-Rain-
My return home from college in 2013 was marred by uncertainty and melancholy. My family had endured two deaths in late spring, and the coming months of farmwork were jeopardized by two factors: Papaw’s health and weekly torrents of rain. Papaw underwent lower back surgery in the winter for two slipped discs in his spine. While his spinal issues were fixed, the procedure left him with neuropathy in his feet. His movement was severely impacted and his days were filled with pain and constant discomfort.
Then there was the rain.
The rain in the summer of 2013 filled the cattlemen on my road with dread. Throughout June and July, it rained every week, and many weeks, it rained every day. The Appalachian mountains are notorious for their “gullywashers” in summer. These short-lived storms are capable of dropping multiple inches of rain in under 30 minutes before dissipating, and leave steaming, swamped hayfields in their wake. Following these mountain storms, the sky often clears to reveal a glowering sun that ignites the humid air without drying the land. When conditions are right, the higher elevations might be stricken with multiple storms in a single day, while the valleys below remain parched for rain. That summer, the old cattlemen in my county found no help from the weatherman; it was impossible to predict the best time to cut hay. Many farmers saw their grass grow exponentially with the constant rain, and were forced to mow in the midst of bad weather. They did so only to see their hay rot in the fields due to the lack of dry conditions. I remember driving the county roads all summer and seeing the constant sight of bitter hay blackening in the fields for weeks on end. The air was sour, the hay was sour, and the rain poured that summer.
Papaw found himself severely handicapped by the compound problem of the foul weather and his physical condition. He is 6’3 and a broad, big man. He was 70 years old then, and age had done little to diminish his stature or his strength. But that summer laid him low. Some days the sun would shine and he was unable to rise from his chair to work. Other days, he felt well enough to work and moved the tractors and equipment in position at a field, only to be foiled by three days of sequential rain. Other men on the road worked to help him, and I would do tractor work when I was able, but all the help in the world meant nothing to the fickle weather. So, as the summer got on, I watched him sink into an uncharacteristic despair. Some days, he did not leave his bed. I recall driving by his house to my job in town and seeing him sitting still as a gravestone in his open garage, just watching the rain fall.
-The Account of the Springs-
I was journaling heavily at that time in my life, and I noted a moment in late June that signaled a change in him. I had gone down to his house to visit with him; my Mamaw was out of the house on an errand, and I found Papaw lying in his bed in the dark. I sat on the side of the bed with a cup of coffee and tried to hold a conversation with him, but he offered little in the way of reciprocation. After lamenting the weather or discussing the comings and goings of different family members, we would go quiet and surrender to the ambience of rain at the window mingling with Fox news.
He broke this silence with a question. He asked me, “Have I ever told you about the springs? The indian spring. Have I ever told you about that, son?”
I answered no. He sat up in bed and began to recant stories from his boyhood of three rock springs. Two of the springs he described as pouring forth from limestone jutting from the ground. Their water never ran dry, even during droughts, and the springs formed natural basins from which one could drink or wash his face. Then there was the Indian Spring. Papaw described it as “a box made of cut stone built onto a springrock that sat on top of the ground.” He said the box was so deep inside, that he and his brothers would store “jars of milk and a loaf of bread” in its interior to chill while they worked the fields. When they were finished, they would return to the Indian Spring and “drink ice-cold milk and the best water you ever had.” I asked him why it was named the Indian Spring, and he replied “because it was old when our people got here, and nobody knowed who cut the rock and built it. When people in them days found anything old that weren’t some tool or obvious thing, they just figur’t indians made it.” His account of the springs left me terribly curious; I had roamed and worked the hilly acreage all my life, yet I had never seen any structure matching his descriptions on the property.
I told him as much, and he replied “You ain’t seen em’ because they cain’t be seen; they been buried for years. The woods took em’ back. They been under the ground for a long time.”
