The Diviner's Tale

by Bradford Morrow

  A warm azure sky. The air thinner than what we'd been breathing in Maine, drier. We listened to music on the radio, some candied country stuff on one of the few stations we could receive static-free in these rolling mountains. We were quiet. Whenever Morgan wasn't around to trade competitive verbal repartee with his brother, Jonah reverted to the same outsider's reticence his mother had displayed through most of her youth. I deeply, fiercely, and completely loved both my sons, but long before Jonah set foot on Partridge's land that day I had understood that he—for better or worse—was more like his mother than Morgan. Since I never really knew James Boyd, I had no concept of whether or not Morgan shared traits with his biological father. Early on, I had determined not to torture myself with inscrutable questions like this. Nor would I, by proxy, torture my twins. But this morning I did allow myself to accept what I had known for years. Though Jonah harbored much more potential than to become just another Brooks diviner, I knew there was no point in standing between him and this aspect of his heritage. He was destined to go to college—both boys were—I was convinced. I didn't want either of them to be stymied in this rural community forever if they desired a different kind of life. Wanted to see them spread their wings. Still, it was going to be interesting to walk in Nep's shoes this morning and witness Jonah in mine.

  Partridge probably looked like an old man from the day he was born. One of those people who has an antique demeanor from crib to crypt. Even so, he had aged eons since last I saw him at an Independence Day party he came to a couple of years back. It wasn't so much his majestic bald pate or his muttonchop sideburns, whiter than a trout's gills. It was more about how he moved. Glacially slow, top-heavy on a pair of slim pins, he strode with a painful limp across the flat from his house to where we parked, hand extended and a kindly frown on his face. A frown that would have been merely a frown but for the smiling eyes and pronounced crow's-feet at their corners.

  "Good of you to come," he said.

  "Good of you to ask me. I'm profoundly grateful."

  Partridge only harrumphed.

  "I should have phoned ahead, but you said to drop by whenever I could. This is my son Jonah."

  "We've met," shaking the man's slab of a hand.

  "So," Partridge said, looking at me as he asked precisely what I hoped he wouldn't. "This's the next Brooks diviner?"

  "Don't think so, no," I said at the same time Jonah said, "You never know," our two same-sounding last syllables landing right on top of each other.

  Partridge was amused. "At least you disagree in harmony." He chuckled, maybe at his own cleverness, then just like that the grin faded and he looked ancient again.

  I fully expected him to bring up the doings on Henderson's land, but instead he got right into talking about his job. Maybe he hadn't heard, or didn't care, either of which was fine by me. Turned out he was expanding and needed two more wells. His granddaughter had recently gotten married and planned to build a house farther up the road, as her husband was going to join the hatchery business. "They got it marked out with stakes where they want to site. Opposite that old apple orchard across the pavement. You want me to come with you?"

  "I can find it," I said, grateful this turned out to be real, not contrived charity work. Also that Jonah and I would be by ourselves. "We'll go see what there is to see and come back to let you know."

  "Good luck there, Jonah," he said, gnarling one of his eyes into what was meant to be a conspiratorial wink.

  We walked along the shoulder of the road.

  "Don't I need a rabbit's foot or something to do this right?"

  "Nep sometimes carries a little bottle of water in his back pocket, at least he says it's water. To encourage the spirits. He calls it priming the pump. I don't do anything like that myself, but everybody's got their own way of going about it."

  I had a lightweight backpack with everything in it I would need. My knife, a thermos of coffee, peanut butter and marmalade sandwiches, a roll of bright blue flagging tape, a small sharp hatchet with its leather sheath snapped on tight. The blade end of the hatchet I used for cutting marker stakes and the hammer end for driving them into the ground.

  "I like him," Jonah said as he took off his sweatshirt and tied it around his waist. "Seems copacetic."

  Copacetic. Where does he get these words? "He is."

  "How about you?"

  "How about me what?"

  "You copacetic?"

