I had not finished mourning my father when someone decided my home should belong to him.<\/p>\n
At first, I did not understand that was what was happening.<\/p>\n
People had begun treating me differently after the funeral.<\/p>\n
Before, I was Ferm\u00edn's daughter.<\/p>\n
The girl who knew how to handle a shovel.<\/p>\n
The girl who sometimes followed her father to distant wells.<\/p>\n
After he died, I became the orphan living alone above the village.<\/p>\n
Nobody said it cruelly at first.<\/p>\n
They spoke quietly.<\/p>\n
They offered advice.<\/p>\n
They told me I ought to think carefully about the coming winter.<\/p>\n
I already thought about it every day.<\/p>\n
I thought about how much wood I could store.<\/p>\n
How long our flour would last.<\/p>\n
Whether the roof could withstand another heavy snowfall.<\/p>\n
I thought about the well most of all.<\/p>\n
Every time I walked outside carrying buckets, I remembered my father sitting against the fence.<\/p>\n
Sometimes I stopped without intending to.<\/p>\n
I looked at the place where I had found him.<\/p>\n
Then I continued.<\/p>\n
I hated that the ordinary work of living had become something I feared.<\/p>\n
One afternoon, Don Baltazar came to our door.<\/p>\n
He wore the same comfortable expression I had seen at the store and at the mill.<\/p>\n
He spoke as if his arrival were a favor.<\/p>\n
I let him inside.<\/p>\n
I had been raised to offer a chair to a visitor.<\/p>\n
Before I could decide where he should sit, he took the place across from me at the kitchen table.<\/p>\n
I remained standing.<\/p>\n
He looked around the room.<\/p>\n
His eyes passed over the hearth and the shelves.<\/p>\n
Then they went to the window.<\/p>\n
The well stood beyond it.<\/p>\n
I noticed where he looked.<\/p>\n
He asked whether I was managing.<\/p>\n
I told him I was doing what needed to be done.<\/p>\n
He nodded.<\/p>\n
He said my father had been a capable man.<\/p>\n
I waited.<\/p>\n
He went on speaking about the difficulties of keeping a house on the upper slope.<\/p>\n
He mentioned the road to the city.<\/p>\n
He reminded me that the pass would soon become dangerous.<\/p>\n
None of it was news to me.<\/p>\n
I had lived there my whole life.<\/p>\n
Then he placed a small cloth bag on the table.<\/p>\n
It made a heavy sound.<\/p>\n
Coins.<\/p>\n
I stared at it.<\/p>\n
He explained that he was willing to pay me for the property.<\/p>\n
I could take the money and begin again somewhere easier.<\/p>\n
Somewhere I would not have to face a winter alone.<\/p>\n
He spoke as though he had already solved my problem.<\/p>\n
I looked at his hands resting beside the bag.<\/p>\n
They were clean.<\/p>\n
Mine were rough from carrying wood and water.<\/p>\n
I asked why he wanted our place.<\/p>\n
He said land was useful, even when the house standing on it was inconvenient.<\/p>\n
He smiled.<\/p>\n
I did not smile back.<\/p>\n
From where I stood, I could see the well through the window.<\/p>\n
The wooden frame above it was something my father had made.<\/p>\n
The stones around its mouth had passed through his hands.<\/p>\n
He had spent two summers bringing that water within reach.<\/p>\n
I tried to imagine leaving.<\/p>\n
Someone else would sleep in our rooms.<\/p>\n
Someone else would walk across our yard.<\/p>\n
Someone else would draw water from the well my father had spent so much of his life building.<\/p>\n
And I would be somewhere else, counting the coins Don Baltazar had left me.<\/p>\n
He tapped the bag gently.<\/p>\n
He said the offer was sensible.<\/p>\n
I asked whether the price included the well.<\/p>\n
He looked at me as though the question should not need asking.<\/p>\n
Of course it did.<\/p>\n
The well belonged to the land.<\/p>\n
I remember feeling angry at that answer.<\/p>\n
Not because it was difficult to understand.<\/p>\n
Because he spoke of the well as if it were no different from the fence or the shed.<\/p>\n
I thought of my father working with mud up to his knees.<\/p>\n
I thought of the long summer evenings when I helped him sort stones.<\/p>\n
I thought of the day the water finally came.<\/p>\n
My father had been tired that evening.<\/p>\n
But he had smiled more than I had seen him smile in weeks.<\/p>\n
I could not put a price on that memory.<\/p>\n
Don Baltazar could.<\/p>\n
I told him I was not selling.<\/p>\n
He watched me for a moment.<\/p>\n
Then he said I was young.<\/p>\n
He said the mountains were not kind to people who refused to recognize their own limits.<\/p>\n
I understood what he meant.<\/p>\n
He believed I would become frightened enough to change my mind.<\/p>\n
