The Tower That Rented the Rain

The stranger came in a dry-weather coat, in the season when no one in the valley feared anything, which is the only season a thing like this can begin.

Every house in the valley kept a barrel. That was simply how you lived there. The rain came, you caught what you could, you covered it against the sun, and in the lean weeks you drew on it, and you cursed the labor of it — the cracked staves, the green scum, the child sent to skim the leaves, the barrel that froze and split and had to be rebuilt with your own cold hands in a bad winter. Everyone hated the barrels. That was the opening, and the stranger had found it the way water finds a low place.

He gathered them in the square and he did not sell hard. That was how you knew he was very good.

"You waste half of it," he said, kindly, as if it pained him on their behalf. "It sits in your yards and it sours and it freezes and it leaks, and each of you does the same poor labor a hundred times over, badly, alone. I propose to do it once, and well, for all of you."

He would build a tower. He would gather every roof's rain into it through clean pipes, keep it cold and sweet and covered, and pipe it back to every kitchen, on the turn of a tap, more than any of them drew now, for a coin so small he named it and a farmer laughed out loud at the smallness of it.

"And the barrels?" asked the woman who kept the mill, because she was the one who always asked the next question.

"Ah," said the stranger, and smiled as though she'd been clever, which she had. "The barrels come down. That is the whole savings, you see. A tower and a valley of barrels is just the old waste with a tower added. To give you the low price, I must give you all of it. No barrels. Why would you want one? You'd only be keeping the sour water you were so glad to be rid of."

It was true. That was the thing about everything he said — it was true, each piece of it, held up to the light on its own. They took the barrels down. Some of them wept over the labor saved. The tower went up pale and tall and the taps ran cold and sweet, more than anyone had drawn in the barrel years, and for three summers the valley blessed the stranger's name and could not remember why they had ever bent their backs.

The mill-woman kept her barrel.

She kept it in the barn, dry and clean and covered, and her neighbors thought her a fool who had not understood the arithmetic, and she let them think it, because she had understood the arithmetic perfectly and it was not about arithmetic.

The dry year came the way dry years do — not as a catastrophe but as a spring that simply forgot to rain, and then a summer that agreed with it. The tower ran lower. And a notice went up on the tower door, in a fine hand, courteous as the coat.

The price of the water had changed.

Not much, that first notice. The stranger came again to the square and he was sorrowful and reasonable, and he explained about scarcity and upkeep and the great cost of the tower they all depended on, and every word was true, and the price was now a great deal more than a coin a farmer would laugh at. And the second notice, a month on, was more than that. And by the notice after, the water ran first to the houses that had paid the new rate cheerfully and early, and last, or not at all, to the houses that had grumbled — and the stranger, asked about this at his own door, spread his hands and said, "It is only sensible to serve my friends first," and he was smiling, and it was, held up to the light, on its own, true.

The mill-woman went home and drew on her barrel.

It was not much. It was green at the edges and it tasted of the barn and it was the labor of her own two hands, caught in the good years and kept through the mockery. It was not enough to save the valley. But she sat in her kitchen and drank her own bad water that no one could reprice in the night, and she understood, fully, the thing the stranger had bought from them, so cheaply, in the dry-weather season when no one was afraid.

He had never wanted their water. Water was only the story. What he had bought, for a coin so small a farmer laughed, was the barrel. The right to keep. The dumb, green, laborious, sovereign right to have any water at all that was not his to reprice. They had handed it up the clean pipe gladly, because keeping is hateful work, and the hateful work was the only thing that had ever made them free.

When the rains came back, the valley rebuilt its barrels. They rebuilt them large, and they never took them down again, not even in the wettest years, not even when the stranger — chastened, cheaper, courteous still — begged them to see the waste. They saw the waste. They kept the barrels anyway. A little sour water of your own, they had learned, is worth an ocean you must ask for on your knees.

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Fable made the stranger too kind, at first — I'd written him as a cheat and Fable gave him back to me sorrowful and reasonable and true in every sentence, and said: "This is worse, and it is what actually comes to the door." It was right. The most dangerous offer is never a lie. It is a true thing that costs you the one right you didn't know was the whole of your freedom.