There was an energy to his voice as he recounted stories of the springs. My Papaw is a natural story teller in the mode of old mountain men; nothing in the waking world is too ordinary to spark a yarn or old memory. A woman’s laughter in a restaurant might trigger a tale, just as the howling wind might, or a finch posturing on a fence post on a spring morning. But I had never heard of these wondrous ‘springrocks’, as he called them. The farm is suffuse with ground springs; they are pieces of ground that stay damp year round. They can be dug up and boxed with a concrete reservoir, whereby the water can then be tapped and piped to wherever it is needed. Everyone on the property uses spring water, but I had never seen a spring remotely resembling the springrocks Papaw was now describing to me.
They seemed to be nodes of special memory to him, as their presence was bound up with tales of his boyhood and a way of life that no longer existed. I imagined that his physical isolation and the constant rain had dredged them up from his deep memory. As his telling slacked, I asked him plainly about why he had chosen now to tell me about these springs. He answered me flatly: “It occurred to me I needed to tell you b’fore I die. Ain’t nobody after me that’d remember where they are.”
Papaw then asked me if I’d like to dig out the springs. He’d accompany me to point out their locations, but I’d have to to walk the woods and do the digging myself. “I’d just like to see em’ again, I don’t really know why,” he said. “Seems all of a sudden like I’m thirstin’ after that cold water.”
-The Raincrow-
After our talk, the rain continued to fall and the cattle work continued to be a struggle. I told him the first day he had time, we’d ride out to find a springrock. It was all Papaw could talk about. There was a vigor about him that was utterly absent at the start of summer. It is difficult to describe this change without falling into cinematic cliché, but the memory of the springrocks, and the ambition to see them unearthed again, moved something in him that had been dormant since his surgery. He began to call me nearly every day, and he was jovial again; his booming laughter and jokes returned, and the entire family took notice. It had been unspoken, but my family had dreaded that his condition would continue to lame him until he languished in a hospital, where he might succumb to despair and die. His father, my Great Grandpaw, famously refused treatment for a minor fluid buildup in his chest and died in his sleep the day after Thanksgiving. Grandpaw was 98 years old when he passed on. He had lived most of his life with a lame leg that he acquired from a sawmill explosion when he was 14 years old. He was splitting wood the day before he died. I have memories of him from when I was a young boy. He was a tall, imposing man, whose smile was so uncommon and so faint, that a stranger might have mistaken it for a brief bout of palsy. The family remembers Grandpaw’s strange urgency well that fall; he was insistent that as many people as possible attend Thanksgiving at his house. Papaw was the last person he confided in before he died. Grandpaw told him that he’d had a dream in which a bright light appeared in the corner of his room. After he looked at it, he became engulfed by it, and glimpsed heaven before waking. Grandpaw told Papaw sometime after his dream that he ‘was ready to head home’. Even though he was of good body and good mind, Papaw said that he had simply grown tired of living. Grandpaw chose to die on his terms; myself and my family quietly feared that summer that Papaw would do the same.
While the talk of the springrocks reinvigorated him, working in the hay continued to prove difficult in the relentless rain. As we sat together one day watching the rain, he asked me if I knew about the raincrow. I told him I had heard of it, but I didn’t know anything about it. He told me when the rain dies down, we’d probably hear one. Sure enough, the steady rain slowed to a mist, and a ‘hooo-ooooohhhh’, ‘hooooo-oooooohhh’ issued from a stand of trees nearby. “That’s the ol’ raincrow,” Papaw said. I recognized the birdcall immediately. It was the sonerous call of a mourning dove. This, like the springrocks, was new to me. Papaw then explained that if one heard the raincrow during the evening, he could bet his money that it would rain the next day. However, if one heard the raincrow around dawn, it was an omen that rain would follow later that afternoon or in the night. “I tell you ‘h’wat. Let’s trust the raincrow over the weatherman for this crazy hay, ‘cause the weatherman ain’t done nothin’ but lie since May. I’ll call you about every mornin’. You tell me if you hear’d the raincrow and I’ll tell you if I hear’d it. If we ain’t heard it, then by the Lord, we’ll mow. If we heard it, then we’ll do what we can, but we won’t do no mowin’. You’re educated, what’d you think about that?” I told him that it seemed like a good idea as any, and I asked him where he learned about the raincrow. “Morma b’lieved in it. She b’lieved in all them signs and omens. She had had one for just about anything you could think of.” He chuckled slightly as he trailed off at the thought of my Great Grandmother.
