Chapter 13

Robert’s turn:

Life back on the family farm. It’s different this time. Before, I was always in school. Spring – the plantings, and fall, the harvest, I was in school. After high school, it was college.

And now I’m back, and the cycle of life changed for me, matching the one I watched with Dad and his father before him: winter – preparation. Spring – planting. Summer – watching. Autumn – harvest. And doing it again next year, and the year after that, and what changed in my mind and my heart that I suddenly saw that as where I was supposed to be – what I was supposed to do, instead of getting my engineering degree and going off into a different world with different patterns and cycles.

The answer to that question was in the left seat of the all-terrain side-by-side four-wheeler. Driving did not come naturally to Sachiko. Nothing existed in her world that was anything like it. Me, typical American kid, had been riding and steering things since I was old enough to walk. Sachiko, though, was a fast learner.

Turning over the wheel of the ATV to her was part of the process I came up with to transition her to driving on public roads.

An “Oh, I missed that turn...” followed by a bit of jockeying and finagling the ATV out of the mud was immensely preferable to pulling my car out of the ditch or explaining a fender-bender to an attentive cop.

Today, we’re well into the process, though, and I relax and let her navigate up the paths between the blocks of rice field. On one side of us was rice field, stretched for half a mile off into the distance before fence and treeline blocked the horizon. On the other side was the raised levee that marked one side of the irrigation canal, the artery that supplied the water to flood the fields in the spring and summer.

Our task today was to check the work others had done, overhauling the big sliding gates that we would use to let water out of the canal and into the fields when the time came. This stop was atop a culvert because this gate flowed water into a lateral canal that actually distributed it to fields going off to the north on both sides of the lateral.

It was dry, essentially – water puddled in low, grassy spots down its length.

I did a visual examination of the gate valve. It showed signs of being worked on.

“Let’s give it a try,” I said, then, “You can sit here...”

“I will not,” Chiki asserted. “You work. I work.”

One of us on each side of the big handwheel had it spinning. It was obviously worked over. A season in the rain and sun and these things can freeze up tight. This one? Lots of turns of the handle, but the gate was coming up. As it started moving, water made its way under the valve seat, and the higher we got, the more water flowed.

We opened it all the way, then closed it.

“Call that one good,” I said.

Chiki stripped off her gloves. “In our fields, where water did not flow from the hills, we had pumps that were powered by men who used their legs, all day, for days, stepping up from one step to the next as the waterwheel picked up water from the stream and lifted it to the fields. You push a button. Something turns, water comes out...”

We’d done the checks of our irrigation pumps, some electric, some diesel, some from the nearby bayou, others from wells. Brown water from the bayou, that didn’t faze Chiki, but when I pushed the button on the deep well and clear cold water came tumbling out of a twelve-inch pipe, she was taken aback.

The flow from that well quickly filled the weir with gate valves leading to canals in three directions.

“This is beautiful water, Robert,” she said, drinking from a cup I’d handed her.

“Wait’ll late spring when we’re irrigating. This is THE place to take a swim.”

“We must do that. Cold water. Very invigorating. Good for you.”

“Yeah,” I said. I was imagining her ... I’d been swimming here since Dad used to bring me when I was a kid. As a teen, it was respite from a hot day’s work, and, well, clothing-optional. As in skinny-dipping. And here I am imagining this lithe thing knifing off the edge, diving naked into the pool.

She saw my face.

“Robert, you are having those thoughts...”

“Yes, my dear, I am. I am married to the most exotic of beauties and I am having those thoughts.”

I don’t know if she had to cultivate that giggle, but there it was, coupled with laughing eyes. She looked around. “There is nobody...”

“No, not today...”

“In Japan, maybe a quick swim – no clothing...”

“The water’s very cold.”

“Good for us.” She was undoing her shirt.

We plunged in together. The water was COLD. Reverse sauna. Almost heart-stopping, but we clasped each other, made a few splashes and rubbed the dirt from ourselves, then OUT.

“Shut the pump off and let us go home...” as we hurriedly redressed.

Oh yeah, she’s really driving pretty good.

A woman who can reassign my thoughts to see myself back on the farm riding on the tides of eternity is also a woman who can take me to galaxies uncatalogued. The whole range of Sachiko in a playful mood, the giggles, the laughing eyes, the curiosity, the eagerness - My boyhood imagination was woefully lacking.

Just a little bit longer than a quickie but not nearly as long as some of our sessions. For a creature sent as a curse, she fails horribly.