A Hard Witching (11 page)

“Yes,” Edna said absently, for she was still trying to think whether she’d seen anything like a pump near the house, “that’s for sure. You said it.”

“Well, then, you just hang on there once,” Eulan said, and thumped a fist against the truck. “You just hang on,” he said. “I know a fella.”

• • •

Edna drove home, the water slopping out on the truck bed with each bump in the road. Just as well, she thought, listening to it slosh and roll behind her. Full pails would be too heavy for her to lift anyway. You’d think Eulan could have figured that out for himself. You’d think, after all Mr. Crosie had done for him, he would have offered to haul some over for her, or at least have one of the boys do it. But that was Eulan. She’d noticed he hadn’t offered to check the pump for her either. Well, that was no real surprise; she’d known Eulan Thauberg too long to expect it of him. No, he had his eye on the land, all right. But he had another thing coming. Typical Eulan: greedy. Greedy and cheap. Lazy, too.

But this fellow Eulan mentioned sounded promising; a young fellow from near Golden Prairie—she didn’t recognize the name. She hoped he worked fast. That chill in the air even at midday promised a hard frost. Soon the ground would freeze; it would be too late to drill if she needed to. Besides, she couldn’t keep hauling water from Thaubergs’, she fretted as she pulled into the quiet yard and unloaded the wet, heavy buckets straight into the porch. It just didn’t make sense.

And, thinking about how things did not make sense, Edna pulled off her coat and boots and sat at the kitchen table far into the evening, waiting for the phone to ring, staring out the window as the sun slowly turned a dull, effortless red and sank beneath the horizon. In the dark, she rested her head on her arms and thought that sometimes, sometimes, it was all just too much.

When Edna woke the next morning, the muscles in her neck aching and the orange cat demanding to be let out and the
water crusted over in the unheated porch (for she had forgotten to bring any into the house), she began to think Eulan Thauberg was right. Maybe she should leave the farm. She lugged one of the pails into the kitchen and chopped halfheartedly at the surface with the wooden handle of a butcher knife and thought, for some reason, of Heddy Kretsch, her lean, sharp face; she thought about trouble coming in threes. Maybe Heddy, too, was right. She put a kettle on to boil for coffee, then washed her face in the icy water and sat again at the kitchen table. Mr. Crosie, the well. Against all her prior reasoning, she began to suspect a connection between the two.

Then Monson appeared.

“It doesn’t rain,” Edna said to him, this time forcing a cheerful smile, as he stepped down from his truck, “but it sure does pour.” Now that Monson was here, she’d decided it wouldn’t do to mope around about things that couldn’t be helped. She smoothed her skirt and stepped back a little as he turned a slow circle, surveying the yard.

He was smaller, much smaller than she’d imagined, and even a little younger than Eulan had led her to believe, though it was hard to tell when a man kept his hair. And what hair he had, forking up all over his head in sharp black curls. As if reading her mind, Monson jammed his cap down low over his flat, rather pointed ears and stared at her from beneath the brim with bright, dark eyes. Edna peered back. She didn’t really like the looks of him. There was something gnomelike, something shifty, unclean. As though all his edges were blurred. He looked like a drinker. Finally, she thrust her hand forward and said, a little uneasily, “I’m Mrs. Crosie.”

“Monson.” He grinned, rather unexpectedly revealing a row of teeth, white and even and delicate as pearls. Edna wondered if they could be real.

“Eulan said he thought you had a submersible,” he said, “but that you weren’t sure.”

Submersible,
Edna thought, there’s that word again. “I believe it is a submersible, Mr. Monson,” she said with authority. “There’s certainly no jet pump that I can see.” She said
jet pump
distinctly.

Monson gave her an odd look. “Okay,” he said, “I guess I’ll check the well then.”

“I’ll walk you over.” She wanted to ask how long all this might take. There had been flurries in the air yesterday, sailing past the kitchen window, though today it was slightly warmer, the sun beaming down on the yard as if heaven itself was sending her hope and goodwill.

“There it is,” Edna said, pointing to the three-foot-high wellhouse.

Monson walked over, unlatched the heavy wooden lid and peered inside with an enormous flashlight he’d unhooked from his belt.

“You got oak casings here,” he said, tapping the flashlight against the inside of the well. “Original, looks like.”

“Oh?” Edna followed him over, unsure what it meant to have oak casings. Surely not good, not if they were original. Would they need to be replaced, too?

