Seeds and Other Stories

by Ursula Pflug

  SEEDS

  AND OTHER STORIES

  Copyright © 2020 Ursula Pflug

  Except for the use of short passages for review purposes, no part of this book may be reproduced, in part or in whole, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronically or mechanically, including photocopying, recording, or any information or storage retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Collective Agency (Access Copyright).

  We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada.

  Cover design: Val Fullard

  eBook: tikaebooks.com

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: Seeds and other stories / Ursula Pflug.

  Names: Pflug, Ursula, 1958– author.

  Series: Inanna poetry & fiction series.

  Description: Series statement: Inanna poetry & fiction series

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200203444 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200203754 | ISBN 9781771337458 (softcover) | ISBN 9781771337465 (epub) | ISBN 9781771337472 (Kindle) | ISBN 9781771337489 (pdf)

  Classification: LCC PS8581.F58 S44 2020 | DDC C813/.6—dc23

  Printed and bound in Canada

  Inanna Publications and Education Inc.

  210 Founders College, York University

  4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario M3J 1P3 Canada

  Telephone: (416) 736-5356 Fax (416) 736-5765

  Email: inanna.publications@inanna.ca Website: www.inanna.ca

  SEEDS

  AND OTHER STORIES

  URSULA PFLUG

  INANNA PUBLICATIONS AND EDUCATION INC.

  TORONTO, CANADA

  ALSO BY URSULA PFLUG

  NOVELS

  Green Music

  The Alphabet Stones

  Mountain

  Down From

  SHORT FICTION

  After The Fires

  Harvesting The Moon

  ILLUSTRATED FLASH NOVEL

  Motion Sickness

  EDITED ANTHOLOGIES

  They Have To Take You In

  Playground of Lost Toys

  To Keemo, with love and spaceships

  Table of Contents

  Mother Down the Well

  The Lonely Planet Guide to Other Dimensions

  Big Ears

  A Room of His Own

  Washing Lady’s Hair

  Seeds

  Unsichtbarkeit

  As If Leaves Could Hide Invisible Beings

  The Dreams of Trees

  On Fire Bridge

  Castoroides

  One Day I’m Gonna Give Up the Blues for Good

  Kaolani, from Kaua’i

  Fires Halfway

  Hamilton Beach

  Judy

  Myrtle’s Marina

  The Dark Lake

  Harker and Serena

  The Meaning of Yellow

  Trading Polaris

  Bus Owls

  A Shower of Fireflies

  Daughter Catcher

  No Woman Is An Island

  My Mother’s Skeleton

  Acknowledgements

  Mother Down the Well

  I WANTED MORE THAN ANYTHING to keep a stone tablet, but they always slipped out of my grasp back into the water. I felt there must be some rule I was missing. They were covered with inscriptions of course; that was the whole point of tablets. Without inscriptions they’d just have been meaningless slabs of stone. Once they’d slid back into the pond I couldn’t remember the inscriptions anyway, so it was just the same as if they’d been blank, as if I hadn’t read them, hadn’t held so much wonder in my hands. Finally, one day a tablet stayed in my hands without being pulled back into the water, as if there was a giant down there tugging with all her might. Needless to say I felt stoked, pretty much like Moses, in fact. I wasn’t expecting proclamations that I could share with multitudes though, or even just my village, but hoping for something more personal. A fortune cookie, a horoscope. Some light thing to cheer and sustain me when all else had failed.

  I had trouble making out the engraved words, what with all the slime and chipping, so I left the tablet by the pond and went up to the house to get the wheelbarrow. My friend Blue was sitting on my back steps; he asked me what was up.

  “I have a tablet,” I said. “It’s heavy so I’m going to get it into the wheelbarrow and bring it up to the well and scour it so I can read what it says.”

  Blue smiled. “I don’t believe in that whole stone tablets business,” he said, “but even if I did, aren’t you supposed to get them up on mountaintops and not out of the lake?”

  “Pond,” I said. “Siena got hers out of the water too. She found it upriver. Maybe some places it’s mountains, but here it’s water.”

  When he was around, Blue stopped by fairly regularly to see if I needed his muscles for anything. He is a big strong man with long blond hair and dark roots.

  “They’re just so tantalizing. Siena got one that said…”

  Blue smiled as though now that I’d cloaked it as a bit of neighbourly competitiveness, my craziness made all kinds of newfound sense. “What did Siena’s tablet say?” he asked.

  “It said her third child would be a great leader of his people. Siena is confused because she couldn’t have any more after her second daughter; all the doctors said so.”

  “She could always adapt a third one,” Blue said, “in hopes of fulfilling the prophecy.”

  “You mean adopt,” I said.

  “I try very hard to mean what I say,” Blue said, “and say what I mean.”

  He followed me back to the pond where my tablet lay in the grass. A long crack running through its middle, right where the words were.

  “Tricky,” he said.

  “No doubt.”

  We headed back to the barnyard to get the wheelbarrow. It was between the well and the house, and I avoided the well like I always do, giving a little shudder.