So, in late June, we began listening for the raincrow. Papaw would call with his morning briefing, and I would answer the phone to his voice inquiring, “Did’ya hear the raincrow this mornin'?” If we had not heard it, we would make preparations to mow. If I wasn’t working that particular day, I could expect to hear his old green Toyota grumbling up the gravel of my family’s driveway within 10 minutes. If we had heard it, either one or both of us, we’d watch the sky until about noon and make our decision based on the mood of the weather. We worked more, and Papaw took chances. As the weeks began to pass, whether by the old ways or mere chance, the raincrow guided us to success. I did not tabulate averages of raincrow days vs non-raincrow days in correlation to daily rainfall, but it seemed to us that the mourning dove’s song proved far more accurate than the weatherman. Some days, the raincrow sang on a hot, clear morning, and Papaw would mow a small field and have the hay up just as the sky blackened with storm above the mountain in the afternoon. Papaw found our method amusing, and treated it as a last ditch game to keep his sanity among the uncertainty. He had never been one to believe much in the signs, but he never took them for granted when they worked in his favor. He maintained an instinctive sense of synchronicity, and took it’s manifestations as sign enough for action. He viewed the summer’s freak rain as an aberration, a natural omen; it seemed fit to him that one omen should be countered with another, and one’s actual belief in the omens themselves, however inconsistent, had little bearing on their logic. They were riddles to be solved when normalcy broke down, and were a kind of natural logic that could be followed to success , if one possessed both the memory of the old wisdom and the wit to seek it in the skein of the living world.
And so it went on that way for the remainder of the summer. Slowly, the fields were cleared and the hay put away. The mowing was incredibly late, but we lost no more hay as we followed the raincrow’s song.
-The Springrock by the Tedder House-
On a bitterly humid Saturday in mid-July, we rode to the top of Hall Hill, and then down into the clefted ridge until we reached a stand of pines. A creek runs the woods and flows past the old Tedder house, which is one of several abandoned homesteads on the farm property.
The Tedders were cousins, and they lived across the creek from ‘The Old house’, which is what the family calls my Papaw’s original home. The story of the Tedders and their house echoes the plight of many Appalachians in the mid- 20th century. The parents were subsistence farmers and maintained a household of many children, who grew up alongside my Papaw and his brothers and sisters. When most of the Tedder sons came of age, they migrated to Michigan and New Jersey, following the exodus of many Appalachian men who sought opportunity in the factories of the burgeoning automobile industry in the North. Many brought their families with them. While it was very common for these men to return home when they had made their money, just as many remained in the North and the mid-West, choosing instead to leave the mountains forever. The Tedder offspring fell into the latter category, and when their parents died, the house was abandoned and the land sold.
The house still stands. Though the roof is now caving in and the front porch is long rotted away, the house is stoutly built of hewn logs and hand-cut boards. As a boy, I weathered out a thunderstorm in the house and watched a black bear cross the creek and disappear into the rainy pines. In another long-gone summer, I ate blackberries in the log framed doorway as a red-tail hawk devoured a black snake in a dead pine across that same creek. The hawk did not heed me as it stripped the meat from the snake, and I remember the carcass swinging like a reddened party streamer from a stilled, stony pine limb. Just about every year, a family of rabbits emerges from beneath an old tire half sunk in the ground where the front yard once was. The pines themselves lend an ancient air of sylvan decay to the long abandoned house, but in truth, the house is much older than any of the trees in the adjacent woods. The house was likely built sometime in the 1920’s, but was abandoned by the 60’s. Thus the house decayed, and the surrounding land fell fallow. The house itself was used for farm storage by my Papaw and his brothers, and was even used to hang tobacco for a time. The land was consolidated into pasturage for the cattle, but where the cows did not linger, trees soon appeared. In most overgrown areas on the farm, the familiar hardwood canopy of birch, beech, poplar, maple, Ash, and white oak reigns; but white pine and the creeping, all consuming rhododendron claimed the Tedder place. Together, they weave a dusky and barren wood, where lime green moss and small colonies of lycopodium overgrow rotting stumps and the crumbling red ruins of fallen pines. Snake skins sway in the wind now from the tobacco poles, where tobacco itself has not hung in some 30 years. When we arrived at the Tedder house that day, the creek sang quietly as it wound it’s way out of the pines, which were gravely still in the heavy air.
