As the water trickled down the rocks of Frog Leg Creek, the girls and boys gathered at its bank dangling their feet in the cold waters. Summer days always meant early rising and chores finished before the heat of the day scorched the back of the neck. Often, the children were free to find other summer diversions like swimming in Wilson’s Pond or cooling their toes along the Frog Leg.
There along the banks was the red-headed Scaley Wilson. He was called that because he shed his skin a lot sort of like a snake but in smaller pieces. There was almost-always-mean Matilda Morris, who was generally too good to play with the other children because her folks didn’t want her to mess up her store-bought clothes. There was Jump Jemison, who could climb high up in the old oak tree beside the creek and hit the swimming hole every time. There was Pearl, who generally sat and played with her doll Maggie given her by the Rev. Smathers.
On this hot day, much of the valley below the Gravelly Spur had succumbed to a drought and the fields and hillsides, just weeks before green and teaming with life, were brown. All of the farmers worked hard to irrigate their crops from the creek so not to lose them completely, but the fields of the farms nearest the water were the only ones holding on, despite all of the farmers banding together to haul barrels of water to the outer most farms in the valley on wagons.
The next greatest adult fear was that the wells might begin to dry up in the valley, but this did not phase the effervescent play of the children around the swimming hole as they simply tried to wash away the heat with a little fun. But even the kids noticed that the things were harder, their parent’s faces were not breaking with even the occasional smile.
Pearl had overheard her parents Bill and Kitty talking the night before about the Jemison’s maybe pulling up stakes and leaving in hopes of making it somewhere else.
She didn’t mention it to Jump at first, thinking he might not know. She had always liked Jump because he was full of life. He was the type of person who could find adventure in any situation and make even the most mundane task fun.
The kids often found themselves following behind him as if he was the pied piper to some mysterious location on the mountain where he concocted some tale of buried treasure left by pirates, an old Indian ceremonial ground filled with spirits, or just some game which could test the patience of any parent if they actually saw what the children were doing.
Pearl was saddened with the thought of Jump leaving and as she sat there, retying the bow around Maggie’s neck, she decided it was time the kids do something about it.
She stood up and called them all closer and said, “Jump, I hear you might leave us.”
“Yeah, if we don’t get rain soon, Pa says we will lose the crop and we’d have to move on,” he said.
“Well, instead of playing in this water why don’t we spend this time trying to get some water to Jump’s farm to see if we can keep him here,” Pearl said. “That’s a great idea,” Scaley said. “But how do we do it?”
“Well Dad has an irrigation ditch that runs from the creek to Scaley’s farm, that connects to one on Matilda’s farm, the problem is that Jump’s farm is uphill from there, so what can we do?” Pearl asked. It was Jump that had the idea. “What if we build a water wheel with buckets that puts the water higher so it runs down onto the farm. We could use the mules to turn it sort of like a cane press.”
It didn’t take much convincing before the group started enlisting every kid in the valley, scrounging buckets, looking for planks and nails, and cutting cane poles to put together a water wheel. Old man Johnson wondered for years where those big planks from the side of his abandoned barn went. They didn’t even tell the parents what they were doing; they just spent all their time away from chores working on the project until about a week and a half later they had finished and borrowed Grandpa Bill’s mule Rawel to see if it would work.
As Rawel began going round and round the buckets turned filling with water from the irrigation ditch pouring into the elevated wooden ditch they built sending the water into a new earthen ditch they dug onto the highest portion of the Jemison field. The water began to flow down the ditch and slowly moved across the rows of corn down the hillside.
As the water flowed, the children screamed in elation. You may wonder where Jump’s father had been all the time the kids were building this mechanism. He went ahead to visit with some relatives and see if there was a new place for the family with them in the West but as the kids were carrying on, he rode up on his chestnut mare, Elihue.
“What’s going on here?” he asked.
Jump came forward telling his father what all the neighbor’s children had done to make the water flow on their crops. He put his arm around the shoulder of his son as the others gathered round and they watched their contraption turn around and around as the water kept flowing giving the corn a new life to fill the Jemison family with a new hope and the valley with a glow of success that was shared with the other hillside farmers as the men and children worked to keep all the crops from floundering in the heat. It is amazing what can come even from the minds of a child when sometimes simplicity is the best approach to solving a problem, that is what the people of the Gravelly Spur found the summer that the rain forgot to come and they held on to a Frog Leg for dear life.
Randall Franks is an award-winning musician, singer and actor. He is best known for his role as “Officer Randy Goode” on TV’s “In the Heat of the Night” now on WGN America. His latest CD release, “An Appalachian Musical Revival,” is by www.shareamericafoundation.org. He is a member of the Atlanta Country Music Hall of Fame. He is a syndicated columnist for http://randallfranks.com.