  There was no dissembling possible when Jonah was around. The boy was already a diviner. Beneath my façade of maternal tranquillity, I was in fact sharply conflicted about holding a witching rod in my hands, given what had happened the last time I did, and equally apprehensive now about my impulsive decision to expose Jonah to my diviner's world. What had I been thinking? But there was no turning back now. Jonah would never forgive me, and I owed it to Partridge for believing in me. Moreover, the underlying idea was to regain my footing here, display courage, not knuckle under. Yes, I was going to try to be copacetic.

  "See those apple trees?"

  "Those ones that look like dead Ents?"

  "Dead ants?"

  "Ents. Fangorn Forest? Never mind, Cass."

  "There are some live ones in there, too, and that's where we start looking for a rod."

  "A-Rod? You think he's out here in Fangorn?"

  "Very funny. A Y-rod is what we need."

  "Only one?"

  "A couple."

  "Now we're talking."

  We crossed the road and looked around in the ruined orchard. I found and cut myself a decent virgula and hunted with Jonah until we located another. Jonah insisted on doing the selection, cutting, and whittling himself. Then we made our way back toward the proposed building site.

  "There's all kinds of divining," I said, and held my rod directly before me, its tip pointed just above the horizon, elbows at my sides. "A remote dowser might grip his rod like this to test a direction. Deviceless dowsers use the palm of their hand, no tools at all. Map dowsers who work with the police on missing-persons cases wouldn't even bother to be out here. They'd lay out a topo at the station and use a pendulum to find who they're looking for. Nep and I aren't into any of that. Our family's tradition has always been pure field divining. We prefer to walk."

  "So, Cassandra, let's walk already."

  My attempt at a little lecture had fallen flatter than a floodplain. There was a proper way to handle this, and I just learned it from my student. I rested the rod forks against my face-up palms, hooked my thumbs over the ends of each stick with a firm light grasp, cleared a sudden unwelcome memory of the hanged girl from my mind, and determinedly began mending the flats. Jonah studied my hands and the way I wended along. I could hear his steady progress as he stirred the grasses and wildflowers, and wanted to warn him to be careful of the stinging nettles, but thought it best not to hover over him.

  The sun warmed my hair, which still smelled of ocean. I traversed the zone back and forth but wasn't cluing in to anything. How I hoped no one would chance to drive past and witness us performing this ritual as old as the pyramids. There they go, crazy as crumbs, I could hear them wag their tongues. The Brooks woman and her sad little boy. You can see she's deluded him into believing all her twaddle.

  Any wonder, I thought, why I'm divining nothing. Too many noisy discouragements yammering away inside for me to be able to listen outward.

  When I began again, my head quieted, I realized I hadn't heard Jonah for a while, so I stopped dowsing and saw he was working a part of the field farther away from the site than would be comfortably within Partridge's budget. No matter. He was so lovely out there, a tiny figure sailing across a patch of earth, hay field with low mountains backgrounding the scene, straight out of some Brueghel painting in one of my art history volumes. Part of me wanted to run and hug him. Another part wanted to march over and take that problematic, useless stick out of his hands and break it in two. Instead, I stood stock-still as I saw him lurch to a halt. I was certain I heard him cal
ling out, but the breeze was behind me and lofted his voice away in its wing.

  "What's that?" I shouted.

  Again I heard but a scrap of sound and began to imagine the worst—a cornered snake, a rabid red fox—as I set out, jogging at first, then running full bore, my pack thudding heavily against my spine. The grass was knee-high so I couldn't see what he was staring at, frozen like a sculpture there.

  "What is it?" I called out, doing my best not to betray my fear.

  "I don't know." His voice was squeezed back tight into his throat.

  No snarling fox, no snake curled like a spring ready to strike. His rod tip pointed down at a forty-five-degree angle and quivered as if some thrashing leviathan out of an old fable were hooked at the end of his invisible line.

  "My God, Jonah, don't scare me like that."

  "What's going on?" he asked, ignoring my mild hysteria.

