Ursula Pflug
SEEDS
AND OTHER STORIES
To Keemo, with love and spaceships
Mother Down the Well
I WANTED MORE THAN ANYTHING to keep a stone tablet, but they always slipped out of my grasp back into the water. I felt there must be some rule I was missing. They were covered with inscriptions of course; that was the whole point of tablets. Without inscriptions they’d just have been meaningless slabs of stone. Once they’d slid back into the pond I couldn’t remember the inscriptions anyway, so it was just the same as if they’d been blank, as if I hadn’t read them, hadn’t held so much wonder in my hands. Finally, one day a tablet stayed in my hands without being pulled back into the water, as if there was a giant down there tugging with all her might. Needless to say I felt stoked, pretty much like Moses, in fact. I wasn’t expecting proclamations that I could share with multitudes though, or even just my village, but hoping for something more personal. A fortune cookie, a horoscope. Some light thing to cheer and sustain me when all else had failed.
I had trouble making out the engraved words, what with all the slime and chipping, so I left the tablet by the pond and went up to the house to get the wheelbarrow. My friend Blue was sitting on my back steps; he asked me what was up.
“I have a tablet,” I said. “It’s heavy so I’m going to get it into the wheelbarrow and bring it up to the well and scour it so I can read what it says.”
Blue smiled. “I don’t believe in that whole stone tablets business,” he said, “but even if I did, aren’t you supposed to get them up on mountaintops and not out of the lake?”
“Pond,” I said. “Siena got hers out of the water too. She found it upriver. Maybe some places it’s mountains, but here it’s water.”
When he was around, Blue stopped by fairly regularly to see if I needed his muscles for anything. He is a big strong man with long blond hair and dark roots.
“They’re just so tantalizing. Siena got one that said…”
Blue smiled as though now that I’d cloaked it as a bit of neighbourly competitiveness, my craziness made all kinds of newfound sense. “What did Siena’s tablet say?” he asked.
“It said her third child would be a great leader of his people. Siena is confused because she couldn’t have any more after her second daughter; all the doctors said so.”
“She could always adapt a third one,” Blue said, “in hopes of fulfilling the prophecy.”
“You mean adopt,” I said.
“I try very hard to mean what I say,” Blue said, “and say what I mean.”
He followed me back to the pond where my tablet lay in the grass. A long crack running through its middle, right where the words were.
“Tricky,” he said.
“No doubt.”
We headed back to the barnyard to get the wheelbarrow. It was between the well and the house, and I avoided the well like I always do, giving a little shudder.
“Why do you always avoid the well,” Blue asked, “giving a little shudder?”
“My mother fell in before I was born.”
“Really, Clarissa? You never told me you had a mother. I didn’t want to pry so I didn’t ask but I always assumed you’d grown up without one.”
I looked at Blue. He is a friend I can stand. Most people really just want to take advantage of your kind heart, should you be lucky enough to be in possession of one. They want to complain and borrow things and not return them and call that poor assemblage friendship, when really what you’ve been praying for is the friend who can help you map it all out, say the insightful thing, help you disentangle the sheets of fabric softener from the wash as it were. Help get your mom out of the well she fell in before you were born.
“I have spent my whole life coming up with ways to try and fish her out,” I said.
“I take it none worked,” Blue said.
“So it would seem.”
“Getting mothers out of wells is something I have a little experience with, actually,” he said.
“Really?” I asked, casually as I could so as not to give away the as-yet-unfounded hope I felt.
Talking about such things, we took the wheelbarrow down to the pond. Blue and I tried to lift the tablet but it was too heavy, even with him on one end. That made me wonder whether the giantess who lived at the bottom of the pond hadn’t pushed a little to help me get my tablet out onto the grass. The grass was wet, the tablet was wet. It was late October and the sky was overcast. I’d worn thick socks and rubber boots so my feet were okay but I needed an extra sweater under my sweater. I wanted to get this thing done so I could get back inside and have homemade squash soup and tea, perennial favourites for dinner.
“We’ll lay the wheelbarrow on its side,” I said, “then we’ll tug the tablet into it; then you’ll right the wheelbarrow with me holding the tablet to prevent it from slipping out again.”
Blue rolled his eyes as if I might find this much exertion and coordination a stretch, but he didn’t offer an alternate plan so we went ahead with mine, which turned out to be successful. We took turns pushing; Blue’s turns were longer than mine. It was hard going through the long wet grass; there hasn’t been much of a path down to the pond since I sold the last of the cows.
By the time we got to the barnyard we were so exhausted we dumped the tablet out of the wheelbarrow instead of gently laying it on its side, and even more gently sliding the tablet out onto the gritty dirt. Because of our carelessness it split in half right along the big diagonal crack, making an inordinately loud cracking sound as it did so, almost like thunder.
I thought I might cry, it was all so pitifuclass="underline" the old well, the split tablet, the dirty barnyard. I’d tried planting flowers but even tansy and comfrey hadn’t taken.
To cheer me up Blue said, “I told you I don’t believe in tablets. I also don’t believe in divine messages being accompanied by cracks of thunder.”
“I’ll just run up to the house and get a brush and some scouring powder,” I said.
“Scouring powder?” Blue asked.
“You don’t believe in scouring powder?” I asked.
“Just the syntax is unfamiliar. I call it Comet Cleanser or Old Dutch.”
I came back from the house clutching a wire brush and a bottle brush and a brush for floors. The truth is I hate brushes now, the way the bristles are all shoddy and made of plastic.
“I’d go gentle with the wire one,” Blue said. “That tablet is made of limestone and flakes easily. I wouldn’t want to brush away what’s left of the words.”
“No ma’am,” I said. I say this all the time, to anyone and everyone, including small girls and grandfathers. It is true I particularly like saying it to big strong young men like Blue, because that makes it funnier.
I cleaned out the carved words on my stone tablet as gently as I could with the sharp corner of a scraper and the wire brush. The well itself is open and level with the ground; no wonder, I sometimes think, that my mother fell in. There used to be a wall around it, a fieldstone-and-muck deal made a hundred years ago. Its crumbling accelerated at some point and I worried all the crumbles would make the water gritty so I took it down. More truthfully, I called Blue and he came over and helped.
We teamed up to push the two halves of the tablet back together.
“Did you hear a clicking sound when they snicked together?” I asked.
“Clicking and snicking sounds we believe in,” he said.
“The crack didn’t disappear, though. The halves didn’t melt back together.”
“Accompanied by a hissing sealing sound,” Blue said.
“And maybe some smoke,” I laughed.
“I can make it out okay now but I think you should be the one to read it aloud,” Blue said.