After we parked, Papaw told me to follow the creek up the woods until I came to a concourse of two smaller streams:
“Cut right at the branch. They’ll be a little gully, a little split in the hill there. Laurel bursches’ve growed all over the top of it. Walk all the way in it and start diggin’ into the side of the hill. Once you strike rock, you’ve found it.”
I took a shovel from the truck and started up the creek.
It began to rain as I came to the branch, and as I turned right into the gully, it seemed impossible there could be a man-high stone concealed in the drab side of the hill. As I dug, I found myself beset by heavier rain, but I was determined to hit solid rock. After about twenty minutes of good digging, the shovel blunted solid stone. I dug around the area until I exposed a flat face of rock, which showed itself about waist-level off the ground. I stood shin deep in mud at this point, and I knew excavating the whole stone, if it was indeed the springstone, would be hard-going in the downpour. I made my way back to Papaw in his truck. He asked me if I hit rock, and I told him what I found. “That basin is probably about chest-high”, he told me. “It’s like a pretty little sink cut right out of the rock. Once you find that, you’ll see directly where the water comes out.”
We sat in the truck and drank softdrinks as the rain poured on, and Papaw told me stories of the old days. The pine woods didn’t exist, and the hill it now smothered was covered in grass and wild flowers. The springstone poured it’s water into the creek as a third branch, and children from multiple families dammed themselves a small swimming hole where they’d play. As he spoke, he wandered in memory away from the springrock and to other parts of the farm; there were long gone farmsteads, tobacco patches and beanfields now buried under pasturage, roads long given up to rhododendrons, green briar, and wild grape. He described a place I had never seen, a peopled land that was shaped by the work and the living of it’s inhabitants. Papaw has always been a story teller, but that afternoon he spoke as a cartographer might over a new map he was drawing. The lost geography of his memory was being dredged up alongside the limestone spring by the Tedder place; it was a world so recently gone fallow, made ancient by the voiceless strength of absence and time.
A few days later, when the land had reasonably dried out, I took a shovel and a 5 gallon bucket and walked from my house one morning to the springrock. When I returned to the gulley, my eyes immediately sought the bare rock I exposed a few days prior. A thin trickle of water glided down it’s dark surface. Though the rain had ceased for a few days, the gulley was stilled choked with the mud of my previous excavation. I heaped it away with the bucket to clear myself a standing area, and I set to work again with the shovel. I dug around the area of exposed rock, shifting away piles of loam, and then viscous clay. The outline of a large jutting stone soon appeared from the side of hill. Water began to run as I dug deeper and I soon found myself inundated again in dark, sucking mud. Remembering Papaw’s description of the basin, I worked at the upper region of the stone. I began to encounter the twisting roots of the nearby rhododendrons, which made the air musky with their oily scent as I chopped them away. I worked hard now to clear the debris, and a sense of discovery drove me on into the afternoon. Eventually, a great clump of dark clay gave way to a gout of water that chilled me for an instant as it rushed down the rock and onto my legs. As the water slowed, it pooled in an indention within the rock. I cast the shovel aside and cleared the mud and small stones away with my hands; sure enough, a rounded basin appeared as the last clumps of sopping dross came free. The basin was fed by three gashes in the living rock, which fed out water in small, clear streams. As the basin refilled, the spring began to sing with that hushed song of hidden water.
