Eben had expected to be embarrassed by the smallness of the crew. He had dug ditches with grown men, shoulder to shoulder, and he knew what real digging looked like, and eleven children and a schoolteacher did not look like real digging. But Selma set them to work the way she set them to sums in the classroom, each child with a task that fit the size of their hands, and she herself took a shovel and dug beside them, and Eben, who had planned to do the heavy work alone while the children watched, found himself digging beside her, and then the children digging beside him, and the hole growing in the ground in a way that surprised him, because it was not growing by force. It was growing by agreement, each shovelful placed where it belonged, the spoil carried to the downhill lip and tamped down the way Selma showed them, a little at a time, so that the lip rose as the bowl deepened, and the whole shape held together like a thing that had been thought about before it was made.
By noon the pond was a shallow scoop in the earth, and by evening it was a bowl a man could stand in up to his knees, and Eben, standing in it with mud on his boots, felt something he had not felt in a long time about his own land: that the land and the people working it were, for once, pulling in the same direction.
Selma stood at the edge of the bowl with her notebook open, and she wrote down the depth at five points, and the width at the lip, and the height of the downhill bank, and then she closed the notebook and said, "Tomorrow we line the bottom with clay, and the day after that we cut the ditch from the headgate to the pond, and then we will see what the water does when it is given a place to wait."
The clay came from the creek bank, where the water had laid it down in the slow bends, gray and heavy and slick between the fingers. The children carried it in buckets after school on Monday and Tuesday, and Eben mixed it with straw the way his father had mixed it for the old well, and they pressed it into the bottom of the bowl in layers, each layer tamped with the flat of a shovel, until the bottom was smooth and tight as a tabletop. Selma tested it by pouring a bucket of water into the shallow end and watching to see how much of it sank away, and when most of it stayed, shining in the sun, she nodded, and wrote the number down, and said, "It will hold. Not perfectly. Nothing holds perfectly. But it will hold enough."
That evening, after the children had gone home with mud on their knees and their lunch pails empty, Eben sat on his porch with his orchard journal open on his lap and tried to write down what the day had meant, and found that he did not have the words for it in the way he usually had words for his trees. His journal was a practical book. It recorded bloom dates and frost nights and bushels picked, and it recorded, in a column he had added himself, how many days of water each block of trees had received. For ten years the numbers had told the same story: the years when the water came early and stayed late were the years the orchard bore well, and the years when the water came all at once and then stopped were the years the fruit was small and the trees sulked. He had never known what to do about that story, because the water had always arrived the way the ditch company delivered it, in a rush, and no one man could change the habits of a whole valley. Now, looking at the pond in his lower field, gray with clay and shining with the bucket of test water, he wrote a new kind of entry, in a hand less certain than usual: "Pond lined. Selma says it will