Some call this sorcery.
Some call it black magic.
But those insightful enough
call it cosmic or psychic.
The water witch
with her twig and her smile
performed her water magic
across country miles.
I often stood in awe as
her stick dipped and quivered.
With her magic wand, clear water,
life-giving water, Ayla delivered.
Some called her water witch.
Some called her douser.
Some called her willow witch.
I called her my dear sister.
There came a time when
superstitions ran rampant,
when her singular gift
met anger that was blatant.
Ignorance is bliss, it’s often said.
but I say ignorance is simply senseless.
By Autumn Solstice the fall of ’42,
the water witch, my comely sister,
My dear, sweet Ayla
was no longer with us!
From the willow rocker on my dark front porch, I watch a harvest moon creep over the eastern horizon, a warm, lush, huge cantaloupe of a moon. The solstice moon is too often the color of Ayla’s hair, a ripe peach color, with streaks of fiery threads flashing through the bright strands. It’s both a joyful and a bitter sweet memory, for Ayla’s gone now, nigh onto sixty years. To think, it was all over water, beautiful, crystal clear, life-saving water. It’s difficult to comprehend, even now, how such a thing could have happened.
When my parents, Anola and Hanz Wilkins, were children, the neighborhood dowser was a person held in respectful, high esteem. Good dowsers were scarce and hard to come by. If a community didn’t have one, they were likely to send out a search for one, and offer substantial incentives to bring that dowser to frontier communities. For dowsers or water witches, as they were sometimes called, were necessary to the way of life on the early frontiers. While land was plentiful, water and rights to water were not.
The solution for the majority of frontier ranchers and farmers was to dig a well deep enough to find water underground. Considerable effort was sometimes expended in an attempt to do that. Dowsers or water witches could supplement a family income, because one and all who requested their services were glad to compensate them in some way for their sought for advice about where to dig a well.
It’s hard for my children to comprehend what happened to Ayla when I try to tell them the story of it all. They’ve grown up in an age of maps, geological surveys, computers and technology. They can’t even remember a time when people witched for water. Sadly, my parents, Anola, Hanz, and I do.
We say mankind has experienced an explosion of progress in this, the twentieth century. Sometimes, as is the case in this quiet, reflective moment as I gaze on this golden globe of moon, I question whether this is actually the truth or not. For a hundred years science has tossed out millenniums of acquired knowledge about folk medicine, folk science, folk remedies, calling them all superstitions.
However, when I was a child, we doctored a bee sting with a poultice of mud. Anola, my mother trimmed our long hair, Ayla’s and mine, in the light of a full moon because it grew faster. My father, Hanz, always planted the potatoes by Good Friday, or he swore we wouldn’t have a potato crop. We searched for yellow morel mushrooms when the May Apples grew knee-high in the spring of the year. An apple a day kept the doctor away, and Ayla could dowse for water.
Ayla discovered she could dowse quite by accident, really. We were cutting willow sticks to use for fishing rods one sunny afternoon during the depression years when I was maybe twelve years old. That would have made, Ayla about ten. Willows grow quite naturally along the banks of any body of water so it wasn’t unusual for the two of us to be playing with willow twigs near the bubbling brook behind our house this particular afternoon.
We were jumping from one stone to another across the sparkling water when Ayla suddenly fell silent, and I turned to notice a bewildered look on her face. “What’s wrong, Ayla?” I asked.
“That was funny,” was all she said in a sort of soft, dazed voice as she held her y-shaped willow twig out in front of her.
Now she had me a little worried. “What was funny?” I quizzed her.
“My stick just jerked down towards the water like I already have a fish on it,” Ayla doubtfully replied.
“Well, that’s ridiculous,” I replied. “The string’s still in my apron pocket.”
Ayla smiled at me wanly, “I know.”
Slowly she held the willow twig out in front of her again, holding it out before her much like the divining rod I had watched the gypsy dowser use a couple of years ago when my father had taken me with him to the neighbor’s house. At the time, the neighbor had been in dire need of a new well. Now, Ayla’s rod quite dramatically dipped towards the stream as if something had given it a tremendous jerk the same way the gypsy douser’s stick had jerked that day.
“Wow!” was all I could say. “Let me try,” I demanded, and Ayla handed over her willow twig. With a little trepidation and a shot of excitement, I held the twig out in front of me, waiting expectantly for something to happen. If I used my imagination, maybe, just maybe, the stick might have nudged down a tiny fraction, maybe a slight movement. I couldn’t be sure though. Nothing like what Ayla had experienced.
I shrugged nonchalantly as if I didn’t really care, though I did, and handed Ayla back her twig. We spent the afternoon fishing, and we might have forgotten all about it if the Dust Bowl of 1941 hadn’t come along.
My family was well acquainted with the variables of farming life. If it got too cold, the newborn calves could freeze to the ground. If it got too hot, they could die of heat exhaustion. Hail in summer could cut a crop to pieces where only moments before it had been thriving in the fields. Too much rain, and a crop would drown. Too little rain, and a crop would wither.
