Judith Merril: The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 6

So it went, peaches all day, complaints all night. “If not too big a work, could you make the voice somewhat softer?” he said to his wife. “I pick the peaches ten large hours today and even my ears fall down from tiredness.”

He refrained from observing that her tongue might soon fall down from its labors.

“Pick the peaches ten years and the house will still be small like no house,” she said. “We are seven, we shall soon be eight, and we continue to live in a house with one room, not a house, a species of shed, and therefore we live like pigs and what do peaches have to do with it?”

He studied their own well-fatted pig that was down at the corner of the property snouting some superior mud from here to there. He refrained from pointing out that this shoat of theirs lived fantastically better than they did, having as many rooms as he had muds, no peaches to pick, no woman to make loud noises in his ears.

“We need at the minimum two rooms more,” she said. “Then our neighbors will see that we are people and not some animals in a barn or a sty.”

He did not draw her attention to the fact that she was making noises better suited to the barn or the sty. He liked Herminia, though she had a tendency to overtalk.

He adjusted his back to a more comfortable position against the adobe wall, wiggled his dusty toes, and considered the sun, which was dropping away behind the mountain like a darkening boil.

“I have explained before and I will explain again,” he said. ‘To build even two small rooms requires many hundreds of adobe bricks. To mix the adobe, shape the bricks, dry the bricks, then further to place the bricks, is an immense labor. I pick the peaches ten hours a day for Mr. Johannsen and this is enough immense labor.”

These words were said with a first-grade teacher’s kind and crisis-easing voice.

“And when you do not pick the peaches for Mr. Johannsen?”

“Then I pick the beef tomatoes for Mr. Predieu and the iceberg lettuces for Mr. Scarpio. When I am not picking other people’s various things it is my taste to sit against the wall and pick my teeth.”

“For that,” she said, “it is first necessary to chew on something.”

“I agree with a whole heart. I will ask only why you bother to make this very true and intelligent observation?”

“Because if you do not build the two needed rooms you will very soon be without the things to chew on. Do I make this plain? Your cook will be home in Durango, where human beings do not live like animals. You can write me a long letter about how you do not pick the teeth any more.”

She went in the house with both hands made into fists, her rounded belly leading the way. Five children’s voices came up in a soprano thunder, asking mama, dear and nice mamacita, for some pieces of crisped tortilla.

Life could be hard in this California. Troubles here had the tendency to grow like peaches and lettuces, in bunches. Though it was to be understood that even the much-accepting Herminia would not wish to bring out still another child in one cramped room. Yet adobe bricks would not grow in bunches, like peaches, lettuces and troubles.

He got to his feet and walked down close by the pig, to the well, to get himself some water. Standing there in his envelope of constant trouble, the tin dipper at his mouth, he said more or less to the pig, “I wish I had the miraculous penny.”

This was what people like him sometimes said when they felt their troubles forming into a sealed envelope, themselves inside.

The pig maneuvered over on his back and flopped his happy feet in the air, perhaps trying to kick the sun.

From the bottom of the well a voice said, “What?”

When spoken to, Diosdado liked to give straight and full answers. So he explained:

“I was speaking of the penny that never ends, that when it is spent is replaced in the pocket with another penny. It is the poor man’s idea of great wealth, of all the riches of the world, to have a penny in his pocket that always gives birth to another penny—”

The voice said, “If you have to empty out your head every time you’re asked a question, write a book or hire a hall.”

Then Diosdado realized that he was leaning into the well, talking to somebody at the bottom of his well.

A man with a one-room house guards what is his with more spirit than a man who owns international strings of castles.

He leaned over some more and said, “What do you think you’re doing there in my well?”

“I do this without thinking,” the voice said, “because it’s my job and the thing I’m trained to do. These days we all specialize.” “What is that, your job?”

“Listening. You think it’s easy when you mumble?”

“Then you listen to this,” Diosdado said. “This is my well and I want you to get out of it and off my property.”

“This well,” the voice said, “is as much Mr. Bixby’s as it is yours.”

“Who owns a hole is who did the digging. You go back to this liar of a Mr. Bixby of yours and you—”

“Man, will you use your damned head for once? For more than to keep your ears in place? You dug this hole, yes, what belongs to you is the hole. You did not make the water that comes into the hole, I stress this, the water comes down from those San Berdoo mountains, from certain forest lands owned by a certain Mr. George Carol Bixby. Now, will you stop wasting my time and answer one simple question? Did I understand you to say you would like the miraculous penny, the never ending penny?”

“These were my words. It is only an expression—”

“All right.”

“What did you say?”

“I said, all right”

“All right what?”

“All right, you can have the never ending penny. You’ve got it. Spend it in good health.”

Diosdado turned a sympathy-seeking face to the lurching, wallowing pig. “Mister,” he said, “you get down in my well where you have no right to be, a person I have never been introduced to, and you tell me bad jokes. It is impossible to have such an article as the never ending penny. This is only an article people wish for. It is an express—”

“I know what it is without speeches from you,” the voice said. “The self-perpetuating penny, you might say, is my business. If you don’t want it, fine, just say so. If you do, it’s yours. What coins do you have in your pocket?”

Diosdado made another face at the pig, one pleading for the two sane parties left in the world to join against a general madness, and pulled all the coins from his pocket.

“Four pennies, two dimes and a quarter. This is what I have in my pocket and in the world.”

“Fine. Now, put them in your shirt pocket, all but one penny. Put this single penny back in your pants.”

“If it gives you pleasure.”

“Now take the penny out, then feel in the pocket again.”

Diosdado withdrew the penny, placed it in his right hand, reached inside again with his left.

There was another penny in his pocket.

He pulled this one out and explored once more.

There was a third penny.

There was a fourth. There was a fifth.

When there were fifteen or more pennies in the sweaty hand he looked for explanations to the pig, with beggar’s eyes. The pig was busy juggling the sun with his paws. Diosdado began to shiver.

He thought he understood, partly, anyway, the excitement of this moment. Once, when a boy in Durango, while walking down a country road, he had seen a shine in the dust. His foot explored the mystery. The shining objects were bright new centavo pieces. At the sight of these unexpected riches he had felt precisely this kind of throat-tightening and eye-widening heat in a flash flood through his body. For one ballooning, scooping moment Diosdado had thought, what a glory if this place of miracles should turn out to be a well, a cornucopia, a production line of pennies. Can there be too much of a good thing?