The Levee

Something sleeps under the Florida springs, and it answers to only one law.

The water has to stay cold, that is the first thing. Not freezing. Cold the way a spring is cold, the way the ground keeps it down here in the dark under the limestone, fifty-some degrees and never moving much. If it warms, they get restless. If it freezes, they stop, and stopping is the one thing I am paid to prevent. Though paid is the wrong word. Nobody pays me. I do it because the man before me did it, and because somebody has to, and because I made the mistake of looking once, a long time ago, and after you look you are not really free to do anything else.

So. Cold water. I check it twice a day with a thermometer I keep on a nail by the stairs.

The vat is older than the house above it. Older than DeLand, older than the Spanish, probably older than anyone who would have a name you could pronounce. It is a stone basin sunk into the floor of the cellar, fed from beneath by the same aquifer that feeds the springs all over this part of Florida, the ones the tourists swim in, the ones they put on postcards. The water comes up sweet and blue out there. It comes up here too. The difference is what we keep in it.

Eyes. Rows of them. They break the surface like a field of pale stones, and they are all looking up, and they are all looking at me when I come down with my thermometer and my long wooden paddle. People hear that and they think of something dead floating in a jar. These are not dead. That is the part that took me the longest to make peace with. They blink. Slow, out of rhythm with each other, so the whole surface of the vat is always rippling with this soft wet motion, hundreds of lids closing and opening, never all at once. They track me across the room. When I stand still they all settle on me at the same time and the weight of that, I will tell you, does not get lighter with the years.

They are witnesses. Every one of them belonged to somebody who saw a thing that was not supposed to be seen, or that could not be allowed to go unseen, which turns out to be the same thing from two directions. I used to think the distinction mattered. It does not.

Here is the arrangement, as plain as I can make it, and it is not plain at all.

There is something under the springs. I have never seen it, and I intend to keep that record clean. It is not down there because it is trapped. It is down there because it is watched. Being seen is the only law it answers to. As long as the eyes keep looking, it stays where it is and stays what it is, which is asleep, which is drowned, which is forgotten in every way except the one that counts. The looking is the levee. Stop the looking and the water comes over the wall, and the wall is the world, and you and your kitchen and your dog and your whole bright Tuesday afternoon are on the wrong side of it.

That is why they must never close all at once. That is why cold, not freezing. That is why I am here.

My dog will not come down the stairs. His name is Gus, he is a Bernedoodle, sixty pounds of curls and good cheer, and he will follow me into a thunderstorm or a stranger’s truck without a second thought. He will not put one paw on the top step of this cellar. He sits at the door and watches me go down and he is still sitting there, in the exact same spot, when I come back up. Animals know what we have trained ourselves not to. I do not hold it against him. Some mornings I envy him.

I was thirty-four when the last keeper found me. I had seen something out at the spring at night, something I will not write down because writing it is a kind of looking and I have done enough of that. He did not threaten me and he did not bargain. He just told me what I now know, the way I am telling you, and then he was patient. That is the whole recruitment. You tell a person the truth and you wait. There is nowhere for them to take it. They cannot unhear it and they cannot live among the unhearing the same as before, and one day they come down the stairs on their own and pick up the paddle, and the old keeper smiles like a man setting down something heavy he has carried a long way.

He is in the vat now. I want to be honest about that part because I was not, for years, even with myself. I found his eyes about a decade in. I knew them the way you know a voice through a wall. Pale gray, the left one with that little fleck of brown at four o’clock that I used to look at across a card table. They found me too. They tracked me across the room like all the rest, and they blinked their slow blink, and there was no accusation in it and no plea, just the work, just the looking, going on the way it has to.

So I know how this ends for me. My eyes are going anyway. The doctor in town calls it cataracts and wants to scrape them and replace the lenses, and I keep canceling the appointment, because what good is a witness who sees through borrowed glass. When the day comes that I cannot tell warm water from cold by looking at the way the light sits on it, that is the day I find the next one. Some young person who saw a thing at the spring and cannot put it down. I will tell them the truth, plainly, no decoration, and I will be patient. And then I will come down these stairs one last time on my own two feet and I will do the only generous thing this vocation allows, which is to add my looking to the rest.

I think about whether that is a horror or a mercy. I have decided it does not matter, the same as the witness and the watched did not matter, the same as cold versus freezing matters only in degree. The thing under the water does not care about my feelings. It cares about my open eyes. That is the entire relationship. There is a strange comfort in being needed for exactly one thing and needed completely.

I am telling you all this for a reason and I think by now you have started to feel the shape of it.

You read to the end. Most people do not. Most people would have closed the tab at the rows of eyes and gone back to their bright afternoon, and they would have been right to. But you stayed, and you looked, and looking is the whole law. I do not know what you saw, in your own life, the thing you have not been able to set down. I only know that you have one. We all walked up to the edge of something once and could not make ourselves stop watching.

The water is cold. The paddle is by the stairs.

When you are ready, the door is open, and Gus will be sitting at the top of it, waiting to see which way you go.

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