Ursula Pflug - Seeds and Other Stories

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.

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.

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.