by Brian Hodge
MORE TO COME FOLLOWING YOUR RECEIPT OF DATA AND SPECIMENS.
………………………………………………………………KRAMER
15
The day starts early in the summer. And it starts earliest of all on the farm. Even with rising before the roosters, there never seems to be enough time to get it all done. Over his sixty-eight years, he’d never truly gotten used to that final hour before dawn, which is not night, not morning, which is a peculiarity utterly unto itself, as if the entire world holds its breath in anticipation. Or dire apprehension.
Ironic, then, that Emily died in that hour.
Caleb Enright had long known that his wife’s end was near. She’d been steadily declining since midweek, and they’d both known there was nothing to be done about it. She hadn’t been the first. They lived near New Holland, Ohio, and now there wasn’t much of a town left anymore. He tried to tell himself it was a blessing they’d managed together this long. The first of the strange and apparently incurable illnesses to strike the area had come two weeks ago, and then all of a sudden it was rampant.
Caleb wished she’d lived to see the dawn of another day, at least, the time of day she’d always loved best. She saw a beauty in each and every one of them, as the sun rose warm with promises through and then over the cornstalks to the east, higher still, bathing the line of trees behind their house with light until they no longer resembled an impenetrable wall, higher, until it was God’s eye shining down good favor. The dawn of this day, a Friday, was the close of July. Had she seen it, he thought at least she could’ve died a little happier.
“I’m sorry about Rachel,” Emily had said in a very soft, misty voice. Her eyes, normally brighter than new pennies, stared out from masses of wrinkles to gaze up through the ceiling. He didn’t think she could see him anymore. He tightened his hand over hers, her fingers twitching back. Crickets outside creaked on endlessly, the steady cadence of a death march.
“So so sorry.” Her head, trailing long strands of silver-white hair, shook gently from side to side.
“Hush yourself, Emmy,” Caleb said, tears smarting at his eyes. “That’s long past.”
“I’ll see her soon.” Emily smiled vacantly and a trickle of foamy red saliva ran from the corner of her mouth. “She should be all grown now, Caleb. She’ll be sooo pretty.”
He nodded as a pair of tears finally fell, zigzagging down through the furrows and seams worn into his brown face, catching on two-day-old stubble. Finally they halted, a glistening line down each cheek, like the paths of slugs that crawled over the flagstones out in the yard.
Emily winced with pain, her free hand moving awkwardly over one shriveled breast and to the center of her chest. Over her heart.
Not now, no, please just give her a little bit longer.
Her breath snagged in her throat, and it sounded for all the world like a gasp of surprise. “Caleb,” she said.
“I’m here, Emmy.” He squeezed her hand to reaffirm it.
“I…I smell flowers.”
And then she died.
Caleb sat beside their bed a long while, holding onto that limp hand. He kept waiting for a floodgate of grief to open, the dam to burst. Instead, all he had were those two pitifully inadequate tears. All he felt within was a numb emptiness, and beneath it, maybe a small sense of relief.
He glanced at the clock on their rickety nightstand, hands frozen at ten-twelve. It had stopped sometime yesterday, but he couldn’t remember if it had been day or night. Or had that happened Wednesday?
He sat.
So when’s it gonna come? They’d scarcely been apart in the last fifty years. What the Bible said about two coming together as one flesh, they’d lived that way. So can’t I work up anything more’n this?
He rubbed his eyes, burning fiercely with lack of sleep over the past days. None last night, maybe a couple hours tallied up from little naps here and there the night before.
Somewhere beyond the windows, down the road at the Bascombs’ place, out there in the nether-light, a rooster let go with the first sound of morning.
And as if awakening from a trance, Caleb arose and wearily shuffled out of the room, down the well-worn stairway, outside. Toward the shovel out in the barn.
The day starts early on the farm.
* *
Caleb stumbled in the barn, catching one booted foot in a small depression in the dirt floor, and was asleep almost as soon as he hit the ground. It was a fitful sleep in which he tossed and turned and sometimes cried out with dreams.
