Wish You Well

“The choice to be a writer was not the mere selection of an occupation, but rather the choice of an all-consuming lifestyle. And the business of a writer, he carefully pointed out, was the business of life, in both its uplifting glory and its complex frailty.”

Lou aspires to be a writer like her father. However, at the beginning of the novel, she views life in black and white terms. She rejects the frailty of those around her, preferring to be a hard-headed realist. When Lou finally taps into the love she feels for Louisa and Amanda, she taps into her own humanity, and this allows her to become a writer in the truest sense. 

“Lou stared out the window as she held tightly to her brother. Nothing was forever, and didn’t she know that.” 

Early in the story, Lou has taken the stance that she and Oz are alone against the world. She has no desire to form any new emotional attachments because these can so easily be destroyed. It will take a year before she’s ready to emerge from her mistrust of life. 

“‘Your daddy he like to tell ’bout the land. But afore he done that he done something real smart.’ She paused as Lou considered this. ‘Like what?’ the girl finally asked. ‘He come to unnerstand the land.’ ‘Understand . . . dirt?’” 

Louisa points out that there is a big difference between touring a place and understanding it. Lou demonstrates how far she has yet to travel in feeling the same reverence for the land as Louisa and Jack. Her reductive description of “dirt” indicates that she still shares the values of the businessmen who exploit the mountain rather than understanding it.

“When them folks wrote to see if’n I’d take the children, how could I not? Amanda’s people all gone, I’m all they got left. And a sorry savior I am, long past being worth a spit for farming.”

Louisa confides her self-doubts to Cotton, not realizing the value she will bring to the children’s lives. In retrospect, the reader understands the irony of her statement. Despite her age and growing physical infirmity, Louisa has amassed a lifetime of wisdom that she now imparts to Oz, and even more so to Lou. She is a worthy savior.

“‘Letters your mother wrote to me. I want you to read ’em.’ ‘What for? […] Words won’t change anything. Oz can believe if he wants to. But he doesn’t know any better.’” 

Louisa wants Lou to read a packet of Amanda’s letters. Lou’s rejection of the notion is particularly ironic, given her aspirations to become a writer herself. By the end of the book, she comes to understand the power of words. 

“Lou never did anything in a small way, Oz well knew. It was either both barrels of the shotgun in your face, or you got to live another day. There was rarely any middle ground with the girl.”

Oz accurately assessed the problem with Lou’s temperament. She initially rejects her mother and all hope of her mother’s recovery. Lou wants to be a pragmatist, and it takes a crisis of epic proportions to soften her viewpoint enough to allow for a change of heart.

“While I can appreciate inspired, well-crafted writing better than most, I’m absolutely confounded when attempting to do it myself. Maybe that’s why I came here after I got my law degree. As far from Longfellow’s Boston as one can be.” 

Cotton explains the irony of his existence. While he inherited a taste for good writing from his illustrious ancestor, he can’t produce any prose himself. Despite his attempts to flee the world of Boston literati, Cotton finds himself drawn to another group of wordsmiths in the form of Jack Cardinal and his children. 

“And if you taught me anything, it’s that what we hold in our hearts is truly the fiercest component of our humanity.” 

Jack demonstrates the power of the word from beyond the grave. These words come from a letter he sent to Louisa. Years later, it now reaches out to his daughter. Lou will learn this lesson once she finally connects herself emotionally to Louisa, Amanda, and high rock.

“Amanda’s face was peaceful, her eyes, as always, shut. To Lou, her mother was a princess reclining in a deathlike state, and none of them possessed the necessary antidote.” 

For the first time, Lou begins to think of her mother’s illness in magical terms rather than viewing the situation through the clinical lens of Western medicine. Since Amanda’s malady springs from her spiritual malaise, it will take a spiritual antidote to revive her. A wish at a magical well is what’s required. 

“You had a fine daddy. A man who loved you. And I know that makes it all the harder to get by, and that’s both a blessing and a curse that we all just got to bear in this life. But thing is, Billy Davis got to live with his daddy ever day. I’d ruther be in your shoes. And I know Billy Davis would.”

As Lou wallows in self-pity, she fails to recognize the blessing despite her loss. Louisa points out that Jack was a good father, unlike George Davis, who abuses his family daily. Lou really is luckier than Billy will ever be. 

“‘But didn’t it hurt, that he never came back?’ Louisa put an arm around the girl. ‘He did come back. I got me the three people he loved most in the whole world.’”

Lou’s problem is that she views the world in materialistic terms. If her father is absent, Lou views him as gone. Louisa takes a spiritual approach to life. She sees Jack’s return in the presence of his wife and children. Lou will eventually come to understand the value of Louisa’s approach.

“‘Good thing you got your momma.’ ‘No, I don’t. I don’t, Diamond.’ ‘Looks bad now, but it be okay. Folks don’t never leave out, less we fergit ’em. I ain’t knowed much, but I knowed that.’” 

