The Well That Breathed

Part One · The Knotted String

Cora Hale arrived at her grandmother's farm on the last Sunday in August, in the driest summer that anybody on the hill could remember. The grass along the lane had faded to the color of straw, and the pond in the bottom field had shrunk to a brown eye ringed with cracked mud. Only the poplars looked untroubled, sixty of them in a single line along the lane, planted by her great-great-grandfather as a windbreak. Gran met her at the gate, kissed her once on the forehead, and announced that the well was haunted, or possibly just broken, in exactly the voice she might have used to say that supper was at six.

The well stood in the yard between the house and the barn, a circle of stone with a wooden lid and a bucket on a rope. The kitchen pump drew from the same water, and so did the trough where the three cows drank. Every afternoon, Gran explained, the pump began to cough around four o'clock, and by milking time it delivered nothing but air. Every morning it ran clear again, as if nothing had happened. Mr. Ambrose, the well man, would come in September with his rig and drill the well deeper. It would cost most of the hay money. Gran said this plainly, the way she said everything, and went to feed the hens.

That night Cora lay awake in the attic bedroom, and she heard it. Far down in the yard, something went in with a long, slow hiss, and out again with a gurgle, like some enormous subterranean sleeper, and she crept to the window. The yard was eerie, silver and utterly empty, and the well lid sat perfectly still. In. Out. In. Out. Cora pulled the quilt over her head and told herself emphatically that wells did not breathe. Then she lay there and listened to it do exactly that, until the rooster finally crowed and the breathing stopped.

In the morning she resolved to be a scientist, because scientists did not hide under quilts. She lifted the lid off the well, lowered the bucket, and counted until she heard the splash, and it arrived at seven. The following dawn she repeated the experiment and reached only five before the water answered. She stood with the rope in her hands, frowning into the darkness. A well does not become shallower overnight. Then she went looking for something she could measure with, because counting was obviously not going to be good enough.

She built a measuring line out of a ball of twine, a rusty bolt for weight, and a knot tied at every foot, which took an hour and most of the twine. At eight in the morning the bolt touched water at the eleventh knot. At four in the afternoon she had to let out two more knots and a hand's width before the twine went slack, and the next dawn it was eleven again. She wrote the numbers on the back of a seed catalogue, and underneath them she wrote her first hypothesis, a word she had learned that spring and had been saving for an occasion. Gran watered the beans every afternoon. Perhaps the hose was drinking the well down.

Gran agreed, straight-faced, to let the beans go thirsty for a day. The beans went thirsty, and the well went down anyway, exactly as if the hose had never existed, and Cora crossed out her first hypothesis. The Pruitt farm lay over the hill with a pump of its own, so she tried a second one. Perhaps old Mr. Pruitt was pumping the same underground reservoir in the afternoons. She marched over to investigate and found that the pump was a windmill that turned only when the wind blew, and that Tuesday had been dead calm. She crossed out the second hypothesis too. She was getting used to the feeling.

On the way home she met Otis, Mr. Pruitt's grandson, eleven years old, the kind of person who has an answer ready before you finish the question. "That well is haunted," he said, in an ominous whisper. "The Well Hag drinks it every afternoon. She sleeps down there at night, and you can hear her snore." Cora inquired why a ghost would only be thirsty after lunch. Otis thought about that for a while and then offered to help her measure, which she understood to be his way of admitting that he did not know. Above them the wind moved through the poplars, and the whole line of trees made a sound like rain.

Part Two · The Chart

They measured every hour the next day, from six in the morning until it was too dark to read the knots, and Otis called out the numbers, and Cora wrote them down. When she joined the marks with a pencil line, the chart made a shape like a shallow bowl. The water stood highest at dawn, sank through the morning, dropped fastest in the middle of the afternoon, touched bottom around five, and climbed back up all night until, by dawn, it was full again. Otis said the sun was making the water evaporate out of the ground. Cora pointed out that eleven feet of rock and clay stood between the sun and the water. The sun did not drink out of wells.

Thursday arrived gray and cool, with a flat ceiling of cloud and no sunshine at all, and the well barely moved. Six inches by five o'clock, and most of that came back before supper, and Otis said that proved it was the Hag, who hated cloudy days. Cora said it proved that the sun was involved somehow, which was not the same thing. She sat on the rim of the well with the chart across her knees and tried to think of everything a sunny day did to a hill farm. It dried the washing and warmed the stones. It sent the cows into the shade. And by four in the afternoon, it made the leaves of the poplars hang limp and exhausted, until the evening cooled and they recovered.

