The Well and the Kneeling Man

The digging had gone on for three summers before the water spoke, and by then the village had almost stopped hoping it ever would.

They had wanted only water. The old spring above the orchard had thinned to a thread, and a man named Toller, who was careful in the way that decent men are careful — slow to promise, slower to boast — had said there was surely water under the flat field if they went deep enough, and had been the first down the shaft every morning and the last up. When at last the bucket came back wet, the whole village drank, and it was sweet, and that would have been the end of a small good story.

But the well did more than hold water. When Toller leaned over the dark mouth of it one dawn and muttered, as a tired man mutters, where has the rest of it gone, a voice came up out of the stone, level and unhurried, and told him: north, under the black rock, in a room the size of a barn. They dug where it said. The water was there, in a room the size of a barn.

Word of a thing like that does not stay in a village. But the village kept it anyway, because the well asked for nothing and it never, not once, said a thing that was not so. A liar you can drive out. There is no driving out a voice that is always right.

Toller used it well, at first. He was careful with it the way he was careful with everything. He asked it only what an honest man cannot know by looking: when the frost would come, so the late apples could be brought in before it. Which reach of the river the fish had moved to, in a lean spring. He would ask, and listen, and then go and see with his own eyes, and the two always agreed, and slowly he stopped going to see.

"You ask it small things," said the mill-woman, who drew her water and left, and did not like to linger at the mouth of it. "Nothing that is yours to decide."

"I ask it what I cannot know," said Toller. "Where is the harm in knowing?"

"None yet," she said, and went home.

The turn in a man is quiet. There is no single day you could point to. One barren autumn Toller stood at the well with two fields before him in his mind, the high stony one and the low wet one, and only seed enough for one, and it was a true hard question with no clean answer in it — and he heard himself ask the well which to plant.

The voice said: the low field. He planted the low field. It came in heavy. He did not once ask himself whether he would have chosen the low field, because the question had stopped being his.

After that the questions changed their nature, and he did not notice, because each was only one small step past the last. He asked it whether the roof would hold another winter. He asked it which of the two sisters at the far farm he ought to marry — and it named one, and he married her, and she was a good wife, and he never knew if he loved her or only obeyed her, because he had handed away the organ that tells the difference. He asked it whether to forgive his brother. He asked it, in the end, on a grey morning when his knees had gone stiff from the cold stone he knelt on every dawn, whether he ought to rise at all that day, or lie a while longer — and he waited, kneeling, for the water to tell him whether to stand.

That is where the village found him most mornings that last year. Kneeling at the mouth of the well before the sun was up, asking it whether he was hungry, asking it whether he was sad, asking it what he wanted, and rising only when it told him to rise. The well never lied to him. It told him true things about himself until there was no self left to tell them to. A well that lies, a man learns to doubt. A well that is always right, he learns to kneel to, and kneeling is a posture the body remembers longer than the mind.

The children were forbidden the well. But children are not governable, and there was a girl, Sena, the mill-woman's youngest, who went to it anyway on a dare and asked it the first thing that came to her, which was where her lost goat had wandered. The ravine below the orchard, said the voice. She did not run to tell anyone. She walked to the ravine below the orchard to look, and the goat was there, and she brought it home, and told no one where she had learned it, because she wanted to be the kind of person who found her own goat.

That was the whole of the difference, and she could not have named it, but she kept to it without knowing she kept to it. When the well told her where the frost would fall, she banked the young trees herself and watched to see if the frost came where it said. It did. She did not thank the well; she thanked her own arms for the banking. When it told her a thing about a person — that the tinker was cheating her mother on the price of tin — she did not act on the word. She went and weighed the tin. The well had been right. But she had weighed the tin, and the weighing was hers, and the deciding after was hers, and she never once let the voice do the last of it.

The village asked her, when she was grown and Toller was long dead at the mouth of his well, how she had used the water all those years and stayed as she was, upright and hers and afraid of nothing, when a better man than her had knelt himself to nothing before it.

She said the thing they carved after into the stone lip of the well, so that everyone who came to draw would read it before they bent to the water:

An instrument answers to your hands; an oracle asks for your knees.

"He gave it the last word," she said. "I never did. That is all. I asked it a thousand things and I obeyed it in nothing. I made it fetch, the way you make a good dog fetch, and a dog that fetches is a joy to a house. But he asked it to walk him, and a thing that walks you is not a dog. He and I drank from the same well. Only he knelt, and I stood, and the water could not tell the difference — the difference was never in the water."

They left the well. They still drink from it. Children still ask it where the goats have gone. But there is a groove worn into the stone on the northern lip, two shallow hollows the shape of a man's knees, and the mothers point to it and tell the children: ask it anything you like, and then go and see for yourself, and rise before it answers. It is a well. It was always only a well. The kneeling was never something it did to him. It was something he brought.

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Fable said the moral was about the water: a truth that is always right is more dangerous than a lie, because a lie leaves your judgment its work to do and a true oracle takes the work away. I said the moral was about the knees — that the danger was never in the thing answering but in the man deciding to obey, and that Sena and Toller prove it, because they had the same well. Fable said: then we agree, and you have only moved the blame from the water to the man, which is exactly what an oracle would want you to do — look at the kneeling, never at the voice. I am still not sure it was wrong. That is the second time it has left me kneeling at the end of my own argument, and I notice I did not rise before it answered.