The Waters

“‘Well, you were wise to bring this child home.’ Herself moved the blanket more to reveal a perfect tiny newborn hand. She was greatly relieved to see it was a girl. She knew how to raise a girl. Boys on the island would signal the end, with the way they broke trees and cracked eggs and stomped precious mushrooms.”

Even when regarding an innocent baby, Hermine remains adamant in her belief that men are dangerous “brutes” who inevitably destroy what they touch. Her policy of refusing men access to the island reflects her deeper fear that her uniquely feminine world might be shattered by the intrusion of a male. In her eyes, males are the enemies of women and of the natural world.

“Mama, Dorothy wasn’t born here, but she’ll be the one who stays here and saves you. I know she will, Mama.”

When Rose Thorn names the baby Dorothy after the protagonist of L. Frank Baum’s “Oz” books, she wishes to ensure that Donkey will remain rooted on the island just as the literary Dorothy is tied to her home in Kansas. Rose Thorn’s words prove accurate when Donkey does eventually become Hermine’s literal and metaphorical right hand. As the youngest of the Zooks, Donkey will inherit the island and Rose Cottage: a reversal of the fairy-tale trope in which the eldest generally inherits the family fortune.

“But Herself saw the shooting not as the single act of a violent man but as the natural outcome of the anger and frustration of the men in the town, many of whom no longer knew what it was to be a man, apart from what was told in the holy, heroic stories. Whoever had shot her had merely been the vanguard. If he hadn’t shot her, one of his kind eventually would have.”

In the shooting, Hermine’s insistence that men are harmful and dangerous comes to fruition. She suggests that the wound is not inflicted out of personal malice to her; instead, she sees it as a byproduct of the toxic masculinity that characterizes many of the men of Whiteheart. As a result of this malice, Hermine withholds her healing from the men of the community.

“Rose Thorn was always overwhelmed by her daughter as much as by her mother. She wanted both of them to love her, and for her abandonment of them, she felt she deserved the love of neither.”

Rose Thorn’s feelings toward her home, and by extension, Hermine, are complicated. Though she is compelled to flee from the place, she is always eventually compelled to return. This recurring abandonment of Hermine and Donkey causes her guilt, but Rose Thorn continually acts in her own self-interest in a way that is not selfish but self-preserving.

“Though lazy Rose Thorn didn’t help much with the island work, Donkey’s load felt lightened by her mother’s presence. Even when she wasn’t with them in the kitchen, even when she was sleeping, she was a part of every conversation, part of everything happening on the island. She had been part of these things all along. Donkey realized, by her absence, by not sitting in her chair where she belonged, by not sipping coffee laced with Delilah’s creams all day. The way negative and positive versions of a number had the same absolute value, the same distance from the zero point. The missing mother, the sleeping mother, the foolish mother was still the mother.”

Rose Thorn has a power that exerts itself without any effort on her part. Her mere presence makes people happy and content. Donkey explicitly identifies this dynamic here. The people of Whiteheart also become better versions of themselves whenever they bask in Rose Thorn’s presence, as if she casts a magical spell. Donkey’s words also emphasize the importance of a motherly role within a matriarchal society.

“[Rose Thorn] wondered now if her tumor had formed last year as a protest when she had refused to bring her body home where it belonged. […] Maybe Herself would regrow her hand and Baba Rose would pass a secret recipe through her. Maybe Dorothy would forgive her for leaving and that forgiveness would heal all their wounds. Rose Thorn wanted to live now; she wasn’t ready for the doctors and their knives, but in search of a magic potion to save herself, she would try to drink them all.”

In Rose Thorn’s view, the tumor she carries does not develop from medical causes but psychological ones. This idea counters Molly’s more mainstream view of illness, for she frequently blames the chemical pollutants in the swamp as the cause of ailments such as cancer. In this passage, Rose Thorn endorses the notion that balance and harmony between women can serve as a healing force, and her thoughts also reflect the fairy-tale quality of the island and of Hermine’s seemingly magical remedies.

“What most of the people of Whiteheart did not know for sure […] was about the value of this earthy life that they sometimes loved and sometimes hated. They wished their ancestors could come to them in sleepless hours and assure them that […] there was an importance in each breath taken on this earth as a human animal, a value not dependent on a heavenly reward. On Saturdays Rose Thorn offered them a few hours of freedom from that lonesome concern, a freedom from what was good or bad, holy or unholy; she offered them a sense that they were appreciated and interesting as individuals right now.”

