The Well That Breathed

Part One · The Knotted String

Cora Hale arrived at her grandmother's farm on the final 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 with a border of cracked mud around it. Only the poplars appeared untroubled, sixty of them in a single line along the lane below the house, planted by her great-great-grandfather as a windbreak and still performing the job. Gran met her at the gate, kissed her once on the forehead, and announced that the well was giving out, in exactly the voice she might have used to mention that supper was at six.

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

Cora had been told that she was there to help, and she took the word seriously. On the first afternoon she lifted the lid off the well and lowered the bucket on its rope, counting under her breath until she heard the splash. It arrived at seven. The following morning, before breakfast, she repeated the experiment and reached only five before the water answered. She stood with the rope in her hands and frowned into the darkness. A well did not become shallower overnight. She lowered the bucket a third time, slowly, and counted five again. Then she went looking for something she could measure with, because counting was obviously not going to be good enough.

She assembled a measuring line out of a ball of binder twine, a rusty bolt for weight, and a knot tied at every foot, which took her 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 release two more knots and a hand's width before the twine went slack, and at the following dawn it was eleven again. She recorded the numbers on the back of a seed catalogue, and underneath them she wrote her first hypothesis, which was 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, two feet and a hand's width, exactly as if the hose had never existed. Cora crossed out the first hypothesis and wrote a second one. The Pruitt farm lay over the hill, and it had a pump of its own. Perhaps the two farms were drinking from the same underground reservoir, and old Mr. Pruitt operated his pump in the afternoons. She walked over to investigate. The pump turned out to be a windmill that ran whenever the wind blew, day or night, and Tuesday had been dead calm from morning until evening. Cora crossed out the second hypothesis too. She was becoming familiar with the feeling.

She returned with Otis, who was Mr. Pruitt's grandson, eleven years old, and the variety of person who had an answer prepared before you had finished asking the question. He informed her that the well was obviously leaking, that the rock had cracked in the heat, and that the water escaped through the crack every afternoon. Cora asked him why it would stop escaping at night. Otis considered 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 leaves turned over all together and showed their pale undersides, and the entire line of trees made a sound like rain.

Part Two · The Chart

They measured every hour the following day, from six in the morning until it was too dark to read the knots. Otis called the numbers and Cora recorded them. 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 gradually through the morning, dropped fastest in the middle of the afternoon, touched bottom around five o'clock, and climbed back up through the night until, by dawn, it was full again. Otis declared that it was the sun, that the heat was simply cooking the water out of the ground. Cora pointed out that eleven feet of rock and clay separated the sun from the water. The sun did not drink out of wells.

Thursday arrived gray and cool, with a high flat ceiling of cloud and no sunshine whatsoever, and the well scarcely moved. Six inches by five o'clock, and most of that returned before supper. Otis announced that settled it. Cora replied that it demonstrated the sun was involved somehow, which was not remotely the same thing. She sat on the rim of the well with the chart across her knees and tried to think of everything a day of sunshine 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.

A teacher had once told her class that a large tree could pull a bathtub of water out of the ground in a single hot day and release it through its leaves as vapor that nobody could see. She had not believed it at the time. Now she regarded the sixty poplars standing in their line along the lane, their roots reaching down toward the identical water the well sat in, and she did the arithmetic. Sixty bathtubs. The trees drank all day while the sun pulled at their leaves, and they stopped at night, and the water crept back in from underneath 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. Cora replied that they did not require pumps, because the sun did the pulling from the top, the way water climbs upward through a towel left hanging in a basin. What they needed was a proper experiment. It was Otis, in the end, who remembered the other well. The old stock well on the Pruitt property 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 explanation, that well should remain perfectly still all day while Gran's well breathed in and out. They would measure both on the next clear day.

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 evidently a thing he had seen adults do. Cora walked home along the lane beneath the poplars with the chart rolled up in her fist, listening to the leaves. She had never considered trees as thirsty before. 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 entire explanation at the kitchen table with her hands flat on the oilcloth, and when it was finished she said that it was a fine piece of work. Then she said that she was still going to drill. Cora stared at her and said that the water returned every single night, that it was all still down there. Gran answered that a well that 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 considering it from Gran's side. Gran did not need to understand the well; she simply needed water at milking time, which was a different problem with a different shape entirely. The water was always present at dawn, every single morning, two feet and a hand's width above where it rested at five. The problem 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 appeared. 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 examine the well before he delivered the rig. He was a large unhurried man with a tape measure on his belt and a way of listening with his entire face. Gran showed him the pump and the trough and explained what she wanted. Cora stood in the kitchen doorway with the chart concealed behind her back. She had never once argued with Gran in front of a stranger, and she could feel her heart going. 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.

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 own father had called it the trees' thirst. He could drill her well deeper, and it would work, and it would cost her 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. He said that it could, by three feet or so, which amounted to a length of pipe and an afternoon's labor. Gran said nothing. She walked down the lane and stood beneath the poplars, one hand against a gray trunk.

When Gran returned up the lane she announced that they would try it Cora's way for one year. They lowered the pipe that afternoon, Cora steadying the top while Mr. Ambrose worked the wrench. After that Gran filled the trough at six in the morning, and the poplars had the afternoons to themselves. A letter arrived in October. The first hard frost had stripped the trees in a single night, Gran wrote, and the twine now read eleven knots at dawn, at noon and at dusk, three days running. The well had stopped breathing. She suspected it was waiting for spring, like the rest of them. Cora pinned the letter beneath the chart and thought of sixty bare trees above the still water, holding their breath.