That’s what happened in 1941. It didn’t snow that winter. It didn’t rain that spring or summer. By the spring of 1942 the well was dry. Hanz and Anola Wilkins looked at each other, and talked of abandoning the farm to move to the east or west coast. Nobody was in a position to buy the farm. All the neighbors were in the same boat we were in.
One of the neighbor lads, William Bruner, had been courting Ayla that winter. Ayla was nineteen, going on twenty at the time. Ayla turned to me, rampant fear in her eyes. “If we move to California, what about Will and I?” she woefully cried in a stage whisper. I sadly shook my head. I simply had no idea.
All was not going smoothly for the two lovebirds anyway since Phyllis Saner, the pompous daughter of a local oil man who moon-lighted as the town mayor also had her sights set on Will Bruner, but Ayla and Will still seemed to have stars in their eyes when anyone saw the two of them together, despite the fact everyone knew Phyllis was lusting after Ayla’s boyfriend.
Ayla and I didn’t sleep well that night. For that matter, we had not been sleeping well for a while, since the well had run dry and we had been seeing a worried look in our parents eyes morning, noon and night. Our whole lives we’d lived on this farm on the Iowa prairie. What would we do if our parents lost it? “Ayla,” I whispered that night long after we had overheard our parents talking, “do you think you could witch for water?”
Ayla looked at me with eyes, luminous blue orbs of fear gleaming in the light of a full-moon filtering in through our bedroom window. “I don’t know,” she hesitantly whispered.
“I know it’s a sort of scary idea,” I whispered back, “but I don’t want to move to California. Do you?”
Ayla sadly shook her head at me. “Tomorrow,” she reluctantly replied, “I’ll ask Mom and Dad what they think about the idea tomorrow.”
A week later, we were the only farmers in miles around who had any well water. Neighbors wanted to know why we had water and they didn’t. My father, being the kind hearted German friend and neighbor he was, couldn’t stand to see others suffering while we enjoyed a bounty of water. Soon, Ayla was helping his best friend, Shawn. Then she was helping the Millers on the next farm. Before long, it had spread throughout the community that Ayla was witching water.
At first, all the neighbors saw her as almost a “Savior” like figure. That might have continued if it hadn’t been for Phyllis Saner. Whispering behind her fan at church one Sunday morning, she just happened to innocently mention in a stage-whisper to her mother, “I thought the Bible spoke out about witchcraft, Mama.” Mrs. Saner’s eyebrows arched almost to the ceiling. She gave the pastor an expectant and definitely disapproving look, and the pastor began squirming and pulling at his pastoral collar right there at the pulpit while reading out of the good book.
Ayla and I gave each other a worried look, and Hanz and Anola Wilkins, our sainted parents did the same. In a week, there wasn’t a man, woman, or child in the community who wasn’t crossing themselves when they saw Ayla passing on the street.
I was fuming mad. All of these good people now had water in the middle of a national drought thanks to Ayla. Yet, how quickly they had forgotten about that fact to now turn on her like she was some harbinger of ominous things to come sent down upon them from the devil himself.
Maybe the cruelest thing of all was when Will Bruner’s mortified patents put the kibosh on Will and Ayla’s budding relationship. The morning Phyllis Saner waltzed into church, Will Bruner escorting her to the Saner family pew where he promptly sat down with her through the duration of the service, a heartbroken Ayla looked at me with hollow eyes.
It was well after midnight that very night when I awoke out of a sound sleep, startled by the ominous quiet of our bedroom. I reached out for Ayla, but she was gone. The sheets were cold where she should have been. Springing from our bed, driven by fear and foreboding, I raced through the small farmhouse searching for my sister in the dark.
Then flinging open the front door, I ran from the house, bruising my bare feet on cold stones in the dusty yard as my long white nightgown whipped around my bare legs, twisted by the night wind that whipped the autumn leaves off trees to swirl through the cool air across the luminous autumn moon, a soft harvest moon that looked strangely like a leering ghost haunting the night sky.
Suddenly, I knew. Crying out, “No, Ayla, no!” I ran to the open-faced well that looked like a wishing well where it sat at the side of the house in the dark. Leaning over the edge of it’s stone sides I could only see her white nightgown in the dark. “No, Ayla, no!” I whispered, tears washing down my cheeks as I dropped into the dust, sobbing, desperately sobbing.
It was sixty years ago tonight that Ayla committed suicide, I think, as I brush the blond curls from my great granddaughter’s forehead where she sleeps soundly in my arms. I like to think Ayla would have been honored to have this new little Ayla named after her. Ayla’s only two years old, but this afternoon, I placed a willow twig in her tiny hands and we walked to the brook that runs behind the house.
Little Ayla has the gift. She doesn’t know what it means yet. Only her great-grandmother knows, but Ayla has the gift. It is a gift I will guard with my life.