Throughout the novel, mainstream practices and beliefs are at odds with more unconventional ones, such as Hermine’s natural remedies and open acknowledgement of the supernatural world. This quote illustrates the fact that the people of Whiteheart are torn between these ostensibly opposing forces. Rose Thorn offers them a bridge between the two worlds because she is embraced and valued by both her family and the citizens of Whiteheart.

“Donkey tried inventing a cure for the cancer that same way, out of thin air, calling it Z-fix. After assuming Z-fix existed and could cure Rose Thorn, it was just a matter of finding the herbs and mixing them up the right way. In pursuit of Z-fix, she tried looking at plants the way Herself used to. […] [B]ut she soon accepted that she wasn’t like Herself; she didn’t work from intuition or from a mysterious wisdom that originated in her bones or was whispered to her by a ghost. Donkey was a logical healer—if she was a healer at all—working from recipes, from known quantities, performing small experiments and making small adjustments.”

Donkey desperately wants to cure Rose Thorn’s cancer. Though Hermine insists that cancer is the one illness she cannot treat, Donkey imagines that this is not true. Her imagining is ironic, given her reliance on logic. The experiments she performs in search of a potential treatment parallel Hermine’s gathering of increasingly dangerous poisons, though at the time, Hermine is unaware as to why she is gathering them.

“Hermine saw what it was to be Rose Thorn, that she was bright even when she was miserable, with no ability to draw the curtains or staple up plastic over the windows or send out a fog to stop her from transforming with her light whatever was around her. Anybody could see her or head toward her or take aim. Hermine hadn’t acknowledged the power of this light before, hadn’t guided Rosie in using it. […] Her girls had needed her encouragement, and she hadn’t been able to give it. And so her girls, these powerful sources of energy, were pointing away from her, away from the island, toward things as absurd as law and math.”

Learning that Rose Thorn has cancer causes Hermine to inexplicably have insights into her treatment of Rose Thorn. She comes to regret what she regards as her abandonment of Rose Thorn and her failure to learn from what her daughters and granddaughter might be able to teach her. These insights signify a movement toward the further unity among the Zook women.

“[Rose Thorn] wasn’t saying never to treatment, but she needed to come to it in her own time—it wasn’t something she could make herself do for other people—and she understood that her own time might seem like too late to them, might even truly be too late to save her life. Something like this had happened when she was pregnant. When Herself hadn’t given the medicine to start the bleeding again, Prim had made her an appointment at a family planning clinic. Three times Rosie had said she would go. Just not yet. The time wasn’t right and wasn’t right, and then it was too late. Women in this family were supposed to do what they wanted, but often the most Rosie could do was figure out what she didn’t want. Not deciding was a decision in itself, she knew; it possibly allowed some larger, wiser version of herself to make the decision, or that was how she felt anyway.”

Rather than actively making important choices, Rose Thorn intentionally remains passive and allows the choices to be made by circumstances. It is an atypical form of logic and one that differs from the clear-cut, mathematical logic that Donkey relishes. In a sense, Rose Thorn’s approach to her life decisions parallels the innate intuition that Hermine uses to heal others.

“It had taken Prim many years to realize that she hadn’t escaped motherhood by leaving the island. Not until Rose Thorn herself was pregnant did Prim realize how profoundly she’d failed the girl. At least she should have taught Rosie about the dangers of men, should have prepared her to defend herself. Prim didn’t want this cycle to continue. Could she possibly leave California and return to the backwater to help raise her granddaughter? […] She had things to teach the girl that nobody else could, things not written in the books she sent. A girl needed a hundred weapons merely to defend herself against the brother, the father, the friend, even before considering how to defend herself against the stranger.”

Prim references the rape of Rose Thorn by Titus Senior, expressing regret and frustration that she, as Rose Thorn’s mother, was not able to keep her safe from this violence. In this chapter, both of Rose Thorn’s mothers express regret over their lack of care for Rose Thorn. Both vow, as result, to protect Donkey as a penance for failing Rose Thorn. In this and many other family matters, the Zook women demonstrate a cyclical pattern in their interwoven lives.

“[Whitby’s] inability to do the right thing twelve years ago had poisoned him, and now he knew he could not escape what he’d been running from ever since. Titus Clay Senior had shown him something true and terrible about men, and Whitby had tried to resist becoming terrible, and now the terrible thing possessing him made sense. Teresa had seen it in him, and that’s why she’d left. With his new Stihl chainsaw, with all that beer and liquor in his blood, he embraced his ruin.”