Orphaned Diamond tries to console Lou. Materialistic, literal-minded Lou refuses to focus on the spiritual nature of kinship. Amanda is still present, but Lou has already given way to despair based on physical evidence alone. Illiterate Diamond is far wiser than that. 

“‘Louisa told me about a story your father wrote when he was a little boy. It was about a family that survived one winter up here in that little house. Without wood, or food.’ ‘How’d they do it?’ ‘They believed in things.’ ‘Like what? Wishing wells?’ she said with scorn. ‘No, they believed in each other. And created something of a miracle.’” 

Cotton tries to nudge Lou in the direction of faith, but she’s still too skeptical to accept the power of belief as a real principle. Once again, the allusion to a literary work is an ironic commentary on Lou’s aspirations. She wants to be a writer like her father but still lacks his faith in the unseen. 

“‘It’s hard, Cotton. To let yourself love something you know you may never have.’ Cotton nodded slowly […] ‘What you say makes perfect sense. But I think when it comes to matters of the heart, perfect sense may be the last thing you want to listen to.’” 

Lou resists believing in the power of the wishing well because she fears being disappointed. She prefers to rely on the material evidence that her mother will never wake up. Cotton makes an important distinction between matters of fact and matters of the heart. The latter is governed by an entirely different set of rules. 

“Diamond Skinner had had no material possessions to his name and yet had been the happiest creature Lou had ever met. He and God would no doubt get along famously.”

Diamond’s attitude stands in stark contrast to Lou’s. He believes in magic and finds wonder in the small things in life. Lou makes this comment about him shortly after his death. She is beginning to understand the value of the intangible at last. 

“‘What do you think about that? Never coming back to your roots so you can be a great writer?’ Lou did not have to ponder this long. ‘I think it’s too big a price to pay for greatness.’” 

Cotton and Lou are discussing why Jack never returned to the mountains that he wrote about so often. Cotton speculates that the reality might not live up to the memory. If this was Jack’s reason, his daughter rejects the notion of doing the same. Her comment indicates just how much the mountains have come to mean to her personally. 

“You ask me why I don’t never leave this place? I love this land, Lou, ’cause it won’t never let me down.” 

Louisa views the mountain as a source of sustenance that never fails, even if the crops don’t come in. Its absolute dependability gives her a sense of security. In this respect, the mountain functions as a caring mother figure who looks after her children. As Louisa later says, the mountain is family. 

“Farmers on the mountain had a good year, but the people in the towns are hurting bad. It’s usually one or the other. Prosperity only seems to come in halves up here.” 

Cotton’s comment about the cyclic nature of prosperity on the mountain seems to echo Louisa’s view that high rock can be both beautiful and cruel. The folly of the timber interests and coal companies is that they think they can maintain prosperity indefinitely. When it can’t, they abandon the villagers who believed in their false promises. 

“‘Poetry is beautiful, Cotton, but I’m not sure it can fix real life.’ ‘Poetry needn’t fix real life, Lou, it need just be. The fixing is up to us.’” 

Lou is still feeling a sense of despair about the dire circumstances that surround her. Once again, she rejects the power of the word because it can’t magically fix her life. What she fails to realize is that words aren’t meant to fix. They are meant to inspire the people who will do the fixing. 

“For outside the large window her mountain was now boldly visible. The sight was so beautiful to the woman, although winter had taken most of its color. Next year, though, it would surely all return. Like it always did. Family that never really left you. That was what the mountain was.” 

In an earlier segment, Louisa expresses her love for the mountain because it gives her sustenance no matter how bad growing conditions might be. This quote delves deeper. Louisa loves the mountain because of its permanence; it will never leave her. Given the ups and downs of life and the loss of loved ones, the mountain always remains the same, no matter what.

“Some years they lose, other years are fine. But for them, the resources of the mountain are never extinguished, because they do not tear its soul away.”

Cotton is making a distinction between the subsistence farmers who dwell permanently on high rock and the big business interests that seek to exploit specific resources. The latter fragment the mountain by taking part of it and discarding the rest. In some sense, they are killing the soul of the mountain by violating its ecological wholeness. 

“You can’t let Southern Valley steal the woman’s family. All folks have up on that mountain is each other and their land. That’s all.” 

Cotton is making a final appeal to the jurors to keep the gas company from destroying Louisa’s farm. Cotton’s statement now echoes the sentiments the old woman articulated about the land being family. To all the high rock farmers, the land is their family, too. Their greed for quick cash has blinded them to this one essential fact.

“I will never forget Cotton’s great kindness. And I will go to my own grave knowing that my mother and I made the most of our second chance.” 

At the beginning of the novel, Lou prefers her father to her mother. Her emotional exclusion is partially responsible for Amanda’s catatonia. Lou writes this quote decades after the events in the story, and it shows how well she learned the lessons of the past. She has come to value both her mother and Cotton, to stop idolizing her dead father, and to make the most of her new life.