The Wheel at Hollow Creek

Part One · Two Plans

Every morning at Grandma's, the first job was water. The tomato bed sat on a dry flat shelf above the creek, and the creek was the only water for half a mile. So Cal carried it, two buckets at a time, up the bank and along the path. On a hot day that meant twenty trips before breakfast. By the second week of August his hands had blisters and his arms felt like rope. He was ten years old, and he was fairly certain there had to be a better way.

The better way was hanging on a nail in the barn. It was an old bicycle wheel, slightly bent, with no tire, and Cal had been staring at it for a week. In a library book he had seen a picture of a water wheel with cups around the edge, turning in a river and lifting water up to a field. The river did all the work, and nobody carried anything. He took the wheel down, blew the dust off it, and went to find his cousin.

Nora was twelve and had plans of her own. She was standing in the creek with her jeans rolled up, frowning at the water, which barely covered her ankles. Hollow Creek was wide and clear and cold, and it was never deep enough to swim in properly. Nora wanted a swimming hole. She had already chosen a bend below the enormous sycamore, and she had been stacking rocks across the creek since breakfast. Cal looked at her dam, and Nora looked at his wheel, and neither of them was impressed.

The wheel took most of the day. Cal wired eight tin cans around the rim, so that each can would scoop up water at the bottom and pour it out at the top. All eight had once held peaches, and the labels were still on. He pushed two forked willow branches into the creek bed for the axle to rest on, and for a trough he used a length of old rain gutter from behind the barn. Grandpa watched from the porch with his coffee and offered no advice at all, which Cal understood was a kind of respect.

By evening it was finished, and it worked, which was the amazing part. The wheel sat in the fastest place Cal could find, where the creek narrowed between two stones, and it turned slowly, with a creak at every can. Each can came up full, tipped over at the top, and poured its water into the gutter, and the gutter carried it along the bank to the tomato bed. It was only a trickle, but Cal had not carried a single bucket. He stood there grinning like a person who had invented fire.

Nora's dam was done by evening too. She had built it the way Grandpa built stone walls, with big rocks at the bottom, smaller ones on top, and the spaces packed tight with gravel and mud. Behind it the creek had stopped looking like a creek and spread out into a wide, still, brown pool, up to her waist already and rising. She floated on her back in the middle with her eyes shut, looking happier than Cal had seen her all summer. The dam was thirty steps downstream from his wheel.

Cal did not think about that until the next morning. He came down the path with toast in his hand and stopped completely. The pool had crept up the creek overnight, stone by stone, until it reached the narrow place, and then it had quietly swallowed it. His wheel stood up to its axle in still brown water, and the peach cans hung there, full and going nowhere. The gutter was dry, and nothing in the whole valley was moving except one fat frog, who sat on the axle and looked pleased.

The argument that followed was short and loud. Cal said the dam had to come down immediately, and Nora said the wheel could move somewhere else. Cal said there was nowhere else fast enough, and she knew it. Nora said she had been there first, which was not even true. Grandpa came down to find out what the shouting was about, and he looked at the pool, and the wheel, and the two of them. "One creek," he said, "and two cousins." Then he went back to pick beans and left them standing in the water.

Part Two · The Gap

Cal spent the afternoon carrying buckets again, and being angry, which is surprisingly tiring work. Nora spent it floating. That night he lay awake listening to the creek through the window and made a plan he was not proud of. He would get up before anyone else, and he would go down to the dam and pull out the biggest rocks at the bottom. The whole thing would wash away, and he could say the creek had done it by itself. He set his alarm for five and hardly slept.

The creek at five in the morning was a different creek. Mist lay on the pool like a sheet, and the water was so cold that his feet ached immediately. Cal crept along the bank in the gray light and waded in from the downstream side, and he put both hands on the biggest rock at the bottom of the dam. Then something huge and gray unfolded out of the mist beside him, with a screech like a rusty gate. A heron, taller than he was, flapped away over the sycamore, and Cal sat down hard in the water.

He sat there with his heart going like a drum. When it calmed down, he noticed a sound he had missed the day before, when they were busy shouting. It was a steady rushing roar, like a tap turned all the way on, and it was coming from the middle of the dam. Nora had left a gap. Right in the middle, between two flat rocks, there was an opening the width of his two hands, and the entire creek was pouring through it, white and hard and fast.

Cal put his hand into the gap, and the water shoved it aside as if it were nothing. He forgot all about the big rock. He stood in the cold with the mist around his knees and thought it through, slowly, the way Grandpa did things. The dam had not stopped the creek. It had only gathered it up and squeezed it through one small door. His wheel did not need a lot of water. It needed fast water. And the fastest water in the valley was now right here, in the middle of his cousin's dam.

Moving the wheel took him until breakfast. He pulled the forked sticks out of the mud and pushed them in again directly below the gap, one on each side, so the bottom of the wheel hung right in the white water. The gutter had to be longer, so he found another section behind the barn and wired the two together. By the time Nora came down the path, yawning, in her swimsuit, the wheel was in position. She stopped and stared at it. Then she stared at him, and at his wet shorts.

The wheel was not turning slowly anymore. It was spinning. The white water hit the cans at the bottom and flung them up and around. Each peach can came over the top so fast that the water flew out in a bright arc and smacked into the gutter. The gutter ran full, a real stream, racing along the bank toward the tomatoes. Nora did not say anything for a while. Then she asked whether he had taken any of her rocks. "Not one," said Cal. "I was going to. Then I heard it."

"Good," said Nora. She sat down on the bank and wrung out her braid. "I left the gap on purpose, you know. Yesterday morning I watched you build that wheel for six hours, and I thought, he has put it in the only fast spot on the whole creek. So I made a new fast spot." Cal opened his mouth and shut it again. "You did that for me?" "Don't be weird," said Nora. "I did it so I could have my pool and you could have your wheel, and nobody would have to talk about it."

They walked up to the tomato bed together, following the gutter. The water was already there, spilling out of the end and running down the rows in a dozen little dark streams. The tomato leaves that had hung limp all week were going to have a very good day. Nora picked the first ripe tomato and bit into it like an apple. Then she went back down to her pool, and Cal sat on the bank and listened to his wheel tick. Every cousin should have a creek, he decided, and every creek should have a gap.