The days that followed were mostly uneventful. I had topped out onto a placid plateau in my battle with myself, perhaps because I had something new to occupy my mind or perhaps it was just a slack place since any emotion has to rest sometime.
However, the wonder of finding Low was slow to ebb. I could sense his “Good morning” with my first step down the stairs each day, and occasionally roused in the darkness to his silent “Good night.”
Once after supper Marie planted herself solidly in front of me as I rose to leave. Silently she pointed at my plate where I bad apparently made mud pies of my food. I flushed.
‘“No good?” she asked, crossing her wrists over the grossness of her stomach and teetering perilously backward.
“It’s fine, Marie,” I managed. “I’m just not hungry.” And I escaped through the garlicky cloud of her indignant exhalation and the underneath amusement of Low. How could I tell her that Low had been showing me a double rainbow he had seen that afternoon and that I had been so engrossed in the taste of the colors and the miracle of being able to receive them from him that I had forgotten to eat?
Low and I spent much time together, getting acquainted, but during most of it we were ostensibly sitting with the others on the porch in the twilight, listening to the old mining and cattle stories that were the well-worn coins that slipped from hand to hand wherever the citizens of Kruper gathered together. A good story never wore out, so after a while it was an easy matter to follow the familiar repetitions and still be alone together in the group.
“Don’t you think you need a little more practice in lifting?” Low’s silent question was a thin clarity behind due rumble of voices.
“Lifting?” I stirred in my chair, not quite so adept as he at carrying two threads simultaneously; “Flying,” he said with exaggerated patience. “Like you did over the canyon and up to the porch.”
“Oh.” Ecstasy and terror puddled together inside me. Then I felt myself relaxing in the strong warmth of Low’s arms instead of fighting them as I had when he had caught me over the canyon.
“Oh, I don’t know,” I answered, quickly shutting him out as much as I could. “I think I can do it okay.”
“A little more practice won’t hurt.” There was laughter in his reply. “But you’d better wait until I’m around-just in case.”
“Oh?” I asked. “‘Look.” I lifted in the darkness until I sat gently about six inches above my chair. “So!”
Something prodded me gently and I started to drift across the porch. Hastily I dropped back, just barely landing on the forward edge of my chair, my heels thudding audibly on the floor. The current story broke off in mid-episode and everyone looked at me.
“Mosquitos,” I improvised. “I’m allergic to them.”
“That’s not fair!” I sputtered silently to Low. “You cheat!”
“All’s fair-” he answered, then shut hastily as he remembered the rest of the quotation.
“Hmm!” I thought. “Hmm! And this is war?” And felt pleased all out of proportion the rest of the evening.
Then there was the Saturday when the sky was so tangily blue and the clouds so puffily light that I just couldn’t stay indoors scrubbing clothes and sewing on buttons and trying to decide whether to repair my nail polish or take it all off and start from scratch again. I scrambled into my saddle shoes and denim skirt, turned back the sleeves of my plaid shirt, tied the sleeves of my sweater around my waist and headed for the hills. This was the day to follow the town water pipe up to the spring that fed it and see if all the gruesome stories I’d heard about its condition were true.
I paused, panting, atop the last steep ledge above the town and looked back at the tumbled group of weathered houses that made up this side of Kruper. Beyond the railroad track there was enough flatland to make room for the four new houses that had been built when the Golden Turkey Mine reopened. They sat in a neat row, bright as toy blocks against the tawny red of the hillside.
I brushed my hair back from my hot forehead and turned my back on Kruper. I could see sections of the town water pipe scattered at haphazard intervals up among the hills-in some places stilted up on timbers to cross from one rise to another, in other places following the jagged contour of the slopes. A few minutes and sections later I was amusing myself trying to stop with my hands the spray of water from one of the numerous holes in one section of the rusty old pipe and counting the hand-whittled wooden plugs that stopped up others. It looked a miracle that any water at all got down to town. I was so engrossed that I unconsciously put my hand up to my face when a warm finger began to trace …
“Low!” I whirled on him. “What are you doing up here?”
He slid down from a boulder above the line.
“Johnny’s feeling porely today. He wanted me to check to see if any of the plugs had fallen out.”
We both laughed as we looked up-line and traced the pipe by the white gush of spray and the vigorous greenness that utilized the spilling water.
“I’ll bet he has at least a thousand plugs hammered in,” Low said.
“Why on earth doesn’t he get some new pipe?”
“Family heirlooms,” Low said, whittling vigorously. “It’s only because he’s feeling so porely that he even entertains the thought of letting me plug his line. All the rest of the plugs are family affairs. About three generations’ worth.”
He hammered the plug into the largest of the holes and stepped back, reaming the water from his face where it had squirted him.
“Come on up. I’ll show you the spring.”
We sat in the damp coolness of the thicket of trees that screened the cave where the spring churned and gurgled, blue and white and pale green before it lost itself in the battered old pipes. We were sitting on opposite sides of the pipe, resting ourselves in the consciousness of each other, when an at once, for a precious minute, we flowed together like coalescing streams of water, so completely one that the following rebound to separateness came as a shock. Such sweetness without even touching one another… ?
Anyway we both turned hastily away from this frightening new emotion, and, finding no words handy, Low brought me down a flower from the ledge above us, nipping a drooping leaf off it as it passed him.
“Thanks,” I said, smelling of it and sneezing vigorously. “I wish I could do that.”
“Well, you can! You lifted that rock at Macron and you can lift yourself.”
“Yes, myself.” I shivered at the recollection. “But not the rock. I could only move it.”
“Try that one over there.” Low lobbed a pebble toward a small slaty blue rock lying on the damp sand. Obligingly it plowed a small furrow up to Low’s feet.
“Lift it,” he said.
“I can’t. I told you I can’t lift anything clear off the ground. I can just move it.” I slid one of Low’s feet to one side.
Startled, he pulled it back.
“But you have to be able to lift, Dita. You’re one of-“
“I am not!” I threw the flower I’d been twiddling with down violently into the spring and saw it sucked into the pipe. Someone downstream was going to be surprised at the sink or else one of the thousands of fountains between here and town was going to blossom.
“But all you have to do is-is-” Low groped for words.
“Yes?” I leaned forward eagerly. Maybe I could learn ….
“Well, just lift!”
“Twirtle!” I said, disappointed. “Anyway can you do this? Look.” I reached in my pocket and pulled out two bobby pins and three fingernails full of pocket fluff. “Have you got a dime?”
“Sure.” He fished it out and brought it to me. I handed it back. “Glow it,” I said.
“Glow it? You mean blow it?” He turned it over in his hand.
“No, glow it. Go on. It’s easy. All you have to do is glow it. Any metal will do but silver works better.”
“Never heard of it,” he said, frowning suspiciously.