Water Witches

by Chris Bohjalian

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  her working as a teenager at a Friendly Ice Cream parlor, wearing an institutional beige uniform that she despises. Clearly Dawn is determined, disciplined, and methodic.

  "How big were the catamounts?" she asks Miranda.

  "They were bigger than a big dog. At least the biggest one was. It was taller than Mindy Woolf's sheep dog, and maybe even a little bit longer," she answers, using the comparison we came up with last night.

  John Bussey takes off his jacket and folds it over the back of his chair. He smiles at Miranda as he does this, and I can't help but feel that he is trying to distract her.

  "And the two smaller ones? Can you remember how big they were?"

  "Of course I can!" Miranda says, reinforcing for John Bussey her faith in her recollection. "They were half as big."

  "Half as big?" Dawn repeats. Although our hearing next month before the state's Environmental Board will resemble a courtroom trial, there will be many differences. At that hearing, and in this morning's prehearing deposition, attorneys are allowed significant latitude when it comes to leading a witness.

  "About as big as a regular dog," Miranda answers.

  "Your father said the two smaller animals were each the size of a springer spaniel. Do you"

  John slashes at the air before his face with his hand. "Come on, Dawn, that's enough. Give us all a break here."

  Ignoring him, she continues, "Do you think the smaller animals were the size of springer spaniels?"

  "Yup."

  Immediately John asks, "Miranda, when was the last time you saw a springer spaniel?"

  "Don't answer that, Miranda," Dawn tells my daughter, more firmly than I would have liked. She then turns to John and says, "I must insist you keep your mouth ... closed. You know as well as I do you'll have your chance to question her statement."

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  "And you know you're going too far!" John says, trying to mitigate his anger with a small chuckle. "You're not just asking the questions, you're answering them, for God's sake!"

  "That's not for you to decide," Dawn argues.

  "Miranda, have you ever seen a springer spaniel?" John asks, plowing ahead. "Do you know how much one weighs, how big they are?"

  Although I am supposed to remain silent, I hear myself saying reflexively, "John, you're completely out of line."

  "Fine," he says, pleased to see Dawn turning an angry gaze in my direction. "That springer comparison won't stand up at the hearing."

  "Then leave it be," I tell him.

  "I'm doing you all a favor!"

  "You're bullying a nine-year-old girl!"

  "Ten, in six weeks," Miranda says, correcting me.

  All of the adults turn toward Miranda. "I have a birthday next month."

  After a long pause in which we all catch our breath, Dawn says, "Can we get on with this?" and John nods, sitting back in his chair to fiddle with his eyeglasses.

  When I come home from the office late Tuesday afternoon, one of Michael Terry's platforms is parked in the middle of the yard, a path of lawn and field and driveway chewed up behind it. The drill, a diamond-tipped rotary monster with four stories of scaffolding around it, sits like a small skyscraper under construction in my own backyard.

  The croquet court is destroyed.

  Laura wanders over to the barn to greet me as I climb out of the truck.

  "How far did they get?" I ask.

  "About one hundred and ten feet today. They'll probably reach the vein tomorrow."

  She brushes some loose, flaky dirt off one of the carrots she

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  has just picked, and offers it to me. There is dried blood along the cuticles of most of her fingers.

  "You did quite a job on your hands today," I tell her, taking the carrot. "Did you do that during the deposition?"

  "I don't know when I did it," she says, shrugging. "Did Roger Noonan get ahold of you?"

  I find myself flinching. "No."

  "He called here a half hour ago. I said you were still at the office."

  "Well, clearly we just missed each other," I answer, unable to restrain the anger creeping into my voice. "Did he say what he wanted?"

  "No. Well, yes. Sort of."

  I stop walking and glance once again at the huge rig on our property, and the way our yard has been ruined. "Sort of?" I repeat, afraid that I understand instantly when Laura attacked her nails.

  "There's going to be some stuff in the Sentinel tomorrow about the appeal. Maybe in the Burlington Free Press as well."

  I sigh. "Do I need to call Roger back?"

  "Yes. He wants to talk to you because he views you as a friend." She takes back the carrot in my hands. "I need to clean that better. Wait till we're inside."

