DIVINING ROD
Also by Michael Knight
Dogfight and Other Stories
The Typist
Goodnight, Nobody
The Holiday Season
DIVINING ROD
Michael Knight
Copyright © 1998 by Michael Knight
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Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint an excerpt from “Looking Forward to Age” from The Theory and Practice of Rivers by Jim Harrison, Clark City Press, 1989. By permission of the publisher.
First published by in 1998 by Dutton, an imprint of Dutton NAL, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.
Published simultaneously in Canada
ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9699-6 (e-book)
Grove Press
an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
Distributed by Publishers Group West
www.groveatlantic.com
For Jill
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First and foremost thanks to Warren Frazier, who has invested more in this book than any right-thinking person otherwise would have. Thanks also to Jennifer Dickerson, my editor, and to Meg Tipper and all the Gilman crew for much time and support. To the folks at Hollins College for helping support this nasty writing habit, and a special l-could-not-have-done-it-without-you to a certain bibliophile who shall remain nameless at this time.
Part 1
To walk in ruins, like vain ghosts, we love,
And with fond divining wands
We search among the dead
For treasure buried
While the liberal earth does hold
So many virgin mines of undiscovered gold.
—Abraham Cowley
How It Ended
Sam Holladay was sixty-three years old when he jabbed a snub-nosed .38 revolver into Simon Bell’s chest and pulled the trigger, knocking him flat, like he’d been shoved, and dead, the bullet passing through his heart and exiting at his left shoulder, trailing blood and tissue like the tail of a comet. It was a July Sunday. It was late morning, long pine shadows drawn on the flat ground. Bell had, the day before, driven a riding mower over the lawn so the air smelled of cut grass and the clippings stuck to the men’s shoes and clung to Bell’s hair, where he lay on the ground. Sam Holladay stood over him a moment, then went into Bell’s house and called the police himself.
He had expected to have to face some sort of consequence right off, but the house was quiet and empty. He’d been there before, years ago, and the place still looked the same to him. All the furniture exactly as he remembered it, the same pictures on the mantel. He let himself wander back to the bedroom and sat on the edge of the mattress, his forearms across his knees. He made the call, then went into the kitchen for a glass of water. The sink was a clutter of crusted dishes, a week’s worth at least, piled precariously to the edge. When he leaned his face close to wet his fingers and dab his eyelids with cool water, he could smell the faint, damp thickness of rot. A few empty beer bottles on the counter, like glass skyscrapers of a model city. A pot of coffee burned to carbon. He tried to think of his wife, closed his eyes and imagined her in another kitchen, their kitchen, not twenty yards away, pictured her taking copper pots from their hooks on the wall and arranging them on the stove. She was, he knew, making breakfast. He wondered if she’d heard the shot—she played the radio too loud when she cooked—if, just for an instant, she’d turned away from the stove to look in the direction of the report. He didn’t know what would happen now, what events would follow, but he worried about her. Through the window above the sink, Holladay could make out Simon Bell’s body, just a shape in the grass, no more ominous or frightening than a dress shop mannequin.
Simon Bell
My father bought the house on Speaking Pines Road and all the furniture in one ridiculous and sweeping impulse the day after he proposed to my mother. He was so thrilled that she said yes, he found a realtor, scrawled out a check for the down payment, then hurried all over lower Alabama buying couches and end tables, armoires and love seats, without regard to interior space or a coherent design scheme. Finally, standing in line to buy a beanbag chair in a head shop stocked with dope-smoking paraphernalia from a guy with stringy hair and a half-assed goatee who would have ordinarily sent my father off on a tirade, his credit card was rejected, and he came reeling to his senses.
Being a stubborn man and generally a financial pragmatist, my father would neither admit that the house looked absurd nor part with the money needed to replace the furniture. I could imagine the first time my parents saw the place together, the two of them standing in the living room, turning slow, dazed circles, my mother wondering what she’d gotten herself into and trying to think of a tactful way to suggest a few changes, and my father boiling with humiliation but keeping a straight face, refusing to admit his mistake. He was not a man who liked to say that he was wrong.
He did all right on the house itself—redbrick Georgian, four bedrooms, two and a half baths, across from a golf course, zero crime rate. My father was forty-nine when he married my mother, fifty-two when they had me. He’d been a bachelor for so long that he never really got the hang of domesticity. And my mother was a trooper until his death, subtle and determined. Over the years, she picked up new pieces of furniture, slipped them into the house one at a time, so my father hardly noticed that the house was looking less preposterous.
He died when I was home on summer vacation from college. It was just after five o’clock and swallows flitted in the trees. My father was soaking himself in the swimming pool behind the house, his head tilted back, eyes closed, elbows up on the deck, and my mother was inside playing records for him, music trickling through the open windows. I was sitting in the patio doorway, exactly halfway between them. It was nice to be home for a while, the daylight blurring, the birds chanting arcanely. The phone rang, and I went inside to answer it, so that neither of them would be disturbed, and when I returned, my father was dead. He had climbed out of the pool, maybe to tell someone about the pain in his chest, and I found him on his side with his knees drawn up, his mouth open like a sleeping child.