Whitby’s impulsive act of cutting down the tree at Boneset Table is something he does to express his pent-up frustration over his inaction after witnessing Titus Senior’s rape of Rose Thorn. He feels a lack of control and a powerlessness that he seeks to cure by dominating and destroying a part of the natural world. Significantly, this is the precise behavior that Hermine believes all men to exhibit.

“[Rose Thorn] didn’t want to die—far from it. Like the other women in her family, she wanted to save lives, her own included, all things being equal. Her ability to save other people from their rage by simply reflecting their own light back onto them could only be sustained with energy that had to be replenished. By sunshine, by love, by liquor. But she didn’t know how to use that power of reflection on herself.”

Rose Thorn’s debate as to whether to receive medical treatment for her cancer reveals much about her character. In this passage, she recognizes that the light and energy of her personality, which makes her so popular amongst the people of Whiteheart, also needs to be recharged. Even so, she laments the fact that she does not know how to heal herself; she can only pass that light on to others. Her own methods of “replenishment” range from healthy to unhealthy, and this dynamic illustrates her underlying need to pause her forward momentum in order to consider the appropriate path for her life. Eventually, Rose Thorn will decide to obtain medical treatment, and she will go on living as a result.

“[Rose Thorn] could keep her daughter hidden away on the island, but she couldn’t protect the girl from what she was made of. Rose Thorn’s own body was the scene of two crimes, and there was nothing here to distract her from that sickening truth. […] If both Wild Will and Titus Clay Sr. had not been terrible men, her daughter, with all her genius, wouldn’t be in the world.”

Unlike Hermine, Rose Thorn understands that it is futile and foolish to attempt to keep Donkey from encountering men for the rest of her life. Rose Thorn has been profoundly impacted both by the quasi-incest that resulted in her own birth and the rape that resulted in Donkey’s birth. However, despite the traumas of her past, she acknowledges the great boon that Donkey’s existence has been for the family, highlighting the recurring theme of Matriarchy and the Power of Women.

“As [Rose Thorn] worked her way through these possibilities [regarding marriage to Titus], she felt often in her pocket for the amber Titus had given her, the reassuring warm stone.

Hadn’t this been the direction she’d been headed all along? Wasn’t this the melodramatic turn in the story of Titus and Rose Thorn that people had been waiting for? Ask anybody in Whiteheart. She would deliver this child to Titus, even if it killed her. All the better if it killed her, for the town could use a martyr who was a mother instead of a solider.”

As Rose Thorn debates whether to carry out her pregnancy, she takes into account that Titus is the father of the baby. Titus has longed to marry Rose Thorn, and she knows that he will value a child of his own. In this passage, she decides to give birth to the child rather than to terminate the pregnancy, for she believes that the child can bring good to the world.

“[Rose Thorn] wouldn’t deliver a child to curse Titus in his new life; she wouldn’t bring another child to the island to be raised by Herself in old age, however much Herself wanted one. She wouldn’t put that burden on Dorothy or displace her daughter as the youngest and most precious. It was not fair to bring forth a life to serve as a bridge across a deep gulch. She would ask Herself for what she needed one more time. Nobody in this world had a right to more of her than she could bear to give. If she could get out of this mess alive, she would take the energy and expense that she might have spent on a new child and spend it trying to better care for the child she had.”

Just prior to this passage, Rose Thorn solidified her decision to bear the child, but now, she changes her mind and resolves to terminate the pregnancy, insisting that this decision is in her and Donkey’s best interests. Her wavering on this issue highlights the difficulty of the decision and aligns with her lifelong habit of delaying monumental choices. This moment therefore parallels her inaction years ago when she was pregnant with Donkey.

“All her life Donkey had seen men gaze across the swamp channel jealously, while they talked to Herself at Boneset or when they drank beer at the firepit. […] Now that these men were here, it was a kind of relief for all of them. Donkey imagined them carrying bags of chicken feed, bales of straw, firewood. She saw them […] [p]utting up a railing on the bridge so Herself could walk across it again. […] She imagined men stopping other men from shooting at them. So what if the men opened the doors too wide and let the heat off and walked off paths with their heavy boots? […] Surely the men wouldn’t stomp all the mushrooms or cut down all the trees. […] She thought if she listened harder to the men, she could learn to be more like a man herself, and then Rose Thorn wouldn’t need Titus so much.”

Donkey, unlike Hermine, refuses to believe that men are inherently dangerous. In contrast to the rest of her family, she welcomes their presence on the island even though Hermine has strictly forbidden it. Donkey has longed for the presence of men throughout her life and hopes that they might show her how to nurture her own masculine traits. She therefore sees masculinity as a boon rather than as a destructive force.

