Divining Rod

by Michael Knight

  She could see the silhouette of his shoulder in the darkness and she shook him. “You awake?” she said.

  He grunted and said he was, rolled on his side to face her.

  “We watched this tree,” she said, “an entire uprooted tree, roots and all, get pulled through. It was the worst sound I ever heard and it came out in splinters. Completely mangled. I remember watching that tree go through and come out torn, and watching the light bouncing off the ice and the whitewater and wanting to jump in. Can you believe it? Jump right in after I had seen what had happened to the tree. It wasn’t that I wanted to kill myself or anything. I think I wanted to see if I could outswim the current or come through that gap somehow undamaged. I know it’s crazy. My mother was worried sick when we got back. She had reason to be. I don’t know what made me think of that just now. You still awake?”

  He didn’t answer. She shook him again, and he snorted, flopped over on his back, his chest lifting and sagging heavily with sleep. “You’re always saying you want to know things about me,” she whispered. “There you go. That’s something.” She was awake for a long time after that, her muscles shaking like a faint current of electricity was passing through her.

  She felt a similar sort of energy the day Simon Bell told her where his father died. There was an electric warmth along the bottoms of her feet and the hair on her arms and neck stood on end like the air was full of static. Evening light danced across the surface of the pool. He had been looking at her in that tired and familiar way that men have, as though trying to commit her shape to memory. But now, she recognized a sadness in him that she hadn’t seen before, though she suspected it had been there all along. She took a step toward him, and stopped, let her fingers linger for a moment on the top of his head, as if to offer comfort, then hurried home and didn’t go back for three days.

  None of this did she mention to her husband. She went on with the ordinary pace of her days, finishing up the last of her paperwork at school before summer vacation, cooking dinner with Sam and eating at the wooden table in the kitchen, then settling in front of the television to watch a movie on the VCR. At night, she let her husband tell her stories to put her to sleep, sometimes from history and myth—Ovid watching his nameless love at a Roman cocktail party, Menelaus courting war to reclaim his wife—and sometimes the story of their future together, simple inventions, full of country houses and rocking chairs and dogs in open fields. Every now and then, she would lose track of what she was doing and find herself remembering her mother polishing someone else’s silver or her father peeking around the hood of his MG to give her a smile, and somehow she was also recalling Simon Bell. The image of his face hovered just beyond the reach of her memory. She had to remind herself that nothing unusual had happened, that there were no secrets to keep.

  When she discovered that she was being followed on the golf course, she felt the current a third time, first from fear, then, as she listened to him crashing around in the brush—she assumed it was a man—from amusement and simple wonder. She wasn’t worried exactly; she believed that she could handle herself. Intrigued was closer to the truth, or thrilled or aroused or anxious, some combination of emotions that produced a definite tingling at the base of her spine. To her surprise, it was Simon Bell, looking so pathetic when he emerged from the pines, soaked to the knees, his hair a mess of tangles and sweat, his forearms and face tracked with scratches.

  She took him home and fixed them each a beer in the kitchen and loaned him a pair of her husband’s shorts while his pants were in the dryer. Here was this man who had been spying on her for weeks, he’d said, and strangely, she found the idea romantic in a sad way; Simon Bell pining along in her wake, the way she found it endearing when one of her students developed a crush on her. He had washed his arms and his face, the hair at his part still damp. She was sitting on the counter, letting one leg swing out and thump back against the cabinet. Simon was standing by the sink. While he was talking—telling a story about a wave of burglaries in the neighborhood when he was a boy—she closed her eyes. She lifted her chin to the sun through the windows. Blind, she could hear everything, distant voices, like the intercepted bursts of a radio transmission, hungry birds, faint music from somewhere, her awkward heart, the whole day washed in sibilant noise.

  “Let’s get drunk,” she said.

  “You want to get drunk?”

  “Isn’t that what they do in the movies?” she said. “Whenever people are about to make a mistake, they get drunk.”

