So he'd gone down there in the driest week of the driest month on his knees. And he dug a hole with his hands about a foot deep, and he'd waited. And when he came back that evening, there was water standing in the bottom of it.
He'd pressed his palm flat against the sides of the hole, and he'd felt it: cool and damp and weeping, the soil giving up moisture it had no business having in a drought. There was a seep down there, a slow thread of a spring, feeding up through a floor of clay that held the water instead of letting it drain away. The clay was why it puddled after a rain; the seep was why it never fully quit, not even in a dry year.
He told nobody. He filled the hole back in and went home and lay awake in the dark until every piece of it—the seep, the pamphlets, the word Kesler had used—stood up in his mind at once and fit.
And that draw, the quiet, overlooked crease the whole family had learned to walk past without a second look, sat about nine feet higher up the slope than the field that was dying.
Nine feet. That was all it was. Enough to water a quarter-acre if he could build the thing to carry it there, and no pump anywhere in it.
That night, his grandmother found him on the back steps, the pamphlets closed in his lap, staring up at the dark shape of the high ground.
"I'm not going to push it up," Micah said.
Eunice waited. A breath left the boy, and something in his face settled.
"I'm going to let it fall."
She didn't fully understand it yet, but she reached over and squeezed the back of his neck the way she had when he was small. And she said she'd keep the coffee on for as long as he needed it. And in the morning, she left the whole stack of pamphlets on the top step, tied with a piece of string for him to keep.
The trouble was that a system like that took pipe—a great deal of pipe. And a boy with a coffee can of egg money couldn't buy pipe, so he went and got it for free.
Every Saturday that summer, before the heat came up, Micah pedaled his bicycle out along the dirt roads of the county, a wooden trailer bumping along behind him that his father had built years back for hauling feed. He stopped wherever he saw old equipment sitting out at the edge of a field: rusted lengths of aluminum line, cracked PVC, fittings gone green in the weeds. He'd walk up to the house, he'd knock, and he'd ask, polite as Sunday, if he could take the old pipe off their hands.
And farmer after farmer told him the same thing: "Sure, son. Help yourself."
Then they'd lean back against the porch rail and watch a 13-year-old wrestle broken pipe into a wagon, and they'd chuckle—the soft, baffled kind of laughter that isn't cruel, just lost: a boy hauling off the very stuff they'd been meaning to burn. Not selling it, not playing with it—working at it like it was the most serious thing in the world.
"What's a boy want with all that junk?" one of them called after him.
Micah just lifted a hand and kept pedaling. He wasn't telling.
His brother thought the whole business was a waste of a perfectly good summer.
"Dad needs you in the shed," Reuben said one morning, watching him lash another load down. "And you're out here playing with pipe that didn't work the first time somebody threw it out." He shook his head and went back inside.
Micah let it go. He was getting used to letting it go.
His little sister, Nella, was the only one who came along without being asked. She was eight, and she trailed him everywhere, handing him tools he didn't always need and asking questions he didn't always answer.
"Why's it got all those little holes in it?" she asked, poking at the roll of black tape he'd finally gone and bought.
Micah crouched down to her level. "So it doesn't waste a drop," he said. And that was all he'd tell her, all he'd tell anybody. He tapped the roll once and went back to loading. And Nella decided on the spot that guarding it was now her job.
That drip line was the one thing he couldn't scourge. New emitter tape cost real money, and there was no old farmer giving that away. So one Saturday, he took the coffee can out from under the loose board and he counted it twice, and he rode into town to the farm supply store, and he laid a summer's worth of egg money on the counter and bought the roll outright.