The Fishing Well
For forty years John had scratched out an unlikely living as
the simpleton in a certain town. He had
no family in the area, nor could anyone now living remember how he had come to
it. Not that anyone bothered to
ask. Year after year, he was just the
town fool.
The town thrived on a stretch of
fertile ground claimed from a swamp, surrounded by ponds and streams and a wide
lake teeming with fish. Despite their
good fortune, however, the townspeople were a sullen, sharp-eyed lot, always on
the lookout for someone behaving oddly or not doing his share of work. Anyone judged to be a misfit was soon run out
of town. By rights, then, John should
have been long gone, but his brainlessness was so absolute that his neighbours
marvelled at it as they would a natural wonder.
Sometimes they even rewarded his hare-brained schemes with a coin or
two, just for the amusement they afforded them.
And with these tossed bits of change, along with scrounged food and
cast-off clothes and other oddments, he managed a meager living in a lean-to
under a bridge.
One day,
John decided to go fishing in an abandoned well at the edge of town. He’d seen people cast lines and nets in every
body of water more than two feet deep, but never in this one, so it stood to
reason that any fish in it would have grown to huge size and be hungry to snap.
He had a length
of line and a rusty hook from his scavenging, and with his hoarded coins he
bought an earthworm from the baitseller’s son, paying for the price of two,
since cheating John was something the town’s children learned long before they
entered school.
Perched on
the edge of the stone well, he whistled as he unrolled his line with wriggling
worm down into the depths below.
Meanwhile, the baitseller’s son had nudged his father, who had nudged
his neighbour, and so on, and now a small crowd was watching from behind John,
holding in their laughter for the present.
One of the boys whispered that it would be fun to push him in and let
him flounder awhile before they hauled him out, but his father wanted to wait first
and see how long John would sit whistling over his empty pond.
Soon,
however, to the amazement of everyone—except John, who merely grinned—the line
gave a couple of sharp jerks downward.
John set the hook and hauled up his fish. It was small and thin and pale, with sickly
mottlings and ragged fins unlike those of any of the local fish. Still, it was a fish—a fish pulled somehow
from a nearly dry well—and John would have a few fried morsels to go with his
crust of bread tonight.
That is, if
John did the sensible thing—but in any situation that was just the thing John
was incapable of doing. Instead, as the
villagers, more of whom had gathered, watched incredulously, John lowered his
fish back into the well in the hope of attracting a bigger one.
Sure
enough, he did. A longer, plumper,
stronger-looking fish than before came twisting up the line. It squirmed free of John’s hands and leaped into
the grass beside the well. None of the
villagers was smiling now, and not a few were frowning. Idiocy that brought onlookers laughter was
one thing, but idiocy that brought the idiot profit quite another. One stout man, Otto the blacksmith, advanced
from the group to tell John to be off with his prize, which was flopping about as
John tried clumsily to unhook it.
Otherwise, he would be the first to kick John down the well, and the
last to help him out of it.
John looked
up with his gap-toothed grin, and then did something that stopped Otto
short. He’d finally managed to work the
hook free of the fish’s mouth, but had torn its lower lip in the process. After scratching his head a few moments, he pinned
the fish against his chest and pushed the barb through the base of its dorsal
fin—squinting and chewing his lips in concentration all the while—and then
lowered the fish down the well again to swim about and hook an even bigger
companion.
Scowling,
Otto rejoined the crowd, which had grown as the news had spread and now
included most of the town’s citizens.
They all, even the children, watched John in glowering silence. After a few minutes, a furious tug on the line
almost yanked John into the well. He had
a tough time getting this one up to the top.
When he’d heaved it over the side, the citizens saw a fish as long as
the well was wide, or not much shorter than John, fat and sleek, its huge pink
gills opening and closing like bellows. Fish
enough to satisfy even the greatest dolt, and though the townspeople begrudged
John his catch, which would feed a family for days, they were glad at least to
see the end of the episode. Grumbling,
they prepared to disperse.
Except—John
didn’t shoulder the fish or take out a knife to clean it where it lay. He stood over it scratching his head, raising
raw welts in the patches of scalp between his straw-tufted hair. He was wrestling with a problem his weak mind
couldn’t solve: how to use as bait a
fish of this length and girth, which he had barely managed to hoist from the
depths. He chewed his pulpy lower lip
until it bled. Just then, the dying fish
gave a retch, and out of its mouth slid the previous fish it had
swallowed. John was back in business.
