Kind One - By Laird Hunt Page 0,2

being buried alive under the enemy’s fortifications. I had stopped breathing when another man grabbed my boots and pulled me free. I was eager to take the pebbles down into the hole I had dug. I would do that the next day. I was glad my wife had made such pretty piles with them.

I dug again in the mud all the next long day. I had been worried about the walls of the well, but the earth was rich in clay and held firm. Roots dangled from the walls I had made, and every now and again an earthworm shivered itself free and dropped into the water I now had to put my shovel through. At first I tried to save these worms, as I had when I had dug wells during the war. I picked them up with my hands or with my shovel. I picked them up if I could see them. Often they were just gone into the swirling water. Soon I stopped trying to save them. I knew I would want to be saved if I fell out of my home of earth and into an unexpected pool of water, some wet cavern in the dark. The light from the sunny day above came down and lit me in my labors. The buckets I sent up were heavier than they had been before, but the windlass held and my wife did not complain even as the dirt pile grew and grew.

It rained the next day and the one after that. At first I tried to continue my work, deep below the earth, but the rain grew strong and the walls slick, and I knew I had lowered myself into a foolishness I might not emerge from. We built a fire and sat by it. The livestock were secure and the roof of our house did not leak. Our daughter giggled in her basket or on our laps. My wife did her mending and we spoke of the labors to come. I meant next to clear a fresh field beyond the stream. I meant to erect a barn. I meant for our stock to multiply. It rained and we spoke of days past. My wife had lived by the sea during her youth, and she liked to think of ways that the world around her was like the world that lived on in her mind. She also liked the differences between this world and that one, and I loved her for that. When our daughter had fallen asleep and the fire had settled into itself, we lay down together on the bed.

I waited two days after the rain had stopped and the waters had receded before returning to the bottom of the well. All that day my wife lowered buckets of colored pebbles down to me. She sent the blue ones first, then the green ones, then the white ones, then a mixture of yellow and brown. Last, she sent down the pinks. I set the pebbles down in the water by the fistful and did my best to spread them out as I thought she had imagined them. Layers of hard color the water could rise through.

That afternoon a man and a woman dressed in buckskin came out of the woods. They both wore bright feathers and pieces of colored string in their hair. They came across the field and stepped onto the yard and went to the lip of the well and looked down. Then they looked over to the house where I stood ready with my gun, but they just nodded at me and looked down the well and walked on.

As I fell asleep that night, I thought of the brick I would line the sides of my well with, but when I slept I dreamt of colored stones. Once I thought I woke during the night and called out, but I did not wake, did not call out. It seemed to me as I dug deeper into my sleep that a chink opened in the side of the house and moonlight crept in. Even though there was no moon that night and no chink for it to creep through.

I was slow to wake in the morning and slower to set to piling up bricks by the mouth of the well. I had no hod so I carried the bricks two at a time, one in each hand. I made a neat pile and checked the pulley. I considered aloud just dropping them down