Timmy's fingers were on my wrist again. He sighed. "Then I must just tell and if you do not know, you must believe only because I tell. I tell only to make you know there is water and you must stay.
"My world is another planet. It was another planet. It is broken in space now, all to pieces, shaking and roaring and fire-and all gone." His blind face looked on desolation and his lips tightened. I felt hairs crisp along my neck. As long as he touched my wrist I could see! I couldn't tell you what all I saw because lots of it had no words I knew to put to it, but I saw!
"We had ships for going in Space," he said. I saw them, needlesharp and shining, pointing at the sky and the heavy red-lit clouds. "We went into space before our Home broke. Our Home! Our-Home." His voice broke and he leaned his cheek on the stack of books. Then he straightened again.
"We came to your world. We did not know of it before. We came far, far. At
the last we came too fast. We are not Space travelers. The big ship that found your world got too hot. We had to leave it in our life-slips, each by himself. The life-slips got hot, too. I was burning! I lost control of my life-slip. I fell-" He put his hands to his bandages. "I think maybe I will never see this new world."
"Then there are others, like you, here on Earth," said Father slowly.
"Unless they all died in the landing," said Timmy. "There were many on the big ship."
"I saw little things shoot off the big thing!" I cried, excited. "I thought they were pieces breaking off only they-they went instead of falling!"
"Praise to the Presence, the Name, and the Power!" said Timmy, his right hand sketching his sign in the air, then dropping to my wrist again.
"Maybe some still live. Maybe my family. Maybe Lytha-"
I stared, fascinated, as I saw Lytha, dark hair swinging, smiling back over her shoulder, her arms full of flowers whose centers glowed like little lights. Daggone, I thought, Daggone! She sure isn't his Merry!
"Your story is most interesting," said Father, "and it opens vistas we haven't begun to explore yet, but what bearing has all this on our water problem?"
"We can do things you seem not able to do," said Timmy
"You must always touch the ground to go, and lift things with tools or hands, and know only because you touch and see. We can know without touching and seeing. We can find people and metals and water-we can find almost anything that we know, if it is near us. I have not been trained to be a finder, but I have studied the feel of water and the-the-what it is made of-"
"The composition," Father supplied the word.
"The composition of water," said Timmy. "And Barney and I explored much of the farm. I found the water here by the house."
"We dug," said Father. "How far down is the water?"
"I am not trained," said Timmy humbly. "I only know it is there. It is water that you think of when you say 'Las Lomitas.' It is not a dipping place or-or a pool. It is going. It is pushing hard. It is cold." He shivered a little.
"It is probably three hundred feet down," said Father. "There has never been an artesian well this side of the Coronas."
"It is close enough for me to find," said Timmy. "Will you wait?" "Until our water is gone," said Father. "And until we have decided where to go.
"Now it's time for bed." Father took the Bible from the stack of books. He thumbed back from our place to Psalms and read the "When I consider the heavens" one. As I listened, all at once the tight little world I knew, overtopped by the tight little Heaven I wondered about, suddenly split right down the middle and stretched and grew and filled with such a glory that I was scared and grabbed the edge of the table. If Timmy had come from another planet so far away that it wasn't even one we had a name for-! I knew that never again would my mind think it could measure the world-or my imagination, the extent of God's creation!
I was just dropping off the edge of waking after tumbling and tossing for what seemed like hours, when I heard Timmy.
"Barney," he whispered, not being able to reach my wrist.
"My cahilla-You found my cahilla?"
"Your what?" I asked, sitting up in bed and meeting his groping hands. "Oh! That box thing. Yeah, I'll get it for you in the morning."
"Not tonight?" asked Timmy, wistfully. "It is all I have left of the Home. The only personal things we had room for-"
"I can't find it tonight," I said. "I buried it by a rock. I couldn't find it in the dark. Besides, Father’d hear us go, if we tried to leave now. Go to sleep. It must be near morning."
"Oh yes," sighed Timmy, "oh, yes." And he lay back down. "Sleep well."
And I did, going out like a lamp blown out, and dreamed wild, exciting dreams
about riding astride ships that went sailless across waterless oceans of nothingness and burned with white hot fury that woke me up to full morning light and Merry bouncing happily on my stomach.
After breakfast, Mama carefully oiled Timmy's scabs again. "I'm almost out of bandages," she said.
"If you don't mind having to see," said Timmy, "don't bandage me again. Maybe the light will come through."
We went out and looked at the dimple by the porch. It had subsided farther and was a bowl-shaped place now, maybe waist-deep to me.
"Think it'll do any good to dig it out again?" I asked Father. "I doubt it," he answered heavily. "Apparently I don't know how to set a charge to break the bedrock. How do we know we could break it anyway? It could be a mile thick right here." It seemed to me that Father was talking to me more like to a man than to a boy. Maybe I wasn't a boy any more!
"The water is there," said Timmy. "If only I could 'platt'-" His hand groped in the sun and it streamed through his fingers for a minute like sun through a knothole in a dusty room. I absently picked up the piece of stone I had dumped from the bucket last evening. I fingered it and said, "Ouch!" I had jabbed myself on its sharp point. Sharp point!
"Look," I said, holding it out to Father. "This is broken! All the other rocks we found were round river rocks. Our blasting broke something!"
"Yes." Father took the splinter from me. "But where's the water?"
Timmy and I left Father looking at the well and went out to the foot of the field where the fire had been. I located the rock where I had buried the box. It was only a couple of inches down-barely covered, I scratched it out for him.
"Wait," I said, "it's all black. Let me wipe it off first." I rubbed it in a sand patch and the black all rubbed off except in the deep lines of the design that covered all sides of it. I put it in his eager hands.
He flipped it around until it fitted his two hands with his thumbs touching in front. Then I guess he must have thought at it because he didn't do anything else but all at once it opened, cleanly, from his thumbs up.
He sat there on a rock in the sun and felt the things that were in the box. I couldn't tell you what any of them were except what looked like a piece of ribbon, and a withered flower. He finally closed the box. He slid to his knees beside the rock and hid his face on his arms. He sat there a long time. When he finally lifted his face, it was dry, but his sleeves were wet. I've seen Mama's sleeves like that after she has looked at things in the little black trunk of hers.
"Will you put it back in the ground?" be asked. "There is no place for it in the house. It will be safe here."
So I buried the box again and we went back to the house.
Father had dug a little, but be said, "It's no use. The blast loosened the ground all around and it won't even hold the shape of a well any more."