The marriage

``He's a storyteller,'' Mama says. Squatting by the pleat of earth where water glitters falsely, Daddy tells us how the stream draws out its metal from the sun until it seems almost possible; he squints and shakes his tin pan pocked with holes, and peers in, picking through the silt that he collects for gold, while overhead the sun burns through his shirt, and still he sifts the afternoon for what he's earned: the dirt he wears, a plastic bottle powdered gold he carries home to her - she rinses in the sink at night.