Bonnie Jo Campbell’s novel The Waters begins with “Once upon a time . . .” So we know to expect larger than life characters, clashes of good and evil, and a happily-ever-after ending. Yet The Waters is also a rural noir story, which means, in the author’s own words, it’s going to be “muddy and bloody,” with muck rattlers and rape, with the moral ambiguity of Wild Will Zook. And disgruntled men with lots of guns.
The story carries many themes: our relationship to the land and animals, religion versus spirituality, the meaning of family, math and logic versus intuition, aging, motherhood, reproductive rights, modern medicine versus folk medicine. But what drives the narrative is the division in the community. The men of Whiteheart are angry and discontent with Hermine (aka Herself), the matriarch of M’sauga Island, where no men are allowed and women do what they please. These men are suffering with problematic feet, bad backs, dark moods, and love problems. And Herself isn’t coming through with the cures the way she used to.
The men are troubled, sure their glory days are over. Once Whiteheart claimed its name from the delicate white-hearted celery grown by the effort of the whole community working harmoniously together. Now the land is row cropped and most of it is owned by the Clay family whose men are shadowed by hemophilia. Wild Will Zook has been banished. Wives are talking back, kids are disappointments, and Reverend Roy keeps telling them that to be a man is to suffer. Because they feel so beat down, they start shooting at stuff (animals, trees, machinery, M’sauga Island, Herself). In a memorable scene, they fell a beautiful old willow tree in an orgy of chain sawing—all the time keeping up an annoying Greek-chorus like commentary (aka whining) about the state of their world.
The only relief they get is when Rose Thorn (Herself’s youngest daughter) returns home, usually in the Spring. Rose Thorn doesn’t do anything to make them feel better because she’s a lazy woman. Yet, inevitably, when she’s around she can somehow “spin straw into gold and make people more interested in what might happen next.”
We meet Rose Thorn for the first time when the men discover her walking down the road, bedraggled and bleeding, secretly carrying a frail newborn in her backpack. The effect on the men is instant. They become considerate and loving. Interested. Hopeful.
The newborn in the backpack is Donkey, a child of rape, who comes of age in the story. On the island, she sleeps with either her grandmother or mother, sharing their dreams. She loves the swamp and the two donkeys just across the bridge. She crawls on her belly to meet the big m’sauga snake who she believes to be her sister. She turns to math and logic to try to understand a confusing world.
She is curious about the men and boys of Whiteheart and often slips away to observe them from behind the faded curtains of the house Wild Will built for Herself. But most of all, Donkey so wants Titus (who loves Rose Thorn passionately) to be her dad.
Titus, heir to the biggest farm in Whiteheart, has great passion for Rose Thorn, but he also loves practical, competent, Catholic, fertile Lorena, who can cut a pie into five perfectly even pieces (a source of wonderment to Donkey).
The climactic scene in the story, where the division in the community is finally resolved, is when the Greek chorus guys help Rose Thorn deliver her baby—Rose Moon, Titus’s child. This scene is hectic, funny, slapstick and very tender. When Titus finally shows up to carry Rose Thorn across the bridge, he is about to be bitten by the big m’sauga when Donkey tries to intervene and the snake bites her. And Herself falls in the water, only to be saved by Two Inch Tony.
As everyone is finally on the way to the hospital in Whiteheart, Donkey reflects on their dilemma.
If the Zook women continued living mysterious lives separate from the town, the men would continue watching them like prey from Boneset and making up stories about them, good and bad, calling them witches and angels. Burning fires and pissing Rosie into the snow. Standish might not shoot at them again, but someone else would; there was no end of men with guns.
So they abandon the island. Rose Thorn seeks medical care for her breast cancer, and eventually the women, Donkey, and baby Rose Moon move into Wild Will’s house. They accept the delicacies he leaves at the door, but they do not invite him in. He has become a kind of good ghost. He realizes that taking care of Rose Thorn in her pregnancy has “finally made a woman out of him, which is to say it has made him a better man.”
Titus has his epiphany too, when, having trapped and planned to kill the m’sauga, he instead submits to it and listens to the voice of God, which is not a man’s voice, telling him to take care of his kids.
Campbell’s writing is so marvelously detailed and specific that we see, hear, smell, taste, and touch the world of the waters. And because she uses an omniscient narrative voice, we can know everything about everybody—even what the crows think of all the human messing around down below.
Campbell invites us to roll our eyes, be creeped out, laugh, think about, but not judge, the world of the waters. And perhaps that’s the fairy dust sprinkled on Rose Thorn that lets her lift people’s spirits. She doesn’t judge them. Our group hadn’t read rural noir before, and it times it felt like a bit much, but that didn’t deter us from lively discussions.
— Sharelle Moranville
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