Only now, in the middle of that pasture, the sunlight flashed off water.
For a few seconds, my mind refused to understand what my eyes were seeing. I stopped the truck with one boot still hovering over the brake and stared through the dusty windshield. It looked like a mirage at first, one of those heat tricks Alabama can play on a man in August when the air is thick and the horizon shimmers. But mirages don’t have cut banks. Mirages don’t have raw red clay piled in mounds. Mirages don’t have excavator tracks carved deep enough to hold yesterday’s rain.
I killed the engine and listened to it tick itself quiet.
The pasture below me had been opened up like somebody had taken a blade to it. A wide basin stretched across nearly two acres of land that had been mixed hardwood and grass when I left nine days earlier. Water had already gathered in the bottom, brown-blue and still, reflecting the sky like it had every right to be there. The banks had been shaped. Straw had been thrown over the edges. A pipe ran from the direction of my spring, diverting the water that had fed our creek for longer than I had been alive. The spring that my grandfather had cleaned by hand with a shovel and a wheelbarrow. The spring my father used to drink from when he was a boy. The spring my wife and I had once walked to on a hot July evening, back before there was no wife to walk with anymore.
