After just a few minutes, he forgot about being out of sight, too. He crept farther down, until he could see into the big room. Papa sat on the floor, surrounded with wood. It surprised Al Junior that Papa was still doing that, even after coming upstairs to kill roaches, even after so much time had passed. He was bent over now, his face buried in his hands. Mama knelt in front of him, the biggest hunks of wood between them.

“He’s alive, Alvin,” said Mama. “All the rest ain’t worth never mind.”

Papa lifted his head and looked at her. “It was water that seeped into the tree and froze and thawed, long before we even cut it down. And we happened to cut it in just such a way that the flaw never showed on the surface. But it was split three ways inside, just waiting for the weight of the ridgebeam. It was water done it.”

“Water,” said Mama, and there was derision in her voice.

“This is fourteen times the water’s tried to kill him.”

“Children always get in scrapes.”

“The time you slipped on a wet floor when you were holding him. The time David knocked down the boiling cauldron. Three times when he was lost and we found him on the bank of the river. Last winter when the ice broke on the Tippy-Canoe River—“

“You think he’s the first child to fall into the water?”

“The poison water that made him throw up blood. The mud-covered buffalo that charged him in that meadow—“

“Mud-covered. Everybody knows that buffaloes wallow like pigs. It had nothing to do with water.”

Papa slapped his hand down hard on the floor. The sound rang like a gunshot through the house. It startled Mama, and of course she started to look toward the stairs to where the children would be sleeping. Alvin Junior scampered right back up the stairs and waited out of sight for her to order him back to bed. But she must not have seen him, cause she didn’t shout anything and nobody came up after him.

When he tiptoed back down, they were still going at it, only a little quieter.

Papa whispered, but there was fire in his eyes. “If you think this doesn’t have to do with water, then you’re the one that’s a lunatic.”

Mama was icy now. Alvin Junior knew that look—it was the maddest Mama knew how to get. No slaps then, no tongue-lashings. Just coldness and silence, and any child who got that treatment ftom her began to long for death and the tortures of hell, because at least it would be warmer.

With Papa she wasn’t silent, but her voice was terrible cold. “The Savior himself drank water from the Samaritan well.”

“I don’t recollect that Jesus fell down that well, neither,” said Papa.