Daughter in the Well

At his last Christmas my grandfather was old and told me about his daughter in the well, because he was old and no one could stop him or call the subject too macabre. She died in a well; she had epilepsy, he told me: his only daughter, stricken by God like the demoniacs Jesus healed. My father had mentioned this older sister, but not in detail like my grandfather did, describing the thinness of her hair, how at nights she, an adult, would wake her parents by standing in the middle of their bed, the time she carried a cat into the swimming pool and pushed it away when it had drowned. I was enraptured. He spoke of all this quietly, for theatrics and because we both knew my father and uncles hated to see such tragedies retold. “But your grandmother is dead,” he whispered to me. “Who else will ever hear of my daughter?”

I asked how old she was, and he said she looked eighty-six by the end. “Like me now,” he said. She had never left home—she couldn’t. I wondered how frightening it must have been. She died at thirty-three, when my youngest uncle was only eleven. My grandfather reminded me of their old house, its heavy oak doors and locks everywhere. Those were for her. During seizures, she became a creature and could flail and anything might break; for a full day after, she wandered dreamily and did things like drown their barn cat. “We worried a little about your dad and uncles, but your grandmother wouldn’t consider the State School.” He said this a little loudly, and my mother peeked in from the kitchen to ask what we were talking about. “I’m eighty-six,” my grandfather told her with a waving hand.

When she left, he said she had died on Christmas Eve, thirty-one years earlier. They woke up late and she wasn’t anywhere. He said he knew immediately she was gone, and after a day of searching with the police dogs, they found a stone well, deep in the woods about a mile from the house. “No one had seen it before. No surveyors, no reports from hikers. It was a beautiful thing, really, probably a hundred years old.” My grandfather never smiled, but he spoke like the world was a great, exciting secret. His voice demurred at the end. He said he didn’t know if he should’ve told me any of this; he didn’t want to make me sad. I told him I was all right, and he looked out to the trees in our yard. “She just fell into it,” he murmured. I nodded but he stood up to shuffle toward the kitchen. Then louder, closer to a shout: “Maybe jumped.”