  "If I could answer that question I'd be the wisest woman this side of the rainbow," I said, kneeling to catch my breath, shocked by the implications of what I was seeing. By rote I hauled the pack off my back, unsheathed my hatchet, and cleaved my own rod in half to fashion a stake. Awestruck, Jonah tied the flagging tape to the end, leaving a couple of streamers that reminded me of the tails on his coastal kite. He pushed the stake into the soft loam to mark the spot. When he stood away, the plastic tails fluttered.

  "Blue ribbon, dude," I said, masking my shock at what had just occurred. I asked if he was interested in me showing him how to circle, triangulate, verify the find.

  "But you wrecked your rod."

  "Yours seems to work fine. You all right?"

  "Let's keep going."

  As we did, many sentiments convened in my head. The first was shame, because I'd never wanted him to divine. Hadn't I sworn to myself over the years that I would stop this vexing legacy from being passed beyond me? Second was a contradictory pride that he had taken an interest in learning, had allowed me to pass him this unwieldy and all but obsolescent torch. And third was a sense of validation that, yes, this was real. I had witnessed only validity in Jonah's eyes when he looked into mine for explanation. Right here was living proof Nep was not a fraud and I, when not working with the safety net of research spread beneath where I tightroped, was not a fraud, either. How I wished Nep were here to witness Jonah Brooks become himself.

  On the other hand, I was glad nobody had seen us and that ours had been a moment of private grace, both substantial in its end result but also duly ephemeral since it would never happen again. With Jonah's help I went ahead and finished siting Partridge's wells, knowing that I would not send him a bill after all. I never got paid for the Henderson job, because for myriad reasons, not the least of which was that I had failed him, I never invoiced the man. Broke as I was, I now thought it better to scrape by on savings or a small loan from the bank using my house as collateral than take any more money from this craft that had left me in such a confused, exasperated state. Jonah had proven himself a diviner and that was going to have to suffice. Just because he landed on his feet this time didn't mean he needed to leap off a ledge twice.

  Part IV

  WIDENING CIRCLE, TIGHTENING CIRCLE

  20

  AS I DROVE to the park, having left Jonah and his lawn mower at my parents' place so he could work on it with Nep, my thoughts turned to Niles and Melanie. She had no reason to worry about me and her husband, yet I was embarrassedly excited to see him. It dawned on me, as I got out of the truck, there was a fair chance I had always been so distant with other men because I had invented a kind of false marriage for myself with Niles. My request that he be the twins' godfather. Was it a ruse? Had I married Niles in absentia, been an illusory wife? If only I could cut a witching rod and dowse myself for answers.

  My problem had always been that I could forevision what others ought to do but was too often blinded when it came to my own life, trainspotting my own future. Don't go to the movies, I could warn Christopher. If you need water, I might advise Partridge and so many others, you'll find it here. There's a girl in dire trouble in these woods, I could report, and even though she hadn't been hanged, hadn't died, she was there nevertheless. No hardy magenta campion like my father wanted me to be, I felt uprooted and more lost than ever. And, as I walked across the macadam parking lot to the well-trodden path around the edge of the lake where Niles and I'd grown accustomed to meeting, I had to admit I was frightened about what I imagined was coming.

  Under the gathering clouds and light wind that threatened an afternoon shower, some indifferent swans paddled along the far shore, making soft chevrons in their wakes. A man in an aluminum rowboat was fishing for bass. When rocked by his casting, the sides of the boat caught sporadic sunlight and flashed, as if he were trying to signal me some message but I didn't know the code. The minute I sat on the lakeside bench, I realized I should have brought something for Niles. Blueberries, a seashell from Covey.

  He didn't give me much time to worry about it. His car pulled into the lot soon enough, and I watched him stroll the path toward me, hands in his pockets. A family had started a fire in one of the square metal barbecue stands held aloft on a steel rod in the picnic area. I could smell its burning charcoal briquettes downwind and across the water. A girl's laughter floated over with it. Otherwise, the park was vacant this afternoon. Maybe the darkening clouds and breeze kept people away.

