What Foma Ryabov Still Won’t Trust the Sky For

Twelve mornings now. Foma climbs the ladder at first light, touches the barrel’s rim, and finds the same three fingers of standing water he found on the first morning and every morning since — old rain, going faintly green at the edges, not new. He climbs down without saying anything to it. Takes the yoke instead. Two buckets from the well, twice a day, same as the day before and the day before that. The cabbages can’t tell carried water from fallen water. He can, or believes he can, which comes to the same thing in a garden.

At the well this morning three women were talking about the sky instead of drawing from it, which is its own kind of news. Something built in the west past noon, they said, dark enough to shadow the promontory for an hour, and came to nothing by evening bell. The dockhands have started listening for thunder that hasn’t sounded yet. Twelve days is the mark the old saying keeps for it — I did not know that number until today, and neither, I think, did most of the women at the rope. Foma didn’t join the talk. He filled his buckets and left before the second one finished her sentence.

His granddaughter carried the near bucket back for him, the yoke’s other arm empty on his own shoulder, and didn’t spill past the second turn in the lane — she has that now, the not-spilling, which she didn’t have at the start of summer. He didn’t tell her so. He watered the near row first, the one closest to the gate, the way he’s watered it every day since the barrel stopped giving him anything.

Two doors past his fence, a girl who has answered to Malinka for three weeks got the same word written into the Temple’s book this morning, official now, which changed nothing about what she already answered to. Foma’s water is like that too. It doesn’t care what day the almanac says is the day. It only knows whether the row got wet.