Kind One - By Laird Hunt Page 0,1

do it and I said I didn’t like for her to have to. It was just the two of us with the baby, she said. Who else in the wide world was going to help me as the hole grew deeper? Someday we’ll have all the help we’ll need, I said. Someday isn’t today, she said. I thought of climbing in and out of the hole each time I had a bucket to pull up. I was going to hit water soon and would be wet each time. Our daughter had begun to cry, and by the time she had quieted I had nodded my head.

The next morning my wife brought the baby’s basket out into the yard, and each time I had a bucket filled she pulled it up. She sang as she did this work and I, in the shade of the hole, felt very happy. I was happy when I could hear the baby laughing or crying. Once my wife came and held the baby over the mouth of the hole so that she could see her father. The baby laughed but I could not see her face, only her curly-haired silhouette. I was standing in cool mud when my wife held our daughter over the mouth of the hole, and I shivered and after a while climbed up out of the hole and into the sun.

The next day we gathered pebbles from the streambed. I plucked them from the water and tossed them onto the bank. My wife separated them into piles by color. There were blue pebbles and pink pebbles and green pebbles and white pebbles. There were brown pebbles and yellow pebbles. The baby liked to put her hand into the piles and to put the pebbles into her mouth. She seemed to like the blue ones best. I told my wife that it wouldn’t matter what their color was where they were headed, but my wife said that it would matter to her. That it mattered to her was enough for me, and I took to calling out some of the colors I pulled up from the mud. It was pleasant to be out in the sunlight, in the warmth, in the gentle stream by my wife and our child. We had our dinner by the stream. I held my feet out of the water as we ate, but my wife let hers dangle in the wet. The baby cried a little then laughed and pulled herself aloft by grabbing onto my back.

I had hoped it would be time for the pebbles but found there was still a good deal of digging to be done. Twice I came out of my hole and breathed the warm air and let the sun bake the chill out of my bones. As I sat resting I considered the mound of dirt they had made. It was taller than my head. My wife had had to walk up its side in places. I could see her footprints. I knew that if our daughter was older, she would like to play on that pile. She would finish her chores and play at climbing to the top. I was tired, but I thought of climbing to the top of the pile myself. Of jumping down to its bottom. When I was a boy, far away from this Kentucky hill country, I had once jumped off the side of my father’s barn and broken my arm. None of the other boys had dared to do it. My father had whipped me until the switch broke. I did not plan to use a switch on my daughter. Even if the memory of jumping off the barn and of my father whipping me now, in the wet and dark of the hole, made me smile.

That evening I took my rifle out into the trees over the rise. The woods were quiet. I sat still for a long time. I did not know why the birds weren’t singing. It was too early for them to have gone to sleep. Nothing stirred. I both liked and did not like it. We had chosen our place, far away from anyone, but not from anything. Once, as I sat, the wind shifted and I could smell the fire from our chimney. I had grown lonely in the well. I did not understand this. I had worked alone for long hours in dark places during the war and had never grown lonely. Once I had just missed