We kids said that if Father saw the Acre he would have a fit, or else laugh at us. He was a perfectionist. I could not forget how, on the mountain, he had kicked his lean-to apart and sat on the windy ground all night and said, "I want to sleep in my own bed!" He would suffer rather than sleep in a badly made hut, and he often looked at the Zambus' food or Mrs. Kennywick's wabool and said, "I'd starve before I'd eat that" — and he meant it.
We did not dare to say that you could eat what grew wild and sleep on the ground. His mosquito traps, "Bug Boxes," invited insects through inescapable baffles and kept Jeronimo free of flying bugs. But you did not need nets and Bug Boxes if you knew about the berry juice that acted like citronella. "Afraid of a few bugs?" he sometimes said, and, at other times, "It's not that I don't want them on my skin — I don't want them within three miles of me." We could have told him that we had learned that most work was needless, and a bathhouse wasn't necessary if you had a pool or a river. Father's homegrown carrots were tasty, but wild yautia was just as good, and no trouble. He had outlawed bananas and manioc—"They make you lazy, and I don't like the implications of bananas." And the ice — it was a marvel, but like most marvels all you could do was marvel at it.
The more I thought about, the more sure I was that we kids stayed in Jeronimo because of the Acre. It lay in the jungle between the mountains and the river, at the dead end of a narrow path our feet had made. It was invisible, it was safe.
We spent every afternoon at the Acre, and we were sorry we could not sleep there overnight. We wanted to prove to Father that it could be done. But at the end of every day, we pushed the bushes aside and walked back to Jeronimo and heard the pumps, their whops and claps, before we saw the buildings. Father would be smiling, for in the coolness of the late afternoon he cleared Fat Boy and gave ice to the river Creoles or Zambus who had worked for it. There he was, with his tongs and his pulley, hoisting great blocks of vapory ice out of this monster cupboard with its firebox blazing.
And always, when we came back, Father said, "Where have you been? Fooling in the bushes?"
We would say swimming or hiking.
"Look at them, people. We're killing ourselves and they're walking around the block."
The "people" were Mr. Haddy, the Zambus, Mr. Peaselee, and Mr. Harkins. They were his listeners for he never stopped telling them his plans. These days he spoke of freezing fish and rushing them inland where no one had ever seen big river fish. "Six-footers! Catfish! Could change their whole way of life. Especially if they're open-minded and not in the grip of some moral sneak who's preaching hellfire to them."
That was a frequent complaint. The Maywits had not come back. Father said it made him mad.
"And the funny thing about hellfire is, it's imaginary. But not Fat Boy! He's got more poison in him than a century of hells. Oh, gaw, I could teach those missionaries a thing or two about chemical combustion. If they saw hydrogen and ammonia get loose they'd believe in me, instead of the dead top-spinner! If Fat Boy blew his lid—"
This Jeronimo talk made the Acre seem happier. The camp was our secret. And we had learned things there that even Father did not know.
***
My birthday came and went — the month, anyway. The months had names, but the days did not have numbers. I was fourteen, but still smaller than I wanted to be. And now the dry season lay across Jeronimo. It was dust and dead leaves.
The river had begun to get narrower, and it stank. It turned into a creek between deep slabs of bubbly mud, with flies buzzing over it and green hair in it. It snored and pooped past the mooring. A little above us it had become a marsh, and there was now no way upstream to Seville. Our boats were shanked against the mud, and our pumps at the river's edge often gagged on the slime and weeds they sucked up. It had not rained for months, and it might be a month or more, Father said, before it rained again. Now Father was making only small quantities of ice, and all our drinking water came from the condenser on Fat Boy's shin, the Hamstring.
We had not mentioned the Acre to Father, so we could not tell him that spring water in our pool still brimmed to the grassy edge.
The Jeronimo garden was green, producing beans and tomatoes and corn — the cornstalks were as high as some of the eaves. But the pumps were still gasping. Father said he had been a fool for believing the river would go on flowing — it was as undependable as anything else on this imperfect earth. He spoke again of sinking a shaft, not the geothermal one but a simpler borehole to the water table. Whenever people came these days, they were put to work digging this hole.
The work was hard, and not many people were willing to shift dirt in return for a small block of ice or a bag of hybrid seeds. Father predicted that the Maywits would soon be back and Jeronimo working at full strength. He had been saying this for three weeks.
One day he said to Mother, "I'm putting you in sole charge of Jeronimo, honey."
"Are you going somewhere?"
"Nope. But I've got my Hole to think about."
He hated the river and its smell, and all he talked about was his Hole. "Going to work on my Hole," he said in the early morning. And he asked every visitor, "What are you going to do about my Hole?" He was either in it or at the edge of it, his face as red as a tomato, cursing the river and the climate and trying to devise a machine for moving dirt. "Say, on the same principle as a vacuum cleaner, that can dig and suck at the same time — give it teeth and lungs, fit it with claspers—"
He complained that he was working with caveman's tools. "If only I had the hardware!" He dug with the Zambus. He did nothing else. If there was smut on the corn, or worms in the tomatoes, or rot on the beans, he ordered us kids to see about it. There was no water. He kept digging. The task took hold of him like a fever. He said, "I never stop until I get where I'm going."
Then he shut down Fat Boy. The roar and gurgle of the ice maker had been so familiar to us that when he put the fire out one morning, it was like hearing my heart stop. I had to hold my breath to listen. Fat Boy wasn't wet and dripping anymore. It looked as if it had died, and Father stiffened a little, resembling his invention.
"What about the ice?" Mother said.
"What about my Hole?"
So the hole got deeper, and it was wide enough for four men to stand in, swinging shovels. It looked like the opening to Father's volcano hole, and next to it was a pyramid of dirt and boulders, "Which proves, if proof were needed, that even with primitive tools and a little muscle you can do something constructive about this gimcrack world we've inherited."
But still he had not struck water. We stopped getting visitors. The work was too hard. Father dug in the hole and ate practically nothing and said, "If I only had the hardware—"
The pumps only brought us a green trickle from the squeezed river. We had to water the gardens by hand, pouring buckets of water into the sluice pipe that siphoned into the irrigation ditches. Mother stayed knee-deep in mud at the river's edge, and the four of us kids, in what Father called the Bucket Brigade, passed pails of water from hand to hand up the bank.
We were on Bucket Brigade just after dawn one day when Mother looked up and said, "Mr. Haddy's in an awful hurry."