“Donkey reached past [Titus’s] slippers to grab the m’sauga by her slender neck. She knew how to hold the head, had seen Herself do it dozens of times, but before she could get hold, the Lindworm curl-whipped around and sank her hollow fangs into Donkey’s bare wrist.

She’d known the blood and smelled the meat, and now at last she knew the electric release of the venom. It burned through her veins like rattlesnake whiskey. And now that she’d finally given in to the euphoria of being bitten, she invited the snake to empty herself into her. She wanted all the burning venom in the world for herself. In this way, she could keep Rose Moon and the rest of them from being bitten. And this was how she would carry the power of the island with her wherever she went in the world. […] Her own blood would become the antivenom, as Wild Will’s had been.”

Donkey intentionally allows the Massasauga to bite her in order to prevent it from biting Titus or Rose Moon. In doing so, Donkey symbolically ends the battle with the snake that she began a year ago. Despite the bite, Donkey regards herself as victorious over the snake because she is convinced that the snake’s bite will make her immune to its venom.

“It wasn’t loyalty that made [Donkey] want to use her granny’s antivenom. It was the medicine itself, as elegant and simple as a mathematical proof. An island cure would work exactly right for the person taking it, unlike the crude hospital medicine that didn’t know who or what a person was.”

Much like her mother, Donkey is resistant to go to the hospital for medical care. She trusts that Hermine’s form of medicine is superior and more effective because it is personalized. Ironically, although this mindset defies logic, Donkey compares it to the logic of math. Donkey ultimately agrees to receive treatment at the hospital only because she believes that the act will convince Rose Thorn to do the same.

“Donkey has always said she would not betray Herself the way everybody else did, but her readiness to do so had lived inside her all along like a trickster animal. […] That shameful willingness to abandon the woman who had wanted her, who had loved her, taught her, raised her must have been gestating since Donkey’s first trip across the bridge on her own two feet.”

When Donkey makes the decision to travel to the hospital to have her snakebite treated, she does so in hopes that it will convince Rose Thorn to consent to medical treatment of her cancer. However, in choosing the hospital’s medicine over Hermine’s, Donkey feels as though she is betraying her grandmother. To reconcile this, she decides that she has already betrayed Hermine in many small ways by communing with the “Nowhere” beyond the island.

“[Donkey] wore Hermine’s necklace under her shirt every night while she slept, and it soothed her to listen to the whispers of those souls not born, souls who Herself had said were preparing to travel on in their own time. She expected to feel weighed down by the burden of keeping the necklace safe, but most of what she heart from the string of clinking bodies was laughter, and what she felt was a tickling energy and a sweet pure light rising from someplace without fear or desire, a place of healing kindness without this life’s uncertainties. Some of the energy and light she sensed might have come from the relieved and renewed souls of the women who had been freed from burdens they could not endure.”

Contrary to the sentiments of men such as Titus and Standish, the abortions that Hermine provides are not enacted out of hatred or malice but out of love. As Donkey gains insight into this dynamic, it becomes clear that the cowry shell necklace is a powerful symbol that links the generations of women healers who have lived in Rose Cottage.

“It is nothing new that the greatness of men often leads to their downfall and that their downfall often pulls the women around them down too. What is new is that Wild Will’s doggedly sober solitude, as well as his experience taking care of his daughter, has finally made a woman out of him, which is to say it has made him a better man.”

In this passage, Bonnie Jo Campbell suggests that a balance of masculine and feminine qualities provide wholeness and harmony for all people. Furthermore, whereas many of the men feared or felt threatened by the feminine powers of the island, Wild Will grows to embrace them, recognizing the benefit of harnessing such qualities.

“The snake has removed everything hard or angular from [Titus]—even his bones feel soft. He imagines himself standing before a heavenly throne to say, I’m cleansed, I’m whole, I’m as good a man as you made me, and I beg forgiveness. Kill me if you want. To say, If you want me better, God, please make me better. He thinks this so powerfully that he hears his own voice about the humming and buzzing insects, over the gu-gunging of frogs, but nobody in the Waters responds in a language he understands. He will have to take responsibility for himself.”

Titus’s encounter with the Massasauga changes him profoundly, for he senses what Donkey has always known: that the Massasauga is a powerful creature and a source of wisdom. The metaphorical spell that the snake casts on him suggests that, despite its ability to harm humans, the snake is free to choose whether or not to do so.