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Bonnie Jo Campbell

Bonnie Jo Campbell Books

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The Waters

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“The three shiny blond heads leaned toward the lamp flame. With steam and a bit of black smoke swirling, the image conjured a fairy-tale vision, with Rose Thorn's long tangled hair splayed across her back so voluminously it could have wrapped around all three of them. Together, these sisters were one creature with six arms and legs, animated by flame, not subject to the earth's gravity as much as to one another's.”

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“With her left hand, Herself clumsily tucked the shells into her nightgown and straightened them, each cuntshell wrapped in its cradle of braided lavender or gray or black cotton thread now touching her skin. Herself had told Donkey that each shell was a woman's life saved at great cost, and she needed to keep the shells warm and safe while she lived, giving these souls their time in the world. Baba Rose had had over a hundred shells on her necklace when she'd finally been unable to get out of bed under the burden. Every time Herself told the story of how Baba Rose died, there was another cause, and Donkey had to assume that the ghost whose fire had warmed their cottage for so many years had died of all of it, of everything.”

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“Normally, Donkey would have pushed them away, even run to escape their touch, but then Molly laid both hands on her face, and Donkey felt a soothing warmth, a settling. And after that, all the hands in the room were on her, and it felt like the eureka! of discovery. They were no longer five separate bodies in a kitchen but five flowers growing from the same root; whether she hated or loved them wasn't relevant to their work together. Donkey's vision blurred until they all seemed wrapped up together in fog and spiderwebs. Any talk of Donkey being special and precious didn't mean anything, because she was not even separate from them, just the youngest part of the family monster--- and a monster was what it would take to cure Rosie. Donkey knew now why Herself dreamed of having her daughters gathered together--- because such distance between the parts of a whole was unnatural.”

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“She wore Hermine's necklace under her shirt every night while she slept, and it soothed her to listen to the whispers of those souls not born, souls who Herself had said were preparing to travel on in their own time. She'd expected to feel wished down by the burden of keeping the necklace safe, but most of what she heard from the string of clinking bodies was laughter, and what she felt was a tickling energy and a sweet pure light rising from someplace without fear or desire, a place of healing kindness without this life's uncertainties. Some of the energy and light she sensed might have come from the relieved and renewed souls of the women who had been free from burdens they could not endure; this energy of having a second chance permeated Donkey's body when she wore the necklace.”

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“Rosie wanted her daughter to know who she was before she went out into Nowhere, where terrible things would happen to her. It was hopeless to try to protect a girl--- better you equip her to protect herself. If Dorothy could feel certain of who she was and what she wanted of the world, if she could be confident in her skin, as none of the rest of them had been after a childhood on the island, she could make her way anywhere, do anything.”

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“Donkey had spoken to and petted dozens of dogs she'd seen jogging along the road or poking around for food at the edge of the Waters; some of them were traveling dogs, males chasing the scent of females in heat, while others had mysterious agendas they did not share. The cats she met were usually more elusive, hiding out and hunting until Molly saw the signs of their presence and trapped them and took them home and saved their lives all by herself. But dogs were valued in a town that knew them as man's best friend, and usually the loose dogs who appeared on Lovers Road were reunited with their owners or else were taken to the makeshift shelter Smiley Smith's mother had set up, where they were quickly adopted.”

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“Across the road, under the willows, Rose Thorn saw a tangle of purple waterleaf, edible. The May apples had opened their umbrellas over creamy flowers, and a clump of white trillium waved flags of truce, a few of them blushing pink. The foliage between them and the island--- elderberry bushes and silky dogwood--- was already so thick that Rosie could barely see the cottage perched just above the bridge. She didn't understand why she'd wanted to leave this lovely, lush, watery place; at this time of year, she was always sure she'd never want to leave again.”

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“The big willow clogging the channel was evidence of the damage men could do, but maybe they would be different if they were allowed on the island. Maybe they would learn to be a little more like women. They wouldn't have to start fires here the way they did at Boneset; they wouldn't have to burn the rotting wood where hen-of-the-woods mushrooms grew. Donkey would have to tell them about all the special care the island needed. Every crevice and swollen place needed a certain treatment--- different in spring than in summer or fall. There were nesting sites to watch out for, broken places in a tree's bark that could be sealed with goop to help the tree survive. The women who had lived on the island all this time moved carefully, tenderly, because there was so much to lose.”