It was almost as if he were the one dying, because it seemed as though his entire life was passing parade-style before his eyes.
He saw himself as a ten-year-old boy again, ears sticking out from his head at near-right angles, his Adam’s apple looking like a half-swallowed peach pit, his overalls always too short and leaving his ankles exposed. He was with his grandfather Elmer down in Ross County, and was getting his first lesson. Caleb had a tradition to carry on someday: He came from a long line of dowsers.
“The secret’s in knowing just how to hold her,” Grandpap Elmer explained, holding a big forked stick in front of him. “’Course, the kind of wood it is helps too, leastways how I see it. Most of us Enright men have done our best with ashwood.”
“How come, Grandpap? What difference does it make?”
Elmer shrugged his big shoulders, still strong and broad even though he was past sixty. His face looked every year of it, except maybe his eyes, but he didn’t act it in any way. Even at ten, when Caleb was old enough to know about death and its finality, he still thought Grandpap Elmer was going to live forever.
“How come?” Grandpap Elmer repeated, his eyes going wide with mock surprise. “Shoot, I don’t know. Don’t reckon as I ever wondered how come before. The good Lord don’t mean us to know everything, Caleb. We go questioning too much and maybe it turns out we lose a little something in the knowing. That make sense to you?”
Caleb thought it over, scratching his head to make sure Grandpap knew just how hard he was thinking, and then nodded. He fished a fresh October-harvested apple from a rear pocket, took a huge bite. Smiled. October 1929…a good vintage for apples.
“Watch me when we get there,” Grandpap said. “Just stick close and watch how it happens.”
Caleb tagged along with Grandpap, scuffing along the dirt road for two miles or more until they got to where one of the area’s young men and his new bride were setting up home and farm. A fine autumn day it was, too, with the faintest of nips in the air and a soft breeze, with plenty of warm sunshine to wash it down with.
Grandpap joshed with the young man a while, laughing it up and nudging him in the shoulder and asking him how things were going with the wife and all, was she tired of him yet, ha ha ha, were those stars out of his eyes yet. Caleb amused himself by firing pebbles gathered along the road at birds as they zipped through the trees.
Finally, though, Grandpap went to work.
He got real quiet, and just stood there for a long while, his head tilted back a bit. He held his ash stick in front of him, one hand on each fork and the straight length poking away from him.
Caleb crept up close behind his grandfather, so quietly he didn’t even hear himself. Grandpap knew he was there just the same.
“Ready, partner?” Grandpap whispered, as if he didn’t even dare disturb the air around them with his voice.
“Yep,” Caleb whispered back just as quietly.
Elmer moved forward along one edge of the lawn near their house, stick held out like a lance. Caleb tiptoed alongside Grandpap’s elbow.
“Don’t hold her none too tight, none too loose, either,” he said. “Just enough so’s you got a nice easy grip on her. So you can feel her when she starts to pull.”
Caleb watched with rapt eyes as his grandfather trod slow and steady on a back-and-fo
rth path across the young fellow’s property. And just when he was starting to grow bored and wonder what all the fuss was about, Grandpap stopped dead in his tracks.
The stick was quivering ever so slightly. And it almost looked as if the tip were trying to point downward.
Grandpap Elmer looked down at him, a twinkle in those old, wise eyes. Then he held the stick a little lower. “You can touch her if you want.”
Caleb reached a wary finger out to rest on the stick near its forked notch. A minute vibration coursed through the stick, and Caleb held his breath. It wasn’t like Grandpap was vibrating the stick in his own big liver-spotted hands. Caleb could plainly see from his loose grip that that was impossible. No, those quivers came from someplace else. The wood itself?
“You just gotta believe,” Grandpap was saying, that twinkle growing even merrier. “Believe, and let it happen.”
