Water Uphill

Part One · The Stuck Tap

Wren had grown the pumpkin from one flat white seed, and she had grown it herself. She planted it in May at the bottom of Grandpa's garden. By August it was the size of a soccer ball, deep orange, and still growing. It was the only pumpkin on the vine. Every afternoon now, the big leaves went soft and hung down, because it had not rained in three weeks.

Grandpa had one rule for dry weeks, and he announced it at breakfast. The well was low, so the water from the house tap was for drinking and washing and nothing else. The garden would have to live off the rain barrel. The barrel stood at the top of the yard beside the shed, still full to the rim from the June rains. The garden was at the bottom of the slope, forty steps away.

The barrel had a tap near the bottom, and the tap refused to turn. Wren tried it with both hands. Then Grandpa tried it with a wrench until his whole face went red. The tap had rusted shut over the winter, he explained, and he would buy a new one on Saturday when he drove into town. It was Tuesday. Wren looked at the drooping pumpkin leaves and decided that Saturday was a very long way off.

So she carried buckets. She stood on a stool, dipped the bucket over the rim, and walked it down the slope with water slopping onto her sneakers. Then she climbed back up and did it again. Her little brother Hal helped with his red beach pail, and most of his water landed on his boots. Wren counted twenty-two trips. By three o'clock, her arms were shaking, and the leaves hung down anyway, as limp as wet paper.

Wednesday was even hotter. The water in the barrel had dropped so low that Wren had to stand on tiptoe on the stool and stretch her whole arm down over the rim. Grandpa watched from the porch with a glass of iced tea, and he did not get up. "Water only runs downhill," he remarked. Then he took a long, slow sip. "Unless you ask it properly."

Wren asked him what that was supposed to mean. He said she had a hose, a barrel, a hill, and a brain, which was more equipment than he had owned at her age. Then he went inside for his afternoon nap. Wren sat in the shade of the shed and studied the green hose. It lay coiled by the barrel like a sleeping snake, and it easily reached the garden. It simply had no water inside it.

Then she remembered the fish tank at school. The man who cleaned it had used a clear plastic tube. One end went into the tank, and the other end went into a bucket on the floor. The dirty water had climbed up the tube, over the glass rim, and down into the bucket. Up and over, and nobody had pumped it. The water had simply gone, and kept on going, until the bucket was full.

She dropped one end of the hose into the barrel and laid the other end down the slope beside the pumpkin. Then she waited, and nothing came out. Hal put his ear to the end of the hose, announced that it was broken, and wandered off to look for a frog. Wren sat with her chin on her knees. She was certainly missing something. The fish tank man had done one more thing, and she needed to remember it.

Part Two · Up and Over

He had filled the tube first. She remembered it now. He had pushed the whole tube under the water in the tank, and bubbles had come up until there were no more bubbles. So Wren pushed the hose into the barrel, one loop at a time, and the hose drank. Air escaped in enormous bubbles, like a pot about to boil. Forty feet of hose takes a long time to fill, and she fed it in patiently.

When the bubbles finally stopped, she pressed her thumb over the open end, hard. She lifted it out and carried it carefully down the slope. The hose was heavy now, and cold, and it dripped wherever her thumb did not quite cover it. Hal held the other end down in the barrel with both hands. "Do not let go," she told him. Then she knelt beside the pumpkin and took her thumb away.

The hose coughed once, and then water shot out of it, a cold clear rope of water, straight into her face. Wren shrieked. The dirt around the pumpkin turned dark in a circle, and the circle grew. It smelled exactly like the first minute of a rainstorm. Up the hill, Hal shouted with joy and let go of his end to come running. The hose went quiet. The rope of water shrank to a dribble, and then to nothing at all.

Wren wanted to shout at him. She took a breath instead, because shouting would not put the water back in the hose. The problem was not Hal. The problem was an end that could float up whenever somebody let go. So she tied a stone to the hose with string and sank it to the bottom of the barrel. Then she gave Hal a job he could not possibly drop. He would count to two hundred for every row, out loud.

She filled the hose again, thumb and all, and this time the water ran and kept on running. Wren sat in the dirt and tried to understand exactly why. The hose was like a rope hanging over a wall, she decided. The side that hung down the slope was longer, so it was heavier. It fell, and it pulled the shorter side up and over after it. As long as no air got in anywhere, it could not stop.

Grandpa came down with two glasses of lemonade and listened to her explain it. He said the word for it was siphon, and that he had not learned that word until he was thirty. By evening, Wren had discovered one more trick. If she hung the garden end on a nail higher than the water in the barrel, the flow stopped. Lift it down again, and it started. She had made a tap with no tap in it.

For the rest of the week, she moved the hose from row to row, and Hal counted. He skipped forty-three and fell asleep at one hundred and nine, but the water did not seem to mind. Each morning, the pumpkin leaves stood up again like open hands, and the pumpkin itself was wet and shining. A bee walked across it. The vine had put out a second flower, which seemed to Wren like a thank-you note.

On Saturday, Grandpa returned from town with a new brass tap in a paper bag. He stood by the barrel and studied the hose hanging on its nail. Then he studied the dark wet rows below. He put the tap back in the bag. That night it finally rained. Wren lay in bed and listened to it drum on the shed roof. And she thought about the green hose, which had not been coiled by the barrel on Monday. She was almost sure.