With the Land

 All around, stone walls and horror. The light goes on. The light goes off. There’s the smell of damp earth. The sounds of thunder. She climbs up crevasses in the stone. Her fingernails scrabble at the soft, crumbling earth. One more toehold lifts her head above the rims of the well. The light goes on as lightning slashes across the sky.

She walks barefoot, toes gripping the muddy earth.

“I must look a fright,” she thinks, seeing the streaks of mud on her bare arms and legs.

She finds the house as she always does. It’s an immovable monument on the landscape, much as the well is. It seems to slant more on one side than another and paint is peeling off like scabrous pieces of bark on a tree. It’s hard to discern the house’s true color in the dark. She swings the screen door back and forth and listens to its creaking before she knocks on the door.

When the man opens it, the light behind him blinds her momentarily.

“Have you come to visit then?” he says.

A small terrier levitates from his ankles to his knees, yapping all the while. It’s white and tan and has a taut round belly like the man does.

He’s a different man from the last one and his easy acceptance of her appearance makes her doubt herself momentarily. The last man had been in awe of her. This one blinks and scratches at his cheek, gray with stubble.

“You’ve been expecting me,” she says. Her voice is resigned.

“Yah, well, you’ve got a bit of a reputation. My grandfather told me about you.”

“I come with the land,” she says.

“A package deal.”

“You might say that.”

“Well, come in. Come in. You’ll catch cold out there. Or don’t you care about things like that?”

She shrugs and walks inside, drips of mud and memories pooling on the hardwood. She wants to touch the man. No, to do more than that. She wants to take him by the shoulders and shake him. But something about his acceptance of her makes her polite and she slips into the habits of the girl she once was. 

“Why now?” he says. “I moved here six months ago.”

She shrugs again. Lightning snakes across the sky and now it’s she who’s backlit, all mud-slicked and grimed and hollow-eyed.

He moves to reach for her but changes his mind and gives her space. He gestures to the kitchen, the dog still levitating at his heels and yapping. 

“Hush,” he says. “Hush. That’s no way to be with company.” 

His voice is soft and gentle and surprising coming from such a tall and bulky man. He reaches into a cupboard and takes an old-fashioned kettle that he fills with water from the tap, letting it run for a few seconds to dilute the rust that always seems to leach from the pipes. 

“What can I do for you?” he says.

She bites her lips. No one has asked her this before, as ancient as she is. She shakes her head in wonderment and slides onto one of the kitchen chairs.

“Alright,” he says, misinterpreting her gesture for dismissal. “Suit yourself.” He turns his back to her and puts the kettle on one of the burners of an old gas stove. Fire whooshes into the space between the kettle and the burner, a blue light that reaches her and reminds her how cold she feels.

“Do you know why I’m here?” she asks.

“Now how would I know such a thing?” He says this without looking at her, busying himself with gathering the items to make tea: a box of Lipton tea bags, sugar, a small carton of cream, in case she goes for that sort of thing.

She struggles to find her own memories, retraces her steps to the door and back, picking up her footprints and the damp spots she left behind. She finds her name, Eve. She turns it around in her mind as she might a dust-grimed gem fallen to the ground.

“Ahh,” she says finally. “I remember now.” Her voice is like the sigh of wind through the trees in the surrounding woods. “You called me.”

“I did no such thing,” the man harrumphs. “My name is Harold, by the way.”

Eve looks around the room and its aspect changes. The man is no longer this man but another man, slimmer in build, with nervous, darting hands. “I didn’t mean….” he says and fades away.

She returns to the kitchen and fixes her eyes upon the small dog, now sleeping and snuffling in its dreams, its round belly rising and falling.

She looks up and finds Harold watching her.

“I’ve actually been waiting for you to come, a bit miffed that you took your time.”

“I didn’t take any time,” Eve said.

Harold frowns. His frown reminds her of something. 

She reaches for the slender man’s hand. John his name was, is. “No one means anything,” she tells him. “All of this,” she gestures at the house, the room they’re in, but she really means their lives together.”

The water whistles in the kettle and Harold gets up as its pitch rises. With fussy, precise movements that belie his size, he pours water into a mug with a limp tea bag in it. He places it on the table by Eve. Still standing, he leans over to pour more water, then shifts slightly and spatters her hand instead. 

She doesn’t scream, or even flinch, but the skin on her hand turns red and he jumps back. “Jesus,” he says.

“Did you think you could hurt me?” Eve whispers.

John looks at her and purses his lips. There are shadows in his eyes and on his lips, a grey stain on his chin and cheeks from the stubble he has not shaved away. He disappears from her and Eve finds herself in the same room as John’s father, a blocky, brute who does not believe in her or anything she stands for. 

“You’re the devil’s harlot,” Jonah says, his voice surprisingly shrill. He takes a wooden crucifix from his back pocket and places it on the table.

She draws back her hand and looks at it. Harold is hovering before her. On the table, there’s the shadow of the cross, but only she can see it. “Harold,” she says, “why did you do this?”

