Improve I did. I sometimes suspected her of pulling invisible strings behind my back, such that her handiwork may have lain behind Niles's absence. This I now doubt, but I'll never quite know for sure. At any rate, I do recollect being in bed one frosty autumn night a few months into my exile, staring up at that same pale meniscus of a moon that had cast shadows on poor Emily, and deciding I'd had enough of forevisions. Even if I believed some special knowledge had lodged itself in my heart or head, that's where it was going to stay. And, if it were possible, I would gird heart and head against such fantasies which, even when accurate, brought little peace or succor to anyone. Myself included. That night I made my first covenant to do my very best to become, for lack of another word, normal. To unpleat, smooth, and ease the patterns of thought in my mind.
Even now I didn't experience a regretful wistfulness following Niles into Henderson's land. I never indulged in any bitterness toward him for moving on with his young life. What else should he have done? Occasionally, I allowed myself to remember the ways in which Niles and I made love—yes, we did have a brief, predestined season together in our twenties, after I matured some and before he became enamored of Melanie—and cherished the images of those times. He even asked me to marry him, in part, I always thought, because that was what everybody naturally expected, including us. Our engagement, however blissful, was short-lived, and that was that. I still felt so strongly connected with the man that regret was not a word in my emotional vocabulary. What I felt was comfortably safe as we headed toward what I believed, equally strongly, would be an abyss of some kind. A dead end that was quite alive.
It was like this. Years ago, in my early teens, I bought for fifty cents a huge fat folio of a book at the annual local library sale. I wanted to find a Greek or Latin dictionary, but all they had on the table was Mathews's Chinese-English Dictionary. I told myself, with all the sense of pride that accompanies such an outlandish purchase, that for half a buck I was going to be the only person in this whole damn county who could speak Chinese. When I got home, I cleared my little oak bedroom desk and sat the tome down before me. I opened it up to a chance page, Lu. Page four thousand something. The first entry, in bold type, showed what I later learned was an ideogram. And beside it, the English translation: "A bad road; the road is bad." Not too promising. The next word translated to "A sacrifice by the way, before a funeral." Nervous, I read an other entry. "Dangerous ways; dead end," and closed the volume. What came as a grand disappointment and revelation was that I would never learn Chinese, but I would always navigate difficult paths. This was my nature, I believed, and serendipity had brought me certain proof. I never opened the book again. But I still own it.
"Niles?"
He had gotten pretty far ahead of me, or rather, I had fallen behind. I could just make out his red and purple jacket through the crowded mesh of tree limbs. In another week or two, he would have been invisible behind a thick scrim of leathery green leaves.
"Niles, slow down."
He walked a little farther and then I saw him stop, not necessarily because of me. It wasn't as if he turned and shouted back my name or acknowledged my calling out to him. I hurried down the path, through zigzags of toppled trees, huge trunks fallen so long ago that moss and wild mushrooms had taken up residence on their woody carcasses. He was standing over a knit cap, his jaws flexing as they habitually did whenever he was upset. Bright pink, with a black tassel. It wasn't clean, but neither was it so dirty that there was much chance it had languished here lost all winter. He photographed and bagged it, marked the location again with tape. I was speechless. Without exchanging words, we both searched the forest floor but found nothing else.
Niles said, "Your description didn't include a pink cap."
"That's because she wasn't wearing one."
He was weighing what to do. "Any sense of how far we are from that grove where you allegedly saw her?"
"Allegedly?"
He didn't respond.
"I'm guessing we're not that close," I answered into the quiet. "Another three, four hundred yards."
"I know I asked you yesterday, but are you absolutely sure you took us back to the same exact spot where you'd been earlier?"
"No question. Besides, you saw my divining rod was there."
"That doesn't prove much. You could have dropped it anywhere along the way."
"Niles, I didn't lead you to the wrong place. She was there before. I swear it on the twins' souls."
