Granny always says not to drink from the well, she reckons it’s got the taint about it. She shakes her head disapprovingly whenever we’re close. “Never should’ve placed dead bodies so close to the Lord’s water,” she says, making her tut-tut sound, and the sign of the cross.
Great Uncle Raymond is the nearest dead body, and he’s buried not more than twenty feet away. Granny reckons he would’ve leached through the soil, right into the well, putting the touch of death in the water.
“Maybe he wanted a taste,” I say. “He might’ve been thirsty.”
“Mary-Anne, don’t be so stupid. Your Mama didn’t raise you to be a half-wit. You know the dead got no need for thirsting or eating when they’re gone.”
“You don’t know that, Granny. You don’t know everything.”
She gives me a look that tells me she certainly does know everything. “Well, Missy, let me remind you that you don’t get as old as I am without knowing things. I’m coming up for seventy, and you’re an itty bitty ten. When you’re as old as I am you might know things, but at your age you know diddly squat. Besides, if you don’t believe me then you’ve just gotta take one look at your big sister, Ruth, to see what happens when you take a sip from that Devil water.”
I went real quiet at that.
We both did.
That’s what Ruth’s name does these days. It seems to shut everyone up, as if the mention of her name’s the same as cussing.
I stare down at the hole in the toe of my shoe, where the dirt’s getting in and my big toe’s trying to poke its way out, but it’s like I’m not seeing any of that because my head’s filled with Ruth things.
“You think she’ll come right, Granny?” I say after a while.
“Only time will tell.”
It’s a real Granny thing to say. It’s not a yes or no, but a fancy way of saying “I don’t know.” Still, ‘I don’t know’ is better than a straight out ‘no’.
“We should probably head back,” Granny says. “This was meant to be a short walk. I don’t want your Mama frettin’.”
“Ruth said they get lonely.”
“Who?”
“The dead. She said they’ve got no one to talk to.”
Nanny bristles and looks away. “That’ll be the well water talkin’ inside of her. Just nonsense. C’mon, pick up your pace and get a move on.”
The walk back to the house isn’t too long. I suppose in the olden days no one wanted to walk too far for water, or too far to bury their dead. Dead bodies are heavy, Ruth told me that. She said they weigh you down.
We’re just about at the house when I hear her scream.
The first few times it scared me something silly, till Granny told me to hum over it. So that’s what I do now, start humming Ring-a-ring-a-Rosie. We make our way up the path with both of us humming, and Granny’s face lined with pain; I’m not sure if it’s her arthritis or something else.
It was Ruth that told me our house used to be grand in the old days—games of croquet on trimmed green lawns, feasts in the dining room, and dancing in the ballroom. Sometimes, if I squint, I can imagine it. Ladies with pretty parasols gliding by, like they hadn’t got a care in the world, men with top hats, moustaches and thick accents. The air laced with perfume and scents of lavender and roses. They even had servants to look after folk, cleaning up mess, and cooking. The well water helped Ruth see all that.
Our house ain’t so grand now, and there’s no one but ourselves to look after it. The paint’s peeling off, like the house got sunburnt, and the weeds are so tall they almost cover the steps. Even our roof has sagged, like it’s given up, and Pa, when he’s around, says it costs too much to fix. Inside it’s no better. It smells dusty and wet, like socks left in the rain too long, and the wallpaper sheds from the walls like it can’t wait to leave.
“Over there was a gazebo,” Ruth once told me. “With flowering jasmine winding all the way around. It was gorgeous, Mary-Anne.” But when I looked at the spot she pointed to, all I’d see was dirt and weeds.
People fall on hard times, and I guess houses do too.
When we reach the front door the screaming’s finished, and so Granny and I stop our humming. The top half of the door is covered in stained glass roses, but it’s been so long since it’s been cleaned that it’s hard to make out the colours. Ruth’s favourite flowers are roses.
We head to the kitchen without talking. It’s where the screams came from, and there’s Ruth sitting at the big wooden table with her head in her hands, rocking back and forth. Ruth doesn’t go to school anymore, barely sets foot out the house other than Church, and every day in our house is determined by whether Ruth is having a good day, or a bad one. Today it looks like a bad one.
Mama’s at the old stove, her back to Ruth. It can be hard looking at things you don’t want to see, and Mama doesn’t like much about Ruth these days. “Your sister had a turn,” she says as she stirs soup. That’s what they like to call it these days, a turn. Like a great big cog in Ruth’s mind that just switches to madness.
Ruth looks up—stringy, white hair, all caked in grease, purple bruises from Papa’s last beating. Her eyes have the green wild about them. “He was here! Right here! Why won’t you believe me?”
“Who was here?” I ask, my voice low.
“Great Uncle Raymond. He was standing there, right behind her, smellin’ that soup.”
“There wasn’t anyone in the room, Ruth. It was just you and I, and you know your Great Uncle Raymond is buried out back.”
