Time In A Well
for Mervyn Morris & Hermione Baptiste

Down in that well, I could only look up. Water in the well, about my midsection. Beneath my feet, soggy sticks, rotting. To follow fashion, I’d followed my brother into the forbidden.

Out neighbour, Mr. Edgecombe, had given us permission to fetch water for our many goats and sheep, our pigs, our many chickens. There was a rope tied to the handle of a bucket to draw the water up. It would come up splashing. It was difficult to steady it. What ever was left in it, we’d pour into our empty, waiting buckets.

As if this was not exciting enough, as if we hadn’t enough to be grateful for, we had to descend into the well ourselves. It was Kevin’s idea. He went down, came up and I followed.

When my bare feet were resting upon the well’s very bottom, I was alone. Kevin had left. Immersed in the water in the well, almost up to my shoulders in it, my short pants and short-sleeved shirt as soaked as I was, I bent and I drank. This done, it was time to ascend.

Small as I was, its was not at all easy. Everywhere I placed a hand or a foot, attempting to climb, I slipped. The soaked quarried sides of the well provided no place to grip, no way to climb. What Kevin had done easily enough, was impossible for me.

That he was bigger, stronger, more developed, I had not ever admitted to myself. I never even admitted to myself that he could beat me. And though he always did, I thought he only did because I’d let him.

I needed him now. I was unable to pitch like a frog or slither like a snake, prisoner in this circle in quarry, in this circle in earth.

I hollered. I cried out. I panicked.

Was I relieved to see him staring down with the sky as if about him. The blue sky looked like something he was wearing.

He instructed me where to place my hands, my feet and I obeyed like one having something to prepare with a recipe to follow and following every step not wanting what’s being prepared to be spoiled.

I was used to defying him, disobeying him, disrespecting him. Always as if to say: Two years older than I was, who did he think he was.

But he knew the way, the route to salvation. He had ascended from where I was. I was in deep water, way below. He was on earth. He seemed as far away from where I was as heaven was from earth.

Following his instructions, I climbed. I was amazed to find myself ascending. “Put your hand here and your foot there.” And sure enough, within minutes my hand was in his and as effortlessly as he had hauled himself out, he hauled me out.

We were on the ground together. Buckets of water to return to the farm with, was enough after all. I was relieved. I was happy. I was crying still. I was sobbing. He was scolding and laughing and elated to have been relied upon as he was and to have rescued me.

In the well in water, in fear, I’d begun to imagine I’d remain down there until Mr. Edgecombe came, or daddy or dark or death.


© Obediah Michael Smith, 2004
12:41 a.m. 25/July/04