  “Why do you always avoid the well,” Blue asked, “giving a little shudder?”

  “My mother fell in before I was born.”

  “Really, Clarissa? You never told me you had a mother. I didn’t want to pry so I didn’t ask but I always assumed you’d grown up without one.”

  I looked at Blue. He is a friend I can stand. Most people really just want to take advantage of your kind heart, should you be lucky enough to be in possession of one. They want to complain and borrow things and not return them and call that poor assemblage friendship, when really what you’ve been praying for is the friend who can help you map it all out, say the insightful thing, help you disentangle the sheets of fabric softener from the wash as it were. Help get your mom out of the well she fell in before you were born.

  “I have spent my whole life coming up with ways to try and fish her out,” I said.

  “I take it none worked,” Blue said.

  “So it would seem.”

  “Getting mothers out of wells is something I have a little experience with, actually,” he said.

  “Really?” I asked, casually as I could so as not to give away the as-yet-unfounded hope I felt.

  Talking about such things, we took the wheelbarrow down to the pond. Blue and I tried to lift the tablet but it was too heavy, even with him on one end. That made me wonder whether the giantess who lived at the bottom of the pond hadn’t pu
shed a little to help me get my tablet out onto the grass. The grass was wet, the tablet was wet. It was late October and the sky was overcast. I’d worn thick socks and rubber boots so my feet were okay but I needed an extra sweater under my sweater. I wanted to get this thing done so I could get back inside and have homemade squash soup and tea, perennial favourites for dinner.

  “We’ll lay the wheelbarrow on its side,” I said, “then we’ll tug the tablet into it; then you’ll right the wheelbarrow with me holding the tablet to prevent it from slipping out again.”

  Blue rolled his eyes as if I might find this much exertion and coordination a stretch, but he didn’t offer an alternate plan so we went ahead with mine, which turned out to be successful. We took turns pushing; Blue’s turns were longer than mine. It was hard going through the long wet grass; there hasn’t been much of a path down to the pond since I sold the last of the cows.

  By the time we got to the barnyard we were so exhausted we dumped the tablet out of the wheelbarrow instead of gently laying it on its side, and even more gently sliding the tablet out onto the gritty dirt. Because of our carelessness it split in half right along the big diagonal crack, making an inordinately loud cracking sound as it did so, almost like thunder.

  I thought I might cry, it was all so pitiful: the old well, the split tablet, the dirty barnyard. I’d tried planting flowers but even tansy and comfrey hadn’t taken.

  To cheer me up Blue said, “I told you I don’t believe in tablets. I also don’t believe in divine messages being accompanied by cracks of thunder.”

  “I’ll just run up to the house and get a brush and some scouring powder,” I said.

  “Scouring powder?” Blue asked.

  “You don’t believe in scouring powder?” I asked.

  “Just the syntax is unfamiliar. I call it Comet Cleanser or Old Dutch.”

  I came back from the house clutching a wire brush and a bottle brush and a brush for floors. The truth is I hate brushes now, the way the bristles are all shoddy and made of plastic.

  “I’d go gentle with the wire one,” Blue said. “That tablet is made of limestone and flakes easily. I wouldn’t want to brush away what’s left of the words.”

  “No ma’am,” I said. I say this all the time, to anyone and everyone, including small girls and grandfathers. It is true I particularly like saying it to big strong young men like Blue, because that makes it funnier.

  I cleaned out the carved words on my stone tablet as gently as I could with the sharp corner of a scraper and the wire brush. The well itself is open and level with the ground; no wonder, I sometimes think, that my mother fell in. There used to be a wall around it, a fieldstone-and-muck deal made a hundred years ago. Its crumbling accelerated at some point and I worried all the crumbles would make the water gritty so I took it down. More truthfully, I called Blue and he came over and helped.

  We teamed up to push the two halves of the tablet back together.

  “Did you hear a clicking sound when they snicked together?” I asked.

  “Clicking and snicking sounds we believe in,” he said.

  “The crack didn’t disappear, though. The halves didn’t melt back together.”

  “Accompanied by a hissing sealing sound,” Blue said.

  “And maybe some smoke,” I laughed.

  “I can make it out okay now but I think you should be the one to read it aloud,” Blue said.

  “Raise Your Mother,” I said after first reading it inside my head a couple of times to make sure I’d gotten it right.

  “Well, that’s kind of anticlimactic, isn’t it?” he asked.

  “Come in for soup and tea?” I shrugged.

  “I would, Clarissa, but I’ve got a dinner date,” Blue said.

  After he had gone I stayed a moment alone by the well and thought about my mother. Trying to get her out of the well was a project that made me feel stupid so much more than it ever made me feel smart. I’d turn over stones and ask them what I should do and they’d answer me with a stony silence. I’d make tea and forget to drink it. I’d walk until my legs ached. I spent as much time as I could outside, communing with nature, with tree spirits; seeing myself or the fate of the world in the flight of a bird or the curve of the current around a submerged rock.