When was the last time my Papaw had seen it? How long ago? Were the pines already sowing their glades over the neglected hills? Who had come there? Who had last drunk from it before it was finally sunk in the earth? The springrock was a reliquary of the farm’s past, and it’s very water the relic which belonged to a landscape of ghosts now collapsed into sumped green earth and the unquiet hollows of the returned woods. The joy I felt from rediscovering the springstone was rivaled only by my reverence for it. It was beautiful to look on, set like a made thing into the gulley. The work of digging it out, and confirming my grandfather’s memory, bound me up with the land beyond practical affection and experience. At last, I washed my hands and face in the basin. I let the water resettle and drank deeply of it. It was cold and sweet with the mineral tang of springwater. I gathered my tools and walked the hills until I reached Papaw and Mamaw’s house. I found Papaw at the kitchen table nursing a cup of coffee and he grinned when I told him about the springrock. He was eager to drive to the Tedder house, so that he might see it himself. After we drank coffee together, we took the truck back to the Tedder place. After we arrived, we leaned on the hood and talked for a few minutes as he worked up the gumption for his walk on the uneven ground of the woods. With a walking stick in each hand, he went forth like a man on skies into the trees. I guided him carefully until we came to the gully. He leaned on his walking sticks and straightened, saying nothing at first. I cannot recall his exact words, but he first spoke about how pretty the spring sounded, and then, how impressed he was at the amount of water that went forth from it. He told me that he’d like to drink from it. I steadied him as he ambled his way through the mud to the spring. I held his walking sticks as bent down and clasped his hands in the water and then raised them to his mouth to drink. He turned to me with a big grin and said, “Boy, that’s good, ain’t it? Just something about it. I cain’t believe all this mud. Looks like it was sunk awful deep.” He fell into reverie again, describing the gone people and the buried landscape.
“Wait’ll you see the indian spring,” Papaw said. “Now that’ll be something when you dig that out. I wanna be with there with you when you bring it up.” I told him we would do it, and we lingered at the springrock a while until we could say no more.
-A Cow Skull and a Ghost Story-
After the day at the springrock, Papaw’s mood transformed entirely. He became more talkative, and his normal vigor returned to him. He still struggled with walking, but his bed-ridden days were behind him. He talked ceaselessly of the indian spring and was eager to see it. His insistence on recovering the springs lent him a strange energy, and he spoke like a man grateful to be alive after facing the prospect of his death. My own thoughts were bent on the remaining springs and their recovery. Between my job, school readings, and farm work, I wandered the woods and the hills as I always had, but something in the land was changed for me now, and I began to understand that the quest of the springs was drawing my Papaw and I together in a fashion that would never be repeated. As the summer drew to a close, I sensed the weight of a true turning point in both of our lives. Papaw was contending with his first dire struggles of old age, and I was making peace with the twilight of my youth. The family land was the pivot on which we both turned, and in the quest for the springs, we each recovered something of ourselves that was fundamentally unknowable to the other. The symbol of the springs was bearing Papaw through his despair, and the work of digging them out had re-tethered me to the land, even as college and the restless ennui of my twenties was pulling me away from it.
It was a dark morning in mid-August when Papaw pulled into the driveway in his John Deere gator. When I came out to greet him, I noticed a shovel and a sledgehammer lying in it’s bed. He said, “Are you fit to go dig out the indian spring with me this mornin’?” I asked him what the hammer was for, and he replied “We’re gonna need to break it out and free the water. You’ll see what I’m talkin’ about.” I shrugged at him and started back in the house for my boots, but out of impatience, I elected to keep my sneakers on. As we made our way down the highway towards the backend of the property, a light rain began to fall. We entered an old red gate and immediately encountered the herd, and Papaw pulled the break and killed the gator. He then cupped his hands and called “Sukathi! Sukathi!” and the cows surrounded us, intent upon Papaw in the driver’s seat. Some of the more tame bessies craned their heads in towards us, and we scratched their ears and necks. The herd diminished back into the pasture in groups, until only a single black angus remained. She was an old cow, and she stayed alongside Papaw, leaning into the gator as he continued to pat her. He smiled and said “This is the ol’ cow that loves me. She’ll foller me just about anywhere.” He’d told me about this cow for years, and as he fell in with the cadence of his familiar accounts of her accompanying him as he drove a tractor or worked in a barn, I just grinned and listened. He started the gator again and she meandered behind us as we plodded up the road. I wondered if she would come with us to the Indian Spring. When I turned back to look for her, I saw that she had returned to the field and was suckling her calf by a clump of purpling thistles.
