“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.

Alvin Junior thought of hanging onto the well bucket, falling down into the darkness, until the rope bound up on the windlass and the bucket stopped just above the water, where he would have drowned for certain. They told him he wasn’t yet two years old when that happened, but he still dreamed sometimes about the stones that lined the inside of the well, getting darker and darker as he went down. In his dreams the well was ten miles deep and he fell forever before waking up.

“Then think of this, Alvin Miller, since you think you know scripture.”

Papa started to protest that he didn’t think nothing of the kind.

“The devil hisself said to the Lord in the desert that the angels would bear Jesus up lest he dash his foot against a stone.”

“I don’t know what that has to do with water—“

“It’s plain that if I married you for brains I was plumb cheated.”

Papa’s face turned red. “Don’t you call me no simpleton, Faith. I know what I know and—“

“He has a guardian angel, Alvin Miller. He has someone watching out for him.”