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“Rosie was a bright spot in all their lives. Even a decade ago, people would come to sit beside Herself at the roadside hoping for a chance to see the pretty, dreamy girl reading a book in the grass or walking slowly and lazily across the bridge from the island. If she talked back then, she talked about the characters in books, as though their adventures were real, or she'd say she saw a troll under the bridge.”

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“There were herbs in the Waters of Massasauga Swamp that could be rendered into medicine for just about every affliction: yarrow and plantain for bleeding wounds, elderberries and boneset for flu, willow bark for fever, and foxglove and dandelion for too much pressure in the body. Mullein for eliminating mucous, slippery elm for sore throats, honey for ulcers, and turkey tail for the old cancers, if you caught them early. And if you asked Herself to make a potion or tonic to fix you, she would study the veins in your hand and the whites of your eyes while considering what kinds of poison to add in minuscule amounts. Bloodroot? Snakeroot? Rattlesnake venom, if she had it?”

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“Likewise, when she sometimes found arrows stuck in the roots of trees, she quietly unscrewed the shafts and used them to stake plants in the poison garden, where Herself grew hemlock, tall thimbleweed, white snakeroot, swamp milkweed, poison sumac, and bloodroot. Poison ivy with its white berries was ubiquitous on the island and didn't need any special place. This morning the island was alive with flowery and moldy fragrances, alive with the urgent trills and chirps of birdsong, while more quietly, down low, sounds of scurrying and munching. The island was bursting with spring things to count and measure and eat--- ramps and wild onion sprouts, three-leaved trillium and speckled trout lily, dandelions, horse tails, tender new nettles for tea, pokeweed shoots to boil, fiddlehead ferns to fry.”

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“Except that it was not fog but a body forming before her eyes out of a stream reflecting golden sunlight, a yellow checkered tablecloth, and the bones of two hundred goldfinches. Donkey forgot how to breathe. She opened the door wider and in doing so somehow flipped the contents of the hot pan onto the porch planks. Now the figure was fully conjured, tipping back in the chair, as Donkey was forbidden to do. There was Rose Thorn with her bare brown feet resting on the table, legs crossed at her slender ankles, her hands clasped behind her head, shiny hair as windblown as feathers. All around her, in the mid-morning haze, golden light fingered upward. Rosie was as perfect as a perfect number with all her factors adding up to make the sum of her, and the whole day felt fresh and breezy.”

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“She opened the oven with a potholder and poked a meat fork into both buttercup squash halves cooking under tinfoil, one stuffed with sausage and sage and the other with butter, apples, black walnuts, and cinnamon. She pressed the side of the fork against the chicken Titus had brought them last night. Herself had inspired to guide Dorothy through stuffing it, and a little extra stuffing was in a pan on the shelf below. As she closed the door, the sausage, cinnamon, and chicken smells wafted into the warm room.”

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“At the apex of the snake's resistance, its body formed a fine powerful arc that was held momentarily in perfect tension, like a bow. Woman and snake were perfectly attuned to the moment and the task, each focused on the other. Hermine's absolute command over the creature, like her power over all the island, was as inalterable as the equality of the three sides of an equilateral triangle. The storm-colored m'sauga gradually torqued her thick body into a flattened S in her silent, flowing resistance, matching the resistance of Hermine's right arm, and turned to reveal a smoky ribbed belly. Her mouth opened wide, as if in a yawn, and she revealed a pearly pink-white iridescence, the color of a princess dress or the inside of a river clam. Another wave of morel-mushroom musk rose as the venomous fangs bit the air in a staccato rhythm.”

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“Through a break in the willows, if the fog isn't too heavy, you can see the edge of what everyone around here calls the Waters, where a sort of island rises up, accessible by a bridge three planks wide, strung between oil barrels floating on the watery muck. There, under the branches of sycamores, oaks, and hackberries, the green-stained Rose Cottage sinks on the two nearest corners so that it appears to be squatting above the bridge, preparing to pitch itself into the muck. Beyond the cottage, the trees give way to a mosquito-infested no-man's-land of tussocks, marshes, shallows, hummocks, pools, streams, and springs a half mile wide between solid ground and the Old Woman River. This is where Herself harvested wild rice, cattails, staghorn sumac, and a thousand other plants.”

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“The island and its women loom large in the dreams of local folks, who sometimes wake up sweating from visions of witches in black (though the island women never wore black) or of crows watchful in treetops, or of swamp streams bubbling up through the floorboards of their houses. It is said the island, where healing waters percolate to the surface, was a place where women shared one another's dreams, a place where women did what they wanted.”

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