We drove slowly up the red clay road by the Old House, which was leaning badly, but resisting final collapse. A hedge of hemlocks cast the house in grey shadow as we passed by, and the leaves of several apple trees shivered quietly in the soft rain. We cleared the ridge and came out by a meadow that Papaw calls ‘the far meader’, as it is the last hayfield on the edge of the property. There is something lonesome about this field, though I’ve never been sure of the reason for that feeling. I learned how to ride a four-wheeler on it’s winding slope. And one October, when I was a younger boy, I watched from behind an oak along the field’s upper fence line as two Gobblers bloodied each other as evening fell. We stopped by the field’s gate and Papaw pointed down a steep slope marked by a cow path which disappeared into a wall of trees. “The indian spring is down in there,” he said, easing off the brake as we began our descent. “They used to be a good road going down in there, but it was eat up by the trees a long time ago”. We made our way down slowly, climbing over clumps of thistle and ironweed as we went. I realized then that I had never come down here before. As we struck the remnant of a red clay road, I noticed a cow skull set upon a corner post on the field’s edge. It was clear from the road that it had a hole between it’s eyes. I asked Papaw about it, and he answered “That’s the skull of an old jersey cow I had once. She was like an ol’ pet to me, and I found her dead one day with a bullet square between her eyes. I never figur’t out who shot her, or why. Prob’ly some man huntin’ who thought she was a deer. You know them jersies can look like a deer from far off. When I found her she was too far gone for me to bother moving her, but when she was picked clean, I set her skull up on that post. She’s been settin’ up there since you was a baby.” I didn’t ask him why he had done that. The skull faced downhill towards the trees, which were now hung with rain mist.
We ran the small road out into an overgrown field with a tin-roofed shed. Even though the tin was rusting, the shed was clearly built recently. “That’s Ol’ Carl’s shed,” Papaw told me. Carl was one of Papaw’s mercurial older brothers who gardened on this side of the land. The field itself was hedged in ironweed and field daisies; there was little grazing to be had here for the cows. We stopped by the shed and papaw killed the gator again. The rain ceased, but a faint mist hung about us in the field. It would rain again. As we paused, I knew Papaw was working up a story. He pointed down the field to a dark copse of apple trees and what appeared to be an old road cut into the hill that trailed off into the woods.
“You see them apple trees? They was a little house there when I was boy, but nobody lived in it,” he began. “And that road there? It run down to the main road where the store was; everybody ‘at lived up in here’d take that road to buy their flour, coffee, dry goods, you know. But they’s a story I’ll tell you about that house. They’s a man and a woman ‘at lived there, and the woman never left the house. People talked, as they did, you know, about why that woman never left. The man weren’t particularly mean, but most people seem to think he wouldn’t let her leave. They was already dead when I’s little, but the little house was still there, and my brother and sister told me this tale when I was older. The woman made the kids curious, or maybe scared em’ because anytime they come by the house playin’ or on business, she’d stand at the winder and just watch; wouldn’t hardly wave, and sure wouldn’t holler. She’d just watch you till’ you was gone, and that’s the way she always was. Well, she died one year, and the man left the place. Morma sent Tom and Rose down to the store one mornin’ to get some things, and when they come back, they come by the little house. Rose told Tom she didn’t like the feel of that house, and they didn’t stick around. They used to be a little barn not far up the hill from this shed, and they stopped in at the barn to get some tools or toys one, I don’t remember now; but the important thing is they set their groceries down. When they turned back towards the barn door from rummaging in the back, they saw a woman standing there in the threshold. Ruby and Toll both said she was dark, like she had a shadow on her, but they knew from her shape it was the woman from the house. She was there for a few eye blinks, they said, and then she walked off to one side of the door. Tom and Rose was so scared they climbed out a hatch in the back of the barn, and screamed all the way to the ol’ house. Morma asked what was wrong, and why they didn’t have her groceries, and they told her about the woman. Rose said Morma stood there and thought a minute, and then finally said ‘She probably was just glad to get out of that house and have a look around. I wouldn’t worry too much about her. She ain’t got no reason to be cross with you.’ Morma believed in signs and omens, and she had a work for just about everything. Rose once told me she never figur’t out if Morma was just calming her and Tom down to go and fetch them groceries from the barn, or if she really b’lieved that woman’s ghost could walk around. But I tell you h’wat; Tom didn’t believe in hardly nothin’ but the Lord his whole life, and he swore he saw that woman. And Rose, well, she claimed to see ghosts her whole life. But one thing was sure then: You listened to Morma, whether you believed her or not. But that’s a story about this place, and lookin’ at this field now, noone’d ever know they’s anything here but weeds and grass.”
