Kind One - By Laird Hunt Page 0,3

into the dark and following afterward, but my wife said she wouldn’t like that. There was a way to dig a well, and that was the way I had been digging it. During the war I had watched men drop what they needed into wells and had no quarrel with the approach, but followed my wife’s wishes. We saw that the bucket could hold three bricks at a time and she brought our daughter out and set her on the ground and told me she was ready. I was ready too and turned to climb down into the hole.

I saw the bear when I turned. It was standing beside an oak sapling, sniffing at the air. It lifted one of its paws a little as it sniffed. It looked at us, then sniffed the air in our direction. It took two steps toward us then turned and ambled slowly over to the stock pen. It set some of its weight into its haunches then swept out a forepaw and quietly stove in the fence. I could not remember afterward how it had happened, but I suddenly had the rifle in my hands. I shot the bear as it was considering the pigs. The ball did nothing and the bear continued its work. It killed two pigs, sniffed their carcasses carefully, then took the third. The other stock had pressed themselves against the fence walls, mad with fear. I was still reloading as the bear walked off into the woods with its prize. I was still reloading when my wife started to scream.

The baby had been hurt in falling, and when I carried her up out of the well she was dead. I gave her to my wife then went and leaned against the side of the house. The wood was warm from the afternoon sun. Everything below my chest was dripping. I knew our daughter was dripping too. She had struck her head in falling and had a crescent mark above her eyebrow. I turned to look and saw that my wife had not moved. I could see my daughter’s leg, the soft skin above the small, wet boot. We buried her near the stream. We sat together for a long time next to the small grave. Then we went back to our house. I came back out of the house as quickly as I had entered it. I could not stand to see the baby’s basket, the rattle I had made for her, the bowl I had carved. My wife asked me to come back in but I didn’t. Instead I climbed down into the well. There were fresh earthworms floating in the water, but I did not save them. Instead I reached down and pulled up handfuls of pebbles and put them in my pockets. Instead I moaned and tore at my beard.

Later, although my wife asked me not to, I filled in the well. Our baby must be properly buried, I told my wife. She must be safe. And it did seem to me, during my labors and long after them, that my child was still down there, that she was crying and clenching her fists above the colored pebbles, that she was not buried safe and dry in the loamy dirt beside the stream.

Some years hence I dug another well, but I would not drink from it, nor sit at table beside any who would.

KIND ONE

(FIELD AND FLOWER)

1911 / 1850s / 1861

Sometime am I

All wound with adders who with cloven tongues

Do hiss me into madness.

1.

ONCE I LIVED IN A PLACE where demons dwelled. I was one of them. I am old and I was young then, but truth is this was not so long ago, time just took the shackle it had on me and gave it a twist. I live in Indiana now, if you can call these days I spend in this house living. I might as well be hobbled. A thing that lurches across the earth. One bright morning of the world I was in Kentucky. I remember it all. The citizens of the ring of hell I have already planted my flag in do not forget.

Charlotte County. Ninety miles from nowhere. It was four hundred acres, varied as to elevation, with good drainage to a slow-running creek. There was a deep well, fine pasture for the horses. Much of the land never went under cultivation, and there were always frogs and owls for the night and foxes to trot bloody-jawed through the