The Well That Answered Once

A FABLE ABOUT QUESTIONS WORTH CARRYING

for everyone who carried the question home again

Past the birch wood, where the path began to forget it was a path, there was a well that answered questions. Not a wishing well — wishes it let fall straight through, the way a pocket lets go of sand. But lean over the rim and truly ask, and the water would say something back, and what it said was true.

It answered once a day. Whoever came second heard only the stones dripping.

The fox found the well in spring, and he did what everyone does at first: he spent its answer the way a cub spends a found coin. “Will it rain?” he asked. “Toward evening, from the west,” said the water, and toward evening, from the west, it rained, and the fox stood in it feeling that he had traded gold for a pebble.

The next day he came with three questions jostling in him, and at the rim they all shouted at once, and he asked the loudest instead of the truest. “Where did the rabbit go?” — “Under the blackthorn,” said the water. Under the blackthorn the rabbit was. The fox had his supper and no joy of it, for supper was a thing his own nose could have told him.

So he made himself a rule, the way one does after spending badly twice. One question per walk. Chosen before he set out. Carried the whole way.

The way was long — up the dry streambed, over the stile that leaned like an old man listening — and a question carried that far begins to change. Some wore through before he ever arrived; walking, it turns out, is a kind of answer. Some grew strangely light, and at the rim he would find they were not questions at all, only worries wearing question-coats, and he let those drop in with the wishes.

But some questions survived the road. Those he asked. And the water’s answer always fit — not because the well had grown kinder, but because the question had been worn to its true shape by then, and a true answer only fits a true question.

In autumn he set out with the best question he had ever carried. It had survived the streambed; it had survived the stile; it sat in him like a warm coin, and the longer he walked the better company it made. At the rim he leaned over, opened his mouth — and stopped.

A question that had walked that far was a companion. The answer would end it.

He sat a while on the leaning stile, in the kind of light that does not hurry anyone. Then he walked home with his question still in his pocket, and the well’s answer stayed in the water, unspent, the way a lamp left burning in an empty room is not wasted — it is waiting.

The well was never generous. But one answer a day had taught the fox what a thousand a day could not: that most questions are for walking, a few are for asking, and the very best ones are for keeping.