That took him aback. Did me, too. In a life of dealing with doubters, this was, I realized, the most I had ever longed to be believed. I began to understand why it was that he decided to bring me along. It wasn't because he needed my help. To the contrary. He had intended to try to help me with a serious display of earnest regard on his part—the calls, the map, the off-duty time reexamining a place that wasn't in any official way of interest to him. No crime seen, no crime scene. He wasn't humoring me. Niles wouldn't bother. More that he wanted to help me regain balance and come around to accepting the fact I'd suffered some kind of phantasm or waking nightmare as I had when I was young. But the pink cap plainly scuttled his purpose some.
We walked on. The birdsong thinned out. Just some complaining crows floating by overhead. The trail disappeared, then reappeared now and again, and we managed to stay on it, more or less, all the way down. I had no reason to believe it would lead us to the hanging ground, but when it did I remembered this copse of ironwoods and black cherry trees with razor clarity. Niles did also. We hiked, him first, along the same narrow path I had surmised was a deer run and quickly came upon the clearing where, on its farther verge, stood the beetle-branched tree. It looked for all the world like a photographic negative of a lightning mass, St. Elmo's Fire done up in black.
She was as absent this morning as yesterday afternoon. The walnuts and maples glistened in wan filtered sunlight. Niles and Bledsoe had combed through this scrub before, but he went searching again now while I stayed behind, in a blind of bushes. How was it that the birds were so voiceless in this spot? Birds always were to my mind the very freest of all creatures. Why they avoided singing in a landscape so naturally suited to them was beyond me. As if their silence were condemnatory.
I stood just where I had the day before. While I could mentally paint the hanged girl right where she had been, there was no willing her back into being. For the briefest moment I felt remorse, and not a little shame for having dragged Niles down here in the first place.
I had to admit to myself it must have been a cognitive slippage, a gross delusion. To have held her in my arms, though? I was mired in confusion. Wanted to leave here now, go home to my boys and forget any of this happened. I was wasting everybody's time. Niles, my mother, Nep, the twins, even Bledsoe and Ponyface, had all been put out for no good reason.
Then Niles materialized from the scrub. His face was as pale as an anemone. In his gloved left hand he was holding a long light brown snake. It dangled there, dead. Quietly he said, "Let's get you out of here." His revolver was drawn, I saw. He held it in his right hand pointed earthward. The snake was a rope.
6
THE REST OF THAT confessional Fourth of July sailed by in a haze. My father and I strolled back up the hill together, quietly from the quiet space of the pond, toward the laughter and chatter around the house. There wasn't more to say. He knew the import of what he told me, and I was still weighing what he'd shared. No doubt he understood his daughter was shaken. Wouldn't take the very least diviner—and all of us are diviners, one way or another—to predict that. Before we were within earshot of the nearest partygoers, some of whom had gathered on a flat knoll at the periphery of the lawn to set up the annual amateur fireworks display, he said, almost whispered, —All will be well, Cassandra. Trust my word.
Trusting him was what I had always done. Like second nature to me. Like nature itself, not second, not first. Just nature. My faith in him wasn't simply going to evaporate like fine rain on a hot stone.
We were approaching the group. Morgan saw us and called out, —Hey, where you two been? Hurry up already. Jonah added, —Yea now, time to get the sky lit up.
—Coming, Nep shouted back, bright and smiling as if life's path were only merciful and infinitely smooth, without a single pit to fall in.
I thought, Let's slow everything down. It's only early twilight.
—Can't shoot the fireworks off without the general on the ramparts, one of Nep's pals pitched in.
How beloved he was, my father who had always done things his own way. And how these many people on the back porch, and over along the side of the house playing croquet, and the ones setting up the fireworks, and those inside the house helping put the leftovers into the fridge—how they were going to miss him when he went away. I know morbidity and sentimentality are brothers, like the Greek gods of sleep and death. But it was hard not to say to him, and I didn't bother to suppress myself, —I love you, Dad.
He stopped us—we were arm in arm—and replied, in a flat voice unexpectedly filled with an edge of warning, —I think you have the gift. It's a real gift. You mean something when you see something. Let's never talk about this again.
