Only now, in the midst of that grass, sunlight slipped out of the water.
For a few seconds, my mind refused to understand what my eyes were seeing. I stopped the truck with a trunk still floating on the brakes and looked through the dusty windshield. It looked like a mirage at first, one of those heat tricks that Alabama can play on a man in August when the air is thick and the horizon shines. But the mirages have not cut the banks. Mirages do not have raw red clay stacked on mounds. The mirages have no traces of excavators carved deep enough to contain yesterday’s rain.
I killed the engine and heard it quietly.
The grass beneath me had opened as if someone had carried him a sword. A wide basin stretched across nearly two acres of land that had been hardwood and grass mixed when I left nine days earlier. The water had already gathered in the background, brown blue and still, reflecting the sky as if it had all the right to be there. The benches had been molded. The straw had been thrown at the edges. A pipe ran from the direction of my spring, diverting the water that had fed our stream longer than I had been alive. The spring my grandfather had cleaned by hand with a shovel and a wheelbarrow. The spring my father drank as a child. The spring that my wife and I once walked on a warm July night, back before there was no longer a wife to walk with.
