I had not finished mourning my father when someone decided my home should belong to him.
At first, I did not understand that was what was happening.
People had begun treating me differently after the funeral.
Before, I was Fermín's daughter.
The girl who knew how to handle a shovel.
The girl who sometimes followed her father to distant wells.
After he died, I became the orphan living alone above the village.
Nobody said it cruelly at first.
They spoke quietly.
They offered advice.
They told me I ought to think carefully about the coming winter.
I already thought about it every day.
I thought about how much wood I could store.
How long our flour would last.
Whether the roof could withstand another heavy snowfall.
I thought about the well most of all.
Every time I walked outside carrying buckets, I remembered my father sitting against the fence.
Sometimes I stopped without intending to.
I looked at the place where I had found him.
Then I continued.
I hated that the ordinary work of living had become something I feared.
One afternoon, Don Baltazar came to our door.
He wore the same comfortable expression I had seen at the store and at the mill.
He spoke as if his arrival were a favor.
I let him inside.
I had been raised to offer a chair to a visitor.
Before I could decide where he should sit, he took the place across from me at the kitchen table.
I remained standing.
He looked around the room.
His eyes passed over the hearth and the shelves.
Then they went to the window.
The well stood beyond it.
I noticed where he looked.
He asked whether I was managing.
I told him I was doing what needed to be done.
He nodded.
He said my father had been a capable man.
I waited.
He went on speaking about the difficulties of keeping a house on the upper slope.
He mentioned the road to the city.
He reminded me that the pass would soon become dangerous.
None of it was news to me.
I had lived there my whole life.
Then he placed a small cloth bag on the table.
It made a heavy sound.
Coins.
I stared at it.
He explained that he was willing to pay me for the property.
I could take the money and begin again somewhere easier.
Somewhere I would not have to face a winter alone.
He spoke as though he had already solved my problem.
I looked at his hands resting beside the bag.
They were clean.
Mine were rough from carrying wood and water.
I asked why he wanted our place.
He said land was useful, even when the house standing on it was inconvenient.
He smiled.
I did not smile back.
From where I stood, I could see the well through the window.
The wooden frame above it was something my father had made.
The stones around its mouth had passed through his hands.
He had spent two summers bringing that water within reach.
I tried to imagine leaving.
Someone else would sleep in our rooms.
Someone else would walk across our yard.
Someone else would draw water from the well my father had spent so much of his life building.
And I would be somewhere else, counting the coins Don Baltazar had left me.
He tapped the bag gently.
He said the offer was sensible.
I asked whether the price included the well.
He looked at me as though the question should not need asking.
Of course it did.
The well belonged to the land.
I remember feeling angry at that answer.
Not because it was difficult to understand.
Because he spoke of the well as if it were no different from the fence or the shed.
I thought of my father working with mud up to his knees.
I thought of the long summer evenings when I helped him sort stones.
I thought of the day the water finally came.
My father had been tired that evening.
But he had smiled more than I had seen him smile in weeks.
I could not put a price on that memory.
Don Baltazar could.
I told him I was not selling.
He watched me for a moment.
Then he said I was young.
He said the mountains were not kind to people who refused to recognize their own limits.
I understood what he meant.
He believed I would become frightened enough to change my mind.
He believed I would become hungry enough.
I told him again that I intended to stay.
He closed the bag.
The sound of the coins moving inside it was very clear.
When he stood, his face had changed.
He was still polite.
But he no longer tried to make his words comforting.
He said I ought to remember the offer while it was still generous.
If I returned to him later, I should not expect the same amount.
I watched him take the bag from the table.
I did not ask him to stay.
When he left, I stood alone in the kitchen.
The room seemed smaller than before.
I could still see the place where the bag had rested.
For a moment, I wondered whether I had been foolish.
The money might have carried me through several hard months.
I could have gone to the city before the pass closed.
I might have found work.
I would not have been alone on a mountainside with winter approaching.
Those were real possibilities.
I will not pretend I dismissed them easily.
I was nineteen.
I had never traveled far without my father.
I had never managed a winter entirely alone.
And I had just refused money from the man who controlled much of the village's trade.
But I also knew what I would lose if I accepted.
My father's land was more than something I owned.
It was where he had taught me to work.
It was where my mother had lived.
It was the place he had chosen to make a home for us.
I could not walk away merely because someone else thought I would eventually fail.