  I stood and gave him a strong embrace. The relief I felt at being in his presence was overwhelming, as if the lake were filled with warm lavendered water and I had just slipped into it. "How have you been?" I asked as we sat together toward one end of the weathered wooden bench.

  "Been all right," he began, then said, "Actually, I've been worried about you, if you want to know the truth. I'm glad to see you got some sun. You look more rested."

  Rested was not how I felt, but I thanked Niles anyway. "I know you might have thought I was being a coward to cut out like that—"

  "No, I didn't, I thought you were being perfectly sane. Nep do all right?"

  "He goes in and out. But some days up there I swear you'd never know he had any problems. He's especially wonderful with the boys."

  "I didn't like the sound of that man showing up out of nowhere and harassing them, though. You have any idea what that might have been about?"

  Here I hesitated. The postcard was in my jacket pocket, ready to be turned over to Niles. The story about Millicent's theft and the hideous rag effigy—my poor hanged girl brought to life, as it were, on Covey—was fresh as an open wound in my mind. Resurfacing memories of Roy Skoler's past with me and unfounded suspicions about him now simmered, fairly or unfairly, within. Much as I wanted to divulge everything, I knew that if I broached all this with Niles, no matter how hard I begged him to keep it to himself, hoping to avoid another wave of public scrutiny and humiliation, he would inevitably urge me to file an official report. Breaking and entering, petty burglary, unlawful trespass, harassment, who knows what all. An investigation would be launched. None of which I felt I could handle just now.

  "They didn't seem overly alarmed by him," I said.

  "You were, though."

  "Maybe I overreacted."

  "Maybe you didn't."

  I looked at Niles there beside me and registered his distress. I could swear his hair had grayed even since the last time I saw him and that the green of his eyes was clouded by uneasiness. He looked both exhausted and worried.

  "Niles, what do you mean by that?"

  His response was punctuated by merry shrieks of the little girl whose brother was now chasing her around the picnic area. "Did he ever show up again while you were there? This man, I mean."

  "I never saw him," I hedged.

  "Casper, you know my business. When things aren't right, especially when it comes to people closest to me, I get concerned. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad your family had a good vacation. But something's off."

  "You've become a diviner now, Niles?"

  As on that morning in He
nderson's valley, I was compelled to take his hands. They looked like uncomfortable creatures, careworn and very much in need of being held. I stared at them until, to my surprise, one of them reached over and firmly, rather than tenderly, took one of mine.

  "Cassandra," he said. "You need to tell me what happened on Covey. Did you know about Mrs. Milgate?"

  "What about her?"

  Niles explained he had received a call from an investigator on Mount Desert, no big deal, just running a routine background check on any possible witnesses before the death certificate was signed and the file on an accidental death was closed. The Brooks family were apparently the only other people in residence on what was presumed to be her last day. Mrs. Milgate's body was discovered the morning after we left by a boy she'd hired to bring out her supplies from the mainland every week. He found her dead at the foot of her stairs. Clearly, a slip and fall. Been dead for days, the investigator said. Maybe as long as a week. No evidence of foul play but he was just wondering if anyone had seen or spoken with her before her mishap.

  "That's horrible," I managed to say, dumbstruck as I was. When standing on her porch, noticing her wet boots and smelling what I'd wrongly thought were burned syrupy beans, if I had only been more forward instead of shyly whispering her name, I might have discovered that she was in need of help. Or no, not help, she was clearly beyond my help by then. But at least the dignity of having her eyelids closed and her body sheeted against creatures that would disturb it. Too, if Rosalie and I had only knocked instead of trekking past, had been willing to bend her hermitage rules a little, we might have found Mrs. Milgate. I hated the idea of her lying there, utterly alone.

  Could the man have been behind this? A calling card of sorts, letting me know his postcard was no idle threat? I dismissed the thought. It was one thing to play mind games, quite another to murder a woman just to underscore some point.