The Well and the Mine (6 page)

Mainly we’d watch the lightning bugs, sometimes count their flashes, sometimes catch them in our hands. Papa would smoke, and as long as there was a smidgen of daylight, Mama would do the hand stitching that she couldn’t use the machine for. She’d finally quit working when she couldn’t see no more. People were always passing and saying hello, maybe coming up on the porch to chat; sometimes Virgie and I would walk down the street and say hello ourselves to the shadows on the other porches. She didn’t care for that as much as I did.

But sitting there on the cold concrete that night, Virgie surprised me.

“We should make a list,” she said, clear out of the blue.

“What?”

“Like Aunt Celia said. We should figure out who did it.”

“Make a list of babies?”

“Well, I s’pose of women who’s had babies. If we know who’s had babies in the last six months or so, we ought to be able to go ’round and see who’s missing one.”

“How do we know he was six months?”

“Prob’bly less than that, but we’ll be safe thinking it’s six.” She’d crossed her ankles, and her legs were stretched straight in front of her. Her dress came to a little above her ankles, but the way she was sitting, I could see the tops of her stockings rolled down. I didn’t wear stockings, of course. I didn’t even have on my shoes—I’d tossed them by the back door as soon as I got in from school. I didn’t care for them, even though Mama said I should be grateful to have shoes. She said plenty of kids didn’t, like those little Talbert kids whose parents worked Papa’s land. She said worms could crawl up into the bottoms of your feet and make a home there.

I could see those little worms setting up house in my heels or big toes, carving out little living rooms in my feet, building nice warm fires and bringing in tiny mattresses and kitchen tables no bigger than freckles.

Mama said that was not how they did it at all.

But she always kicked off her shoes, too—was sitting there sewing with her bare feet tap-tapping on the porch—so she couldn’t get too worked up about me.

“What’re you girls plottin’?” called Papa, jarring me.

“Nothin’, Papa,” we answered at the same time.

He looked at Mama and flicked the ashes from his cigarette. “That’s trouble if I ever heard it,” he said. But he didn’t ask again—just went back to flicking and rocking.

Virgie went and got her school tablet and a couple of pencils. She always kept her shoes on, not caring at all about how trapped and sweaty her toes got. “So let’s start with the people nearest to us…”

“Virgie?”

“Lola Lowe had one a few months back, I know.”

“Virgie?”

“What?”

“Why’re you doin’ this?”

“What?”

“I know you don’t believe in ghosts. And you’re not havin’ nightmares. What’s your hurry?” It wasn’t like Virgie to leap into something with both feet. She liked to stick a toe in.

She kept staring out at the animals, didn’t even look at me. “I don’t want you to have nightmares, fussbudget. And it’s only right. To give the poor baby a name.”

That didn’t explain how excited she’d got at Aunt Celia’s idea. She’d been quiet ever since then, and I knew she’d been thinking. She never could talk and think at the same time. But after all that thinking—whatever it was—she wanted to get started right away, come up with steps like you’d do to solve a math problem.

“I’m not sure I want to,” I told her. “I want to put it out of my head.”

That got her to look at me. “Don’t want to know who did it?”

I looked away and swallowed, trying to make my mouth less dry. I’d thought about what Aunt Celia said, too, and it had weighed on me. I was more selfish than what she’d talked about, though, about owing that baby something. I wanted my well and my creek and my dreams back. Some nights, sitting out there on the porch by the well, I’d thought that view was the most beautiful, perfect thing in the world. And the more I thought about the baby, the uglier everything got. I wanted to stop thinking about it altogether.

“Don’t you want to know why she’d do it?” Virgie kept on.

“Why don’t we just leave it be, Virgie? Just try to forget about it.”

“You can’t just forget about it,” she said. “That kind of thing doesn’t up and disappear.”

“It might. You don’t know, Virgie.”

“Think about that baby, Tess. Think about what Aunt Celia said about the baby wanting you to help him.”

I was not happy with that baby for turning me inside out, and I wasn’t really inclined to help him out none. It seemed like he might be nicer to me—maybe give me dreams of soda crackers and peanut butter and lemonade—if he wanted me to comfort him. But then again, maybe if we gave him a name and a mama and a house and a life, maybe he would let go of our well. And then it’d be mine again.

“You think if I helped him out he’d go on to heaven and leave me be?”