The dorsal
fin was tattered now too, so this time he hooked it through the tail and
lowered it down that way. When he’d got
it rigged up, he turned and gave a hearty wave to the people watching. This was his fishing wave, the one he always made
from shore to fishermen poling through the marshes or rowing on the lake. They answered it with shouted jokes or
curses, depending on their luck—sounds which wind and distance tore to lusty
shreds that made John smile. No sound
returned to him now.
This time, he
had the sense to plant his feet outside the well and brace his elbows against
the stone rim. Which was fortunate, for
the bait fish was no sooner lowered than the citizens saw John yanked over the
edge and halfway in. No one moved to
help him as he righted himself with difficulty and began hauling, the tendons
in his arms popping, his face turning purple.
He hauled and he hauled and he hauled.
Grunting and panting, he would gain a foot of line, then lose half of it
when he paused to take a breath. The
struggle seemed to go on forever. Finally,
an enormous, goggle-eyed fish cleared the top of the well—or its head did, for
try as John might, hugging the fish around the head with both arms, he couldn’t
raise it further.
Now, at
last, some of the town’s men, led by Otto, rushed forward to help. Not for John’s sake, but simply to preserve
this miracle that their fool had managed to snag. One pulled on the line, another hugged the
fish from the other side, linking his arms with John’s, and two others pushed
their fists inside the enormous gill slits.
They all strained upward, cursing and grunting and panting as one human
winch. And they budged it an inch or two
higher—just enough to ensure that it was wedged there immovably, a giant fish’s
head filling the mouth of the well, so tightly it couldn’t be raised further or
pushed back down.
The fish
opened its gate-like jaws, gasping in the unwelcome element. The other men stepped back a pace at the
gargling rasp the monster produced. John
stepped forward and peered into a black space like a cellar staircase. Somewhere down there was his bait. Climbing onto the rim of the well, he dove in
headfirst and slid down the fish’s giant gullet. It was slippery and slimy and
putrid-smelling, but no more so than the marshes in July near his lean-to.
At the
bottom of the gullet he landed in a dry oval space littered with papers and
lined with books. John couldn’t read, of
course, but he’d seen offices before.
This one was lit with a soft greenish glow pulsing from the fish’s
innards which were arranged in neat parallel coils across the roof of the
little room and down its sides. Whirring
devices that John had never seen before hummed in the four corners, blowing the
air about to keep the place dry, which also reduced the fishy odour a
little. At the back of the chamber sat a
man in a top hat and frock coat, a silk cravat knotted at his throat. He was peering intensely at a book, so
preoccupied that he hadn’t noticed John’s thudding arrival, nor, seemingly, the
upward-hauling commotion that preceded it, which had tilted his chair back steeply
and scattered his books and papers.
Finally, squeezing his strained eyes between thumb and forefinger, he looked
up.
“John!” he
cried. “My God, it’s been ages. How long exactly, do you reckon?”
“I haven’t
a clue,” John replied. He was using some
of the papers to wipe off the gluey gullet slime. Filthy to begin with, patchy-haired and
blotchy-skinned, wearing cast-off rags, he seemed to share no features with the
man rising excitedly from his chair to greet him. But if he could have enjoyed a bath and the
long attentions of a barber, plus a month of good eating to fill him out, he
would have seen a face not unlike his own, though at least twenty years younger
and not worn down by rough living. Not
that John had ever owned a mirror, or wanted to.
“I’ve been
waiting forever for this day,” said the well-dressed man, pumping John’s hand. “What took you so long?”
“I don’t
know,” John said.
“Well, how
are you?
“Same as
ever.”
“What have you been doing with
yourself?”
“Nothing,”
answered John.
Hoarse
shouts drifted down from above, followed by gleams of light that played over
the fish’s gullet without quite reaching the chamber where they stood. The man in the top hat frowned up at them.
“I wish we
had more time, so I could explain a little better. But those louts won’t wait. I’ll tell you what I can do. Here’s something that will distract them and buy
you some time.” He went round behind his
desk and rummaged through some drawers, returning with a nut that he pressed
into John’s palm. “Here. This should keep them busy while you get
away. Set it in the town square and then
stand back and slip away.”
“Go?” John
said, staring at the nut in his palm. It
was about the size and shape of an acorn with its top off. His stomach grumbled, and his first thought
was to pop the nut in his mouth.
“No
time...no time....,” muttered the frock-coated scholar, and he gestured at a
rope that had dropped down the fish’s gullet to dangle behind John. “John!
JOHN! GRAB HOLD!” the voices
bellowed from above. The gentleman
pushed a vial into John’s trouser pocket.
“This will straighten you out. I
wish I’d made up more. Drink it a bit at
a time. But not before you’re clear of
the town. D’you hear? Not before you get clear!”