“Don’t see that much anymore,” Monson said, leaning back and clicking off the flashlight. “This must be the genuine article.”

Edna blinked. “You mean the original well?”

“Must be. Don’t find oak casings these days.” He laughed. “Not a lot of oak trees around here.”

Edna nodded. She didn’t really like the fellow’s laugh.

Monson hooked the flashlight back on his belt the way Mr. Crosie used to knock the ashes from his cigarette without tapping it against anything, holding it backhand between his thumb and pointer fingers, flicking it with his index. A quick, smooth motion as natural as breathing. One of the things she’d first noticed about Mr. Crosie. Funny to remember that still, thirty, no, nearly forty years later.

Monson patted the wellhouse. “She’s dry,” he said, “that’s for sure.”

Well, I already knew that, Edna thought.

“I’ll go down and check the pump.”

Edna peeked over the side of the well. “How will you get down?”

But Monson was already uncoiling a long, thick length of rope, the kind Mr. Crosie had used for bridles back when he’d still kept horses, before she’d finally convinced him they weren’t worth the cost of feed. Pets, they were; useless. The cat, now, at least it was good for something.

“It’s wide enough,” Monson said, “so I don’t have to go down headfirst. I can climb back out.”

“Headfirst!” Edna said. “Surely not.”

“Usually not enough room for a man to turn around.” He glanced at her with another of those brilliant smiles. “Even a man my size.”

Edna blushed, looked away. Could he read her mind?

“If you don’t go down headfirst …” he said, and shrugged.

Edna tried to imagine being lowered down a well headfirst, into the earth, like a worm. She shivered and rubbed her arms.

Monson tied a fat knot to the outside of the wellhouse, tested it by throwing all his weight into it, then clipped the end of the rope to a kind of leather harness he wore around his hips. As he climbed over the edge, Edna barely suppressed an urge to
shout,
Don’t!
Instead she asked nervously, “Won’t you just drop … straight down?” She eyed the loose coil of rope on the ground. “It’s all slack.”

Monson grinned. “Just watch.”

So Edna watched as he braced his compact shoulders and back against one side of the well, his feet firmly against the other, and began to edge himself slowly down, feet then shoulders, feet then shoulders. It looked so effortless. Still, she was uneasy. She didn’t relish the thought of a dead man tied to a rope at the bottom of her well.

“You got a good wide one here,” Monson said as his black curls disappeared into the well. “Hand-dug most likely, considering that casing.”

There was a sound of earth falling, and Edna pressed her hands to her mouth.

“It’s okay,” Monson called up, though his voice had a strange, ghostly echo now. “Just dirt behind the casings.”

Edna peered over the edge. Even with the sunlight beaming down into the mouth of the well, she could not see Monson, just a shadow, the suggestion of something moving. And the
shh-shh
sound as he edged his way deeper. Soon even that stopped. Edna waited, feeling her skin crawl. It disturbed her that she could no longer see him.

“All right down there?” she called, knowing her palms had begun to sweat.

“All right,” he called. And then the flashlight clicked on and Edna could see all the way to the bottom. Oh, she thought, that’s not so deep. She leaned over the side and breathed the cold smell of earth, like root cellars, like digging potatoes.

Below, Monson moved in the yellow light, twisting around and clanging something against the metal pump. She could see his boots sticking and sucking against the muddy bottom. It was a strange sensation, looking down on him that way, his
small shadow moving over and across the light, as though she had captured some elf and held him in a pit for safekeeping.
Peter, Peter, pumpkin-eater,
she thought, and laughed to herself, even though she knew the rhyme didn’t really make sense. Still, there was something funny about it.
Had a wife and couldn’t keep her, put her in a dried-up well
…

Monson looked up then, his face lit from below, yellow and awful, seeming to leer at her with undisguised malice. Edna stepped quickly back, repressed an impulse to slam the lid shut and run.

“Your pump’s done for,” he hollered up.

What’s the matter with me, Edna thought, trying to breathe evenly, slowly, to calm her thumping heart. I’m so nervous these days. Stupid, she thought, don’t be stupid. She approached the well again, but did not look down.

“What’s wrong with it?” she called.

“Nothing,” he yelled, “everything. It’s just done for. Old. Worn out.”