  “I don’t watch many movies,” he said. He walked over and stood between her knees and she could feel the places where their bodies met, his hipbones against the insides of her thighs, her wrists resting on his shoulders, his forearms at her waist, where he was bracing himself against the counter. He said, “I can’t think of anything to say that hasn’t been said before.”

  “All the good lines are used up,” she said. “I keep wanting to remind you that I’m a married woman. I’m not sure who’s seducing who here.”

  “You’re seducing me,” he said.

  “All right,” she said.

  When she kissed him, she could smell cut grass. No more of her husband’s aftershave or the warm smell of the dryer, just the grass. It smelled gigantic and she wondered if there wasn’t a little sunheat or something in there, too, giving it a simmer. She was light and alive. It seemed to her, at that moment, that this kiss and whatever happened next was a thing apart from her marriage, wholly separate. She could do this and still love her husband. She pulled away, just for a second, and she would have sworn she could see the sunlight on Simon’s teeth and in his eyes. He reached up and held her face with both hands. They kissed the rough kiss of drunks, both of them thinking they knew exactly what was happening, exactly how all of this, all the hands on backs and closed eyes and surging blood, was going to end.

  Buying a Gun in New Orleans

  Sam Holladay bought the gun on his honeymoon. He and Delia had driven down to New Orleans to be married, and as they were emerging from the courthouse, the sunlight as bright as he’d ever seen it, a white man in a white linen suit walked up and asked him for the time. Later, he would remember how beautiful Delia looked in her brown dress with white polka dots, the way her heels pressed her pelvis forward and made her calves go all ropy and lean, the way her hair played against her back. He would remember how glad he was to stop and give this man the time, how proud he was of his young bride, how he wanted everyone to know that she belonged to him. And he would recall a woman standing on a wrought-iron balcony of the building across the street, watching the three of them, this stranger in a white linen suit and Sam Holladay and his wife, and how in the space of time it took for him to look at his watch, the woman on the balcony had disappeared and the stranger produced a slender ice pick from nowhere, like a trick of prestidigitation.

  Sam lost his wallet and the very watch that had distracted him, and Delia gave up a strand of pearls, but on the way back to their hotel, she said, “Don’t worry, Sam. Those pearls were as fake as a movie sunset.”

  Both of them lost their wedding rings. Sam Holladay lost a large measure of his pride, and they lost the time spent at the police station, when they should have been between the clean sheets in their room, celebrating the day. That was the part that surprised him most. How excited Delia was by the whole thing, how she made love recklessly and violently and without restraint, straddling him, the tendons in her neck drawn tight, and then she’d asked him to move around behind her, her back arched, his fingers in her mouth, her eyes on their reflection in the bureau mirror. When they were finished, she said, “Can you believe it? He took us right in front of the courthouse. The goddam courthouse.”

  She had her head on his shoulder, the music and voices of Bourbon Street drifting up to them, faintly, as if from miles away. Her hair smelled like flowers.

  “You can never find a cop when you need one,” he said. “That old saw.”

  The next morning, while Delia was
still asleep, Sam Holladay crept out of bed, went down to the street, and found a pawn shop on Tchopatulous. There was the five-day waiting period to deal with, but the owner thought Sam looked respectable enough and went ahead and sold him the .38, banking that his record would come up clear, and it did. For the rest of the trip, Sam carried the gun tucked in his pants at the small of his back, hidden beneath the hem of his sportcoat. He paraded his wife up and down Bourbon Street with confidence, cut through back alleys pungent with decay, secure in the knowledge that now, if called upon to do so, he could protect her.

  For a year, the gun stayed in a hatbox on a shelf in the silver closet beneath an old fedora that had belonged to his father. On holidays, Delia took down the good flatware and the linen tablecloth, never even knowing it existed. The shelf was high enough that she had to ask Sam for help if she needed something.

