Literary criticism does not have many cult classics. In 1996, Jerry Leath Mills published one of them, an essay titled “Equine Gothic: The Dead Mule as Generic Signifier in Southern Literature of the Twentieth Century.” The essay is both tongue-in-cheek and genuinely insightful. After surveying convoluted theories about what makes southern literature southern, Mills proposes the following “simple, litmus-like test”: “Is there a dead mule in it?” He proceeds to catalog literary instances of deceased mules grouped by cause of death: “Asphyxiation,” “Fall into subterranean cavity,” etc. This, it turns out, is what holds together “Erskine Caldwell with Reynolds Price, or Cormac McCarthy with Kaye Gibbons.”
Mills’s title, “Equine Gothic,” suggests the oft-noted prevalence of rural Gothic in southern letters. Maybe he wouldn’t mind my suggesting a kindred sub-genre of dead-cat-in-a-well poems, even though I have only discovered two instances so far. In both poems, a grandfather lowers his young grandson down into a well to clean it, dredging up a dead cat in the process. The recently deceased North Carolinian Fred Chappell, may he rest in peace, provides our first instance, titled “Cleaning the Well,” published in his 1975 collection River and then folded into his 1981 epic Midquest. The Alabama-born Paul Ruffin offers a second instance. His poem, also named “Cleaning the Well,” appears in his 1980 collection Lighting the Furnace Pilot and gives the title to a later volume of new and selected poems. (With a free account, you can follow the links and read both poems on the Internet Archive.)
I have no idea if there is an intentional conversation between these poems with the same name and narrative core and similar themes. I presume both are based on childhood memories. They are markedly different poems stylistically: Ruffin’s terser, more direct, simpler in diction and syntax, Chappell’s longer, more loquacious, loosely rhymed. They are both powerful poems, though. I hope to note some sources of this power without either pouring cold critical water on the poems or beating the proverbial dead mule.
By now, you may be rolling your eyes and thinking, “Here we go, down into the well of the unconscious.” Well, I’ll try to start with something a little less predictable. A trip down into a well is a descent into the un-homey realms of the familiar home, the realms of which we are usually un-conscious (wink). As Chappell puts it, in words that include but also exceed my point, “Two worlds there are. One you think / You know; the Other is the Well.” The semicolon establishes the connectedness, the proximity, of these two worlds. I remember helping my father work in the dirt-floored, cobweb-festooned crawlspace that runs parallel to the basement under our old farmhouse—powder-dry dirt that nonetheless smelled musty and wet. It was a job that made my skin crawl, even when something wasn’t literally crawling on my skin. But it was also strange to think that this rarely visited nether space was always right there beneath the house. It made the home uncanny, unheimlich. I suspect many feel the same way about crawlspaces or attics. These spaces repel but also fascinate, especially for a child.
Such spaces also tend to collect the flotsam of our lives. Young Chappell and Ruffin discover plenty of normal stuff made strange at well’s bottom; in Ruffin’s case, “a rubber ball, pine cones, leather glove, / beer can, fruit jars, an indefinable bone.” In a detail bizarre but also plausible, he lifts these items out of the water with his searching toes.
A well is uncannier than a crawlspace because you imbibe what is drawn out of it. “You’ve drunk all that cat / you’re likely to drink,” says Ruffin’s grandfather. “Forget it, / and don’t tell the others. It’s just / one more secret you got to live with.” There is a doubleness to a well—provider of life, danger to life. As a young child, my father showed me a pasture well on our farm that his father had filled in with stones. The well was no longer needed, and my grandfather worried that a child might fall in it. My father undoubtedly told me this for explanation but also reassurance. It’s a tale of an adult’s proactive concern for children, after all. But the story unsettled me. I later had a nightmare about two children, a brother and sister, up to their necks in vile water in an incredibly deep well. The doubleness of wells is plenty evident in the Bible, where they are sustainers of communities and flocks, the Eden-glimmer oasis where wives are first met in Genesis and Exodus, but also the site of Joseph’s betrayal and temporary imprisonment by his brothers. Joseph gets a nod in Chappell’s poem, perhaps evoking a child’s passing worry about his grandfather’s intentions in lowering him into this dungeon-like place.
We might call the protagonists of these poems Childe Chapell and Childe Ruffin, as in young unproven squires. This is perhaps more appropriate to Chappell. He grew up reading sci-fi novels and weird fiction pulps. He wrote some serious genre fiction, and his writings are seasoned with the Weird throughout. Consider Childe Chappell’s imaginings as he is lowered into the well:
…A monster trove Of blinding treasure I imagined: Ribcage of drowned warlock gleaming, Rust-chewed chain mail, or a plangent Sunken bell tolling to the heart Of earth….
There are echoes of these fantastic imaginings in what young Chappell actually finds at the bottom of the well. The treasure trove becomes “Twelve plastic pearls, monopoly / Money.” The knight’s gear becomes a “Rubber knife, toy gun.” The “Sunken bell,” with its evocations of passing time, becomes “Clock guts.” Perhaps even the warlock is there, having met his end while in animal form, now “a greenish rotten cat.”
“Childe” is also fitting because the well in both poems evokes womb and cave (another doubleness), the descent and re-emergence a rebirth, the completion of a trial. The initiates descend as boys. They ascend with an accomplished feat but also with unsettling adult wisdom. Their grandfathers play the part of aged sage. In both poems, though more explicitly in Chappell’s, there is a reckoning with mortality. The dead animal in both wells is the notoriously hard-to-kill cat, the cat of the nine lives, here conclusively mortal. Boys, too, often think and act as if they have nine lives. Chappell’s poem ends:
I had not found death good. “Down there I kept thinking I was dead.” “Aw, you’re all right,” he said.
The poem does not rhyme “dead” and “Fred,” but that unsettling rhyme is implied by these closing lines, and it is very much on Childe Chappell’s mind. Ruffin’s poem ends with two pieces of grandfatherly wisdom:
“There was something else down there:
a cat or possum skeleton, but it
broke up, I couldn’t pick it up.”
He dropped his yellow hand on my head.
“There’s always something down there
you can’t quite get in your hands.
You’d know that if it wasn’t your first
trip down. You’ll know from now on.”
The grandfather’s words acknowledge the deep mystery of things, that there will always be something beyond your grasp. (A nod to Frost’s “For Once, Then, Something”?) The second bit of grandfatherly wisdom in Ruffin’s poem is quoted above, when the grandfather directs the boy not to tell the family about the dead cat. There are hard truths you need to live with, no matter how much (here it is) they circle your unconscious. It’s not always good to burden your loved ones with them. That is the implication of Chappell’s grandfather’s “Aw, you’re all right,” as well. A hard bone of stoical wisdom pulled up out of the well of life.
Steve Knepper is Bruce C. Gottwald, Jr. ’81 Chair for Academic Excellence at Virginia Military Institute. He is the author of Wonder Strikes: Approaching Aesthetics and Literature with William Desmond and co-author of Byung-Chul Han: A Critical Introduction. He is an associate editor at the Robert Frost Review and edits the online poetry journal New Verse Review
