Rainwater Pact

I stood on the viewing platform and stared at the clay towers. The sky was hazy again, the same gray it had been all week. I'd been in Jianshui for a week and still hadn't finished my measurements. My name is Madeleine, I'm twenty-eight, and I was here to study erosion on the badland formations for my PhD. My advisor said this site would make or break my thesis on human impact. No pressure, right?

The towers rose out of the valley like somebody had dripped candle wax the size of buildings. Clay spires, softened edges, gullies running down the flanks. Beautiful and falling apart at the same time. Just like my field season.

And there he was again. Jameson. Standing ten feet down the platform with his binoculars pointed at the lake below the formations.

What was he even looking at? There are no manatees in Yunnan. Well, there might be, apparently, if you believed him. He was thirty, an aerial survey observer from Florida, and he'd been stuck in the same travel mess as me since our flight got canceled in Kunming. Conference layover gone wrong. So we'd both taken the slow train out here and turned every conversation into a fight.

Last night's argument was still ringing in my ears. We'd eaten at a place near the guesthouse and gotten onto the topic of whose research mattered more.

"You're measuring dirt," he'd said, grinning like it was a joke.

"It's not dirt, it's structural clay under active hydrological stress!" I'd thrown my chopsticks down. "These formations are eroding faster than anyone's documented. That's real."

"And the freshwater manatee population in these lakes might be the only one in Asia! Nobody's surveyed it. You're staring at mud while an entire species goes unnoticed."

"Mud that holds a whole valley together!"

We'd gone back and forth until the guesthouse owner turned the lights down on us. And then, in the dark courtyard, I'd asked him the dumbest question of my life. I said, "Are you going to kiss me or keep arguing?" And he kissed me. That was the end of it. Neither of us said much after that. I'd gone to my room alone and slept terribly.

So now I stood on the platform replaying it, and he turned and caught me staring.

"Morning," he called out, way too cheerful.

"Morning."

"Look at the water line on that third spire. See the dark band? That's spring seepage. Bet there's groundwater feeding it."

"Every rock in this valley has a dark band, Jameson."

"Every rock in this valley has a spring behind it," he said, and I couldn't tell if he was serious. The man was serious about everything, that was the problem.

***

Then the loudspeaker at the little station crackled. The bus service up to the airport was suspended. Something about road repairs on the pass. The only way back to town was a shared taxi, and guess who was standing in the same line.

"We can split it," he said. "Or we can wait four hours for the next bus that might also get canceled."

"Fine. Split it."

"Fine."

The taxi was old and smelled like cigarettes and pine air freshener. We got crammed into the back seat together and the driver took the switchbacks like he was fleeing the authorities. Every turn threw me against Jameson's shoulder.

"Sorry," I said, for the fourth turn.

"You always apologize this much?"

"You always get thrown at this much?"

"Fair," he laughed, and his elbow knocked mine and stayed there.

And of course, ten minutes in, the bickering started back up like it had never stopped. It's what we did. It was practically our love language, which is a horrible thing to admit.

"So your thesis says human activity accelerated the erosion," he said. "Tourism, roads, groundwater pumping?"

"Pumping, mostly. Wells drop the water table, clay shrinks, cracks open, rain gets in. The whole system speeds up. It's a feedback loop and nobody's mapping it here."

"That's actually a good model. Annoyingly good."

"Was that a compliment?"

"Don't let it go to your head. Meanwhile my manatees, if they exist, are drinking out of those same springs your wells are draining. Our projects touch. Did you notice that?"

I had noticed. I'd noticed two nights ago and said nothing because admitting our work connected felt like conceding a point. "I noticed," I said.

His whole face changed. "Wait, seriously? Then the springs matter to both of us. Those seep bands in the towers are discharge points. If we map the springs together, you get your hydrology and I get my habitat data."

"Are you proposing we collaborate? After three days of you calling my formations dirt?"

"I called your formations beautiful dirt," he said. "Once."

"You said 'dirt with ambition.' I have witnesses."

"Who, the guesthouse cat?"

I was laughing. Traitor body. "Fine. Temporary collaboration. Until our flights get rescheduled."

"Until the flights," he agreed, and stuck out his hand like we were closing a business deal. I shook it. His palm was warm and rough from fieldwork.

***

The taxi dropped us at the edge of the old town around nine, and we walked in past the ponds and the carved gates toward the guesthouse. That's when we saw the crowd outside the old library. A small crowd, maybe twenty people, mostly older folks from the neighborhood. An old caretaker in a blue jacket stood at the door holding a white ceramic cup.

"What's happening?" Jameson asked a woman near the rope line.

"Rainwater ceremony," she said, delighted that we'd asked. "The library cornerstone. Every year we pour saved rainwater into it, to bless the building and thank the sky. The old caretaker needs helpers to carry the water jars. Are you strong?"

"We're very strong," Jameson said immediately.

"We are?" I whispered.

"We are," he whispered back, grinning.

So that's how two stranded scientists got roped into carrying clay water jars through a crowd of grandmothers who gave us thumbs up and one of whom pinched Jameson's arm and told him he had a good face. The jars weren't heavy. The ceremony mattered, though. You could feel it. Everybody had gone quiet.

The caretaker explained it while he waited for us at the cornerstone, near the base of the library wall, under a little bronze plate. His Mandarin was slow and clear, and the woman translated the important parts for us.