  In April of their first year together, she shook him awake one night and said that she’d heard footsteps. Someone was in the house. The air conditioner was broken at the time and the bedroom was too warm. He could feel a faint film of sweat on her palms. He was bleary and thick-headed with sleep, but he touched a finger to his lips and got out of bed and made his way down the hall as quietly as he could. Sam Holladay stood in the dark hallway and listened for a long time. Nothing. The house creaked and settled its weight. He wondered if he could get to the silver closet without being seen by an intruder. He took a few steps. Still nothing. After a while, Delia’s voice from the bedroom, “Sam, you all right? I don’t hear anything anymore. You’re scaring me, Sam. Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” he said, feeling such an overwhelming tenderness for this woman he could hardly breathe. “Nobody’s here. Situation normal.”

  He crept to the silver closet, took down the gun, and slipped it under the mattress, just as Delia was kneeling on the bed to embrace him, and there it stayed, untouched, until the day he used it to kill Simon Bell.

  Divining for Gold

  Betty Fowler saw it happen. She was on the sixteenth fairway of the Speaking Pines golf course when the Holladays’ old Cadillac came swinging into the driveway on their way back from church. Simon Bell must have seen it, too. He crossed the lawn to the car, pressing his hands flat against the passenger window. She watched Sam Holladay get out, watched Delia slip past on his side. When Simon rushed around behind the car as if to catch her, Sam met him in the driveway, held his arms while Delia ducked into the house. He walked Simon back into his own yard. They stood there talking for a minute, almost casually, the way neighbors might have a conversation if they happened to meet on the grass. The lawn was neatly cut. Sam went inside and Simon waited, sitting Indian-style in the yard, his eyes sweeping over the golf course, but blankly, like he wasn’t really seeing. After a while, Sam reappeared, moving with determination, something in his hand.

  She wasn’t playing golf when it happened. Betty Fowler was divining for gold. You could find her almost any evening, when the weather was nice, out on the golf course between six o’clock and darkness, a forked hazel branch in her hands. Twenty-five years ago, her husband had owned all of the property for miles around—the golf course, the lots on which the pretty houses stood. The road, now blacktop, had been covered in cockle shells, white and dry as bone, before his business failed and he’d had to sell off the land a little at a time, first to the country club, then to the developer who had subdivided within eight months. During leaner years, her husband would tell a story about how, when he sensed the beginning of the end, he had buried a chest of gold coins—bought at auction before they were married—somewhere out there among the pristine fairways, the immaculate greens. It made him feel better to believe that a fortune was buried beneath his feet.

  Betty Fowler told all of this to Sheriff Nightingale when he came by to ask her what she knew. She told him how she’d read books on divining—you could find them right in the public library, she said—told him how she had never known her husband to speak a word that wasn’t true. Why should she stop believing him now that he was dead? The sheriff listened patiently, drank her iced tea. What she didn’t tell him was how she knew to look. She had been standing in the fairway with her eyes closed, holding the forked ends of the rod with both hands, just like the books said. She’d been at it for years and never heard a word from her divining rod. But that day, there in the damp July heat, she felt it twitch, felt a tremor in her hands, like a dream of electricity. She turned the way it seemed that the rod wanted her to turn and opened her eyes and there was the Cadillac. And then Simon. And then Sam Holladay bringing his hand up, gently, like he was going to touch Simon’s heart.

  She told him that the sound was like dropping a stone into water. It was hardly a sound at all. He said, “Probably the shot was muffled by his chest. You know how in movies they always cover the gun with a pillow. Same thing.”

  Betty Fowler lived a few houses down from the bend in the road where the golf course made the slow turn back toward the clubhouse. She looked at the sheriff, perspiring in his uniform. His shadow on the windows made it possible to see inside the house, the china cabinet, her porcelain figurines, white doilies on the end tables, all the trappings of the antique. She didn’t want him to leave. She turned her mind over for a detail she might have missed, the stubble on Simon’s cheeks, the way he fell, feet and head going parallel in the air like a magic act volunteer. But she’d already told him everything she could.

