Carol Emshwiller - Water Master

VIP免费

2024-11-23 0 0 25.31KB 11 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

Water Master

by Carol Emshwiller

If the Water Master says, yes, then your apple trees will grow. If he says, yes, you'll take a bath, have a

drink, and you might even have a little patch of grass.

He checks the irrigation ditches and gates all day long. Leans over to pinch the sand between his fingers.

Never looks up to see the birds or the mountains. Never notices the sky except as it's reflected in his

water. He has to watch for secret ditches or for open gates that are supposed to be closed.

When I say, Hello, and he answers the same, he doesn't look up. I don't know what color his eyes are.

Blue, I would imagine. I would hope. He always wears a wide brimmed black hat pulled down low. I

don't know what his face looks like except that it's lean and lined. I don't suppose he cares who I am.

Besides, I only grow prickly pears, squaw tea, tepary beans, and mesquite pods. I don't need the Water

Master's water. At least not much of it.

Water is what's on his mind and rightly so. I can understand that. Nothing is better, how it bubbles up

and sparkles, silvery in the sun, frothing, foaming as it rushes, roaring down from way up there to here.

How it leaps so high over rocks. How it trembles in backwater pools. How it tastes. Cool.… Cold.…

How dangerous it can be.

Those who steal water are the worst, therefore the Water Master wears a bullet proof book of "The

Hundred Best Loved Poems" over his heart (given to him by the town. We need to keep him healthy)

and pistols at his sides. Shoot first, think afterwards, that's what a Water Master does. Has to do. Those

who open gates in the middle of the night after the Water Master has closed them … those people are in

trouble even if they think they're doing all right so far.

He lives way up by his dam, in a big house or so they say. All the things to build it but the stones came up

on mules. Furnishings, too: Bathtubs, beds, mirrors so large you wouldn't think they could get around the

switchbacks. I've heard tell there's an orchard and grapes and artichokes and rose bushes. There's plenty

of water up there, that's where it comes from.

Even so, I'm sorry for him, looking at the ground all day long, seeing not much more than lizards. Lizards

down here that is, goodness knows what crawls around up there. It's a hard, long climb to where he lives

but he goes up and down almost every day, checking our raging river as he goes.

His name is Amos Acularious, but nobody calls him anything but Water Master. I think his grandparents

and parents were shepherds. I wonder how one gets from shepherd to Water Master? It doesn't seem

right. They say it's the river, chooses its own master. I don't believe it. And even if true, why would it

choose a shepherd?

Even though all those Acularius's were nothing but shepherds, and even though Amos Acularius is so thin

there's nothing much to him, and even though he wears a fringed jacket which makes him look even

thinner, every girl would like to marry the Water Master and live in that big house. They've heard how

shiny the floors are, how the roof gleams with copper, how water runs, icy cold, from half the faucets and

even, though hard to believe, hot from the other half.

I, on the other hand, have long since decided never to marry. In fact that's been my policy from the start.

It was because of diapers. (I changed my first diaper at the age of seven.) Because of dishes, too. (As

the oldest child in my family, I had plenty of both those.) Besides, by now I'm too old for marriage,

anyway. Except so is Amos Acularius.

· · · · ·

There hasn't been much snow on the mountains this year. They say our Lake of the Mountain is low.

Many of the ditch gates are shut in order for the lake to fill. Even so it isn't filling. Onions and rutabagas

and apple trees are dying. Perhaps my tepary beans will save us all.

Nobody is supposed to go up there. That was decided a long time ago when the first Water Master was

appointed. (I say appointed, but everybody else says chosen by the river.) That's his private place where

he can work water wonders in seclusion. Bring a wife up and live his own life. Have his little Water

Master children. Little skinny mountain goat kind of children, I suppose, brought up on the cliffs.

But something is wrong. Nobody has seen Amos Acularius for several days. They've formed a group to

go up. A sort of posse. They're angry. They think maybe it's a lie that the lake is low. Maybe there's

plenty of water but Amos Acularius has been persuaded to let our water fall over to the other side of the

mountain into some neighboring town or other we don't know anything about. There's talk of bringing up

a bomb.

Even if he is skinny and ugly (though I've hardly seen more of his face than his unshaven bony jaw with

deep lines at the sides) I wouldn't want him hurt. I'm going up by myself. Secretly. And before that posse

goes. They're still getting themselves together. Arguing. Even though they're angry, nobody wants to go

up this time of year. It's not only harvest time, but this is the season for mountain storms. I wonder if any

of them will actually get around to going up? But I'm going. I'll hide and watch what happens. I'll be there

before any of them even starts. All I need is lunch and a sweater. It's a perfect day for a climb.

· · · · ·

As I go I keep looking back to see if anybody has started up behind me yet. Nobody has. I like looking

back at our little town, nestled in close along the river bank, even though that river is dangerous. Folks

have drowned. Folks have been swept away—God knows where. I won't be able to see it much longer.

A fog is rolling in—up here, of course not down there. It's all blue sky down there. I've seen these clouds

before, hanging around the mountains. Pretty soon the tops will be hidden from everybody down there

and I'm about to be swallowed up in it. I won't get lost. It's easy to see when I'm on the path, and all

along I've been listening to our waterfall. I could follow by the noise alone.

When I'm most of the way up (I hope most of the way, I've climbed for three hours) the fog begins to

seem a little wispier, I see … I think I see Amos A. in the smoky distance.

I feel my heart lurch—in fact my whole body lurches, just from thinking it might be him.

I follow, well behind. Luckily the fog is still fairly thick. I climb right on through it, up and out the other

side. Suddenly the air is clear and the sky—such a dark blue. Below me, everything is all fogged in. I

can't see our town at all.

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

Carol Emshwiller - Water Master.pdf

共11页,预览2页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Carol Emshwiller - Water Master

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: