A Dry Year

It had not rained in the valley since the spring before, and the wells were giving up one by one, like old men. So Aldo dug. He was sixteen and the strongest thing his family owned, and digging a new well was the kind of job that fell to the strongest thing. He dug for nine days in the dry south field, where the dowser's stick had finally twitched. He went down past the topsoil, past the clay, into a layer of pale stone that rang under the pick like a struck bell. On the ninth day the pick did not ring. It clanged, metal on metal, and Aldo cleared the dirt with his hands and found a crossguard. He thought, at first, it was a plough blade. The valley was full of buried iron; war had passed through it twice. But ploughs do not have grips wound in silver wire, and ploughs do not, when your fingers close around them, go warm, and ploughs do not whisper a name that is almost, but not quite, your own.