“I thought the water would go through you,” Harold mumbles. “I’m sorry.”

She shakes her head and Harold disappears. “Where do you come from?” the first man asks, the one who built the house on this gently rising hill by the river. The who has tucked this wan shelter between the rapidly flowing waters and the dark woods that have yet to be breached. 

He’s the one who built the well in that verdant middle ground. He excavated for days, digging and digging, but he never found water and at last he gave up. He makes his way each morning to the river with his buckets, feeling foolish, cuckolded by his own land, as his neighbors on the other side of the river remark on his singular bad luck. They whisper behind their hands. There’s something wrong with this side of the river.

“Is my land cursed?” he asks her when she explains that she found herself in the well. 

Eve tries to tell him but finds she cannot. Some things have no words.

Now Harold is clumsily trying to place a frozen steak on her hand. The dog is awake again. Eying the steak, the dog’s small stump of a tail is wagging its hindquarters.

“It’s so simple for them,” she murmurs, looking down at the dog’s small white and tan body.

“What are you?” Harold asks, as the meat defrosts nearly instantly on her skin and causes the dog to scamper for joy as steak smell reaches its sensitive nose. Harold reaches a thick finger to touch her and she’s neither hot nor cold. As soon as he withdraws his hand, his skin has no memory of her.

“Your land?” she says to the first man, the one who’s dug the well. 

“I have title,” he sputters. “You’re not one of them Indians. You’re white,” he says, his eyes narrowing. In truth, her paleness frightens him. “That well’s twenty feet deep. How’d you get in there? How’d you get out?”

“With some difficulty,” Eve replies, examining the muddy splatter on her skin and her torn fingernails. She moves towards him and he recoils.

And then it’s John, sitting there at the table muttering, “I didn’t mean…I wanted…”

She puts a finger to his lips. She’s tired of hearing him. Tired of listening to all their voices. “Hush,” she says and he forgets her.

But the man with the cross does not forget her. He stares at her with red-rimmed, hate-filled eyes. “I’ve heard about you. You come with the land. But only to the weak. I am not weak. I am a righteous man.”

“Jesus, I’m sorry,” Harold says again, seeing her attentions waver. “No disrespect or anything, but are you always going to be here? It’s a bit hard on the property values, you know.”

“Your great grandfather tried an exorcism,” Eve says. “He thought I possessed the house.” 

“But you didn’t. You don’t?”

“Nor its owners, though your grandfather tried to possess me.” She thinks  of John and his slender hands, always reaching for her and feeling her for the smallest fraction of instants and then instantly forgetting her, the burning coolness of her skin.

“And my father? You never appeared to him.”

“Is that what he says?”

“That’s what he said. He died a year ago. He said also said this house could never keep another woman and he blamed that on you.

Eve shrugs. She’s never seen the female denizens of the house so how could she influence them? She’s hardly to blame if the men have short attention spans when it comes to the living and to matters of devotion. She’s hardly to blame if the women all leave, but something about this disturbs her, makes her feel the cold she gives off.

 

“So why are you here now?” Harold/John/ Jonah asks. “Why are you haunting me?” the first man asks.

She sighs and her sigh spans generations. She is here now and here then; she hardly can keep in mind, all the “heres” that she inhabits, always wanting the one who does not recoil from her. She tries to remember Harold’s father and is surprised that she cannot. She wonders about all the generations that she cannot place in this house. She frowns and gets up, her chair sliding away from her. She feels suddenly like all of the disappearing women who have ever lived in this house, yearning for the attention of men forever turning away.

Before the first man, there is…there was.  She finds herself outside in that fringe place at the edge of the dark woods. She’s standing beneath an ancient tree with roots reaching so far down into the earth that as she places the palm of her hand against its rough skin she can feel its yearning for water, for sustenance. She looks up and there is the one before the first man and he speaks softly into her ear, whispering of promises, and miracles, and contentment, and how he “made her,” how she’s “perfectly right” for this place but only she never changes, never questions, never wants more than what she has. His voice wars with the tree’s voice which is all about wanting, yearning, reaching. 

She leans her cheek against the bark and says “You made me but you can’t unmake me. I’m not quite what you expected but I’m here now.” She feels him pulling away from her then, the vacuum where his attention used to be, filling with disapproval, grief, frustration. 

“You’re not the first I’ve made,” he whispers into her ear even as he leaves her, pitches her in darkness and despair into a deep hollow in the earth to be found again and again by those who come here, always wanting, just as she is always wanting. “I am the water in the well,” she would tell them if she had the words to speak it.” I am the question that is always its own answer.”

“That makes no sense,” Harold says and she is bitterly disappointed again and again and again, by this failure of imagination. She turns away from him as his voice recedes from her, the house receding from her, all the other “heres” disappearing. She’ll come again. She’ll knock again on this door as long as there’s a door to knock on, she’ll ask to be let in.

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Photo credit:
Jake sleeping by Mike Weston