  Roger Noonan's office sits in a back corner of the Sentinel newsroom, its two interior walls made of glass. He has positioned his desk so that the two exterior windows are behind him, and his view instead is the three dozen reporters and editors who write and design every day's paper.

  The Sentinel is a morning paper, meaning that the newsroom is still crowded when I arrive there Tuesday night. As I approach Roger's office, I find myself having to nod at a fair number of Roger's staff. People like Rosamond Donahue. Or the Sentinel's city editor, Noel Holmes. I have been a source of informationand, to be fair, propagandato Noel for a decade.

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  Roger's door is open, and he waves me inside, a motion that makes the rolls of fat on his arms ripple.

  "Fine," he is saying to someone on the phone, "continue the bridge story on the inside. No one gives a damn about bridges anyway unless they collapse."

  He hangs up the phone and sits back in his chair. "Howdy, Scottie. You want something to drink? Coffee? A Coke? A beer?"

  "I want to see the cartoon."

  "Yup, I know you do. Sit down."

  Reluctantly, I take one of the two chairs across from his desk. As he begins digging through the piles of papers and books, I feel a wave of nausea cross my stomach, strongerby farthan the ones I felt when I spoke to Roger on the phone before dinner, and when I started my truck to drive here. I take a series of small breaths, trying to relax.

  "You plan to hyperventilate on me?" Roger asks.

  "No."

  "Good. I'd probably give myself a heart attack if I ever had to give somebody CPR."

  I glance over my shoulder at his staff, and catch Rosamond Donahue staring in at the two of us. She is probably appalled that Roger is sharing with me Chuck Pierson's cartoon before it appears in tomorrow's paper.

  "Aha! Eureka!" he says, as he discovers a sheet of paper underneath the phone book. "Here it is."

  He flips the paper across his desk, a copy of the cartoon the local artist has submitted to the editorial page as commentary. Three witches, complete with black robes and long, pointed hats, are stirring a tremendous cauldron. The words "Copper Project" are written across their chests. One of the witches looks like Reedy McClure, and one of them has a passing resemblance to me. The third witch is a child, a girl, although Pierson made sure that she looks nothing at all like Miranda. She could be anybody's daughter.

  The witches are stirring their concoction with Y-shaped

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  divining rods, and on a rock behind them sit three catamounts. In the midst of the boiling waters in the cauldron is a graphic of Vermont, a mountain, and the word "jobs." The witches are singing a parody of a famous couplet from Macbeth:

  "Double, double toil and trouble;

  It takes just one cat to burst Vermonts' bubble!"

  "You're really going to run this?" I ask. "It's shit."

  "Well, it's not Danziger. But I think it's clever."

  "You know that Ian Rawls and John Bussey probably commissioned Pierson to draw this."

  "Come on, Scottie. Half the letters to the editor in this world are ghostwritten by special interests. Your firm alone probably has someone cranking out every fifth or sixth letter we get.


  "Not true. We"

  He waves me off. "I just want you to know, I wouldn't have agreed to run this if the little girl looked like Miranda."

  "She'll know it's her."

  "Maybe. But she is news."

  He stands up and wanders to the table in the corner. There is a coffee maker on it with a pot half-filled. "You sure you don't want some coffee?"

  "I'm positive."

  He fills his cup, and says, "I probably shouldn't tell you this either, but we've been friends a long time. So I will."

  I wait for the next blow, while he returns to his desk. "I have it on good authority that Ian Rawls will have an opinion piece in tomorrow's Free Press about the importance of the expansion."

  "Swell."

  "And I've been told I'll be getting an editorial from one of those Colorado naturalists Schuss brought in. It'll be here tomorrow or the day after, so I can run it in Sunday's paper."

  Involuntarily I find myself glancing down again and again at the drawing in my hands. "I gather you think somebody should start responding?"

  "Hell, that's up to your friends with the Copper Project. I

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  know you personally can't do a whole lot, not if you want to keep a few clients around to pay your mortgage."

  "Then what? Why are you telling me this?"

  With his hand he wipes away a drop of black coffee that sits like a bug on his desk blotter. "I just thought you should know it's beginning. The Powder Peak counterattack. It's beginning, and nothing's going to be sacred. Not you, not your family. And it won't stop for one second until the hearing next month is over, and they've done everything they can to win."