That evening, I went outside to fetch water.
The air had grown colder.
I carried one bucket in each hand.
I made myself walk at an ordinary pace.
I did not want fear to hurry me.
At the well, I lowered the bucket and listened to it strike the water.
The sound came from deep below.
I drew it up.
The water was clear.
My father had always said that a well was worth trusting only after it had proved itself through both heat and frost.
Ours had done that.
The source was reliable.
The problem was reaching it.
I looked back at the house.
Forty paces.
The distance suddenly seemed absurd.
There was water beneath the ground.
There was a kitchen where I needed water.
And between them stood a stretch of earth that I had always crossed on foot.
I wondered why I had never questioned that arrangement.
Then I immediately told myself the answer.
Because the well was outside.
Because houses had doors.
Because people carried buckets.
That was how things were done.
I returned with the water and set the buckets near the hearth.
I could not stop looking at the floor.
My father had taught me that a problem did not always have to be approached from the direction everyone expected.
I remembered watching him work when I was younger.
Sometimes people insisted that a particular place was the only reasonable spot for a well.
My father would walk around their land instead.
He might choose somewhere they had not considered.
When asked why, he would explain that the water did not care where people preferred to find it.
We had to work with the ground as it was.
I sat at the kitchen table.
I tried to picture the earth beneath the house.
The floor was stone.
Below it lay the same ground that stretched toward the well.
The water itself was deep.
But I would not need to dig down to the water from the kitchen.
I would need to reach the existing well from the side.
A passage.
At first, the idea seemed ridiculous.
I almost laughed.
A person could hardly dig a road beneath a house.
But I was not thinking of a road.
I was thinking of something narrower.
Wide enough for my body.
Wide enough to carry a bucket.
Wide enough to let me travel beneath the surface without facing the wind.
I tried to remember the exact distance.
Forty paces.
I had crossed it so often that I knew the yard almost as well as the kitchen.
I imagined a passage beginning beneath the floor.
I imagined it extending toward the well, a little farther each day.
I imagined wooden frames holding the earth in place.
My father had shown me how to build those frames.
He had shown me how to judge the soil.
He had shown me how to stop when the ground was uncertain.
I knew enough to understand the danger.
That was the first thing that made me hesitate.
Loose earth could bury a person.
A poorly fitted support could fail.
And I would be working without my father beside me.
I considered that for a long time.
It would have been easier to think only about the reward.
Water inside the kitchen.
No more walking through storms.
No more risking the distance that had killed my father.
But imagining the result would not keep the roof of a tunnel from falling on me.
I needed a plan.
I needed timber.
I needed time.
I needed to know where every part of the passage would go.
The first heavy snow usually arrived after the autumn had nearly finished.
I counted the days I might have left.
About ninety.
Ninety days before the mountain would likely close around us again.
Even if I worked every day, I might not reach the well in time.
I looked down at my hands.
They were not my father's hands.
I did not have his years of experience.
But they were hands he had trained.
For the first time since his death, I felt something other than the helplessness that had followed me from room to room.
It was not confidence.
Not yet.
It was the beginning of a decision.
I cleared the table.
I moved it away from the center of the kitchen.
Then I knelt beside one of the floor stones.
It was heavy.
The edges were tight against the stones around it.
I found a tool and worked it into a narrow gap.
For several minutes, nothing happened.
I leaned harder.
The stone shifted slightly.
I stopped and looked at it.
It was such a small movement.
Most people would not have noticed.
But it meant the floor could be opened.
I worked again until I could lift the stone from its place.
Beneath it was earth.
Ordinary earth.
The same material my father had worked all his life.
I sat back on my heels.
There was no tunnel.
No water.
No guarantee.
Only a dark patch in the middle of my kitchen floor.
I knew how foolish it might look to someone standing at the door.
A nineteen-year-old girl digging up her own house because she was afraid of winter.
That was one way to describe it.
But there was another.
I had been given a home with a dependable source of water forty paces away.
I could either accept that distance as dangerous and unavoidable, or try to change it.
My father had died trying to carry water across the yard.
I could not bring him back.
I could not change that night.
But I could decide what happened the next time a storm covered the path.
By morning, I had made up my mind.
I would dig beneath the kitchen.
I would make my way toward the well.
And I would not sell the land simply because Don Baltazar believed I could not endure another winter.