To my amazement, I found that I couldn’t muster sadness. I wanted to be in agony, like my mother, shattered and useless, feeling his absence in my body like a wound, but, more than anything else, his death had left me stunned and blank. I presided over the funeral in a sort of bewildered haze. The service was held at graveside, the crowd wilting in the late August simmer. Folding metal chairs were set out beneath a striped funeral parlor tent. Afterward, I had no recollection of my eulogy or of the warm, consoling hands of mourners or even of my mother in the front row, paralyzed with anguish. What I remembered most vividly was the sight of his secretaries, six of them, seated all in a row, sharing handkerchiefs, shaking with sobs, like the bereaved widows of a polygamist king.
My father, the original Simon Bell, founder, owner, and operator of Bell Tractor & Machine. He had a team of secretaries, ea
ch one more homely than the next, his outer office a showcase of dowdy middle-aged proficiency, women who didn’t do anything that I could tell. A procession of sprawling midsections and terrifyingly wide behinds, of pancake makeup and witches’ hair, as if to imply by the unattractiveness of these women that his operation was strictly business.
When I was a boy, I was convinced he did every job at the company. His coarse, oil-slicked hands turned each bolt and nut on every tractor. I saw him working the showroom. I pictured him driving hump-backed transport rigs loaded with combines and backhoes and bulldozers to Bell distributors in other cities. The bulldozers were my favorite. Mother and I would pass a highway crew when she was driving me to school, the bulldozer scooping away pavement like ice cream, and I would swivel around in my seat, thinking my father was in the cockpit. She never told me I was wrong.
Once, late at night, he took me with him to the manufacturing warehouse of Bell Tractor to crash an illicit meeting. His employees were trying to form a union. My father stood on the hood of one of his tractors, a tractor he had invented using the knowledge of machines that he’d picked up as a tank mechanic in the army. I was nine years old. He lifted me up to stand in front of him, holding my shoulders firmly, so I couldn’t turn away from the crowd of workmen. He told everyone to take a look at me, to get a good look. If I hear any more rumblings about a union, he said, I will sell off every last piece of machinery, every last square foot of land that the machinery is sitting on, and give the proceeds to this boy, my son. He and his family will be taken care of for generations and you, gentlemen, will be out of a job.
That was that, or at least as well as I remember it. All of those pairs of eyes on me. My father stalked out, pushing me along ahead of him, the crowd breaking up around him as if he were surrounded by a force field. That’s the way I imagined his life, when he’d finished his morning coffee and left my mother and me standing on the front porch. Even after I was old enough to know better. All of the people around him seemed unnecessary. It was impossible that he was dead. I kept expecting to come downstairs, in the days that followed his funeral, and find him at the kitchen table reading the paper and waiting for his breakfast, steam rising from a coffee mug in his hand.
I spent the rest of that summer pretending to be in misery. I went around the house heaving great, heartbreaking sighs. I’d stand in the front door, glance longingly over my shoulder, and announce that I was going for a drive, as if a lonely drive might be just the thing to get me back on my feet. I was terrified someone would discover I wasn’t wretched with loss.
During the day, I swatted a golf ball around the neighborhood course, thirty-six holes at a time. At night, I drank beer, chased girls I didn’t know. I couldn’t bear to be in the house, couldn’t stand the sight of my mother, tired-eyed and beautiful with sorrow. I told my friends that I was staying home to keep an eye on my poor mother, told my mother I was out with my friends. I had a secret week-long romance with a Puerto Rican woman named Pilar who bought me beer because I was underaged. When she said my name, it came out long and whiny, and I liked the way it sounded on her voice. Like I was someone different than myself. “Seemone,” she’d say, “Keez me, Seemone.”
I’d sleep awhile with my head on her shoulder before going home.
She said, “Your papa is dead, Seemone. How come you are here with me and not with you madre?”
“I love you,” I said.
She thought that was funny. She laughed and stroked my head and said, “You should be at home. Not in love with me.”
When fall finally came, I went back to school, and my mother started seeing a fortune teller. She drove halfway across town to consult a woman who dispensed mystic wisdom at her kitchen table, her crystal ball beside a jug of grocery store wine. My mother said she never wanted to be caught off guard again. She sent me long letters full of ridiculous prophecy. Don’t ride in a long white car, Simon. Whatever you do, avoid red-headed women who drink gin. I figured she’d snap out of it after a little while. In those days, every moon was full of portent for her, every drifting hawk a harbinger.
There was a terrific picture of her on the mantel. My father took the shot with their first color camera, the image grainy, the tones sepia and blurred. She was sitting on the hood of their car, a 1959 DeSoto Firesweep convertible, long and elegant, stretching away in the picture to angled fins. She was twenty-eight, my age, married just a few weeks to a man more than twenty years her senior, and she was beautiful in a quiet way, her hair pressed down with a yellow scarf, a dark ring of it spilling onto her forehead, her eyes hidden behind cat’s eye sunglasses. Her arms were spread in a gesture of embrace, her feet propped, toes pointing down, on the bumper. A young wife on a new car, her proud smile frozen in time with a brand-new camera.
