When I was sixteen, my brother fell down a disused well,
Gone before my eyes without a shout, as dust and chaff plumed
In the afternoon sun, ready to rise just as he set.
I ran as much by fear of what my father would extract
For my neglect as by concern for my brother, collapsed
In the wilderness, hours from homeward field or sober help.
What drink had done since my mother passed, had done to all;
All shared its sharp relief; all shared its languid pressure:
For him, to daze the day; for us, to pause on the road home.
I cast into the well his name – light-in-darkness snuffed out –
But for tumbling stones and loose gravel, it rendered back silence.
“Lucas! Lucas! Lucas!” I sent down the name; it echoed
Back the same with no suggestion that its owner heeded.
I hesitated as I had done some years ago at night,
When wolves caught my brother’s leg beyond our fevered camp light,
Dislatched at last not by my frantic pleas but wild charge
And rage of my father, hairy arms and bludgeoning hands
Applying blow upon drunken blow – tears and blows flowing
Together and mingling with heated fur and snarl and teeth.
Beyond that day he limped his life, wary of wolf and kin,
And we two were tethered between beast at home or abroad,
Coiled at the margin of our lives, taut with attention.
I ran. The land between well and farmhouse tendered no grace;
Earth tugged at boot and knee, stretched my hot lungs with hotter miles.
Sunk on the porch, ire neatly corked and cradled, my father
Roused with disdain. “What?” Poised to repeat, he saw my broken face.
Words sheared off at their harsh exit from a frowning mouth,
As hammer-tapped casings cleave and leave with rifle blast.
“Where?” he fired, and stunned I stood, astonished and afraid.
“An old well in the back forty. Dad, he fell; he fell hard.”
“Get the truck,” he growled and rounded the house to the barn.
I circled to it as he hauled hempen rope, dark with age,
And I saw years shed away and him at sea grasping tight
Lowering lines for ammo boxes while Guadalcanal
Burned – day and night lowering while shellfire lit hot the sky.
To the far fields; then on foot, my hands empty and him surging
To the spot and not a word between us but all was said.
He knew the well. He dug it. I could hear it as he called
For his fallen son, in the low way men weep as they shout:
Guilt pouring out like interlocking machine-gun fire.
Then in went the rope, and he turned sharp to me and I swear
My father had never pleaded for anything before
And all his pleading I received in one fatal, panicked glance,
As though mates locked forever beneath Ironbottom Sound
Might be pulled up if only we had courage to descend.
I took my grip and closed my eyes and felt the cloistered air,
Down, down with the musty rope and musty well and fieldstone barbed
Until I felt, slumped in frigid water, my brother’s body,
Wedged by some miracle against the rotten boards that fell.
“He’s alive!” I roared up the shaft, and back came, “Hold my lad!
If ever you loved your father, hold. If ever you loved
Your brother and sweet mother, tie the rope and hold fast!”
My arms shook with cold and my hands fumbled in the dark
As I wrapped the frail boy’s limbs around my own, face to face.
“Hold, lad – hold fast and I won’t let you go, but hold I say!”
So I held, and as we rose from that wat’ry grave, I heard
Steady as the rising, my father’s voice call out apace:
“Hold sweet child. Hold. Forgive me lads and hold. Hold fast my boys.”
Todd Anderson (Stuff of the Rind, Sand and Sail, The Reluctant Prophet) writes the newsletter Mirth to share a behind-the-scenes look at his writing process as well as to offer readers the first fruits of his poetry and reflections. He grew up in the forests of small-town Ontario, contending against nature in all its beauty and harshness. His training as a literary scholar of Latin and English literature inflects his love of poignant turns of phrase, but it is the influence of his family and their myriad adventures together that infuses his story-telling and poetry with its substance and power. Todd lives and writes in Ottawa with his wife and six children. If you are interested in supporting Todd’s work, please follow the links below to donate or buy his books.
Todd Edward Anderson 