And when the water is clear and cold,
You’ll find yourself at the house of old
The woods, the vale, shall never tell,
That fateful events shall soon unfold.
There is truth in children’s rhymes. Old wives know it, children know it, you can know it too if you pack away the cobwebs of sticky experience and remember how it feels to let dead people guide you.
We used to tell a fairy story when we were kids, growing up in a humid alluvial wasteland that used to be square farm plots until the 1950s but have since been reclaimed by the kind of scraggly, vine-choked woods that produce spindly trash trees, thorny rose brambles that never bloom, and the kind of kid curiosity that disappears when puberty hits.
My former classmate Lena Stern used to tell it like this:
“An old man had a farm with a barn and a shack, and he got himself a beautiful young wife. But she was from Back East (back when the east was back) and she got homesick. So he spent all his money building a beautiful house for her, the kind like what they had in town. And it was made of wood and had three stories and lots of patios and verandas and porches and balconies and the trimming on the edges they call gingerbread.
“But then the Government came in and said they were building a dam because the county needed it and anyway the men needed work because there was a Depression on. The townspeople said wonderful, we can’t wait. But the dam was going to flood the old man’s land, so he voted against it. And the Government said too bad, that’s tricks. They didn’t say that’s the way the cookie crumbles because cookies didn’t crumble back then.
“The old man went to his wife and says, sorry, dear, but the house and fields are toast, and he’s crying because he wants to give her the stars and they can’t have anything nice because of the Government.
“And she said, no! we’re not leaving. They can drown us. And the old man smiles, because he had a plan. He goes to town to tell the Government they couldn’t build a dam and flood the house because they’d drown his wife and then they’d be murderers, and everyone gasped. But the old man knew something they didn’t. Because his wife, she had a secret. She was secretly a fish. Her whole family was, they were Irish fairies from way back even farther East. He got a beautiful wife-fish because he’d stolen her skin. I don’t know Betty, that’s how it works. She had human skin, too.
“So the Government says, get her off the farm and we’ll give you a thousand dollars. So he goes back to his wife, and he says, wife, if we leave we’ll get a thousand dollars. But she says, no! I want to stay here in my house. That makes him mad because he wants a thousand dollars. So he takes her fish skin and hides it and he goes to the Government and says I put her up in a nice hotel and they give him a thousand dollars. And then they do something, I don’t know, to the river and it makes a lake where the farm was, and they put up a dam.
“The problem was, his wife didn’t leave, and she didn’t have her fish skin so she couldn’t be a fish, so she sat in the house and it went under the lake and she drowned.
“Now on moonlit nights, if you go up to Old Man’s Bluff and cross the water, you can see her house rising from the deep, like an island in the fog. Inside you can hear a beautiful lady singing, and she sings:
And when the water is clear and cold,
You’ll find yourself at the house of old
The woods, the vale, shall never tell,
That fateful events shall soon unfold.
“You have to cross your arms between each clap, Jane. The ghost fish lady wants people to come into the house. But don’t believe her, because she’s angry that people flooded her house, and if you go inside, the house suddenly sinks and you drown with her and then the fish eat you.
“The end.”
Now, like I said, there’s truth in there somewhere. I don’t know about selkies, mind, but there are old court records showing that one John F. Burd, farmer, was convicted of uxoricide in 1938 and then of fraud. What happened was, the county agreed to pay him market price, which was better than the eminent domain agreement, if he’d vacate the land peacefully. Burd told everyone his wife had gone home Back East, and so the county flooded the land. Except that divers found her soggy remains trapped in the basement a few months later after someone caught a carp with a thumb in its guts.
If you don’t mind the trouble, you can take a boat on Marian County Reservoir – they don’t actually use if for drinking water anymore – and look down on a winter’s day when the water’s clearer. You can see Burd’s farmhouse – what’s left of it – beneath the waves.
But be careful, because as more than one boater can tell you, reflection and refraction can be tricky things. And sometimes, sometimes, the wind flows over the water just right, and I can swear it sounds like singing.