We were swallowed up into the crowd as dusk gave way to nightfall. I tried to keep a game face, smiling among dowsing agnostics who doubted my gift and others who'd hired me and now had overflow ponds and sweet-water wells in unlikely places. For his part, Nep seemed wholly engrossed once more in playing host, while showering bursts of billowing bright pink and silvery blue coneflowers exploded in the night sky above and everyone oohed and aahed. He was cutting up with his old friends Joe Karp and Billy Mecham and big Sam Briscoll whose diet, so far as I could tell, consisted strictly of chaw and brew. Jonah and Morgan were there, too, having glommed on to these firebirds, not wanting to miss one moment of the big light show. Not far from their group I noticed some of Christopher's old gang, Bibb and Lare. Was it possible that Roy Skoler was there, too, talking with them? He hadn't been invited, as far as I knew, and later, when I went over to say hello to the gang, he had disappeared.
By now the fireflies had started their own orgiastic light show all around us. A nice man a few years younger than I named Will Hutton, whom I had gone out with a couple of times, stood next to me during the fireworks as we exchanged pleasantries. I noticed my mother saw us together and nodded to me, smiled, at which I genially frowned back. Will had, one blizzarding February afternoon the year before, taken me and the twins to Rollerworld, where we endured an hour of skating ovals to loud hip-hop and heavy metal. His was, I knew, a generous gesture, and I appreciated it. But Jonah and Morgan, then nine going on ten, insisted it was a total sissyass outing, and though I chided them for their ingratitude I couldn't in all honesty disagree with them. When he called again, I seemed to be forever busy.
After Will moved on, Niles stepped over to tell me he and the family had to head home a little early. His girl, Adrienne, suffered from terrible asthma, which was acting up, and they'd forgotten to bring her inhaler.
— I want prints of some of her photos of the party, I said, trying to smile, though it was only Niles I wanted to talk to now about what had been shared at the pond, and that would have to wait for another time, a neutral moment.
— You all right? he asked.
— Never better.
— You seem distracted.
— Thanks for coming. Hope Adrienne feels better.
When the fireworks concluded, those who didn't leave retreated to the house to talk and drink some more. Having confirmed for myself that Morgan and Jonah were still preoccupied whooping it up with their grandfather and his best buddies, I took advantage of this exodus to retreat to my favorite place here, a bluestone bench beneath a tall white pine on the far side of my mother's vegetable garden. I sat down, my head in a mild vertigo.
It was all too strange. It had always been all too strange, my competence as a dowser. Believing my ancestors had been touched by some divination god, I had talked myself into hoping that some of their blood genius was my rightful inheritance. Yet Nep's news, if true, shared on a day meant for the celebration of independence, was, appropriately enough, also relieving. I might not be alone. Might be freed from the years of guilt I'd felt, always believing my father was an honest master, while I was merely his impostor apprentice.
When I turned nineteen and officially added my name to the illustrious roster of divining Brookses, that's when I went professional with my well-meaning subterfuge. The day before I was to go dowse for the first of many clients Nep would pass along to me, nepotist that he was, I drove down to the historical society library, then to the county assessor's office. There, under the guise of fulfilling my teacher's responsibilities, I studied vintage geodetic and recent soil survey maps of the tract I was to walk the next morning. I was sure that left on my own, without benefit of some inside knowledge, the only movement my diviner's rod would make was from my hands shaking out of embarrassment and the fear of failure. And I hit pay dirt right out of the gate, to roll a mildly mixed metaphor and an awful truth into one.
There it was—on paper quite well preserved since nobody had bothered to look at this document for over a century—tucked in the northwest quadrant of the property in question. A marshy pond, small one. Not even big enough for the mapmaker to have bothered scribing its name, assuming it ever had one.
The map was dated 1883. If the gentleman who drew it, one Americus Granby, hadn't been many decades dead, I'd have loved to give him a big hug. As happens when a spring is weak, during the intervening century the pond had filled with runoff sediment, the residual swamp dried up, and cattails had given way to jewelweed, joe-pye, and a riot of huckleberry bushes. But I knew just where an underground source like as not lay, untapped and ready to be rediscovered. What was more, the soil survey told me that the aquifer was bedrock and, as such, twice as likely to hold water in its fractures as, say, glacial till. I was all set.