Her teacher had once said that a big tree could pull a bathtub of water out of the ground on a single hot day and let it go through its leaves as vapor that nobody could see. Cora had not believed it at the time. Now she looked at the sixty poplars standing in their line along the lane, their roots reaching down toward the very water the well sat in, and she did the arithmetic. Sixty bathtubs, and the trees drank all day while the sun pulled at their leaves, and they stopped at night, and the water crept back in from under the hill. Her third hypothesis went onto the seed catalogue in capital letters. IT WAS THE TREES.

Otis was not convinced, and he said so. Trees did not have pumps, and everybody knew that ghosts had a much better motive. Cora said that trees required no pumps, because the sun did the pulling from the top, the way water climbs up a towel left hanging in a basin. What they needed was a proper experiment. In the end it was Otis who remembered the old stock well on the Pruitt land, which stood in the middle of a bare pasture with nothing taller than a thistle for a hundred yards in any direction. If the trees were the answer, that well should stay perfectly still all day, even while Gran's well breathed in and out.

The next clear day was Saturday, and it was a scorcher. They ran between the two wells with the twine until their legs ached. By five o'clock Gran's well had dropped two feet and three knots, while the pasture well had dropped four inches, and Otis admitted that four inches was probably just the cows. He shook her hand, which was clearly something he had seen adults do. "The Well Hag," he said sadly, "is a poplar." Cora walked home along the lane beneath the trees with the chart rolled up in her fist, listening to the leaves. She had never thought of trees as thirsty. Now she could not stop hearing it, sixty trees along a lane, all of them drinking together.

Part Three · The Well Man

Gran listened to the whole explanation at the kitchen table with her hands flat on the oilcloth, and when it was finished she said it was a fine piece of work. Then she said she was still going to drill. Cora stared at her, and the water came back every single night, she said, so it was all still down there. Gran answered that a well which ran dry every afternoon was a dry well, whatever the reason, and that the cows did not care about reasons. The hay money was hers to spend. Cora went up to bed with her chart and lay for a long time studying the ceiling, which seemed to her, just then, an unreasonable distance away.

Somewhere in the dark she stopped being angry and started thinking about it from Gran's side, and Gran did not need to understand the well. She needed water at milking time, which was a different problem with a different shape. The water was always full at dawn, every morning, and the trouble was not the water but the hour. Cora got up before the sun, filled the trough from the pump while it ran clear and cold, and had the kettle on by the time Gran came downstairs. She had written a new line on the seed catalogue. Fill the trough at dawn, and let the trees have the afternoon.

Mr. Ambrose came on Monday to look at the well before he brought the rig. He was an enormous, unhurried man with a tape measure on his belt and a way of listening with his whole face, and Gran showed him the pump and the trough and told him what she wanted. Cora stood in the kitchen doorway with the chart hidden behind her back. She had never once argued with Gran in front of a stranger, and her heart was thumping. Then she stepped off the porch, unrolled the seed catalogue on the rim of the well, and told him about the bowl, and the gray Thursday, and the stock well in the bare pasture, and, as a final point, the Hag.

Mr. Ambrose studied the chart for a long time and whistled. He had seen wells breathe like that before, down in the river bottoms where the big cottonwoods grew, and his father had called it the trees' thirst. He could drill deeper, he said, and it would work, and it would cost the hay money to buy back two feet of water that returned on its own every night. Cora asked whether the pump's pipe could simply reach further down into the water that was already there. It could, by three feet or so, which meant one length of pipe and an afternoon's work, and Gran said nothing whatsoever. She walked down the lane and stood beneath the poplars with one hand against a gray trunk.

When Gran came back up the lane, she announced that they would try it Cora's way for one year. They lowered the pipe that afternoon. After that Gran filled the trough at six every morning, and the poplars had the afternoons to themselves. A letter came in October. The first hard frost had stripped the trees in a single night, Gran wrote, and the twine read eleven knots at dawn, at noon and at dusk, three days running. Otis had added a note at the bottom, and it said, "The well has stopped breathing. I think the Hag has gone to sleep." Cora pinned the letter beneath the chart and thought of sixty bare trees above the still water, holding their breath.