CALL UP THE WATERS, Stories by Amber Caron • Book Review

A Short Story Collection by Amber Caron, reviewed by Char Dreyer
CALL UP THE WATERS (Milkweed Editions)

“You’re gonna wanna find the biggest branch you can and make a lot of noise as you run.”

This was the only terse instruction I received from Jill, the sheep farmer I would spend the next two weeks shadowing, before she flung open the gate to the pasture and thirty ewes and lambs rushed bleating towards me. It was my job to corral them uphill from the pasture to the barn for the evening, along a winding dirt path, through the forest and fading light. Jill, who was nearing sixty with a bad shoulder and a worse knee, couldn’t run this hill anymore –though she was still strong as a ram.

As I read Call Up the Waters, Amber Caron’s debut short story collection from Milkweed Editions, I was reminded of Jill often in the characters I encountered. Throughout ten stories, women work the land and are consequently shaped by the rocks, water, sun or snow that face them. Generally, they are not the warmest of women –they lack stereotypical “soft” femininity and instead are flush with raw, stoic humanity.

Jill was one of the only female farmers in the county, though that was never something she’d tell you. She would never tell you much of anything (other than “don’t do it like that”); you learned by watching her. She worked and worked and worked, because there was always more work to be done. Like the women in Caron’s stories, she’d developed a deep relationship with the land and its inhabitants –the sheep I met that summer, who I could soon recognize just by their bleats. For two weeks, I spent all day everyday chasing, milking, shearing, medicating, wrestling, supervising sheep. At night, I began to dream about the pastures, the barn, the soft, milky breath of a lamb. Inadvertently, the lines began to blur between me and my surroundings, between my body and theirs, between my thoughts and Jill’s.

In Caron’s nominal story, a daughter can’t seem to separate nature from her own mother, when she’d finally come home from long hours spent outside:

Always, when she returned, she whispered in our ears: My sweet little geese… I loved that feeling of her warm lips against my forehead, her cold hands on my cheek. The smell of soil and grass and rocks and, yes, if I breathed in deep enough, it seemed I could smell fresh water.

This mother belongs to both her children and the land. Often, not in that order.

Caron’s collection features women who are steadfastly devout in their commitment to the work. Each of them define themselves through their work, become themselves against the land. In The Handler, Leslie trains sled dogs for races and tries to outrun her romantic past by shoveling faster, racing harder, and freezing better in the New Hampshire snow. In “Bending the Map,” a nameless protagonist strong arms a place onto the mountain search and rescue team after being found there herself, though the rule is to “never hire the rescued.” And in Call Up the Waters, a mother prioritizes bringing water back to the droughtland above all else. These women are in constant motion; they work and move and sweat and hurt, often leaving their loved ones behind. They move like water, strong and unstoppable. So too do they leave wreckage in their wake; Leslie yearns for the ex whose heart she broke and unwittingly steps into a moose attack. Bending the Map’s protagonist oscillates between fiercely independent and mistress, while the mother in Call Up the Waters all but misplaces the two children she’s raising. In much the same way nature plays out over the land, so too do these stories over these women’s lives and their relationships to each other. Caron’s writing is crisp, like freshly fallen leaves. It is sharp and accurate, like a mean winter wind. She crafts portraits of women who are so glaringly human in their complications, and nature that is godly in its indifference.

This is exemplified in no better place than the final lines of the final story, Didi. The protagonist’s niece, Didi, has just returned home from running away, and her aunt embraces her:

I pull her to me. I feel her body against mine … I tuck her in as close as I can and hold her for as long as she lets me. When she begins to pull away, I let go, certain there is nothing I can say, nothing I can do, to make her stay. So I do the only thing I can. I pull her hands out of her pockets. I push her shoulders back. I am not gentle.

Caron does not shy away from the shadows. If anything, she’s drawn to them, watching how the land cools as the sun sets, how these women disappoint and hurt and define the people they love. And somehow, there is beauty in the carnage; There is glory in the work.

I wonder if Jill would see herself in any of these stories, if these women would feel familiar or foreign to her. Once, her own daughter visited the farm. She resembled what I’d imagine a young Jill to look like, if Jill had ever been caught dead in a floral dress and cowboy boots. Jill gave her a brief hug, with just the one good arm, and a soft pat on the side of her face.

“Come on,” Jill said in greeting. “You can help us milk.”

Char Dreyer is a Kenyon College graduate now based in Washington, D.C. She has worked as a podcast producer, soccer coach, sheepherder, and bookseller. Char recently attended the Denver Publishing Institute to pursue a career in bilingual editing and is now an editorial intern at St. Martin’s Press. She loves puzzles, play, good stories, and good food.