  When he asked, “What about before? You didn’t see anything unusual?”

  She said, “You know what I’ve been learning to do in my old age? I’ve been learning how to cuss. Listen.” She arranged her mouth like someone speaking an unfamiliar language, clipping her lower lip with her top teeth. She said, “Fuuuck,” drawing the word out in a country way.

  “I need to get going,” he said.

  “You try it,” she said. “Fuuuck.”

  “I don’t think so,” he said.

  “C’mon,” she said. “It’s fun.”

  She followed him out to the driveway, still muttering profanities under her breath. When they reached his car, she fished in one of the gardening pockets on her dress and came out with a silver dollar, like she’d planned this moment all along. The sheriff waited patiently. She held the coin between her thumb and index finger. Her other hand she whipped through his line of sight, so quick he almost didn’t notice the gesture, and after it had passed, the silver dollar was gone. Both hands she presented to him, palms down, thumbs tucked under.

  “I know this trick,” he said. “You hide it in one hand and tell me it’s behind my ear or something, right? My daddy used to do it.”

  “You’d be surprised.” She turned her hands over, revealing pale, empty palms. “They were in love,” she said. “I think they were.”

  “Who was, Mrs. Fowler?” he said. “Who was in love?”

  Without saying anything else, without ever producing the coin, she patted his arm, like they were old friends and she was sorry to see him go, and smiled and walked away. When she reached the four steps up to the porch, she paused, hitched her gait, gripped the rail with her right hand. She climbed the stairs gingerly, like an old woman, and he liked her better for it. It made him feel like he knew something about her.

  Part 2

  It’s awfully easy to be hardboiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.

  —Ernest Hemingway

  A History Lesson

  At twenty, Sam Holladay decided never to fall in love. This was in the fall of 1952, and he had been seeing a woman named Mary Youngblood who was also a student at the University of Alabama. She was tall with reddish-brown hair, hair the color of pine straw, and she had inspired him to stand in front of the mirror and practice speaking words that he had never said before: I love you like the sky, he would mouth to his own face in the glass, crewcut and lean and big-eared, I love you more than life itself, the phrases lifted from romantic novels. It surprised him how easy it was to imagine bei
ng in love with Mary Youngblood. As simply as if it were the truth, he could daydream the two of them pushing a shopping cart, taking turns making selections from the shelves, or lying side by side in a bed he’d never seen before, each confident of the other’s presence even in their sleep.

  When he finally spoke the words aloud, he and Mary were sitting on the steps of the women’s dormitory, each wearing one of her white mittens because he’d forgotten to bring his gloves. He was always forgetting things. She bumped her shoulder against his, then said she needed to be getting to bed. It was almost curfew time. She stood and kissed the top of his head and slipped through the doors, leaving him dazed and breathless and feeling as though a husk of rough fabric had been placed between the world and his heart. He didn’t say the words again until he met Delia Simpson.

  When he first saw her, standing in the wings of the stage, he went deaf for a moment, stopped hearing the awkward clamor of childish fingers on piano keys and tried to imagine something to say to such a young and beautiful woman. What were young men telling pretty girls these days? Then, without willing it, he saw the two of them washing dishes together, laughing familiarly about his frightened deliberations over an opening line. It would become a part of their shared history, a story to tell as a reminder of what had passed between them. When sound came back to him, the auditorium was full of applause.

  She took him to meet her mother in June, three days after he had asked her to marry him. The age difference made him anxious and doubtful, and he found himself again, forty-years later, practicing at the mirror, this time in his house on Speaking Pines Road: Hello, Mrs. Simpson. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Simpson. I love your daughter, Mrs. Simpson. The bathroom was a testament to his age and bachelorhood: white whiskers in the basin from his morning shave, calcium tablets in the medicine cabinet for his tiring bones. He felt ridiculous and terrified and as sure of his heart as he had ever been.