Edna heard the
click
of the flashlight being turned off, saw the rope move against the lip of the well, like something crawling in. She peeked over the side but could see nothing. Staring into the darkness, she breathed in the good earth smell and listened to the thump
-shh
sound of him climbing up, a different sound from when he went down. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness and the man grew nearer, she could make out his shape coming slowly toward her, and she was overcome by an awful terror, as if everything evil in the world was about to climb up out of that pit. Slam the lid, she thought, slam it quick and lock it. There’s still time. But then Monson’s face hit the light and she saw that he was, after all, only a man.

• • •

“She’s pretty much run dry,” Monson said, as they walked up the rise back to the house. He carried the old pump. “You can try and get this fixed,” he said, “but it looks done to me.”

“But there was mud,” Edna said. “I saw it.”

Monson shrugged. “Couple days that’ll be gone, too. Trouble is, she’s not filling back up. Wells are ground-fed. She should have filled back up some by now.”

“So I’ll have to drill then,” Edna said, not quite believing him. If there was water before, why should the well run dry all of a sudden? Why now? She wondered if she shouldn’t get a second opinion.

Monson spat. “Looks like.”

They stood near the porch, staring back down at the old wellhouse.

“Look on the bright side,” he said. “At least you can get it drilled. At least you don’t have to do it by hand. With shovels.”

Edna did not, at that moment, wish to look on the bright side. She fixed her gaze on the treasonous wellhouse, its metal sides glinting with infuriating cheer in the sun. Funny—she didn’t think she’d ever noticed before today that it was metal.

“They used to be wood,” Monson said.

Edna started. She did not turn to look at him as he continued.

“Prairie fires’d come through in the summer, burn ‘em to the ground. Men would come back exhausted at night after fighting a fire all day, maybe longer.” He spat again. “It was dark. They couldn’t see.”

Edna shivered. What a terrible thing to say. Why would he say that?

“That’s why they’re metal now.”

She looked at him, standing not two feet from her, the heavy iron pump in his hand, and she thought, He could strike me down with that right now, it would take just one blow …

“Thank you for your time, Mr. Monson,” she said quickly. “What do I owe you?”

He squinted for a moment out at the horizon. Edna waited. She wasn’t really afraid, she knew that. It was the strain. She was tired.

“You gonna drill a new well?” he asked.

Now what? she thought. “I guess I have to.”

He worked his mouth, as if he were about to spit again, but he didn’t. “I can witch it for you,” he said finally, “if you want.”

Edna shook her head, was about to say, Certainly not, Mr. Monson, I don’t believe in that nonsense. Instead she stopped, considered the cost of digging more than one hole. Witching. What could it hurt?

“How much?” she asked.

Monson speculated. “Oh, let’s say fifty, for everything.”

Edna pursed her lips. That sounded pretty steep. Of course, she thought, I’m a widow. It wouldn’t surprise her if this fellow were in cahoots with Eulan Thauberg. She’d have to keep her eye on him, that was for sure.

“All right,” she said. “Go ahead.”

They turned to walk back to the house.

“Might take a while,” he said, “what with the cold.”

“What’s that got to do with it? Surely the ground’s not frozen yet.” She stopped to chop at the earth with the heel of her boot. Monson looked at her as though she were simple-minded.

“Not the ground,” he said, “currents.”

Currents were frozen? What currents? She watched suspiciously as he walked to his truck and lifted something out through the open window.

“Energy currents,” he said over his shoulder.

“Mr. Monson,” she began firmly, but then she saw that he held an old box, brown and peeling, tied shut with a fraying loop of cord. He noticed her stare.

“Tools of the trade,” he said, giving the box a pat and tucking it up under his arm.

“I hope you know,” Edna said, resuming her firm tone, “I don’t ordinarily take up with this nonsense.”

Monson shrugged. “Desperate measures,” he said. And he grinned.

So he did think she was desperate, Edna mused with a considerable degree of dissatisfaction, watching from the kitchen window as Monson paced the yard, still carrying that box tucked up under one arm. From this distance, he looked like a child, a boy, scuffing his boots through the dirt. She wondered what she’d seen threatening in him. Edna glanced at the clock over the stove. He’d been stalking around the yard for the better part of an hour. When would he get to business? She had to admit she was curious. She wondered what Mr. Crosie would think. Probably that it was a fine idea. She sighed and shook her head. That had always been the difference between the two of them. Even back before they’d married, Edna could see that Mr. Crosie was gullible, easily taken in. His naïveté had appealed to her then, in a way. But it soon became tiresome. She’d told him as much on several occasions, as recently as that past spring, just weeks before he died. Mr. Crosie had come in late again from helping Eulan seed.