  Every month there is a mortgage payment. There is a phone bill, a gas bill, and one for electricity.

  "What would happen if she didn't testify? What would happen if neither of you testified?" Laura asks that night in bed, her face half-buried in her pillow.

  "I doubt the world would come to an end," I answer. In my mind, I try and calculate what we pay each month on our two American Express cards, and the four separate VISAs and MasterCards between us. As far as I know, we always pay the total balance on each card each month. Even without interest charges, however, the balances must be significant.

  "No. I don't think it would either."

  There is car insurance and home insurance. There is all of the money we send to Mobil and Exxon and Texaco each month.

  "A year from now, this whole thing will probably be forgotten," she continues.

  There are the miscellaneous expenses that always crop up. Cords of wood each May. Repairs to the slate roof in October. Expanding the baseboard heating into the bedroom beside Miranda's in March.

  This month, there will be the new well.

  "That's not true," I tell Laura. "A year from now, a lot of the construction will be in full swing. And that's when people's emotions will be most ... heated. Two years from now, maybe, people will have forgotten about it. Maybe."

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  There is the money we save every month for Miranda's college tuition, for our own eventual retirement.

  "Maybe," she repeats. "But you doubt it."

  "Yup."

  "When did it all get so personal?" Laura asks.

  It is Laura who pays all of those bills each month, it is Laura who writes the actual checks. It is Laura who knows which money is in bank CDs, and which is in municipal bonds. It dawns on me that I have no idea how much money is in our checking account right now.

  "It has always been personal," I tell her. "We're just used to being on the other side."

  Sometimes, Laura has the accountant who looks over the books for the Divine Lights of Vermont look at how we are managing our own money. I gather I shouldn't be worried.

  But lately I have been.

  This is one more ramification, apparently, of being on the other side. The side that isn't invited to lunch with the Governor, or asked to join high-profile state task forces on droughts. The side that offends the only businesses in Vermont with the money to pay for lawyers and lobbyists who cost over one hundred dollars an hour.

  "You never risked hurting a child," Laura says, referring to the cartoon that will be in tomorrow's newspaper.

  "No, I never did," I murmur, as I roll over and rest my hand on her shoulder, rubbing it gently. The cotton of her nightgown feels thin as gauze under my fingers.

  "You never used the likes of a Chuck Pierson."

  "Oh, I don't know about that. We may have."

  "Really?"

  "Really."

  She sighs once, a sigh that is loud and long and perhaps slightly bitter.

  "You're all unbelievable," she says, disgusted. She then burrows her face further into her pillow, mumbling, "You. Reedy. Powder Peak. You are all completely unbelievable."

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  27

  As the days grew shorter in August, Miranda filled a scrapbook with newspaper articles about the catamounts that she and I saw, and about catamounts in general. The newspapers were filled with stories about the rare animals, and at least a dozen different people came forward to claim that they too had spotted catamounts in Vermont. Most of these people were kooks, and one of them would turn out to be legally blind with an astigmatism so bad that she could barely fit a house key into a lock.

  One of them, however, a sometime sheep farmer and sometime English professor at Middlebury College, was so measured, even, and coherent in his story that Dawn Ciandella decided that he should testify at the hearing.

  Miranda began her scrapbook with the very first articles about our sighting, the ones that were published in July. By

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  Labor Day weekend, the scrapbook must have had thirty stories in it, each one cut carefully from the pages of the Montpelier Sentinel, the Burlington Free Press, and the small weeklies scattered throughout the state. The stringer for the Boston Globe garnered two clips from our sighting, both of which suggested strongly that the reporter believed the animals we saw were indeed mountain lions.

  Miranda evidenced no desire to censor the stories about our sighting, and save for posterity only those ones which took our side. She saved all of them, even the cartoon that Chuck Pierson drew for the Sentinel.

  While Laura and I worried occasionally about what school would be like for Miranda when she returned there the Tuesday after Labor Day, the fifth, our fears never lasted for more than a moment or two. Unless we were dramatically misreading our daughter, unless she were keeping inside herself her embarrassment, her trepidation, or her doubts, she wasn't disturbed by the publicity. She actually seemed to enjoy the attention.