The Patron Saint of Liars by Ann Patchett

He found them at that spring he had forgotten, drinking so deeply he thought they’d founder.

George took some rope and set out to bring them back, cursing the rain and the mud and the stupid animals with every step. Then, if he didn’t have enough to worry about, the horses broke free of the corral. Bought milk was more than he could afford. George didn’t say this to her, but he was thinking he might have to slaughter the calves and take his losses. Sounds like a dying child, she said, and she shivered. George had to get up every three hours in the night and bottle-feed the calves, whose crying put his wife beside herself. Not a week after, every last one of his cows came down with mastitis that left them all drier than bones. Both plow horses came down with colic, and Betsy, the horse George rode to town, got a ringworm thick as your thumb that no amount of gentian violet could clear. It wasn’t long after that times turned hard for the Clatterbucks. By the time he’d tied the legs onto his belt he’d forgotten about the water altogether. June, like many little girls, was partial to soft things. He thought he would tan the hide and give it to his daughter, June, for her birthday. He blew the head clean off and didn’t disturb the pelt. But since that was the way George learned, that was the only way he could ever do it, and now, here he was, grown with a family, going down on his knees like a man in prayer to shoot a rabbit. His father taught him that way because he was afraid the rifle’s kick would knock the boy off his feet, thought George would be safer close to the ground. It was as big a buck as he’d seen, and he knelt down slowly to get off his shot. He was thinking about it, thinking what he ought to do, when he saw a rabbit on the other side of the field. The water was warm when he dipped in his hand, and he wiped it off against the leg of his trousers. He thought it was a bad sign, that it meant his land was infected and spitting up bile for relief. He smelled the spring before he saw it, foul and sulfurous as spoiled eggs. It was only fitting that he should be the one, seeing as how it was his land. George Clatterbuck found it when it was already a pretty steady stream. This was a hot spring that had broken loose of its river to make mud in the grass, and it kept on till it was a clear pool and then a little creek, cutting out a snake’s path toward the Panther River. There are rivers, hundreds of them, running underground all the time, and because of this a man can say he is walking on water. Water never needed anyone’s help to come up through the ground once it was ready.

TWO O’CLOCK in the morning, a Thursday morning, the first bit of water broke through the ground of George Clatterbuck’s back pasture in Habit, Kentucky, and not a living soul saw it.

The Patron Saint of Liars by Ann Patchett