"The rain falls on every roof in the town," the caretaker said. "We catch it, we save it, and once a year we give some back to the foundation. So the building remembers the sky."

"So the building remembers the sky," the woman repeated, like that settled everything.

And honestly? It kind of did. I looked at Jameson and he was already looking at me with that same look, the one that meant he was about to say something I'd pretend not to like.

"Water connects everything," he said. "Springs, wells, rain, manatees, clay. Told you."

"Don't get smug at a ceremony," I hissed.

"Wouldn't dream of it."

The caretaker lifted the white cup, held it up to the hazy sky, and poured it slow into the stone basin by the cornerstone. The crowd murmured something together, a blessing I only half caught. Water soaked down into the old stone and vanished. The building remembers the sky.

Then the caretaker turned to us and held out the empty cup, and the woman said, "He asks: would the young guests like to pour the second cup? It is lucky for travelers who carry water."

"Absolutely," Jameson said.

"Yes," I said, before I could think about whether I was being rude.

So we each poured. His first, then mine. The water ran over the rim of the basin and soaked into the earth at the base of the library, and the whole crowd clapped, and I felt ridiculous and happy at the same time. The caretaker pressed a dried jujube into each of our hands as thanks and patted my wrist.

Afterward the crowd drifted off and we stood there on the library steps eating our jujubes like two people who had not, twenty hours ago, been arguing about dirt.

"That was nice," Jameson said. "Weird and nice."

"Very weird. Very nice." I finished the jujube. "You know the water you poured came off the library roof, right? Collected rain. Meaning the sky over this exact town."

"You did a full hydrological analysis of a blessing?"

"Somebody has to keep standards up around here."

He laughed, that real laugh he only did when he forgot to be competitive. And then he got quiet for a second, which for Jameson was basically a press conference.

"Madeleine. About last night. The kiss."

"What about it?"

"I liked it. I want you to know it wasn't just airport-cancellation madness. But I also don't want to make anything weird while we're stuck working together."

I turned the empty jujube pit over in my fingers. "Okay. Noted. And I don't want weird either. But for the record, I asked you to do it, so the madness was at least half mine."

"Half," he agreed. "Fifty-fifty madness."

"So. Springs. When do we start mapping?"

"Tomorrow, dawn? I'll bring the GPS."

"I'll bring the thesis-grade instruments, since one of us has standards."

"There she is," he said, and bumped my shoulder with his.

We walked back toward the guesthouse through the narrow streets, past the ponds, and I kept thinking about that line. So the building remembers the sky. I didn't know yet that the next day was going to change a lot more than my survey grid. I just knew the jujube was sweet and my shoulder was warm where he'd bumped it.

We didn't map springs yet. We got distracted. I'll tell you how.

We were walking past the museum, the little one off the main street with the crooked wooden sign, and there was a table set up out front. A donation drive. Kitchenware, mostly. Old pots, chipped bowls, a basket of ladles. A handwritten sign said the town was gathering objects for a display about domestic life in the valley.

"Look at all this stuff," Jameson said, slowing down. "Some of this is older than the library."

"Probably. Don't touch anything."

"I'm not going to touch anything."

He touched something. Of course he touched something. He went straight down the table like a man at a yard sale and stopped at a wooden rolling pin lying on a square of cloth like it was the crown jewels.

"What is this?" he said. "Madeleine. Look at this."

"I'm looking."

"It's maple. Spalted maple. Do you see these lines? That's the fungus staining. And here, look, there's bark still in the handle groove. Somebody cut this from a branch with the bark edge still on it. This is beautiful."

He was holding it up to the light like a jeweler. I'll admit it looked good. Dark gray-black veins running through pale wood, all swirled. It was longer than a normal rolling pin and heavier too.

"Put it down before someone yells at you," I said.

"Can I hold it?"

"You are holding it."

"I mean can I keep holding it?"

A woman at the table, the one running the donation drive, waved at us. "You can pick things up," she said. "That's the point. We want people to look."

"See?" Jameson said. "The point."

But this is what matters, and I hadn't planned to say it in front of him. I knew that rolling pin. I knew exactly where it had been for the last few hundred years, give or take.

"Where did this one come from?" I asked the woman.

"Oh, that one hasn't been logged yet. It came in this morning, no name on the form."

"It came from me," I said. "I left it at the clerk's window when it opened, before I could change my mind. I found it up in the clay formations. Two days ago. In a collapsed cave shelter on the north face."

Jameson turned around slow. "You what?"

"You found that in the badlands?" the woman asked. She'd pulled out a ledger already. "You must tell us exactly where. It goes in the register."

"Of course. It's in a shelter about forty minutes up from the lower trail. The ceiling collapsed a long time ago, part of the same erosion phase I'm studying. There's a dry pocket under the rubble. Things stay in there. It was just sitting on a ledge, like somebody set it down and walked off."

"And you carried it down," Jameson said. "In your pack. With all your thesis-grade instruments."

"There was room."

"There was not room. You complained the whole train ride about your pack weight."

"I did not complain the whole ride. I complained a reasonable amount of the ride."

The woman was writing fast. "A rolling pin from the shelter. This is a good day. The museum has nothing from the shelters, nothing at all. Everything comes from the town. Do you know how old it is?"

"Older than anything else on this table," I said. "I can't date it properly. That's not my field. But