Pure Dirt

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The white mud that came up own of the well hole as the big rig hammered deeper and deeper, forming a white mountain-cap on the pile where Dutch regularly extruded fresh tubes of inner Earth from his cable-hung, sharp-ended pipe. The virginal dirt covering the previous browns and reds like icing and gradually oozing farther and farther, its creaminess giving it more range than the cloth brown stuff, burying more and more green grass, oozing down the bank and finding the driveway ditch, becoming a creek of milky lava that was amazing for distance — all the way down the long, flat stretch of driveway, around the big curve and then down the steep hill, extending its reach an inch or two at a surge, lengthening while we watched it, walking along with it. Would it reach the creek itself? The beauty went out of it. Whatever that lovely mud really was, whatever it was meant for, however righteous its intentions, whatever understandable vengeance or happy mischief it was embarking on, however wonderful it was to have the world’ earliest, cleanest dirt springing from God’s secret underworld, we could not be happy to have it touch our creek. As impure and full of sinister things as our creek was, it was the way ur creek was when we came into life in the old valley, and we did not want anything molesting it. We got busy with our boots, with sticks, with our small soft hands, trying to dam it. Then divert it. Then Billy and I ran asif a life depended on it to get real tools — two shoves, a hoe a monstrously heavy and dangerous pick axe.

Panting and weak, I lunged to work with no definite plan. “Just get out of the way!” Billy commanded, and I did. He went into battle with the pick that I could barely lift above my head once, fearing it would come down on me, putting a spike straight down through my brain. The double-spiked head hung above my brother time after time, and his body contorted in a  skillful way to bring one iron point down into the hard earth. Over and over he contorted the war tool arching  over him like segment of orbital speed turned solid. He was chopping a groove across the driveway itself, splitting and uprooting our raw country cobbles of creek rock, dividing the the fundamental cement of our proudest road, creek rock baked in red Missouri clay. It was like seeing a building cut through the middle. “Make a dam!” my brother commanded, red and wet, in the full throats of his stamina. “There!” Below the channel!” He had a plan, he had a technology and a terminology. Like so many things he came up with seemingly out of the blue, it had the ring of utter correctness. I snapped to, did it wrong, got told off and shown the right way. In another 10 minutes we had it working. Some of the white flow had already gotten past s, but it didn’t matter. The stream in the ditch was cut off like a snake. At our dam, the flow was redirected into Billy’s substantial rut across the road. Almost immediately we saw that it was working. By the time the flow had reached the other side of the driveway, the original cut-off branch was drying, its moisture sucked back downward through the leaves and black crumble of the ditch bed, leaving a powdery grayness on the leaves and dirt that was startling,so quickly had the foreign mud turned from pudding to cigarette ashes.

“But  it’s still going toward the creek!” I shouted, with sudden realization. My brother went into one of his head-shaking, shoulder-heaving chuckles.

“What?” I demanded, a little more direct in my anger when he was in a light mood.

“You imbecile,” he said happily, “there’s an acre of dry field between here and the creek.”

“So?” I asked. Things that were obvious to him and the people who built dams in canyons and bridges across rivers, and so on, were sometimes dark to me.

“So?” he  demanded. “What don’t you get? What an acre is?”

“Why the white stuff won’t still go into the creek.”

“Because!” my brother explained.

I felt dizzy. I didn’t understand what it was I wasn’t understanding.

He wasn’t laughing so, so I couldn’t make my enquireiess directly, or talk in a yell, which could sometimes make whatever it was seem more to the point. 

“It’ll just cover up everything down here, and then start filling up the creek,” I ventured. He chuckled again. He enjoyed moments like that more than I did.

“There’s not an infinite amount of it,” he said.

“There’s not an infinite amount of anything.”

“Poh, really?” he said, as if he knew otherwise, and I realized that was an argument I couldn’t win. Another of many.

I had thought for a moment that I was making sense, but saw now that in some way I could’t grasp I was hopelessly ignorant. Smart in some ways, maybe very smart by some families’ standards, but in a family like mine, with a father who could cream worlds into being and an eight-year-old brother who could use men’s tools and acquire men’s knowledge out of nowhere, I was practically a moron.

“I just think if it could get to the creek that way —“ I pointed to the ditch — “it could get there this way, too.”

“What you think and what is are obviously different things.”

So I saw that saving the creek was something we were done with now. The logic that made the game possible had been broken.

We stood looking.

“That stuff is pretty neat, though,” said my brother.

“White mud,” I said.

We followed the white river back uphill, and all along the way it was still now and drying. At the well head the mound was now brown. Dutch had cut through that layer of white Earth and was bringing up regular dark dirt again, little different from what we’d always known, always found to be a good enough kind of earth. The other kind had just been there in a small amount, there without you expecting it, gone before you knew it.