Ruth thumps her fists on the table. “He said Papa’s the reason our house is like this. He said it’s a travesty for good fine folks to be living in misery. He said Papa gambled and drank all our money away, and we aint’ got squat—”
The slap came out of nowhere. A red stain blossoming on my sister’s pale face. Granny’s arms are suddenly around me.
“Enough!” says Mama, her hand still raised. “Get out!”
“Gladly,” replies Ruth. She moves like one of the ghosts she’s always seeing, not so much walking, but gliding out the room, her footsteps barely making a sound.
“Don’t you ever get like that, Mary-Anne,” Mama warns.
“You all right, Granny?” I ask.
“Don’t like the arguin’ is all,” she says, but she looks awful pale, and she’s staring at the stove behind Mama.
It was less than six months ago that Ruth drank from the well. That was at a time when Ruth didn’t see ghosts, and Mama loved us both the same.
We’d been chewing stalks of grass, lying in the sun, and talkin’ about all the dead around us. There’s about fifty or so graves dotted around the well, most in a small grove of forest, but some like Great Uncle Raymond are right close.
“He must’ve been heavy to have dumped him here,” Ruth mused.
“I bet he liked chicken,” I added, even though I had no idea.
Ruth and I liked to make up stories about the dead. Some had really grand gravestones, made of marble with little angels. Others were a plain wooden cross, and Granny said there were plenty of others around here that were unmarked. I used to think that the bigger the gravestone, the more important or loved you were, but Granny explained that’s not the case at all. It’s the hole in people’s hearts that you leave that determines how loved or important you were, not the size of the gravestone, she’d tell us.
I’m remembering that conversation with Granny when Ruth interrupts my thoughts. “You know, when I die and get buried, I want a rose bush on my grave. I don’t want my body to just feed worms. I’d like to grow something pretty. Will you make sure of that, Mary-Anne?”
It seemed like a heavy responsibility, and I wasn’t too sure I’d remember, but I still said yes.
“And for mine I want a little angel,” I added.
“Not sure if Papa can afford that, but maybe I can chip one off the old gravestones for you. Pretty sure they won’t be needing it.”
At ten and fourteen years old, we weren’t really thinking of dying. I suppose we weren’t thinking of much at all.
After a while we got to tossing stones into the well for fun. We had no coins to waste away on wishes, but we thought stones would do just the same.
“What you wishin’ for?” asked Ruth.
A house all fixed up, for Mama to smile, for Papa to stay away from the drink and stop beating Mama, for Granny’s aches and pains to go . . .
“If I say, it won’t come true, will it?”
“Maybe, maybe not.”
“Then I’m not gonna say. Why, what you wishin’ for?”
“Same things as you probably.”
We kept throwing those stones into the water. Till we ran out of stones.
“You think the stones land on their heads?” I asked.
“Whose heads?”
“The dead.”
Ruth had laughed. “There’s no dead in the well, stupid. What, you think they’re hanging down at the bottom of the well having a party or something.”
“No, but Granny says—”
“You believe all that? Granny likes making up stories, that’s all. Scarin’ kids, like you and me. The water’s just old.”
“I don’t know, Ruth. Granny calls it Devil’s water.”
It was one of those things I wish I hadn’t said, because as soon as those words fell out of my mouth, it was like Ruth had to prove me wrong. She went over to that well, leant over the crumbling bricks and dropped the little bucket down into the blackness.
“Ruth, you don’t need to—” But she was already hoisting a bucket full of well water back up. Old chains clinking away with water sloshing over the sides. It looked like regular water when she showed it to me.
“You wanna taste?”
I shook my head. And that’s when she drunk it—her ‘told you so’—to show me it was harmless.
“Tastes delicious,” she pronounced, wiping her wet chin with her arm.
My legs had begun trembling, and I kept casting nervous glances towards those gravestones expecting one of the dead to speak up, to tell us off for drinking their water.
“You sure you don’t want some?” she asked, holding it out to me.
I stepped away.
She gave her little laugh, like it was all a big joke, while all the religious sermons of fire and damnation went through my head. “It’s nothing, Mary-Anne, just some harmless water.”
She was still laughing as I ran all the way back home, and locked my bedroom door behind me.
It was a week later she started the turning.
Ruth’s turning had started with a single scream in the night.
“Just a bad dream, go back to sleep,” Mama had said.
“Shut your trap!” yelled Papa, the drink still sloshing in him.
But Ruth couldn’t quieten, she’d talked about voices, and ghosts, and her green eyes had been wide with fright. None of us could sleep.
It was Granny that asked if she’d drunk the well water.
And then it all came out.
“You stupid girl,” admonished Granny. “Haven’t I told you plenty of times not to drink that Devil’s water. Mary-Anne, did you drink it?”
I’d shaken my head.
“Well at least one of you has some sense. Christ Almighty.”
“What should we do, Ma?” asked Mama.
“Pray,” Granny had whispered.