I could tell Virgie wanted to argue that he was already in heaven because there wasn’t such a thing as ghosts, but she also wanted to get me to go along with her without much more fussing. After chewing her lip a minute, she settled for answering, “Everybody’d be better off if he had a name and a proper burial.”

As it was, he’d have to be buried in the section for pitiful people who didn’t have nothing, not even a headstone. I felt bad about that, but I felt like she’d gotten me off track.

“And he’d leave me be?” I repeated.

“Well, Lord, I don’t have a rule book on it,” she huffed. “Look, right now you’re tryin’ to ignore it away. And you still have the nightmares. So that’s not workin’.” She looked out toward the woods again, then reached around and tapped my ankle, which I guess was the easiest part of me for her to reach.

“And you shouldn’t be mad at the baby, you know. It’s the mother who caused all this.”

That was true. And she hadn’t gotten in the least bit of trouble, which wasn’t fair at all. Instead I was tossing and turning and waking up gasping while she probably slept like a big ole log. I could just imagine her, mad-eyed and covered in pockmarks, chuckling to herself in the pitch black as she went to sleep in a narrow, hard bed. Without me wanting to, I saw her start to move. As she drifted off, one strong hand would reach out and pat the space beside her, claws tapping the place where a baby had been. And every time she felt the empty space, she’d laugh all the harder. I saw her clearer than I ever saw mermaids.

“You goin’ to do the talkin’?” I asked. “Go in first if we stop by anywhere?”

“Yes,” said Virgie, even though I was the talker.

“And if I don’t want to go somewhere, you won’t make me?”

“’Course not.”

“Okay. I’ll help you,” I said, wishing I could toss the Well Woman out of my head as easy as she tossed away her baby.

Jack walked up to us, curls falling over his forehead.

“You playin’ tic-tac-toe?” he asked. That boy loved to doodle and draw, always wanted a pencil in his hand. Mama said he always was a marker. (Back when he could barely crawl he got hold of a pencil and drew all over the sitting room wall. I was too little to remember it myself and Mama wouldn’t tell what happened after, but I sure would’ve loved to known what his punishment was. It must’ve been a doozy.)

“No, Jack,” I said.

“Can I play?”

I started to tell him to go catch lightning bugs, but Virgie scooped him up and settled him in next to her. She drew a tic-tac-toe board on a sheet of paper, then ripped another one off and handed me a pencil. She handed the other pencil to Jack, telling him, “You go first. You can be Xs.”

To me she said, “So let’s go on and get started. I already been thinkin’ about who’s had babies: there’s Lola Lowe, Pride Stanton…” and she kept going with a whole string of names. I scribbled them down as she and Jack scratched out Xs and Os. She let him win twice, then won twice herself. By the time we finished, the sun was down, and the last of the names were slanted down the side of the page. But we had fourteen women we knew who’d had babies since March.

“Wouldn’t you think we’d know?” I asked.

“Know what?” Virgie said, craning her neck around to look at what I’d written.

“If we came across who did it. She couldn’t just blend in.”

“Why?”

“Because she’s crazy. Or evil.”

“That’s just what she’s doing. Blending in.” Virgie let her hand dangle by the concrete, the pencil in one curled finger. “We could be lookin’ her in the face every day.”

“But you can tell crazy,” I said.

“If it’s so plain, why doesn’t she stick out? Crazy or evil must look different than we thought.”

“Who’s crazy?” asked Jack.

“We’re just talkin’,” said Virgie. “Don’t pay us any mind.”

“Who’s crazy?” he said again.

“The woman who threw that baby in the well,” I said too sharp.

“Oh,” he said, frowning. “I was only askin’.”

“Well, don’t be such a Nosy Parker.” He was always trying to get in on everything.

“I think you’re just as crazy as anybody,” he muttered.

“What?” That boy wasn’t right in the head.

“You still believe there’s mermaids and fairies and such.”

“So?”

“There’s no such thing. Don’t know about mermaids in the ocean, but you say fairies live in the woods. And they do not.”

“Sure they do.”

“Then why don’t we ever see them?”

“Oh, quit it,” huffed Virgie. “You’re like two puppies yapping back and forth. Don’t pay her no mind, Jack. She’s just grumpy.”

With a glare at me, he went back to waiting for Virgie to draw a new board. She did, smiling at him and cutting her eyes at me. It wasn’t fair that the littlest and cutest one always got to be right.