My mother was a lover of horror movies, the bloodier the better. She would study the TV Guide for weeks, looking for just the right picture, then make my father watch with her, the two of them sitting on the couch, my mother squealing with delight, my father stiff and unamused. He said he had no desire to suspend his disbelief for that sort of feebleminded waste of film. But gradually, as my mother became more and more afraid, his hand would creep along the back of the couch until she was tucked firmly beneath his arm.
She liked to hide in closets or behind doors and leap out at my father or me when we least expected it. Just to get the blood going, she’d say. It’s good for you to be afraid once in a while. My father always kept his composure, pretended that she hadn’t scared him, but one time when he was coming in from work, after what I guessed was a particularly trying day, she sprang out from behind the living room curtains and grabbed his shoulders. On instinct, he turned and cold-cocked her, sent her sprawling over the coffee table, scattering magazines like startled quail, breaking a porcelain lamp that she loved. I heard all the commotion and came hustling out from my room. I saw the lamp first, the pieces like chips of bone. My father was cradling her, her head on his shoulder, a trickle of blood running from her nose. Both of them were crying. I’d never seen my father cry before. I didn’t know what had happened, but I knew it must have been something terrible, so I wedged myself in between them and let the tears fly. We stayed like that, weeping in a strange, almost happy way, like a bankrupt farmer who’d won the lottery too late to save the family land.
Exactly six months from the day of my father’s death, my mother drowned in the Gulf of Mexico. Her body washed ashore, pale and bloated, about a half mile down the beach from a house that she had rented. And I was home again, conferring her body to the ground. There were rumors that she had committed suicide, walked into the water, let it fill her lungs. But I didn’t believe that sort of talk. No one died from loneliness or a broken heart anymore. I knew that. A few days after her funeral, I filled the bathtub—a clawfooted leftover from my father’s shopping spree—with warm water, drank seventeen beers, and held my head under for as long as I could. As miserable as I wanted to be, I only lasted a minute and a half.
The first time I saw Delia Holladay, she helped me unload my car. I was moving back into my parents’ house. This was the tail end of April, seven years after my mother’s death, the air already rich with summer. Delia crossed the driveway from next door and introduced herself. She had a broad, scrubbed-looking country girl’s face and round hips and green eyes. When she shook my hand, she looked down at her bare feet, curled her toes into the grass.
I said, “I didn’t know Sam had children.”
She looked at me a moment, her eyes pleating at the corners to pinch out the sun. A wisp of corn-yellow hair was caught at the corner of her mouth. My car was still ticking from the heat. She hauled a duffel bag from the trunk, her arms slender and tan, and said, “I’m his wife. Almost a year now.”
“Shit,” I said. “Sorry.”
She laughed and let the duffel fall at her feet and crossed her arms. “Don’t feel bad,” she said. “People think that way all the time.”
It only took us thre
e trips to get my belongings inside. I didn’t have much that was my own, a few suitcases and a golf bag and a lamp that had been given to me by a girl I wanted to remember, the meager accumulations of my life so far. Before she left the house, Delia asked what I’d been doing since I moved away. She said she’d always felt strange having an empty house next door. I didn’t know what to tell her. Standing in the open doorway, an air-conditioned breeze wafting out, drying the sweat on my back, I couldn’t, for a few seconds, remember how I had been living my life. It was as if I’d been stricken suddenly with complete amnesia. I tried a smile. I said, “Oh, you know. Nothing really.”
When she was gone, I stretched out on the couch, a vague uneasiness swimming over me, and made a mental list of all the things that I had done. I went back to college after my mother died, then to law school, because everyone was going to law school in those days, then a year in the trust department of a bank in Mobile. I slept and ate dinner and watched television, like everybody else. I had my teeth cleaned on occasion and I went to parties. There must have been some parties sometime. I remembered reading a book, a mystery, and buying a Christmas present for the office secretary, this magazine rack made of wicker. There was a place I’d go for drinks after work, where the bartender came to recognize me but never knew my name. I bought new suits. Once, I cooked breakfast for a Jehovah’s Witness. She showed up at my apartment, all clear skin and good intentions. She was maybe eighteen, so I let her in. I’d been reading financial reports at the kitchen table, and I shoved them aside so she could have room for her brochures. I put bacon strips in the microwave, got some bread going in the toaster. Her teeth were white as windowsills.
My Jehovah’s Witness covered my hand with hers and told me in sincere tones about the Kingdom of Heaven—verdant fields, man and beast living together in harmony, all pictured in full-color newsprint. She kept pausing and looking at me, blinking her eyes like she was surprised that I hadn’t yet chased her away. It was the longest, most pleasant conversation I’d had in months. Light was streaming through the windows and getting mixed up in her hair. When she asked me to give myself up to the Lord, I closed my eyes, leaned across the table, and kissed her on the mouth. I felt her lips go rigid beneath mine. When I opened my eyes, she was looking at me with such candid, sorrowful disappointment, her eyes the watery amber of riverbed stones, I would have given anything in the world for a better heart.
Divining Rod Page 1