Wish You Well

After dinner, Diamond, Lou, and Oz go outside, where Diamond promises to show them a haunted well. As they make their way to it, they’re accosted by a man with a shotgun. Lou recognizes him as the tractor driver who nearly drove them off the road earlier that day. The man threatens them at gunpoint until the scream of a mountain lion, known as Old Mo, sends them all running away. Diamond later explains that the bad-tempered man is George Davis, and he doesn’t like people snooping around his property.

When they arrive at the well, Diamond tells the story of two star-crossed lovers who drowned themselves there. He says that the well will grant any wish, providing the wisher is prepared to sacrifice “Just the most grandest, importantest thing they got in the whole dang world” (85). Oz wants to use the well to wish for his mother’s recovery, but Lou insists that nothing will bring her back.

By five o’clock the next morning, Lou and Oz are ready for their first day of chores. Eugene teaches the children how to milk cows. After that, they complete an endless list of other duties: hauling logs and coal, fetching buckets of water, slopping hogs, and gathering eggs. Midway through their routine, a man drives up in an old roadster. He introduces himself as Cotton Longfellow, whom Louisa describes as “the finest lawyer round” (96).

Cotton has come to discuss some legal matters related to the children. When the adults go inside, Lou resumes her chores with a sense of uncertainty and foreboding: “Finally, she eyed a four-hundred-pound hog that would somehow keep them from all starving come winter, and trudged after her brother. The walls of mountains seemed to close around the girl” (96).

Cotton and Louisa move into the house to have a conversation. Cotton informs her that Jack left no inheritance to support his family. Louisa says he always sent her money and must have lied in saying that he was a rich man. She confides to Cotton that the farm is barely keeping itself afloat.

The lawyer suggests that she sell the property, but Louisa refuses, stating that it will belong to Lou, Oz, and Eugene after she is gone. She worries about more coal mining moving into the region: “Ain’t they cutting the mountains up fast enough? Make me sick ever’ time I see another hole. I never sell out to the coal folk. Rip all that’s beautiful out” (100). 

Cotton says that scouts are arriving to check for the presence of oil in the mountains, which Louisa this is an outlandish notion. Before he leaves, Cotton pays a visit to Amanda. He speaks to her as if she can hear him and offers to return to read to her sometimes.

Early the next morning, the children get their first lesson in plowing a field. The instruction seems clear enough, but the mule, named Hit, has other ideas. When Lou tries to take the reins, she ends up with a face full of dirt. She is ready to quit until Louisa tells her about Jack’s awkward first experiences with plowing. He eventually mastered the art.

That evening, the children witness a calf being born. Oz is excited and runs to tell his mother about it. Lou refuses to visit, explaining that the doctors have predicted that her mother will never recover. Louisa hands the girl a packet of letters that Amanda wrote to Louisa over the years, but Lou neglects to open them: “After Louisa left, Lou put the letters in her father’s old desk and very firmly shut the drawer” (109-10).

The next morning, Lou gets up early to exercise her mother’s limbs and feed her. Louisa asks if she’s read the packet of letters yet. Lou explains that she can’t think about the past: “I have to look ahead, not back […] You may not understand that, but it’s what I have to do” (111).

Later that morning, the children go to the one-room schoolhouse that serves grades one through seven. A single teacher named Estelle McCoy is in charge of teaching everyone. She introduces Lou and Oz to the rest of the class and proudly mentions that she taught their famous father, Jack Cardinal. After school, George Davis’s son Billy taunts the Cardinal children. When he picks on Oz, Lou lashes out and beats Billy until he surrenders. Lou’s assertiveness appalls Miss McCoy. 

When the children get home from school, Louisa patches up Lou’s cut lip and gently hints that she needs to learn how to get along with the local children. Lou storms out onto the porch in time to see Cotton arrive with a book under his arm.

She learns that Cotton is a descendent of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Although he appreciates good writing, he isn’t adept at the craft himself. When Cotton suggests reading some of Jack’s books to Amanda, Lou tells him he’s wasting his time.

Inside the house, Louisa encourages Cotton to read. She says, “It ain’t what folks read to her that’s important. I think the best thing is for us to spend time with her, to let Amanda know we ain’t give up hope” (123-24). She finds a packet of letters that Jack wrote to her over the years and asks Cotton to read these to Amanda instead of Jack’s novels.

Outside, Lou encounters Diamond, who has picked her a bouquet of crocuses. She enlists his help in eavesdropping outside her mother’s window. After climbing on Diamond’s shoulders, Lou hears her father’s letters expressing his love of the mountains and of Louisa for taking care of him all those years ago. 

Long after dark, Oz sneaks out of the house. Though he’s frightened of the mountains at night, he’s determined to find the wishing well. When he arrives, he leaves his beloved teddy bear as a sacrifice and prays that the well will grant his wish. “Staring at the sky he said, ‘I wish that my mother will wake up and love me again.’ He paused and then added solemnly, ‘And Lou too’” (131). After Oz leaves, Lou steps out of the shadows and makes a sacrifice of her own. She leaves a photo of herself with her mother and makes the same wish as her brother did.

Back at home, the children’s lives settle into a routine. They go to school each day, where the other students eventually accept them. They learn how to master plowing the fields and become adept at all the other chores Louisa assigns to them. When a local doctor named Travis comes to examine Amanda, he says she is healing well physically. However, he cautions that the real cause of her catatonia is mental. All the family can do is pray that she wakes up one day.