He believed I would become hungry enough.<\/p>\n
I told him again that I intended to stay.<\/p>\n
He closed the bag.<\/p>\n
The sound of the coins moving inside it was very clear.<\/p>\n
When he stood, his face had changed.<\/p>\n
He was still polite.<\/p>\n
But he no longer tried to make his words comforting.<\/p>\n
He said I ought to remember the offer while it was still generous.<\/p>\n
If I returned to him later, I should not expect the same amount.<\/p>\n
I watched him take the bag from the table.<\/p>\n
I did not ask him to stay.<\/p>\n
When he left, I stood alone in the kitchen.<\/p>\n
The room seemed smaller than before.<\/p>\n
I could still see the place where the bag had rested.<\/p>\n
For a moment, I wondered whether I had been foolish.<\/p>\n
The money might have carried me through several hard months.<\/p>\n
I could have gone to the city before the pass closed.<\/p>\n
I might have found work.<\/p>\n
I would not have been alone on a mountainside with winter approaching.<\/p>\n
Those were real possibilities.<\/p>\n
I will not pretend I dismissed them easily.<\/p>\n
I was nineteen.<\/p>\n
I had never traveled far without my father.<\/p>\n
I had never managed a winter entirely alone.<\/p>\n
And I had just refused money from the man who controlled much of the village's trade.<\/p>\n
But I also knew what I would lose if I accepted.<\/p>\n
My father's land was more than something I owned.<\/p>\n
It was where he had taught me to work.<\/p>\n
It was where my mother had lived.<\/p>\n
It was the place he had chosen to make a home for us.<\/p>\n
I could not walk away merely because someone else thought I would eventually fail.<\/p>\n
That evening, I went outside to fetch water.<\/p>\n
The air had grown colder.<\/p>\n
I carried one bucket in each hand.<\/p>\n
I made myself walk at an ordinary pace.<\/p>\n
I did not want fear to hurry me.<\/p>\n
At the well, I lowered the bucket and listened to it strike the water.<\/p>\n
The sound came from deep below.<\/p>\n
I drew it up.<\/p>\n
The water was clear.<\/p>\n
My father had always said that a well was worth trusting only after it had proved itself through both heat and frost.<\/p>\n
Ours had done that.<\/p>\n
The source was reliable.<\/p>\n
The problem was reaching it.<\/p>\n
I looked back at the house.<\/p>\n
Forty paces.<\/p>\n
The distance suddenly seemed absurd.<\/p>\n
There was water beneath the ground.<\/p>\n
There was a kitchen where I needed water.<\/p>\n
And between them stood a stretch of earth that I had always crossed on foot.<\/p>\n
I wondered why I had never questioned that arrangement.<\/p>\n
Then I immediately told myself the answer.<\/p>\n
Because the well was outside.<\/p>\n
Because houses had doors.<\/p>\n
Because people carried buckets.<\/p>\n
That was how things were done.<\/p>\n
I returned with the water and set the buckets near the hearth.<\/p>\n
I could not stop looking at the floor.<\/p>\n
My father had taught me that a problem did not always have to be approached from the direction everyone expected.<\/p>\n
I remembered watching him work when I was younger.<\/p>\n
Sometimes people insisted that a particular place was the only reasonable spot for a well.<\/p>\n
My father would walk around their land instead.<\/p>\n
He might choose somewhere they had not considered.<\/p>\n
When asked why, he would explain that the water did not care where people preferred to find it.<\/p>\n
We had to work with the ground as it was.<\/p>\n
I sat at the kitchen table.<\/p>\n
I tried to picture the earth beneath the house.<\/p>\n
The floor was stone.<\/p>\n
Below it lay the same ground that stretched toward the well.<\/p>\n
The water itself was deep.<\/p>\n
But I would not need to dig down to the water from the kitchen.<\/p>\n
I would need to reach the existing well from the side.<\/p>\n
A passage.<\/p>\n
At first, the idea seemed ridiculous.<\/p>\n
I almost laughed.<\/p>\n
A person could hardly dig a road beneath a house.<\/p>\n
But I was not thinking of a road.<\/p>\n
I was thinking of something narrower.<\/p>\n
Wide enough for my body.<\/p>\n
Wide enough to carry a bucket.<\/p>\n
Wide enough to let me travel beneath the surface without facing the wind.<\/p>\n
I tried to remember the exact distance.<\/p>\n
Forty paces.<\/p>\n
I had crossed it so often that I knew the yard almost as well as the kitchen.<\/p>\n
I imagined a passage beginning beneath the floor.<\/p>\n
I imagined it extending toward the well, a little farther each day.<\/p>\n
I imagined wooden frames holding the earth in place.<\/p>\n
My father had shown me how to build those frames.<\/p>\n
He had shown me how to judge the soil.<\/p>\n
