“Raise Your Mother,” I said after first reading it inside my head a couple of times to make sure I’d gotten it right.
“Well, that’s kind of anticlimactic, isn’t it?” he asked.
“Come in for soup and tea?” I shrugged.
“I would, Clarissa, but I’ve got a dinner date,” Blue said.
After he had gone I stayed a moment alone by the well and thought about my mother. Trying to get her out of the well was a project that made me feel stupid so much more than it ever made me feel smart. I’d turn over stones and ask them what I should do and they’d answer me with a stony silence. I’d make tea and forget to drink it. I’d walk until my legs ached. I spent as much time as I could outside, communing with nature, with tree spirits; seeing myself or the fate of the world in the flight of a bird or the curve of the current around a submerged rock.
I’d wear necklaces that had once belonged to my mother or her mother or my beloved aunt, sometimes all three at once, thinking it would help. I’d stay up late worrying about my brother Dave, alone across the continent. After Father died I was alone too, but I stayed on at the family farm in eastern Ontario, so it was as if everyone was still there even when they weren’t, Grandma and Grandpa and Father. And of course Mother was still alive, just living down the well. I’ve only ever heard her voice the once, although Dave, who was there, has never been a hundred per cent sure it was even hers.
After I retrieved the stone tablet, a doe came out of the woods every sunset for a fortnight to raid the gardens along the river, eating our lettuces. She was so pretty that we mainly forgave her foraging and just gathered on our verandahs to watch. My friend Siena kept her garden right up near the house, and after a couple of days the doe overcame her shyness and investigated Siena’s kale. We stood together drinking tea and Siena pointed, showing me how the deer’s left ear was split. We discussed whether this was the result of a wound or whether she’d been born that way. Siena also told me she had named the deer Georgia O’Keefe. She seemed relieved when I didn’t laugh at this affectation and was even familiar with the famous artist’s work. I suggested that Georgia—the deer not the artist—was skilled like me and my mother at bridging dimensions and that if I could only teach her to speak English we could have the nicest conversation about our metaphysical work.
“Or you could learn to talk deer,” Siena nodded agreeably. “And how do you know Georgia-the-artist didn’t know how to bridge dimensions? Many artists and writers do, you know.”
“Of course. And equally many, or almost equally many, don’t know that’s what they’re actually doing when they create. I just can’t ask her, because she’s dead, and wherever she is now is a place I don’t know how to get to and ask things.”
“How do you know your mother could, then?”
“For starters, she had another name for it. She called it exploring portals. It’s why my grandparents bought the place next door. My mother said there was a particularly powerful portal in the well.”
“Well, that explains a lot,” Siena said.
“Agreed,” I said.
“If it’s true. Maybe she’s been dead all this time and you’re just telling yourself otherwise.”
I laughed at Siena’s joke and said goodbye so I could go home and plant. I expanded the gardens so much I didn’t know what to do with all the food I grew. It was an earwiggy summer because of the damp but the insects left my crops alone. This seemed a boon from nature I had to repay and so I hugged trees on a daily basis, whispered to them to tell Ms. O’Keefe to stop raiding our gardens. I can speak tree but not deer, but you gotta figure a tree and a deer could likely converse.
Lovely as Georgia was, I was worried come November deer season someone upriver would kill her in revenge for eating all their succulent young beans, which would make her flesh so very tasty and tender. Maybe the trees told her this advice of mine for she did eat all my beet tops, but my beet tops only, and I was able to push the dark red globes back into the ground where they simply grew new leaves, palest green streaked with crimson. She also ate my beet tops in a pattern, leaving interesting designs in my rows. At first I thought my eyes were fooling me but after the third time I realized she was mimicking her famous namesake, leaving art behind everywhere she went.
It was because of this succession of events that I felt closer than ever before to raising my mother. It wasn’t just retrieving a stone tablet and reading its self-evident yet powerful message, or my special relationship with Georgia O’Keefe that gave me hope, but the fact that sometimes now when I called down the well my mother answered back, a cool burbling cry that let me know she was submerged but employing some method she knew for breathing underwater.
My aunt’s and grandmother’s necklaces were beautiful, green jade and red carnelian respectively, but my mother’s was the nicest, opulently beaded from coral and amber and finely wrought silver filigree. I knew that once she emerged from the well I would have to give it back. I didn’t mind because I was looking forward to the conversations we would have.
“Have you ever noticed how people may be called Blue or Red, but rarely Green or Purple and certainly never Orange?” I imagined asking her. “Why is that?”
“What did you think the tablets were for?” I imagined her asking back, while putting on the necklace I’d been so careful not to lose. The only time she ever spoke aloud was twenty years ago. She said, “Magic is a skill that can take generations to learn, and many incarnations.”
Dave and I had turned thirty and thirty-one that year. We stared at the speaker we had set up beside the well, astonished, waiting for more. Then Dave proposed that maybe someone had hacked the transmitter and interposed a recording of a woman’s voice uttering these cryptic words, just to embitter us. After all, we didn’t know what her voice actually sounded like, did we? I felt that it indeed was our Mother, and that she was trying to explain how she had abandoned us in favour of the study of magic, so compelling a task she couldn’t give it up, not even for us.
Dave nodded when I told him my opinion, but still he was gone west before Easter and only returned three Christmases out of ten. He’s invited me to Vancouver Island but I’ve always used the excuse that it’s too hard to find someone reliable to look after the livestock. Of course the last cow has been sold for some years now so I wonder what is still holding me back?
I think maybe my mother didn’t throw herself in the well; I think maybe she jumped. Everyone knows there is an inter-dimensional portal down there. Before he died, my grandfather even told me it was a selling point. Perennial gardens; good barn; older farmhouse with new 200-amp service; steel roof; wood/oil furnace; portal.
“What’s this?” my mother apparently asked. She was just a young unmarried lady back then.
“I don’t know,” the real estate rep said. “It must be a typo. I’ve never heard of a portal before. I’ll go home and check the master listing.”
“I know what a portal is,” my eighteen-year-old mother allegedly said. “Magic, of course, is not at heart either wand waving or spell weaving or the gathering by moonlight of certain types of nuts, berries, and owl innards, but a form of thought,” she apparently continued. “The other things in the aforementioned or any other list are just supports, but without mastering the type of thinking that is called magical, all your crystals and ceremonies may be worse than useless.”
My grandmother fished a pen out of her purse and wrote it down right away. This speech was the first, and almost the last, clue that there was anything different about my mother. Whether Grandma got my mother’s words right or not we have no way of knowing, because our grandfather didn’t also copy down this strange proclamation. And my mother certainly didn’t write down her channeled wisdom. Maybe if she had, she’d have had the strength of will to stay out of wells. She might’ve written books and inspirational tracts she could’ve sold and bought me and Dave new school clothes come September, instead of the church sale and Value Village rags Pa was able to provide.