Nep came along. Said he wanted to be aboard for his maiden's maiden voyage. See his Cassiopeia shine like a star. No one was more impressed than he when I strode across the flattish fields shag-rugged with thigh-high grasses, my witching wand that I had cut from a black cherry tree held before me, until I came to the location of the long-defunct, forgotten pond and put on quite a show.
—Right here, I said, matter-of-factly, exhibiting all the confidence in the world. I had already learned by watching my father how to tense the tip of the divining rod to jerk down, palms up with thumbs holding either end of the fork in the traditional manner. Easier than playing Ouija, though the violence of the yank earthward toward the vein of water did surprise me. Nearly took the bark off the branch. My left wrist and up into my forearm even hurt. That was strange, I recall thinking, before recovering my actor's aplomb and reiterating this was the mark. My client brought out his backhoe the same afternoon and dug a test hole ten feet, at precisely the depth I had prescribed. Within days it was half full of water. Not a gusher, but good enough for Cleve Miller's needs. Many years later, Morgan and Jonah would go swimming with his grandkids in the nice third-acre pond that was excavated there the same summer. It even bears a name now. Cassandra Pond.
That is a true story.
I became as addicted to nineteenth-century geodetic maps as an October squirrel is to acorns. Clandestinely made copies of everything at the county assessor's office, cloaking myself in the flimsy robes of the dedicated teacher. I collected soil surveys as well, with their analyses of loams and drainage. Of channery and meltwater streams. Of tuff and varve. I became a dedicated scholar of the area's geology, its river systems and tributaries, its complex aquifer. I studied sites on paper for days before actually setting my diviner's feet on dry land to perform my mime's routine. The time spent in the field doing the witching was the least of my efforts. I became, by my lights, little more than a benevolent trickster.
Business grew. From every couple of weeks to once a week to twice to half a dozen times. It even interfered with my t
eaching obligations. More and more when the principal called me the night before to say I was needed to teach state capitals to Mrs. Peabody's eighth-grade class the next day, or Mr. Vieiro's social studies group, I would have to decline because of a prior commitment to work elsewhere. Guilty as I felt about my methods, I was getting my jobs done. My clients were almost all of them impressed by the results and eager to recommend me to others.
The times I pronounced a spot viable and it came up dry were nearly always because the original surveyors had made mistakes, mistook outwash till for glacial, say, and thus my failure occurred because there was simply no water to be ferreted out. These were cause for double humiliation. I might have felt better about failing if I felt better about succeeding.
The most important, and disconcerting, early event in my divining—my second turning—came one day when Nep wasn't feeling well and, without benefit of any of my usual preparation, I had to fill in for him at the local trout hatchery. Seemed their gallons-per-minute output had dwindled down to nothing and they would lose thousands of fish if I wasn't able to find what the drillers with all their engineering know-how, their clamshell bucket rigs and big sharp rotary drills, had not. My plan, my ruse, such as it was, involved doing some scouting, then stalling until Nep felt well enough to undertake this himself or I had time to pore over some face-saving maps of the site's geologic and hydrologic history.
This hatchery was set in a valley flanked by long, hunchbacked hills and in whose wide basin ran a glistening stream littered with glacial stones. In a normal year, the valley would be greener than envy. Hadn't been a normal year, though. Some seasons of low precipitation in spring and summer, and light snowfall during winters, had left our region in rough shape. Our water tables were way down. Grass looked like Shredded Wheat. Leaves drooped on their sagging branches. My garden tomatoes were the size of walnuts and just about as tough and dry. A reservoir one county over was well below capacity—you could see the top of the old church steeple peeking above the water in the middle of the dam where the ill-named town of Neversink had been submerged when they built it, like some provincial upstate Atlantis. Work was plentiful for both me and Nep. People who used to look down their noses at diviners were driven by dry wells to give us a chance.
The Diviner's Tale Page 6