Two things I like to share about “Achers Pond”: the narration and the brother-sister friendship.

It was around 1939 that Sarah Lynn Collins’ father was overseeing the building of the “damn” Kentucky dam, as he called it. Here’s a photo in the public domain of the men who build the Kentucky dam. I imagine Sarah’s father in there somewhere.

Sarah is the grandmother in the current time of Letters from the Karst, but she was 14 then. She lives with her mother and father (though he is often away) and her older brother Daniel, whose life is fragile due to a bout of polio. The two are the dearest of friends, despite their differences in ability, both physically and intellectually.

Sarah has a painful story to tell in “Achers Pond” (the name of the pond in their back yard, “Acher” for the former owners, though there is definitely a big ache in this story). I tried several different narrative methods—third person, first person chronological—and finally settled on Sarah’s telling her story to her mother, but only in her head. She begins, “You are so impatient! Yesterday, you kept snatching at a strand of hair that had escaped your barrette, and while I helped you get Daniel settled in the kitchen, your mouth was all tucked in.” Later, when her mother asks her to explain what had happened, she says,

I turned toward the cool, rocky air again. What good would telling do? No! I didn’t want you to know the way time disappeared, until something woke me up with a little pinch, and there I was, in school, next to Daniel, at the dinner table. It said, This is who you are. Tell that to you? No!

In my mind, I reached into the space where the cool air met the rising stink of mud and fanned it toward myself. Was there a way to tell and to not make you mad? What part could I leave out without you pulling it out of me? I kept my head resting on the side of the canoe so you would think I was sleeping and wouldn’t guess I was finally telling you, just in my head.

In this way, Sarah can both tell and not tell, which is important to her due to the shame she feels. As important as knowing that her parents love her despite what has happened, even more perhaps is having her brother nearby. Although he was born developmentally slow, he has a wisdom and tenderness, especially for his little sister Sarah, whom he feels responsible for, in part because he saved her life by fetching the midwife in the middle of a snowstorm when their mother was in labor. She is his and he is hers.

One scene shows this. It turns out that painting fire hydrants was a job for kids during the New Deal. And it turns out that this is something a few friends and I did one summer in Bowling Green, Ohio, and somewhat famously I painted the Greek letters for LSD as a belt buckle for one of them. Nothing like that happened for Daniel and Sarah, but when one of the other kids calls Daniel stupid, she reminds Daniel:

“So, I picked up my red paintbrush and flung paint at him. That got the other boys laughing, till Conroy came after me and tried to punch me. You maybe couldn’t run fast but you could punch like the dickens. You took the air right out of that Dumb Cluck.

“Now here’s the best part. I got up on your shoulders with a red paintbrush in one hand and a yellow in the other and we marched all the way back to Uncle Joe’s, singing ‘John Jacob Jingle Heimer Smith’ at the top of our voices and me waving my paintbrushes like flags.

“And those other kids was marching behind us. What a racket.”

Given the betrayal that also occurs in “Achers Pond,” the way these two stand by each other is a saving grace.

Here’s a public domain image of a sink hole, very common in Kentucky. . . The one that occurs beneath Achers Pond is much bigger:

You can purchase Letters from the Karst at your local bookstore of from amazon, here.