  I’d wear necklaces that had once belonged to my mother or her mother or my beloved aunt, sometimes all three at once, thinking it would help. I’d stay up late worrying about my brother Dave, alone across the continent. After Father died I was alone too, but I stayed on at the family farm in eastern Ontario, so it was as if everyone was still there even when they weren’t, Grandma and Grandpa and Father. And of course Mother was still alive, just living down the well. I’ve only ever heard her voice the once, although Dave, who was there, has never been a hundred per cent sure it was even hers.

  sss

  After I retrieved the stone tablet, a doe came out of the woods every sunset for a fortnight to raid the gardens along the river, eating our lettuces. She was so pretty that we mainly forgave her foraging and just gathered on our verandahs to watch. My friend Siena kept her garden right up near the house, and after a couple of days the doe overcame her shyness and investigated Siena’s kale. We stood together drinking tea and Siena pointed, showing me how the deer’s left ear was split. We discussed whether this was the result of a wound or whether she’d been born that way. Siena also told me she had named the deer Georgia O’Keefe. She seemed relieved when I didn’t laugh at this affectation and was even familiar with the famous artist’s work. I suggested that Georgia—the deer not the artist—was skilled like me and my mother at bridging dimensions and that if I could only teach her to speak English we could have the nicest conversation about our metaphysical work.

  “Or you could learn to talk deer,” Siena nodded agreeably. “And how do you know Georgia-the-artist didn’t know how to bridge dimensions? Many artists and writers do, you know.”

  “Of course. And equally many, or almost equally many, don’t know that’s what they’re actually doing when they create. I just can’t ask her, because she’s dead, and wherever she is now is a place I don’t know how to get to and ask things.”

  “How do you know your mother could, then?”

  “For starters, she had another name for it. She called it exploring portals. It’s why my grandparents bought the place next door. My mother said there was a particularly powerful portal in the well.”

  “Well, that explains a lot,” Siena said.

  “Agreed,” I said.

  “If it’s true. Maybe she’s been dead all this time and you’re just telling yourself otherwise.”

  I laughed at Siena’s joke and said goodbye so I could go home and plant. I expanded the gardens so much I didn’t know what to do with all the food I grew. It was an earwiggy summer because of the damp but the insects left my crops alone. This seemed a boon from nature I had to repay and so I hugged trees on a daily basis, whispered to them to tell Ms. O’Keefe to stop raiding our gardens. I can speak tree but not deer, but you gotta figure a tree and a deer could likely converse.

  Lovely as Georgia was, I was worried come November deer season someone upriver would kill her in revenge for eating all their succulent young beans, which would make her flesh so very tasty and tender. Maybe the trees told her this advice of mine for she did eat all my beet tops, but my beet tops only, and I was able to push the dark red globes back into the ground where they simply grew new leaves, palest green streaked with crimson. She also ate my beet tops in a pattern, leaving interesting designs in my rows. At first I thought my eyes were fooling me but after the third time I realized she was mimicking her famous namesake, leaving art behind everywhere she went.

  It was because of this succession of events that I felt closer than ever before to raising my mother. It wasn’t just retrieving a stone tablet and reading its self-evident yet powerful message, or
my special relationship with Georgia O’Keefe that gave me hope, but the fact that sometimes now when I called down the well my mother answered back, a cool burbling cry that let me know she was submerged but employing some method she knew for breathing underwater.

  My aunt’s and grandmother’s necklaces were beautiful, green jade and red carnelian respectively, but my mother’s was the nicest, opulently beaded from coral and amber and finely wrought silver filigree. I knew that once she emerged from the well I would have to give it back. I didn’t mind because I was looking forward to the conversations we would have.

  “Have you ever noticed how people may be called Blue or Red, but rarely Green or Purple and certainly never Orange?” I imagined asking her. “Why is that?”

  “What did you think the tablets were for?” I imagined her asking back, while putting on the necklace I’d been so careful not to lose. The only time she ever spoke aloud was twenty years ago. She said, “Magic is a skill that can take generations to learn, and many incarnations.”

  Dave and I had turned thirty and thirty-one that year. We stared at the speaker we had set up beside the well, astonished, waiting for more. Then Dave proposed that maybe someone had hacked the transmitter and interposed a recording of a woman’s voice uttering these cryptic words, just to embitter us. After all, we didn’t know what her voice actually sounded like, did we? I felt that it indeed was our Mother, and that she was trying to explain how she had abandoned us in favour of the study of magic, so compelling a task she couldn’t give it up, not even for us.

  Dave nodded when I told him my opinion, but still he was gone west before Easter and only returned three Christmases out of ten. He’s invited me to Vancouver Island but I’ve always used the excuse that it’s too hard to find someone reliable to look after the livestock. Of course the last cow has been sold for some years now so I wonder what is still holding me back?

  I think maybe my mother didn’t throw herself in the well; I think maybe she jumped. Everyone knows there is an inter-dimensional portal down there. Before he died, my grandfather even told me it was a selling point. Perennial gardens; good barn; older farmhouse with new 200-amp service; steel roof; wood/oil furnace; portal.