The young fellow and his own father and grandfather and friends commenced to dig the next morning. It was no surprise to anyone that beneath the crust of earth they’d broken through was a sweet, natural spring, as pure as water ever got, just waiting to be tapped for a well.
Grandpap Elmer and Caleb dropped back by the next afternoon to check their progress and to taste of the earth’s offerings. It was no surprise to Elmer either, and he was given a fat, squealing piglet to carry home for his troubles.
“A good dowser never lacks for friends, Caleb, remember that.” Grandpap reached into the pocket of his shirt, whose pattern resembled a horse blanket. He withdrew a cigarette he’d rolled before they’d taken to the road again, with the piglet held squirming in his other arm, and tucked it into one corner of his mouth. He flared a match with a cracked thumbnail, lit the cigarette, puffed sweet-smelling clouds of smoke into the October air. “Nope, you’ll never lack for friends. But some of ’em don’t get as close as they might. They keep a bit of distance ’twixt you and them.”
Caleb stared down at the clodhoppers on his feet, at the stray puffs of dust taking flight in the breeze. “What do you mean?”
Grandpap squinted into the sun, an expression now built solidly into his weathered face. “You know how a cat is, don’t you, boy? A cat can be nice to you, it can rub up agin’ you, it might even bring you the little critters it kills out in the woods and fields. You know it likes you. But there’s always this little part of the cat that holds back. It’s not like a dog, that loves you and’ll even die for you. The cat always holds back.” He sighed, pulled out the cigarette for a moment. “And that’s the way it is with a dowser. Around us, some folks act kinda like cats.”
Caleb kicked this around in his head. Then he looked up at the big man beside him, gazing earnestly into his yellowed eyes. “How come? Is it okay for me to know that?”
Elmer chuckled. “Don’t guess that’d hurt nothing. Only I’m not so sure of that one myself.” He popped the cigarette back in. “We’re just a little different, I guess. Somehow we’re in touch with a part of ourselves, and a part of nature, most everybody else ain’t.” A faraway look narrowed his eyes, then he grinned down at Caleb. “That’s enough lessons for today. But you be sure it’ll be a while before I run out.”
Caleb nodded, feeling very good and warm inside. So long as he had his Grandpap to walk beside, to spout off his words of wisdom and explain the stranger nooks and crannies of the world, everything would be all right.
And more lessons were indeed forthcoming, as the old man passed along legend and lore that had already made the trek of generations upon generations. There’s no teacher quite like time. Grandpap Elmer showed him the gifts of the earth that were there for the taking—roots and herbs and berries and juices and dozens and dozens of wonders that, when properly combined and administered, were good for what ailed you.
Caleb dreamed.
He saw the dream-Caleb leave his boyhood behind, watched the years mirrored in his face. He saw the man he’d become, standing in the corner of a freshly cleaned barn with two friends, watching square dancers twirl to and fro. He saw the dreamy look on his own face when he spied a new girl spinning by, long black hair radiant, as if it still caught the rays of the sun, though dusk had fallen better than an hour before. He learned that her name was Emily, and while watching from the sidelines he figured he didn’t have a chance in hell with the beauty. She’d probably laugh herself silly over those jug-ears of his and that’d be the extent of it.
Only this time his dream came true.
Emily, now his wife, was great with child, greater every passing day. They both thanked God and prayed for the baby’s health, and for the wisdom and patience to bring him or her up in the right ways. Until that waking nightmare of a day when Emily had screamed and shrieked her way through a torturous delivery, and even the midwife was crying…and finally they had the still form of a girl-child before them. She would’ve been called Rachel. And in their failure to bring a child healthy and whole into the world, they were just as suddenly robbed of any further chances. Emily had been stricken barren.
Caleb had wandered amid the trees behind their home, a long, hickory-handled ax over his shoulder. He meandered and kicked at vegetation until he came to the largest tree he could find, then exploded in sudden fury, hacking out wedges and irregular chunks of the tree, until at last he sank to the ground, exhausted. And sobbing.