Mama and Papa refused to believe that Ruth could see the dead, even though she talked about them like they were right there. Oftentimes it sounded like she was talking to herself. I’d hear her laughing and sometimes crying.
“Girl’s not right in the head,” said Papa.
“Leave her be,” said Granny.
“Shouldn’t she see the doctor?” I asked. “Maybe the water was bad. Maybe . . . ”
“She needs a priest,” said Mama.
Granny had shaken her head, but Mama had insisted and so they’d dragged our local priest out to see my broken sister. He came with a cross, bible verses and holy water.
“I can still see them,” said Ruth when he’d finished. “There’s one clinging on the back of your robes, a small boy, says his name is Billy—”
“Enough!” said the Priest, his cheeks glowing red.
I looked at the priest’s white robes, and tried to see a Billy there, but there was nothing.
“Girl’s damned. Can’t be helped,” said the Priest as he almost ran away.
It’s funny when something’s broken sometimes you can make it worse by trying to fix it. I had that once with an old music box, the music didn’t sound right, so I fiddled with it, and eventually it stopped working altogether. I think that’s what happened with Ruth. The more Mama and Papa tried to “fix” her, the more she broke.
With Mama it was locking Ruth in her room, making her recite bible verses, refusing her food and sometimes using the wooden spoon on her backside.
With Papa it was much worse. Things Ruth said seemed to inflame him something stupid. Things about him gambling and drinking, about some other woman that wasn’t Mama. Papa said he had to beat the Devil out of her, and he sure did try.
But the more beatings Ruth got, it was like the more ghosts she could see.
Sometimes I wasn’t allowed to see her, but when I did I’d hold her hand and listen to her talk.
“You’ll remember your promise, Mary-Anne, won’t you?” she said one day out of the blue.
“What one was that?”
“About the rose bush on my grave.”
I gripped her hand hard. “I remember, but you’re not going anywhere.”
“I’m scared Papa’s going to go too far one of these days.”
“Don’t talk like that, Ruth.”
“At least they have one good child. One who didn’t drink the water.”
I tried to ignore the worry creeping inside me. “You know . . . I was thinking of getting those coins that must be down the well. There must be plenty. I was thinking of getting them, and getting a doctor to see you, and—”
“Mary-Anne, there’s nothing wrong with me.”
“But you’ve got the taint—”
“The taint just lets me see things, that’s all.”
“Things that aren’t there.”
“Is that really what you believe?”
Ruth’s green eyes were wet with hurt.
It was two days later that I awoke to a different scream. Not from my sister, but from Mama. Ruth had gone missing. Just after Papa had given her a bad beating.
I knew something terrible had happened.
We all went looking for her, but it was Granny that found her.
Ruth was down the well. Her broken, bruised and bent body was floating on the surface, pale hair fanned out.
I thought Mama and Papa hadn’t liked Ruth that much, but they cried just the same. We didn’t have a Ruth to scream anymore, so I did it for her. Letting it all out, screaming down into that dark pit of the well that had killed my sister until they had to drag me away.
“She’s gone now, pet,” Granny said, hugging me tight. “There’s nothing more that can be done.”
But she was wrong.
That night I drank the well water.
Ruth’s grave sits not too far from the well; it has a small headstone as that was all Papa could afford. Granny’s words come back to me: It’s the hole in people’s hearts that you leave that determines how loved or important you were. Ruth left some pretty big holes.
There’s a rose bush atop her grave, just like she wanted. I made sure of that.
I come here a lot, and sit and talk. I don’t want Ruth to get lonely.
I see her in silver mostly, like spiderwebs jumbled together. I see and hear the others too, but maybe not as clear as Ruth once did. Granny says it’ll get clearer as I get older. She’s been seeing them too, since she was a girl and drank the well water, but she kept that to herself. “The well water’s a curse, Mary-Anne,” she told me. “You shouldn’t have drunk it.”
But it was the only way to see Ruth again.
I stand up, brush my skirts and head back to the house.
I can hear the screaming already. Papa’s never been the same since Ruth’s death.
The Devil was never really in the water, but was living in our home all along.
“There you are. Hurry up, or we’ll be late for Church,” says Granny, coming to meet me. Mama’s not far behind.
“Is Papa coming?” I ask, but I already know the answer. Today’s a bad day for Papa.
We leave him with his ghosts. They’re angry with what he’s done to the house, and how he’s spent our money, and how he treats us. And they’re especially angry with what happened to Ruth. Now that he can see them, they’ve got plenty to say.
I give a wave to my dead sister as we leave. She’ll keep Papa company too. The dead don’t enjoy being beaten to death and thrown down wells. Papa went too far, just like she feared.
“Did you give your Papa some more water before we left?” asks Granny.
“Plenty.”
Granny, Papa and I might have the taint, but there’s only one that’s going to be turning.
I hum, Granny hums, and even Mama joins in, so we don’t have to hear Papa’s screams as we all head to Church.
