explanation to the girls, “It’s an artesian spring. It doesn’t need a pump. The water’s own internal hydrostatic pressure is pushing it up.” Grace preferred to think of it as a miracle. Cool, pure veins of water rising through rock strata. Water seeking light....

Painting by Kevin Kutz

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