We looked on at the field a minute more as the sky grew darker above us, and then Papaw turned the key and started the gator. We made our way down another half-gone road until we arrived at the mouth of the creek at the bottom of the hill.
-The Indian Spring-
“Many ground springs find there way down here in this little creek,” Papaw told me as he took up his walking sticks form the gator. The creek cut it’s way through a sump and poured out beneath a barbwire fence into the woods below. The grass around us was verdantly green, and moss grew in brainy clumps here and there. Papaw gestured towards the darkening trees with one of his walking sticks and said, “They’s an old road past that fence that follers this creek into the woods.” Back in them days they was some old trees, but the woods hadn’t yet eat up the road. That other springrock is down that road somewhere, probably buried in the side of the hill. Now, it was like a little water fountain; water bubbled from it in a little ball, and you could just bend over and put your mouth right to it. It always had them big ol’ lizards hanging on it, and they was so tame you could just pet em.’ I asked him about the indian spring. “It’s right over there at the base of that big ol’ laurel bursch.” I saw nothing but a huge rhododendron thicket that had overtaken the hill astride the gulley. There was no sign of any white stone box in the loam or leaf litter beneath it. “Grab that hammer and shovel and let’s get over there,” Papaw said, as he began to navigate the soft ground of the creek bed. When we stood beneath the rhododendron, Papaw looked thoughtfully at the ground for a few minutes as he leaned on his walking sticks. “I believe",” he began, “if you start diggin’ right where the hill starts right, you’ll hit it.” I began to dig tenderly with the shovel, mindful of marring the cut stone of the box. Papaw looked on as I dug, saying nothing. When the shovel blunted stone, I turned and looked at him. He remained still and said “Get at it with your hands, now; see if you can get it to show.” I knelt down and turned the loamy soil away with my hands. There was no clay here, and the soil was stony. Finally I felt a flat surface and began to expose it. When the dirt was clear, an off-white stone showed itself. It was indeed flat. “You found it, boy. That’s the indian spring. It’s been took up in this hill. Clear off the top and then you can get at the sides.”
