The first thing I noticed was the color.
Blue.
There was blue where no blue had ever belonged.
I had come over the ridge in my old Ford with the windows down and the late-summer heat pouring through the cab like breath from a furnace. The road back there was not really a road, just two hard-packed tire tracks running between waist-high grass, sweetgum saplings, and a line of pines my grandfather had planted before my father was old enough to hold an ax. I had driven that path thousands of times in my life. I could have done it blindfolded, though my grandfather would have slapped the back of my head for saying so. Every rut had a memory. Every bend had a reason. The land opened at the top of the ridge the same way it always had, rolling down into my southern pasture, dipping toward the spring, rising again toward the old stacked-stone fence that marked the boundary between Mercer land and the property south of it.
Only now, in the middle of that pasture, the sunlight flashed off water.
For a few seconds, my mind refused to understand what my eyes were seeing. I stopped the truck with one boot still hovering over the brake and stared through the dusty windshield. It looked like a mirage at first, one of those heat tricks Alabama can play on a man in August when the air is thick and the horizon shimmers. But mirages don’t have cut banks. Mirages don’t have raw red clay piled in mounds. Mirages don’t have excavator tracks carved deep enough to hold yesterday’s rain.
I killed the engine and listened to it tick itself quiet.