He had shown me how to stop when the ground was uncertain.<\/p>\n
I knew enough to understand the danger.<\/p>\n
That was the first thing that made me hesitate.<\/p>\n
Loose earth could bury a person.<\/p>\n
A poorly fitted support could fail.<\/p>\n
And I would be working without my father beside me.<\/p>\n
I considered that for a long time.<\/p>\n
It would have been easier to think only about the reward.<\/p>\n
Water inside the kitchen.<\/p>\n
No more walking through storms.<\/p>\n
No more risking the distance that had killed my father.<\/p>\n
But imagining the result would not keep the roof of a tunnel from falling on me.<\/p>\n
I needed a plan.<\/p>\n
I needed timber.<\/p>\n
I needed time.<\/p>\n
I needed to know where every part of the passage would go.<\/p>\n
The first heavy snow usually arrived after the autumn had nearly finished.<\/p>\n
I counted the days I might have left.<\/p>\n
About ninety.<\/p>\n
Ninety days before the mountain would likely close around us again.<\/p>\n
Even if I worked every day, I might not reach the well in time.<\/p>\n
I looked down at my hands.<\/p>\n
They were not my father's hands.<\/p>\n
I did not have his years of experience.<\/p>\n
But they were hands he had trained.<\/p>\n
For the first time since his death, I felt something other than the helplessness that had followed me from room to room.<\/p>\n
It was not confidence.<\/p>\n
Not yet.<\/p>\n
It was the beginning of a decision.<\/p>\n
I cleared the table.<\/p>\n
I moved it away from the center of the kitchen.<\/p>\n
Then I knelt beside one of the floor stones.<\/p>\n
It was heavy.<\/p>\n
The edges were tight against the stones around it.<\/p>\n
I found a tool and worked it into a narrow gap.<\/p>\n
For several minutes, nothing happened.<\/p>\n
I leaned harder.<\/p>\n
The stone shifted slightly.<\/p>\n
I stopped and looked at it.<\/p>\n
It was such a small movement.<\/p>\n
Most people would not have noticed.<\/p>\n
But it meant the floor could be opened.<\/p>\n
I worked again until I could lift the stone from its place.<\/p>\n
Beneath it was earth.<\/p>\n
Ordinary earth.<\/p>\n
The same material my father had worked all his life.<\/p>\n
I sat back on my heels.<\/p>\n
There was no tunnel.<\/p>\n
No water.<\/p>\n
No guarantee.<\/p>\n
Only a dark patch in the middle of my kitchen floor.<\/p>\n
I knew how foolish it might look to someone standing at the door.<\/p>\n
A nineteen-year-old girl digging up her own house because she was afraid of winter.<\/p>\n
That was one way to describe it.<\/p>\n
But there was another.<\/p>\n
I had been given a home with a dependable source of water forty paces away.<\/p>\n
I could either accept that distance as dangerous and unavoidable, or try to change it.<\/p>\n
My father had died trying to carry water across the yard.<\/p>\n
I could not bring him back.<\/p>\n
I could not change that night.<\/p>\n
But I could decide what happened the next time a storm covered the path.<\/p>\n
By morning, I had made up my mind.<\/p>\n
I would dig beneath the kitchen.<\/p>\n
I would make my way toward the well.<\/p>\n
And I would not sell the land simply because Don Baltazar believed I could not endure another winter.<\/p>\n
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 … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":12056,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12058","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-drama-sory"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastestdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12058","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastestdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastestdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastestdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastestdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12058"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lastestdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12058\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12078,"href":"https:\/\/lastestdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12058\/revisions\/12078"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastestdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/12056"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastestdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12058"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastestdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12058"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastestdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12058"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}