John backed
away and grabbed hold of the rope end. With
so many arms pulling at once, he was whisked up the gullet so fast that he flew
out of the gaping mouth, clear of the well, and landed, stunned and winded, on
the ground a distance from it. His fists
sprang open and the nut he’d been clenching rolled free.
The
townspeople crowded around him in a circle of tense faces, obviously expecting
an accounting of all they had witnessed, forgetting for a moment what they knew
of John’s mental powers. Angry men,
sullen women, surly older children and sly younger ones—all the faces of the
place he knew whirled and loomed above him, like storm clouds in a threatening
sky.
Then, just
as he was wondering how he might squirm away between their legs, their eyes
widened, their mouths dropped open and they drew back in awe.
A few feet away, the nut that had
rolled from his hand into the dirt, was sprouting. In a few dazzling moments it became a
flowering bush, dense with leaves and thorny stalks in its middle. Spiral blooms of amber and rose began as the
whorled lower parts of women, and opened out into flushed pink faces draped
with coiling tresses of black and brown and honey hair, revealing in places the
swell of breasts below their pale necks.
For some
moments, the citizens stood in shocked silence, gaping at the marvel in their
midst. But the stillness didn’t last
long. When the men saw what was on the
bush, they shouldered to the front of the crowd. The children, sensing passions that could
inflame to danger, fell back. Some of
the women tried to hold their places, but as the men pressed forward, they too gave
way, melting back with muttered curses and warnings.
Otto, the blacksmith
who had wanted to kick John down the well, was married to his second wife, with
a large brood already underfoot. Yet he
stepped forward now, his face red and sweating, and snapped off a bloom from
the bush of women. It grew quickly in
his hand, so quickly that even his strong arm could not hold it up. She fell to the ground, her lower legs
crushed and bleeding where Otto had wrenched them free. Otto stepped back, alarmed. Several of the women rushed forward to help
the woman on the ground, now life-sized and moaning piteously. One of them called for a blanket to cover her
nakedness, but this was unnecessary, as her skin from shoulders to calves began
to alter, extruding an outer layer of fabric in soft-coloured folds and
flounces. Within seconds she had in all
respects the appearance of a decorous bride, albeit one crippled by rough handling
below the knees.
Now that
they saw how the magic worked, the other men were anxious to take their
turn. A gardener stepped forward with
pruning shears to show them the correct procedure, snipping the stem well back
of the bloom, which left a tiny stiff tail that might be later removed or, if
desired, left on.
Men, single
and married, pressed forward urging their rights. Arguments sprang up, which were decided not
by marital need but by physical size and status within the town. In the welter of raised voices, and plucked
and forming girls, John saw his chance to slip away. He slunk back unnoticed, and when he’d
reached the rim of the crowd, turned on his heels and hurried as fast as he
could toward his lean-to under the bridge.
It had been a confusing day, one that had addled his weak mind more than
usual. He’d lost his fishing line and hook,
and somehow given up fish that would have fed him a week. At the same time, he’d seen marvels, but
marvels that turned quickly into horrors.
He couldn’t hold so much spinning circumstance in his mind, and it all
resolved into a simple desire to escape, to run away from the town he’d never
thought of leaving before. Wherever he
ended up, it was time to clear out. He’d
grab a sack and a few things from his pile and be on his way before anyone
noticed.
He’d only
gone a short way, though, when familiar shouts and curses reached his
ears. “John! JOHN!
Where the HELL’S the fool gone to?”
With a sigh, he turned and
trudged back.
The scene
around the flowering bush was wilder than ever, with knots of arguing men and
shyly courting couples threaded with crying children and cursing mothers, and
disappointed men and women wandering away with slumped shoulders, like drab
trickles spilled from a brimming pool.
When the
crowd caught sight of John, they shouted at him to hurry, waving him on
excitedly. They parted to let him
through, and he saw what had them so worked up.
The bush was badly mangled, as if the suitors had ignored the gardener’s
instructions and had snatched at it in a frenzy. Most of its leaves lay scattered on the
ground, its branches snapped off or half-snapped and dangling. Inside, at the middle of the wreckage, stood
a woman, full-sized and of middle years, her nakedness poorly covered by her
hands and the scanty screen of thorns and leaves, her slack breasts scratched,
rivulets of blood running down her belly and thighs. Neither did her face have anything in common
with the faces of the graceful brides.
She had large protruding pale eyes, each of which seemed to goggle away
to the side, a low brow, rough skin, big fleshy lips that made her small mouth
pucker, and, under her chin, two long wiry hairs, like the whiskers of a
catfish or sturgeon. She clutched herself
miserably, shivering and afraid.