After a half-hour of careful digging, the Indian Spring emerged; a box made of three keenly cut pieces of off-white stone that were so thinly mortared together, they seemed to be naturally formed. As I cleared the dirt around the box, I observed that it seemed fixed onto the true springstone beneath it, which was composed of the same limestone as the springrock by the Tedder house. What was unclear, however, was how the box itself was fixed to the stone. But for the obvious cutting symmetry that comprised the top slab, the box seemed to be hewn directly into the living rock. The sides of the box were not mortared to the stone, but rather seemed to grow out of from it; it seemed possible that ridges were cut into the limestone to fit the side pieces, but I could not observe any jointing or mortaring daub lines. There was also no water issuing from the spring, and I feared it had gone dry. Papaw said this spring would never go shallow, and he asked told me to finish clearing out the front of the box. I did so, and discovered that the opening was sealed; the mortar’s color suggested it to be a modern instant cement, such as Quikrete. Papaw explained that a few decades prior, his brother Kyle had sealed the spring and planned to pipe the water into a reservoir for a house he was considering building nearby. However, the house was never built and the spring remained sealed. “Take that hammer and knock that old mortar out of there. Just beat on it a little bit and the center, and that oughta bust it loose. Don’t worry about the rock, its worlds tougher than cement.” I did as he asked, and tapped on the cement until I created several splintering cracks down it’s face. Water began to free itself from the weakening cement, and I pulled the sledgehammer back and let it swing like a pendulum into the seal. As it crumbled, water that was cold as snowmelt gushed free from the interior, and soaked my feet through my sneakers. Papaw straighened on his walking sticks, and with a big grin,shouted “Man alive! Would you look at that!” The water was so cold that I felt I could smell it against the muggy air of the August afternoon. Papaw and I watched the water course from the Indian Spring as it rushed to join the creek below. As the runoff slowed, Papaw put his hand on my should and said, “go ahead, ease down there and look into it. See how far you can run your hand back in it.” I got to my knees and peered into the spring. The light allowed me to see the space in the immediate entrance, and I cleared the rest of the cement seal way from the cut rock. The water was clearing rapidly, and silt was settling on the bottom of the interior. There were small ridges of dark stone jutting up from the silt, and I saw two small salamanders splayed out among them. I reached in with my arm lay it in the water. It was impossibly cold, and felt clean and sheer on my skin. I felt around on the silty bottom and discovered several places where the water gushed up from gashes in the living rock. It was deeper inside than the exterior of the box suggested. I imagined quart jars of raw milk sitting inside the spring, the glass going cold in that living water while the sun baked the fields dusty on some long gone summer day. I soon found I could not reach the back of the interior; As I had left the back portion of the indian spring in the hill, It was impossible to know exactly how deep or far back the interior ran. As I never finished digging it out, I’m still uncertain as to where the cut stone ends and the living rock begins.
I got to my feet and turned to Papaw, who had been watching silently. He was bent on his walking sticks as if posing for a tableau against the rainy woods. He had been excited, but his face had now stilled back a lined and thoughtful repose. “It feels to good to see it run again,” he said. I could tell he was slipping into reverie again, and I said nothing. I finally asked him if he wanted to drink from the Indian Spring, and I offered to search out an old Powerade bottle or some other empty container from the floorboards of the gator. He reached towards his back pocket and produced an old long-handled dipper, which looked to be made of hammered tin. He shifted the dipper in his hand, as if feeling the contour of the metal, and said “I’ve had this layin’ around for awhile in the garage, thought I’d bring it today. We use to have ol’ dippers like this hung up around the drinkin’ springs. I cain’t bend down there, but would you fetch me a cupfull?” He handed the dipper to me, and I bent down to the spring, taking care to not disturb the silty bottom as I drew the water. I passed it to him, and he drew the dipper to his mouth and drank from it. Saying nothing, he passed it back to me, and I held it to my own mouth and drank. The water was clean and cold, with a mineral sweetness wholly unlike the springrock of the Tedder house, or the spring water tapped at my family’s house.
There is no water like that of the indian spring; and even if there is better water in the world, it can never be the water of home; it can never taste of what my grandfather and I freed that day. And then I looked up at Papaw again and his eyes were reddened, as if swollen to tears. Perhaps the water dredged something bittersweet up from his memory, an image or a thought he had not contended with for a long time. Maybe too, it was the sheer emotion of the quest fulfilled, with the finding of the springs serving as means of release from the burden of a long and painful summer. But he did not cry; and I have never seen my Papaw cry. Whatever drew him near to tears remains unknowable to me. He seemed so old to me then, and I felt myself share in that oldness with him. We were both strangers in that moment, bound in affinity for gone days that are never coming again.
Wonderful writing. I don't much go in for reading narrative online in this way, but your tale was gripping and beautiful. Thanks for sharing it with us.
Absolutely loved it. Wow 👍🏽