“Still want to argue that you can tell crazy from not-crazy?” she asked, talking softly and hardly moving her lips. “Oh, that’s the whole thing, Tess.” She caught her lip with her teeth for a second. “We can’t tell crazy. We can’t tell anything. It’s not like she’s got big googly eyes that turn around in circles. We have to be smart to track her down.”

“I didn’t say she has googly eyes.” That was stupid.

“And if you’re not going to be serious about it, I’ll do it myself.”

“I’m serious,” I insisted. Virgie didn’t say anything. “I am. I’m very, very serious. Serious as a funeral.”

She looked mad.

“I didn’t mean it like that,” I said.

I didn’t. Sometimes you make a bad joke when you really don’t mean it, and my mouth could be too fast for my brain. “I’m very serious about it.”

“That’s fine then. As long as we can be grown up about it.”

“Yes,” I nodded quickly. “Just like we’re sheriffs.”

She twisted around and took the list off my lap. “Oh, I didn’t think,” she said after she read over them. “These three had girls.” She crossed them off.

“Why y’all namin’ names?” asked Jack, drawing curlicues around the edge of the paper while he waited for Virgie to make her move.

“Oh, just ’cause,” Virgie said. “No one special.” She blocked his row of Xs and he forgot about it.

“Virgie, how many people are in Carbon Hill?” I asked.

She looked up, chewed her lip a minute. “Papa,” she called, “how many people in Carbon Hill?”

“’Bout three thousand,” he called back.

That worried me. “We don’t know all them three thousand.”

She thought about that. “Well, she put him in our well. She must live around here, probably knows us.” She looked down at the list. “I think we ought to go check the babies.”

“We gone knock on their doors and ask ’em to hand ’em out?”

She scanned over the list. “Well, we ought to see some of ’em at church on Sunday. Then we’ll start on the others.”

“And you’re doin’ this so the baby will be at peace?” I still wasn’t quite clear.

She answered right away. “I just want to know if too much motherin’ and tendin’ and cleanin’ ends up pushin’ you to this.”

Virgie
IN OUR PRIMERS, “OUTSIDE” WAS LISTED AS A PREPOSITION.
“Put the ball outside the box.” But here “Outside” was a thing you could touch. A noun.

The woods started at the edge of the creek, and the sound of moving water blocked out the sound of birds until I got deep into the trees. Then the ground was speckled with shadows and leaves and sometimes sunshine, and my shoes made loud sounds that made me feel like I didn’t belong. But if I was still, I could be completely quiet, and I could sink into the woods, maybe lean against a tree or sit down on a flat rock with no moss or bugs. I could hear pecans or hickory nuts hit the ground. No one else there. No one watching, no one listening. I liked the woods best when I could be alone.

Ella and Lois were with me this time, but I knew them so well it was almost like being alone.

The trees were mostly green, just tinged with fire as we walked, with a little spark of yellow or orange drifting down around our heads every now and then. Ella had a sackful of chinquapins, and Lois collected all the hickory nuts. I had the wild blueberries. We all sampled from our sacks and snitched from the others, and even with our bellies swollen and ready to pop, we’d still have enough to take home for roasted hickory nuts and berry pies and cobblers.

Back behind Highway 78, up along the mountain, was a dinner table always set.

“So if he is sweet on you, are you gone let him call on you?” Ella asked. She crunched a chinquapin, tossing away the shell with its mouth still gaping from losing its nut.

I frowned. Henry Harken was the son of a big mining inspector in town, well-to-do. He made me nervous. His family had plenty of money, and his clothes must have cost more than mine, Tess’s, and Jack’s put together and doubled.

“I don’t know.”

“You better get t’ thinkin’!”

I didn’t like how he never introduced himself as Henry—he always said Henry Harken, Jr. I thought that was right snooty. I watched Ella and Lois in front of me, walking so close their arms touched, like paper dolls still attached at the elbow. I hadn’t known any other twins, so I didn’t know if they all acted like mirror images—their movements, gestures, the way they walked. It was like God had given lessons with just those two in the class. When Mama and Tess and I walked and the sun lay our shadows down in front of us, we looked like that, like triplets. But we were stick-figure women, all legs and arms and skinny middles, and Ella and Lois had enough curves to wear girdles on Sundays. I didn’t weigh a hundred pounds soaking wet.