“Go on,
John!” jeered an onlooker. “Go claim
your Fish-Wife!”
Ignoring
the hooting and laughter that followed this—he had long moved through the
citizens’ clamour in a trance of protective deafness—John took off his greasy
coat, and holding back the thorny branches, pushed it through. After the woman had covered herself, he
beckoned her out through the alley he’d made.
She emerged hesitantly. He put
his arm around her shoulder, trembling still with fright or cold, and they made
their way off down the road.
Jeers and
taunts followed them—“Fool and his Fish-Wife!
Mr. and Mrs. Fool-Fish!”—and sticks and pebbles struck them in the
backs. John moved partly behind the
woman to shield her, though he had to keep supporting her with his arm, for she
wobbled unsteadily. The taunters behind
them soon turned back. John had counted
on them doing so. They couldn’t stick
with anything long; it was part of what kept them on the lookout for signs of shirking
in another. John didn’t understand it in
quite this way of course—he was a fool through and through—but living among
them all these years, he knew the citizens’ shifting moods the way an animal
senses turns in the weather long before they occur.
The same
ingrained sense steered him down another road away from the lean-to, which the
citizens were bound to visit soon in search of more fun with the new
couple. They wouldn’t be happy to find
their sport gone, so he hurried the woman as best he could along the road that
led out of town.
After a
long stretch of walking, harder on her than on him, they stopped to rest in a
cave across a gully off the road, its mouth half hidden by a bramble bush. Ushering her in first, John stopped to listen. The road was silent behind them.
Inside,
they fell into wordless rhythms as if they’d been living together for
years. The woman fashioned a broom from
some twigs tied at their base with a length of vine and began whisking the
spiders and earwigs and other vermin out of the corners. John found a place where moss grew around a
trickle of water. Pulling out a clump of
the moist green, he paused her in her work and dabbed at the scratches on her
hands and face and ankles, signing to her to open his coat and swab her private
parts herself. Meekly she turned and
began doing so. Meanwhile, John, seeing
that she was still shivering, looked about for something that might fortify
her. The damp rocks around the moss were
covered with a lichen that he knew was edible if very bitter. Opening his rusty knife, he scraped some off,
and put the olive-brown shavings in the hollows of some walnut shells an animal had left
nearby. He added some water to one and
drank it down. The mixture had gotten
him through many lean times, but its bitterness still made him wince. He didn’t think she’d stomach it without
spitting it out.
While he
was scratching his empty head, his hand strayed to his pocket and found the
vial the gentleman scholar had given him inside the fish. In the frantic commotion since he’d fogotten
all about it. Now he took it out,
unstoppered it, and added a drop to a half shell of lichen shavings and
water. Whatever it was, it could hardly make
the concoction any worse. He tipped another
drop into the shell and tasted it. A
faint sweetness leavened the bitterness.
He added two more drops, swirled it with his finger, and took it to her.
She looked
at him questioningly, but drank it down, not wincing but actually licking her
lips to catch all of it. He crossed the
cave to mix up another little dram, and by the time he’d turned, a wondrous
change had begun spreading over her. Her
skin looked smoother, her eyes brighter and closer together, and her chin
whiskers a little finer and shorter. She
reached for the second shell and gulped it down. As John watched, her whiskers disappeared
entirely; her brown eyes sparkled out at him; her brow rose straight and high;
and her mouth widened. All her misshapen
features rearranged themselves, pinched or stretched like putty, and she
straightened her spine with relief and abandon, like a young girl stretching
herself in the morning.
“It’s
Martha, John,” she said in a low, loving voice.
“I don’t know how you managed it, but God bless you! Quick, mix up another batch for
yourself. We’ve got to make plans
quickly, and who knows how long this will last.”
Now, John’s
wits were already a little sharpened by his first taste, just enough for him to
have an inkling of what Martha was getting at.
He knew there was something he’d known, and needed to know again. Swiftly, he mixed up two shellfuls for
himself, working so hastily he slopped out some of the liquid in the vial. At the first draught, his brain begin to
tingle and hum, and after the second it was surging with thoughts and
memories. Some of the memories were
bitter, so bitter they made the lichen seem like honey; but some of them were
very sweet, and he turned to face the sweetest of these, his wife, Martha. Halfway across to her, the thought of his own
hard-used, wretched appearance made him pause in shame, but she sprang across
the space and they clung to each other tightly.
She led him
by the hand to a flat rock outside the cave.
There, sitting in the sun with a clear view of the road, they reviewed
the strange vengeful history that had brought them here. Martha started off, quickened by the potion
first, but John soon caught up to her and they were trading pieces of the tale
they’d lived and suffered through together.
