That evening I took my rifle out into the trees over the rise. The woods were quiet. I sat still for a long time. I did not know why the birds weren’t singing. It was too early for them to have gone to sleep. Nothing stirred. I both liked and did not like it. We had chosen our place, far away from anyone, but not from anything. Once, as I sat, the wind shifted and I could smell the fire from our chimney. I had grown lonely in the well. I did not understand this. I had worked alone for long hours in dark places during the war and had never grown lonely. Once I had just missed being buried alive under the enemy’s fortifications. I had stopped breathing when another man grabbed my boots and pulled me free. I was eager to take the pebbles down into the hole I had dug. I would do that the next day. I was glad my wife had made such pretty piles with them.
I dug again in the mud all the next long day. I had been worried about the walls of the well, but the earth was rich in clay and held firm. Roots dangled from the walls I had made, and every now and again an earthworm shivered itself free and dropped into the water I now had to put my shovel through. At first I tried to save these worms, as I had when I had dug wells during the war. I picked them up with my hands or with my shovel. I picked them up if I could see them. Often they were just gone into the swirling water. Soon I stopped trying to save them. I knew I would want to be saved if I fell out of my home of earth and into an unexpected pool of water, some wet cavern in the dark. The light from the sunny day above came down and lit me in my labors. The buckets I sent up were heavier than they had been before, but the windlass held and my wife did not complain even as the dirt pile grew and grew.
It rained the next day and the one after that. At first I tried to continue my work, deep below the earth, but the rain grew strong and the walls slick, and I knew I had lowered myself into a foolishness I might not emerge from. We built a fire and sat by it. The livestock were secure and the roof of our house did not leak. Our daughter giggled in her basket or on our laps. My wife did her mending and we spoke of the labors to come. I meant next to clear a fresh field beyond the stream. I meant to erect a barn. I meant for our stock to multiply. It rained and we spoke of days past. My wife had lived by the sea during her youth, and she liked to think of ways that the world around her was like the world that lived on in her mind. She also liked the differences between this world and that one, and I loved her for that. When our daughter had fallen asleep and the fire had settled into itself, we lay down together on the bed.
I waited two days after the rain had stopped and the waters had receded before returning to the bottom of the well. All that day my wife lowered buckets of colored pebbles down to me. She sent the blue ones first, then the green ones, then the white ones, then a mixture of yellow and brown. Last, she sent down the pinks. I set the pebbles down in the water by the fistful and did my best to spread them out as I thought she had imagined them. Layers of hard color the water could rise through.
That afternoon a man and a woman dressed in buckskin came out of the woods. They both wore bright feathers and pieces of colored string in their hair. They came across the field and stepped onto the yard and went to the lip of the well and looked down. Then they looked over to the house where I stood ready with my gun, but they just nodded at me and looked down the well and walked on.
As I fell asleep that night, I thought of the brick I would line the sides of my well with, but when I slept I dreamt of colored stones. Once I thought I woke during the night and called out, but I did not wake, did not call out. It seemed to me as I dug deeper into my sleep that a chink opened in the side of the house and moonlight crept in. Even though there was no moon that night and no chink for it to creep through.
I was slow to wake in the morning and slower to set to piling up bricks by the mouth of the well. I had no hod so I carried the bricks two at a time, one in each hand. I made a neat pile and checked the pulley. I considered aloud just dropping them down into the dark and following afterward, but my wife said she wouldn’t like that. There was a way to dig a well, and that was the way I had been digging it. During the war I had watched men drop what they needed into wells and had no quarrel with the approach, but followed my wife’s wishes. We saw that the bucket could hold three bricks at a time and she brought our daughter out and set her on the ground and told me she was ready. I was ready too and turned to climb down into the hole.
I saw the bear when I turned. It was standing beside an oak sapling, sniffing at the air. It lifted one of its paws a little as it sniffed. It looked at us, then sniffed the air in our direction. It took two steps toward us then turned and ambled slowly over to the stock pen. It set some of its weight into its haunches then swept out a forepaw and quietly stove in the fence. I could not remember afterward how it had happened, but I suddenly had the rifle in my hands. I shot the bear as it was considering the pigs. The ball did nothing and the bear continued its work. It killed two pigs, sniffed their carcasses carefully, then took the third. The other stock had pressed themselves against the fence walls, mad with fear. I was still reloading as the bear walked off into the woods with its prize. I was still reloading when my wife started to scream.
The baby had been hurt in falling, and when I carried her up out of the well she was dead. I gave her to my wife then went and leaned against the side of the house. The wood was warm from the afternoon sun. Everything below my chest was dripping. I knew our daughter was dripping too. She had struck her head in falling and had a crescent mark above her eyebrow. I turned to look and saw that my wife had not moved. I could see my daughter’s leg, the soft skin above the small, wet boot. We buried her near the stream. We sat together for a long time next to the small grave. Then we went back to our house. I came back out of the house as quickly as I had entered it. I could not stand to see the baby’s basket, the rattle I had made for her, the bowl I had carved. My wife asked me to come back in but I didn’t. Instead I climbed down into the well. There were fresh earthworms floating in the water, but I did not save them. Instead I reached down and pulled up handfuls of pebbles and put them in my pockets. Instead I moaned and tore at my beard.
Later, although my wife asked me not to, I filled in the well. Our baby must be properly buried, I told my wife. She must be safe. And it did seem to me, during my labors and long after them, that my child was still down there, that she was crying and clenching her fists above the colored pebbles, that she was not buried safe and dry in the loamy dirt beside the stream.
Some years hence I dug another well, but I would not drink from it, nor sit at table beside any who would.
KIND ONE (FIELD AND FLOWER). 1911 / 1850s / 1861
Sometime am I
All wound with adders who with cloven tongues
Do hiss me into madness.
1
ONCE I LIVED IN A PLACE where demons dwelled. I was one of them. I am old and I was young then, but truth is this was not so long ago, time just took the shackle it had on me and gave it a twist. I live in Indiana now, if you can call these days I spend in this house living. I might as well be hobbled. A thing that lurches across the earth. One bright morning of the world I was in Kentucky. I remember it all. The citizens of the ring of hell I have already planted my flag in do not forget.