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 pitiful: 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.
“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.
sss
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.
And so they bought the place. Sometimes people assume we’ve been living here for generations, beneficiaries of a land grant. It is true that during the Irish famine the local government gave away lots of hundred acre tracts of swamp and brush and bush to starving farmers from Ireland. That was what the Williams Treaty was all about, swindling the local Michi Saagiig out of what they had left, so it could be given away for free to white folk. Blue and his cousins still complain about it and why wouldn’t they?
Mainly, the only people who think we’re a land grant family are newcomers, for the old timers around here still know exactly who is who and some of them are old enough to find it a point of scorn that my best friend is Indigenous. I figure that along with a lot of other things that is their problem more than it is mine.
My mother jumped down the well the day after her wedding to a local settler boy. Everyone thought her young husband must just have been awful until a beautiful baby girl floated to the surface nine months later. That would’ve been me. Dave followed a year later although how Pa impregnated Ma once she was living down the well I was too shy to ever ask.
Pa did a fine job raising us. I think he missed my mother a lot and wished he had been able to provide whatever it was she got suckling at the portal down the well, but of course he could not. Special as he may have been he couldn’t provide her with whatever other dimensional flavour it was she loved best, for it simply doesn’t exist here on Earth, not now and probably never. Ma never did tell me what it was either.
sss
This year’s harvest was a bumper crop in everything the earwigs didn’t eat, although I’ve had better-tasting tomatoes; they prefer things on the dry side. Siena and I bottled for weeks. Come November, Blue went hunting; he said it was how he gardened. Successful on the second day, he brought me half a deer for my freezer once they’d done cutting and wrapping it at the organic abattoir. I thanked him and he asked whether he could tan the hide in my barnyard. He lives in a little apartment in town, so there is nowhere to tan a hide unless he does it in the parking lot of his building, which wouldn’t work for a number of reasons.
I said okay. Once he was done with the hide he nailed it up in my barn and said I was welcome to it. This seemed puzzling to me but I figured he had his own reasons for doing things, as well as his own ways. When I went and checked I saw the hide had a telltale slit in its ear. This made me sad. Would I be able to eat this beautiful wild creature we had fed all summer? Had Georgia been easy to kill because she was half tame from snacking on our carrots while we stood by and watched? Had my whispered warnings to the trees gone unheard after all? I didn’t know whether to tell Blue the story or not. I didn’t want to make him feel bad, for the food and the skin were beautiful gifts, and he would not have shot her had he known she was our pet. As to the mother raising operation he suggested we try sinking rare earth magnets into the well.
sss
We worked most of the morning and half the afternoon with a complicated assemblage of pulleys and ropes, magnets, delicious snacks, and photographs of my brother and me when we were babies. The snacks were for us, not for my mother. Like a baby in amniotic fluid, we figured she had been nourished by the earth herself while she was sunk. When we finally got her up we stood discussing how to get her back to the farmhouse. It was because she was too heavy to carry. Blue is a really big and really strong man but he couldn’t lift her, not even a few inches off the ground. We finally got her into the wheelbarrow, but it took the two of us. I am as shrimpy as they come but was still able to help with the leverage. It all seemed like a rerun of our tablets adventure except so much more important. Would she split in half if I dumped her accidentally? And what would her insides look like if that happened?
We trundled her up to the house. Blue kept saying he’d never seen anything like it, and he’d gotten a few women up out of wells.
“Anything like what?” I asked.
“The amount of water,” he said. “The wheelbarrow keeps filling. We’ve had to empty it four times between the well and the house.”
“True. It’s as much water each time as a king-size duvet you’ve just removed from a machine where the spinner doesn’t work,” I said.
“It’s got to be magic on that count,” Blue pointed out.
“How so?” I asked.
“More water than the body of one small woman can contain,” he said.
“It must be some portal down there.”
“That’s what they’ve always said,” he agreed.
Artificial respiration. They used to teach it to all the children at swimming class. Maybe it was so that should their mothers throw themselves down wells, the children could perform this trick once they were fished out. And once they were able to breathe by themselves again, their mothers’ eyes would open. That was my hope anyway.
We got her up onto the table in the farmhouse, an old varnished job, slightly better than the one you use for slaughtering chickens on. Then I pinched her nose shut tight and pushed air into her lungs, over and over and over. You are supposed to give up after three minutes, or is it twenty? When do you make that decision, and how? Blue said I should just keep going, since magic was involved. I said I didn’t believe in magic.
“Portals then,” he said. “Call it portals.”
Those I believe in. I kept going, breathing into her mouth and then the moment came when her chest started to rise and fall, rise and fall.
Rise and fall, rise and fall.
“Well, that’ll be that then,” Blue said, making for the door.
“Stay for soup and tea?”
“Dinner date, Clarissa.”
I meant to thank him profusely but he was already gone.
I sat and looked at my mother whom I had never seen before, even though she had carried me for nine months and given birth to me from inside the bottom of a well. It was the original water birth.
Her eyes were open and she was breathing. I put pillows under her but left her on the table as she was still too heavy to move. The pillows soaked through immediately. She was dribbling big puddles all the time as if she were an unending source of water.
“For the last fifty years I have been sure my life would have been different if I had only had a normal mother like other folks, and not a drowned one,” I told her. “Waterlogged, silent, unmoving. Your hands waving feebly, not that Dave and I could even see them except when we attached waterproof video cameras to poles and stuck them down the well.”
I think that is what sent my little brother to Vic in the end. He couldn’t stand Christmas after first our grandparents and then Pa died. Just me and Dave left, sending cameras and mics down the well, hoping Ma would wave and offer Christmas greetings.
“Why are people never called Orange?” I asked after trying to help her sit up for the fourth time.
“Give me back my necklace,” she gurgled.
I went and got it from the bathroom and clasped it around her neck, gently as I could. She didn’t thank me. She fingered the necklace as if she knew each bead from memory but didn’t look down at it. She didn’t speak again either. Mainly she dripped and dribbled.
After a couple of days I got tired of all the mopping. I put her back in the wheelbarrow and took her to the barn. She had drained so much water I could push her on my own now. Even in the barn she was still spitting water. Finally I hung her up, thinking it might help. Thin rivulets streamed out of her fingers and her feet. I began to realize she had probably been drowned all this time, after all. While our resuscitative methods seemed to have worked, her breathing and even her speech weren’t breathing and speech per se, so much as some kind of enteric nervous system response.
sss
Blue has been scarce. Maybe getting mothers out of wells is more exhausting than he makes it look. No one calls anymore except the telemarketers. I keep making lists and forgetting them. I make tea and forget to drink it. I stay up late worrying about my brother. I wear my grandmother’s and my aunt’s necklaces, but I don’t think they’re helping.
When I go down to check on Ma she blinks at me, or maybe I just think she is. She fingers her own necklace almost constantly, wearing away the filigree. Georgia O’Keefe’s skin is nailed to the wall beside her. I think one day I will use it to make a coat for my mother. She would like a deerskin coat I think, after having spent decades down a well. The damp must have seeped into her bones something fierce.