Why couldn’t she have died too? he had thought. I could start over, still have an heir for everything I am and everything I know…
He stopped abruptly, horrified at what had just passed through his mind. That’s the best I can do? His wife lay half-dead back in their bed, and here he was wishing her even more ill, as if it were her decision he’d never be a father.
Why, he wasn’t even fit to be a father, not with selfish thoughts like that. And that made him cry harder.
Caleb dreamed.
He watched as his talent, or skill, or secret knowledge, or whatever it was behind the dowsing, grew and forged him his own reputation among his own generation. He’d done well for himself with his friends and neighbors, and had the free chickens and pork and eggs and beef and homemade wine to attest to the fact. But he also had Grandpa Elmer’s words in the back of his head, and he understood what his grandfather had meant by comparing people to cats.
He watched the steady trek of time across that dream-Caleb’s face, who held a forked ash stick loose in his hands. He knew that he was probably the best of them all, the pinnacle of that long line of Enright men, who’d had the knack for dowsing. He was the best because he was the last, all the generations of talent narrowed down to one reservoir. And with that came an awesome responsibility.
For one day before he died, perhaps on the very day itself, he felt sure he’d be held accountable. To pay back the earth for all the secrets he’d lifted from her.
* *
When he finally awoke, it took a while to realize where he was. He stared up at the barn roof, then slowly sat up, rubbed his eyes, massaged a knee and shoulder that ached from his fall.
Then he remembered everything else, and that took center stage.
“I wished you dead once, Emmy,” he said, voice breaking. “So help me, I did it, but I’m sorry. Been sorry for it ever since.”
Caleb stepped into the sunshine of that final July day, staring at their home, a warehouse of memories. And the ghosts of the young people they’d once been. It would be so achingly lonely from this day on.
“And I don’t think I’ve been any sorrier than I am right now.” He sat down again, in grass this time, resting his calloused hands across his knees. The tears came easily this time, and he welcomed them. In tears came relief. Not much, but it helped. He bowed his head, let the tears fall soft and silent into the earth.
He lifted his eyes to the sky, an inverted sea holding an armada of clouds, white ships sailing over whispering fields of corn. The sun had recently crossed into the western half of the sky, so it wasn�
��t much after noon. Plenty of time before dark.
He found a shovel hanging on a wall in the barn, and carried it back toward the treeline behind their house. Caleb stopped a few yards this side of it, then thrust the shovel blade into the earth and leaned on it for a long moment.
He thought it was illegal to bury your own on your own, but from what he knew, there wasn’t much of anyone left to complain, not in New Holland. Besides, even the undertaker had been found dead in his workshop. That’s what Halsey Bascomb had said last week, when Caleb had sauntered down for a visit. The two of them had sat on Halsey’s porch, smoking roll-your-owns and hitting from a jug of homemade wine Caleb had brought, a gift from a grateful homebuilder down in Ross County. Halsey’s border collie Shep sat between them, though he’d always taken more of a liking to Caleb than his own master. Caleb scratched the dog’s ears the whole time.
Halsey was dead now too. Like the rest.
And so Caleb planted the notch of one boot heel against the ass-end of the shovel blade, and thrust it deeper into the earth to overturn the first spadeful. Much later, the hole finished, he returned to the house. Ascended the stairs. Wrinkled his nose at the odor pervading the second floor. He gathered Emily up in his arms, the sheet loosely wrapped about her. How long had it been since he’d carried her anywhere? Decades, maybe.
He carried her out through the back door, the grimmest of all the chores he’d ever been called to do. He paused beside a trellis crawling with morning glories, heart-shaped leaves and the trumpetlike flowers open to the day. Such a lovely shade of lavender. He plucked one of the flowers, taking plenty of stem, and tucked it in her loosely swaying hair, just over one ear. Once upon a time she had often worn flowers in her hair…even to bed. How he’d loved that, looking up at her as she sat naked and astride him, raven hair caught in the moonlight and intertwined with flowers.