At one
time, long ago, they’d been the leading citizens of the town—John its founder
and mayor, and Martha his beloved wife and helpmate in every respect. Working together, they’d raised the town up
from a squalid hamlet, stirring its inert inhabitants into productive
life. It was John who’d figured out a
system to drain the marshes and create solid ground, portioned into rich plots
irrigated by canals. He planned the dams
that kept the fish ponds full, and designed the mill over the waterfall that
ground the local grain. At first the
townspeople had been grateful, acclaiming John as mayor for successive terms,
pressing the humble couple to build a grand house on the best plot of land, with
craftsmen donating their time and skills to improve it with graceful
touches. Those were the great, lost
days—of improvements freely offered and gratefully accepted. But gratitude turned, as gratitude will—especially
when the need that occasioned it fades—to dull resentment and rancor. John and Martha were said to be getting above
themselves, becoming petty tyrants who lorded it over their
peasants—accusations never remotely true and ridiculous now, when John spent
his days in his study and workshop, and Martha kept their house and tended
their large garden. In short, to slake
their jealousy, a group of the wealthiest citizens, their purses fat from
businesses John had started up, hired a magician from a distant town. This scientist for hire mixed up a potion
that he sold them for a high price. The
vengeful citizens left baskets of jams and sweets on the couple’s doorstep at
holiday season, offerings laced with the magician’s poison.
“Poison to
rob you of your beauty and your speech, and me of all my brains,” John said
through clenched teeth, pounding a fist on his thigh. “Those bastards took whatever gifts they
resented most, whatever put their own pitiful talents in the shade.”
“...pi-ti-ful...,”
came a thick murmur at his side, and he saw that Martha’s portion of the antidote
was wearing off. Her fish-features were
creeping back, and dumbness was clogging her nimble mouth. A fog was beginning to steal between his own
thoughts as well, a half-enjoyable emptying, as if a soft round scoop were
clearing spaces in his head. He hurried
back inside the cave to mix up two more portions while he still had his wits.
When they
were themselves again, John held the vial up in front of them. Sunlight shining through the yellow glass
showed the level down to almost half.
“If I take
it all at once,” he said, “it should give me a few hours. More than enough time to wreck their drainage
pumps, their mill, their dams and sluicegates.
I designed them, after all. I’ll
get to as much as I can in the time I’ve got.
Those clods will be left stumbling in black swamp water, too lost even
to light a torch.”
“And where
will we be left?” Martha said softly, laying a hand on his arm. Her touch calmed John, and they shared a look
of quiet recognition. This had always
been their secret covenant. John would
race ahead with his schemes, sometimes far too far ahead, and Martha, slower
but more sensible, would restrain him from his wildest fancies.
“We will
lose the little we’ve gained. Far worse,
we’ll be lost to each other again, perhaps this time forever.”
“What’s to
be done then?” said John, holding up the half-depleted vial.
“You’ll
drink it all,” Martha said. “Just as you
planned. But not right away, and not
here. And not for something as useless
as revenge. Once we get to a safe spot,
use it sparingly, as you need, to keep yourself thinking long enough to find
the recipe, or else another way to undo what has befallen us.”
“But you’ll...,”
he began, but could not finish the thought.
Martha’s
voice was firm. “Think, John. I cannot give you my beauty, nor would it
help us if I could. For as long as you
are wise, however, there is a chance you may find us a cure. In the meantime, I will have as fine a
protector as I could want. That is”—and
now a quaver came into her voice, and her chin trembled—“if you will stick by
an ugly and speechless hag.”
He took her
hands between his own and pressed them tight.
“You look better now, it’s true,” said honest John. “But you looked good enough to me
before. Whatever separated us for so
long, I won’t let happen again. I will
not leave you.”
A silver tear appeared at the corner of her
eye. He put his lips to it, and felt his
brain quicken. Perhaps he could get them
to safety without using another precious drop of the potion.
Vile hollerings, like the brayings of
beasts, told that the citizens were on their trail.
“Come,”
John said. “Quickly, now,” as he pushed
the vial deep into his trouser pocket. Martha,
her portion of revival now worn off, stared at him blankly. Her features began to slide back toward the
magician’s curse.
Putting his
arm around her, John led her away from the cave and, with his fast fading wits,
took them down one path, and then another, narrower one, and then down one so
faint and overgrown it was clear no human feet had found it for a long time nor
were likely to. By now the jeers and
whoops of the citizens, which had been fading steadily, were gone, and the pair
found themselves alone together in the stillness of the deep forest.
